anism of this change comes about through the characters' exposure to those in their own culture who carry its collective memory and the insight of that memory into the reality of the culture's experience of subjection.
The big picture of the main characters in these novels is that they exist on and indeed embody the boundaries of experience and encounter between cultures, notably between the formally constituted culture that is the context for their public identities, and the culture of their immediate experience and close personal attachments. The encounter may take various forms; what is important is the fact of difference.
The initial scene of Beka Lamb, which describes Beka's victory in an essay contest, vividly portrays the collision between folk memory and the culture of imperialist authority, even as it hints at the fact that the central character is likely to be pulled between cultural priorities at some point:
It seemed to her family that overnight Beka changed from what her mother called a "flat-rate Belize Creole" into a person with a "hig
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