In his play entitled Where There is Darkness, first presented at the Lyric Theatre, London, in February 1982, Phillips presented his audience with the plight of a West Indian man on the eve of his return to his home in the Caribbean after over twenty years’ residence in Britain. Although set in one of London's commuter suburbs, the story of Albert Williams subtly engaged with Shakespeare's characterization of the dispossessed Caliban, a ‘thing of darkness’, in his play The Tempest, and Joseph Conrad's novella of 1899, Heart of Darkness. Four years later, in his second novel, A State of Independence, published in 1986, Phillips developed the protagonist of his earlier play and imbued him with some of the confusions and ambivalences characteristic of protagonists within other texts dealing with the paradoxical conditions of post-coloniality, such as V. S. Naipaul's The Mimic Men (1965). In this text, Naipaul had highlighted some of the most pressing failures of the emergent ‘independent’ nation states, exposing the predicaments faced by those post-colonial societies whose colonial rulers had been replaced by a selfinterested black elite. The realities of post-colonialism, as depicted by Naipaul, suggested that such states had entered a condition of unmoving stasis in which historical temporality existed merely as a sequence of constant repetition. In contrast to Naipaul's sombre pessimism, however, Phillips injects a delicate, almost imperceptible element of hope into his post-colonial landscape. As suggested by its title, the novel deals with a distinct period of time - that is, the twenty-four hours leading up to the unnamed island's withdrawal from colonial authority, an island that in many ways resembles the small island of St Kitts where Phillips was born. In A State of Independence, a once-colonized island optimistically awaits its ‘rebirth’ as an independent entity. Phillips's text explores the dynamics of transition, not the revolutionary ethos or violence precipitating the post-colonial moment, but its legal and political consequence.