the literate reader finished bemoaning Tante Atie's decision, however, when the text launches into an example of the creativity of language in cultures without texts, as Sophie and her aunt watch the children play and call out each other's names--AsTfi, Enough-Girls, Enough-Boys, Big/Small/No Misery, etc., "names as bright and colorful as the giant poincianas in Madame Augustin's garden" (Danticat 6).
It is widely agreed that the foundational text giving voice to the colonized was George Lamming's autobiographical coming-of-age first novel In the Castle of My Skin, published in 1953 (Skinner 84). Told principally from the viewpoint of a character named G and set in Barbados in the late 1930s, the novel describes conditions that led to the 1937 labor riots that themselves led to an expansion of rights of the indigenous Barbados people. The works of the other authors represented in this research, however varied, take at least part of their cue from Castle. That is so even though Lovelace's Salt and Naipaul's Mystic Masseur are set in Trinidad; Cliff's Abeng in Jamaica, Danticant's Breath in Haiti, as well as New York City; and Edgell's Beka Lamb in Belize.
In addition to presenting a narrative from the perspective of the indigenous "other," each of the texts is also a coming-of-age story. The perspective of the developing human being whose insights are being shaped by experience can be likened to the perspective of the developing countries that were taking their place geopolitically as they emerged from their status as colonies and protectorates. Indeed, the shift in perspective that is accounted for in the book reflects at some level the child's growing awareness that his or her earliest understanding was childlike in its grounding in the values received wisdom of the dominant conquering culture and that his future understanding acknowledges and/or embraces the culture that he or she physically and emotionally embodies. A key mech...