"In the early Tiger books, there is a sensitive and even painful probing of the Indian sense of self. An Island Is a World is an even more searing treatment. One values the impishness of the Moses books and, of course, the grand "federation" experiment of the all-ah-we-is-one Caribbean reality executed, most appropriately by language, in The Lonely Londoners. It is around this point in Sam's writing that he begins to veer away from the particular in favor of a "Pan-Caribbean perspective." He only returns to the Tiger motif at the end of his life through an unfinished novel, a fragment of which deals with "free paper"-the pass that Indians had to carry when they left the estates of their indenture. This is published as the short story "Turning Christian." My point is that here was Sam, almost at the end of his life, struggling to reopen that vein in his writing which probed the Indian sensibility, and invoking the humiliation of the pass-system that existed as a condition of Indian serfdom. This was not standard in all the territories of indenture, but it did occur in Trinidad. I can't help but wonder about what would have happened if he had not been waylaid by the simplistic falsehood of the all-ah-we-is-one agenda and had continued to explore the Tiger-type character. Or even integrated both-because Sam really belonged, unlike Naipaul, to both worlds. Yet ideologically, as "Three into Two Won't Go" so eloquently expresses, he positioned himself within the "progressive" agenda of mixing and merging and inventing a true-true Caribbean creolized self, and my question really is, at what cost to his writing? Or how did this facilitate his writer's agenda?"