It is the first time I am in a church and I don’t like it. It is as though they are making me eat beef and pork. The flowers and the brass and the ol… - V. S. Naipaul

If a writer doesn’t generate hostility, he is dead.

He read political books. They gave him phrases which he could only speak to himself and use on Shama. They also revealed one region after another of misery and injustice and left him feeling more helpless and more isolated than ever. Then it was that he discovered the solace of Dickens. Without difficulty he transferred characters and settings to people and places he knew. In the grotesques of Dickens everything he feared and suffered from was ridiculed and diminished, so that his own anger, his own contempt became unnecessary, and he was given strength to bear the most difficult part of his day: dressing in the morning, that daily affirmation of faith in oneself, which at times for him was almost like an act of sacrifice.

More than England to the British West Indian or even Holland to the Surinamer, France is the mother country to the Martiniquan.