Highway in the Sun - Sam Selvon

In the title play, the new imperialists have arrived to build a road clean through the agricultural land of a group of provisions growers. ‘All I saying is the Americans and them would build their road and go. And after that, we left on we own again.’ Suddenly there is segregation in the local rum shop as the Americans are given their own private room and service and this galvanises Tiger, one of the growers, to begin to realise and fight to stop the wheel of sameness in his village from ‘going round and round in a circle, round and round all the time.’

These three plays are attempts to escape - in ‘Home Sweet India’, a group of Indo-Caribbean men struggle to persuade their government to help finance a repatriation to an India that they have never known. It is all to escape the parochialism and continuing underdevelopment of village life, prey to the message of the metropole, for it is only there that ‘real’ life can happen: ‘What do you expect to happen in this half-dead village? One day just like another. Is only in England and America big things does happen.’ The dreams and frustration of rural Trinidad are at the centre of Selvon’s prose, which carries the poetry and figurative energy of the words which tumble from the poor of his island.