“Yet I feel absolutely no shame in having endured the colonial experience. There was no obvious humiliation in it. In fact, I think that many of what are sneered at as colonial values are part of the strength of the West Indian psyche, a fusion of formalism with exuberance, a delight in both the precision and the power of language. ... I think that ... our early education must have ranked with the finest in the world. The grounding was rigid – Latin, Greek, and the essential masterpieces, but there was this elation of discovery. Shakespeare, Marlowe, Horace, Vergil – these writers weren’t jaded but immediate experiences. The atmosphere was competitive, creative.
It was cruel, but it created our literature.