Literary awakenings

Reading Jak Peake's Between the Bocas: A Literary Geography of Western Trinidad provides a fascinating window on a world of literary history and criticism that I knew nothing about. Of course I knew about the existence of Ken Ramchand's The West Indian Novel and Its Background, but it blows my mind a little to know that a book called The Trinidad Awakening: West Indian Literature of the Nineteen-Thirties was published in 1988!

The truth is that every page of Peake's book seems to bring new revelations that not only put my ignorance in sharp relief, but also leave me feeling a bit cheated. Why didn't I know about this 20 or 30 years ago?

So can I write without knowing all this history? Of course. But that doesn't erase the feeling that by the time I'm finished writing, I should know this stuff.