ABSTRACT
There are, I am sure, many approaches to the ideas, themes, and concepts embodied in what is called ‘creoleness’. My main interest in writing this essay is to seek to trace how creoleness may apply to fiction, indeed to the genesis of the imagination in the living soil of South America and the Caribbean. May I say at the outset that such genesis for me is ceaselessly unfinished and that this sensation of unfinished genesis-in worlds of space and nature and psyche-has its roots as much in Old Worlds as in New, in the crossroads of a civilization upon which we may have arrived in subtle and complex and involuntary ways that are altering conventional linearity and conventional frameworks.
