The past few decades have seen an explosion of writing by women from the Caribbean. From Antigua, Barbados, Belize, Dominica, Grenada, Guyana, Haiti, Trinidad - women of African, European, and mixed ancestry have explored and manipulated their complex matrix: of languages and subtle linguistic codes; of folk traditions and formal English schooling; of vital politics and tormented histories; of intoxicating natural beauty and devastating poverty. They have written of mothertongues and motherlands, of exile, of the boundaries of bodies, of the politics of owning and not owning themselves.