The Saint Lucian Nobel Prize winner Derek Walcott claimed in his essay “The Caribbean: Culture or Mimicry” that, despite the shadow of empire being inescapable, Caribbeans “were American even while [they] were British” (3). The insistence on national identification is a result of power intentions in an “archipelago […] broken up into nations, and in each nation we attempt to assert characteristics of the national identity” (ibid). This is absurd according to Walcott, since it cannot be denied that West Indian culture is American “not because America owes me a living from historical guilt, not that is needs my presence, but because we share this part of the world, and have shared it for centuries now, even as conqueror and victim, as exploiter and exploited”.