Taking, or Spurning, the Imperial Road:
 White West Indian Writers and
 their Black Protagonists"

 Kim Robinson Walcott
 University of the West Indies, Mona

" n the colonies," Frantz Fanon pointed out some forty years ago, "the
 economic substructure is also a superstructure. The cause is the
 consequence; you are rich because you are white, you are white because
 you are rich."' Undeniably, the white West Indian's burden involves grappling
 with such stereotypes. On the other hand, the burden also involves struggling
 with a sense of marginalisation as a dwindling minority in an environment of
 increasing Afro- and/or Indo-centricity. In such an atmosphere of polarisation,
 how have white West Indian writers negotiated their identities or more
 specifically, how have they conveyed such a negotiation in their depictions
 of the blacks who make up the majority of the population?
 Charles Mills has suggested: "Being white in the Caribbean cannot mean
the same thing as being white in Europe, for being white in the Caribbean
means, above all, not being black. Thus the ideas and values that develop in
this so-called 'cultural section' will be permeated by the necessity of defining
itself against its despised and feared opposite."2
 Mills' use of the words 'despised and feared opposite' brings to mind
Kenneth Ramchand's observation, in his seminal 1970 work on the West
Indian novel, of a 'terrified consciousness' as a feature permeating a selection
of works written by white West Indians in the middle of the last century: two
novels by Barbadian men, Brown Sugar (1966) and Christopher (1959) written
respectively by J. B. Emtage and Geoffrey Drayton, and two by Dominican
women Phyllis Shand Allfrey's The Orchid House (1953), and Jean Rhys's
Wide Sargasso Sea (1966).3 Ramchand suggests that

* This paper was presented at the Jean Rhys Conference held 10-13 June 2004 at
the Garraway Hotel, Dominica.
' Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth (1961; New York: Grove Press, 1968) 40.
2 Charles Mills, "Race and Class: Conflicting or Reconcilable Paradigms?" Social
and Economic Studies, 36.2 (1987): 100.