What often results from this process is their works become reshaped by a larger metropolitan cultural tradition which regards itself as `better’, and bestows terms like `prominent’ to selected expatriate writers. The quick foreign acceptance of many early local writers largely resulted from their works being completely new items, with new content, for European publishers.

Today, that novelty has worn off considerably because there is so much more similar material to choose from. The idea that the `best’ books are still chosen abroad for publication is notoriously flawed, and subject to numerous personal and relative choices.

The career of many expatriate writers begins with brilliant local novels or collections of poetry, then by adjusting elsewhere local novels or collections of poetry, then by adjusting elsewhere elsewhere local reality loses its true vitality. Expatriate writers found or join similar expatriate literary trends under banners like `Immigrant novel’; `Post-modern’; `Diaspora’; `Demotic traditions’, etc.

The earliest well-known examples of the transition from local to expatriate writer, are:

(1) Edgar Mittelholtzer, whose early brilliant Guyanese novels like `The Kaywanna Trilogy’, `Shadows move among them’; `Sylvia’, `My bones and my flute’, `Latticed Echoes’, and `Thunder Returning’, gave way to England-based expatriate novels like `A twinkling in the twilight’, `The aloneness of Mrs. Chatham’, `The Jilkingson drama’, as he moved and settled there. A move that certainly killed his fresh and audacious early local inspiration, and resulted in his later depressing subject matter and eccentric behaviour, ending in his eventual suicide.

(2) V.S. Naipaul of Trinidad, though he left his native island at the age of 18 for studies at Oxford in England, his writing career began with five powerful local Trinidad-based works of fiction upon which his expatriate success would be built. Works like: `The mystic masseur’, `The suffrage of Elvira’, `Miguel Street’, `A House for Mr. Biswas’, and later `A flag on the island’. Naipaul’s first novel, in fact, was perfect for release and acceptance in England because it made fun of a local Oriental man struggling to learn the English Language, and this established Naipaul within the English tradition of satirical writing. That novel also represented for English culture and society all the pathos of `changelings’ and `foundlings’ struggling for acceptance as participants in the culture of the coloniser.

Naipaul’s later peculiar style which clearly derived from his giving up Trinidad as an inspirational local source, and adopting the personality and lifestyle of simply being `a writer’ (i.e.): a person applying his language of choice to any location or topic of choice.

The same process occurred with Wilson Harris, but in a completely different stylistic manner. Harris first emerged with a series of staggeringly original Guyanese novels, all set on Guyana’s coast or interior. `Palace of the peacock’, `The far journey of Oudin’, `Heartland’, `The Whole Armour’, `The Secret Ladder’, `The eye of the scarecrow’, and `Tumatumari’. But after Harris had settled in England, his Guyanese locations became the primary universal structure, creating a mental bridge between time zones, humans, cultures, and geography. Though good, these later novels lost the magic and poetry of local sites found in his first works; and, in any case, the same universal significance he now deliberately pursued, could be found in his early local novels, where the universal exists in the particular.

There are many other examples of expatriate writers from anywhere; many are exiled due to dictatorial governments, censorship, national violence, etc. But Guyanese and Anglo-Caribbean writers suffer few such dangers. Rather, their expatriate condition stems from being both of isolated geography and a limited literary culture with readers.

In addition, a peculiar tendency to regard their history in the Caribbean as a mistake, mostly an imposed historical injustice, has produced Caribbean-born writers whose books all reject their birthplace for other faraway locations; writers like Dennis Williams, O. R. Dathorne, E. R. Braithwaithe. Recently, new expatriate writers have emerged with works based in Guyana, or about people born in Guyana; writers like Jan Shinebourne, Grace Nichols, Roy Heath, Fred D’Aguiar, N. D. Williams, Cyril Dabydeen, etc., and though something usually stereotypical or lacking deep real-life local authenticity weakens their work, the fact that they are expatriate writers of local origin is like a welcome feather in our national caps. Only a few of our new expatriate writers truly deliver authentic local insights like Pauline Melville with her vivid new daring novel `The Ventriloquist’s tale’ and some of her stories in `The migration of ghosts’; also David Dabydeen with his outstanding novel `Disappearance’. Other expatriate writers, like John Agard, who published his unique first little book of poetry `Shoot me with flowers’ in the 1970s. Guyana, later opted for popular folkloric topics written in ribald creolese, and providing an exotic proverbial humour.

Caribbean writers remain free individuals who can both write what they please, and choose to live where they please. A number of local drawbacks nevertheless continue to influence such moves toward being an expatriate writer. Drawbacks like little financial reward for such a profession, lack of proper local publishers and readers, lack of translated and published local works for the huge neighbouring Latin American markets. If local writers are to emerge and stay at home, examples of writers who have done so, need to be studied.

Writers like Jorge Amado of Brazil, who, though once exiled and away for periods of holiday in Europe and the USA, never left his cherished Salvador, Bahia, from which all his Brazilian novels were written. Or Naguib Mafouz of Egypt where he lives and writes. Or Jorge Luis Borges, of Buenos Aires, Argentina, where he remained to write all his famous works, many based in other times and places, from knowledge gained by being a librarian and avid reader. Such writers are excellent examples for newly emerging Guyanese and Caribbean writers because they prove that writers can remain in their homeland and produce works of the highest international standards.

The problem is not a lack of local writers, but a lack of local writers of the same high quality and distinct personal style as Amado, Mafouz or Borges. Upcoming local writers are lucky, however, to have the early novels of Mittelholtzer and Harris based in Guyana, which I have mentioned here, as a tradition to build on. Added to such works of quality should be the collected poems of A.J. Seymour, whose profoundly written local poems, like `Name poem’, `To a family home awaiting repair’, `There runs a dream’, and `Sun is a shapely fire’, show topics of everyday Guyanese life in the best light. Martin Carter’s poems like `I come from the nigger yard’, `Looking at your hands’, `Not hands like mine’, and `Poems of shape and motion’, offer as well as vital dignity and sense of values for each of our personal lives. The poems of Ian McDonald and Monar also make us aware of Guyana as a social and natural reality to contemplate and reveal.