THE BARBADIAN author George Lamming, was fond of telling groups of students that the West Indian novel was essentially a chronicler of the journey taken by groups and classes of people as they founded and formed societies in the so-called New World.

He used to refer especially to the work of the Jamaican journalist Herbert G. de Lisser, whose novel, ‘Jane’s Career’ published in the early years of the 20th century, was the story of a poor, black woman who had migrated from a parish in Jamaica to find work as a servant in the capital, Kingston. By the end of the story, the heroine Jane had not only moved from the rural landscape to the city, she had also climbed several rungs up the social ladder of the rigid class/colour structure of her society.

Guyanese artist Stanley Greaves asserted in an interview published in the ‘Sunday Chronicle’ in the late 1980s that the West Indian novel had yet to move out of the yard and therefore, in his opinion, it lacked the necessary finesse to be a literature in it own right.

The comments of Lamming and Greaves were recalled after the recent announcement that Trinidadian-born Sir Vidia Naipaul was the choice for the 2001 Nobel Prize for Literature. The award sent minds racing to review once again, the state of regional literature and to determine whether this part of the world, variously described as the Caribbean or the West Indies, really has a literary voice of its own.

And here, we will ruthlessly disregard the bitter and oft-quoted comment of VS Naipaul about the Caribbean creating nothing. We will also attempt to ignore Sir Vidia’s pointed snub of his homeland in his initial reaction to the news that he had been awarded the world’s most prestigious literary prize. Naipaul’s literary grace is so flawless, so exceptional that his readers and admirers in the Caribbean are constrained to overlook his many negative and infuriating assertions and just savour what they see as the best of his writings.

Arguably, Naipaul is the chief guardian of today’s literary flame out of the Caribbean. His masterly use of language and imagery, his ability to employ pathos to cut through swathes of emotion and illumine the innate dignity of the human soul is awe-inspiring and profound. And if Naipaul is the guardian of the regional Muse, then surely his immediate contemporaries are poet and playwright Derek Walcott (Nobel Literature Laureate of 1993) and novelist and essayist George Lamming (In the Castle of My Skin, Natives of My Person), whose prolific and splendid writings have served to enlarge the understanding of the people in the region.

Other worthy apostles are Guyanese Wilson Harris (Palace of the Peacock); Trinidadian Earl Lovelace (The Dragon Can’t Dance); Jamaicans Olive Senior, the late John Hearne (Voices Under the Window, Autumn Equinox) poet Lorna Goodison (I am Becoming My Mother), Orlando Patterson (Die the Long Day, The Children of Sisyphus) and Barbadian Austin Clarke.

A generation ago, the literary flame in the English-speaking Caribbean was tended by Jean Rhys (Wide Sargasso Sea, After Leaving Mr McKenzie, Tigers are Better-looking)); Roger Mais (Brother Man, The Hills Were Joyful Together); CLR James (Minty Alley); Sylvia Winter (The Hills of Hebron); Edgar Mittelholzer (The Children of Kaywana, My Bones and My Flute, Morning at the Office, Corentyne Thunder); Jan Carew (Wild Coast, Black Midas); Samuel Selvon (Ways of Sunlight); ER Braithwaite (To Sir, With Love, Paid Servant); poet and historian Eddie Kamau Braithwaite (The Arrivants); poet AJ Seymour; poet Martin Carter (Poems of Resistance, Poems of Succession); OR Dathorne and Roy Heath.

The books mentioned here are but a sampling of the body of literature created by the imagination of persons whose lives and thinking were shaped and nurtured by the landscape and customs of their homeland - the Caribbean.

The existence of this corpus of writing is testament to the reality that the citizens of the region have traced their myriad journeys from far-off lands to their efflorescence in the fecund soil of the Caribbean. Indeed, we have a literature.