Drinkers, Drummers, and Decent Folk

Book excerpt: Drinkers is a multi-form text. Essays, poetry, and fiction present rural life in Trinidad. These texts are interspersed with analytic and exploratory sections on the ethnographic and fieldwork experience. Within a context which includes the West Indian sugar estate at its core, and the distant but very influential U.S.A. at the periphery, Stewart reveals villagers struggling with problems of individual identity, as well as with problems occasioned by the historical struggle between African, European, and Indian cultural forms.