I thought of three things in writing an extensive introduction and a series of notes. It was a literary joke – hence I referred twice in Slave Song to T. S. Eliot, because Eliot had also joked and provided a kind of spoof gloss to The Waste Land. On another level, we had been arguing for a long time that Creole was a distinctive language. We made a lot of politics out of that. It was part of the nationalism in the 60s. We had our own airline, environment, landscape, and fruits, so we should have our own language. If we were going to take that seriously we should provide translations to our poems. But the third reason is the most serious … I wanted to question the relationship between the work of art and the critical industry that arises because of that work of art.