Caribbean literature, literary works of the Caribbean area written in Spanish, French, or English. The literature of the Caribbean has no indigenous tradition. The pre-Columbian American Indians left few rock carvings or inscriptions (petroglyphs), and their oral traditions did not survive 16th-century Spanish colonization. The West Africans who replaced them were also without a written tradition, so for about 400 years Caribbean literature was an offshoot and imitation of the models of the colonial powers Spain, France, Great Britain, and the Netherlands. Caribbean writers, however, were not unaware of their environment. The letters and speeches of Toussaint-Louverture, the Haitian general and