In the Caribbean, one emigré writer recollects, “you grow up knowing that you're going to leave” (Philip 230). That seems to be a given for writers‐to‐be of the West Indies/Caribbean basin, whose diaspora includes the United States, Canada, and Great Britain. For the Anglophone Caribbean, London has long served as a de facto cultural capital, and with the post‐World War II surge of migration, its West Indian population grew significantly. By 1961 an estimated 172,000 West Indians had immigrated to the UK, and by 1981 500,000 people of West Indian background lived there. Diasporic literature begins as a literature of immigration, later becoming a migrating literature constantly reformulating its sense of place and identity. “Migration creates the desire for home, which in turn produces the rewriting of home” (Condé & Lonsdale 1999). In its beginnings, diasporic literature exists on the margins of national literatures, whether British, American, or Canadian; as it evolves from one generation of writers to the next it redefines national spaces and imagines transnational ones.