156 KIM ROBINSON WALCOTT

Lilla. Lilla's half of the novel reads as contrived, self-conscious, stilted prose,
and the character of Lilla seems unclearly defined and inconsistently
portrayed, and unengaging in consequence. In contrast, Vel's narrative
engages the reader from the beginning; it flows smoothly, develops naturally,
reads realistically; and her character, unlike Lilla's, is three-dimensional,
convincing in that we understand her motivation and purpose, compelling
and likable.
 Such a privileging of blackness, whether intentional or unintentional,
reminds us, firstly, of the dominance given by Jean Rhys to Christophine in
Wide Sargasso Sea. In her book Stet, Diana Athill, who was Jean Rhys' editor
at Andre Deutsch, suggests that "Rhys' creed so simple to state, so difficult
to follow was that she must tell the truth: must get things down as they
really were" (177).25 Athill relates how she had to discourage the inclusion of
one of Rhys's stories, called "The Imperial Road," in the collection Sleep it
Off, Lady because of its seemingly racist tone: the burden of the story was
how things had fallen apart in Dominica once the colonial government was
no longer in power the specific reference in this case being the construction
of the trans-insular Imperial Road which Rhys mistakenly believed to have
been completed by the English and whose apparent demise she therefore
blamed on the native Dominicans who took over responsibility for its
maintenance. Rhys, Athill suggests, was in that story sounding very much
like she sounded when she was having conversations with her editor: "she
talked sometimes unselfconsciously, sometimes with a touch of defiance -
like any other old member of the Caribbean plantocracy, describing black
people she liked as 'loyal'; saying what a mess 'they' had made of things
once 'we' were no longer there... and so on.... And it never failed to make
me marvel that in Wide Sargasso Sea she had, by adhering to her creed as a
writer, transcended her own attitude" (177). Although unaware at the time
of the factual inaccuracy of Rhys's story she would only become aware of
this years later when she visited Dominica Athill did not want Rhys to
publish "The Imperial Road" because she "did not want anyone to despise
as racist a writer who could, when it mattered, defeat her own limitations
with such authority" (179). In Wide Sargasso Sea, and especially in the
characterisation of Christophine, Rhys chooses, or perhaps is impelled,
intentionally or unintentionally, not to walk the imperial road, but to take
instead the road of truth.
 A similar road is taken by the Jamaican Anthony Winkler. Winkler has not
only featured black protagonists in the majority of his novels, unlike most of
the other white West Indian writers discussed above, but has appeared to
be more comfortable doing so than in his treatment of his white or brown
protagonists as attested to by the relative stiltedness of the portrayal of
most of the characters in The Great Yacht Race, who are white or brown, in


25 Diana Athill, Stet (London: Granta, 2001).