Though several of the stories focus with satirical sharpness on the pretensions of ‘The Republic’ (Guyana in its most self-consciously socialist imposture), Williams’ stage is the wider Caribbean diaspora, in the UK, Brooklyn or Toronto: the Caribbean that never leaves his characters’ heads. 

His characters’ perspectives are often from the margins, anxious not to be swept away into the anonymous mass, though this stance is not unproblematic: the narrator of ‘Batty Bwoy, Divert’, for instance, has to deal with the contradictions between his attractions to Rastafarianism and his discomfort, as a gay man, over Rasta homophobia. What Williams’s characters want is the space to cultivate their sense of individual worth, though this can sometimes involve becoming trapped in an absurd or confining persona. At the heart of all the stories is the plea for a humane tolerance.