Caribbean Writers and Their Art: Heritage (1991)

Edward Baugh introduces Belizean writer Zee Edgell and New Yorker Lisa Burdige. Edgell, the first internationally published novelist of Belize, discusses her novels and the effect of Belizean culture on her writing. She explains the multiculturality and ethnic groupings in Belize, including Mayas, mestizas, the Garifuna people (free African Maroons), and Creoles. She talks about women in literature, the differing values men and women hold in the Caribbean, and her novel Beka Lamb. Burdige gives her perspective of being an American writer at the CWSI, and she and Baugh discuss ethnicity, regionality and universality in literature. Burdige describes one of her short stories, "Vacations," about a tourist visiting an island, and reads a passage from it. Edgell reveals that most of the conference attendees accepted Burdige and forgot she was not a Caribbean woman; she reads a passage from her fiction.