While teaching a creative writing class in India, I was surprised at receiving stories from the students that were all set in distant places: in the American West with cowboys and in Manhattan penthouses with clinking ice cubes. This was, till an eminent Caribbean writer gave the writers in the oncecolonised countries the confidence to see the shabby lives around them as worthy of being “told”. The writer of this passage is surprised by the creative writing assignments of his students because________.