If one wants to get well-acquainted with the Caribbean life, read Caribbean fictional writings such as novels, short stories, plays, and poems. The Caribbean fiction reveals the inner life, contradictions, tragedy, and the hope of the Caribbean people. It also explains the reality of their complex culture, practices, and ideas, as well as their resistance to oppression, militarization, and imperialism.

Through the Caribbean fiction, the reader learns about the unrelenting attempt of the Caribbean people to recreate themselves, to remake their society, and to fashion another and better Caribbean world contributing to human flourishing in this side of the world. I believe the Caribbean fiction offers a specific entrance into the Caribbean world and condition more than any other form of writing is able to do.

****Here are a few Caribbean classics: Maryse Conde, I, Tituba, Black Witch of Salem; Edwidge Danticat, Breath, Eyes, Memory; Edouard Glissant, Monsieur Toussaint: A Play; Jacques Roumain, Masters of the Dew; Patrick Chamoiseau, Texaco; Marie Vieux-Chauvet, Love, Anger, and Madness; Aime Cesaire, Notebook of a Return to the Native Land; Edward Brathwaite, The Arrivants: A New World Triology; Derek Walcott, Omeros; V.S. Naipaul, A House for Mr. Biswas; George Lamming; Wilson Harris, Palace of the Peacock; Sylvia Winter,The Hills of Hebron; Roger Mais,The Hills Were Joyful Together; Claude McKay, Banana Bottom; Earl Wilbert Lovelace, The Dragon Can’t Dance.