'It's all about ideology: there's no discussion about art': Reluctant Voyages into Theory in Caribbean Women's Writing

All good conferences engender debate and argument, and the Second International Conference of Caribbean Women Writers, held in Trinidad in April 1990 was no exception. Sue Greene's report on the conference mentions a certain amount of 'wrangling' between authors and critics as to which group should be shown 'more deference', even though the interdependence of the two was also clearly acknowledged (534). Personally, I feel such jockeying for position to be a wasteful and divisive exercise: given the continued tendency to 'exoticize' Caribbean literature in the international market, and to treat women's writing as a trendy- but still marginal - subset within this corpus, our united task must be to give women's literary voices the widest possible hearing.