SOURCE: Dabydeen, Cyril. “Places We Come From: Voices of Caribbean Canadian Writers (in English) and Multicultural Contexts.” World Literature Today 73, no. 2 (spring 1999): 231-37.

In the following essay, Dabydeen comments on the works of several multiethnic Caribbean Canadian writers, analyzing how their unique cross-cultural perspectives are changing the body of Canadian literature.

1.

The recent special “Canadian Caribbean Issue” of Descant (Summer 1998) suggests a journey and a maturing of Canadian literature in terms of the latter's flexibility and capacity to be all-embracing, without undermining Canada's identity; moreover, this attitude strengthens the nation's spirit and sense of continuing possibilities in a land which, since its inception, has been formed by immigration and continuing to grow on its “triangular foundation” (John Ralston Saul) of First Nations Peoples and English Canadian and French Canadian heritages. Caribbean links and correspondences with Canada, of course, have been manifold, varied, down through the ages and associated...