In this hard rock, whiles you do keep
from me
The rest of the island.

( The Tempest, I. ii. 342-345)

Thus it comes about that Shakespeare gives Prospero an island
to rule and Caliban a master to serve. It also comes about that
Prospero and Caliban thereby provide us with a powerful meta-
phor for colonialism. An offshoot of this interpretation is the
abstract condition of being Caliban, the victim of history, frus-
trated by the knowledge of utter powerlessness. In Latin America
the name has been adopted in a more positive manner, for Caliban
seems to represent the masses who are striving to rise against the
oppression of the elite.

In the following pages I shall use the name Caliban as a symbol
of the West Indian, as both author and character and as both man
and woman. I trust feminist readers will forgive me for the
masculine pronoun that recurs in this book. This is done mainly
to avoid the awkwardness in style that results from using the
combination of both genders--"he/she" or "his/her." I would like
to emphasize the fact that unless the name refers specifically to
Shakespeare's character, "Caliban" refers to both sexes.

I shall discuss three West Indian writers who migrated to
England and based some of their novels on life in Britain. Jean
Rhys from Dominica, George Lamming from Barbados, and Sam
Selvon from Trinidad depict West Indians who struggle to come
to terms with physical and psychological exile. Through their
fiction they betray their own sense of Otherness, and in an alien
environment the Other is also the Outsider. Despite being Out-
siders they succeed as novelists, thus proving that Caliban is
victorious in the struggle over odds. I would like to suggest that
the trauma of colonialism inspires Caliban to resurgent vitality
as he transcends the limits that constrict him and awakens from
what James Joyce called the "nightmare" of history. He has, in
fact, turned history into art.

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