If you don't have a history or a narrative to go by, it's created by the memory of artists who tell the story their own way, which is how it is in the Caribbean. There are novelists of Chinese and Italian descent working in the Caribbean today. The last bastion race is going to have is art. The tone of a lot of prose can be more exciting than a lot of poetry I read. When you're very young, you're original and that's good.
All originality is imitation, of course.
Everything has been done before. Joseph Brodsky once said, 'Everyone wants a book. Nobody wants a poem.' . . We wanted to go after something as essential as possible. We didn't want to do a phony Spanish thing or something.