"Irony, it seems to me, has always been present in West Indian writing. It is integral to West Indian life as a whole. Survival itself is ironic. When you look at calypso, which is a form of oral literature, it is chock full with irony, and it's been there from the very beginning. Just to survive in the Caribbean, you have to be ironic, and it becomes part of one's range of expression, including humor. It is the tragicomedy of someone like Samuel Selvon (another important influence), a capacity for irony that was in Selvon's work from the very beginning, even before he moved to London to write Lonely Londoners, for instance."