David Dabydeen’s latest work has just been released. It is a new novel, Molly and the Muslim Stick (2008) published in London by Macmillan, and the celebration of its appearance coincides with the acclaim which accompanied the most recent international honour bestowed upon him last weekend.
Dabydeen is among the topmost flight of Guyanese and West Indian novelists; he is one of the foremost fiction writers, poets, critics and academics in the UK where he is Professor of Literary Studies at the University of Warwick. He was presented with his most recent honour in Port of Spain, Trinidad (April 2008), the Anthony N Sabga Caribbean Award for Excellence in Arts and Letters. As it happens, another Guyanese was also a winner in another field; Anette Arjoon was co-winner of the Award for Excellence for outstanding Public and Civic Contribution.
Another significant note is that Dabydeen is extremely highly decorated as a writer. The Anthony N Sabga Award was actually his second for 2008, having, a little more than two months ago, gone to India to receive the Hind Rattan (Jewel of India) Award presented by the Government of India. What is more, that was also his second recent Indian recognition, having been the winner of the 2004 Raja Rao Award, given in India for outstanding contribution to literature in the Indian diaspora.
He won the Guyana Prize for Literature on three occasions, as the writer of the Best Book of Fiction, The Intended, in 1992. He repeated that achievement in 2000 with The Harlot’s Progress and again in 2004 with Our Lady of Demerara. Among his British prizes is the Greater London Council Literature Prize, 1985, while he was shortlisted for two of the most prestigious in that country – the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, which is the oldest literary award in the UK, and the John Llewellyn Rhys Memorial Prize in 1992. Another achievement in fiction is that his third novel, The Counting House, was on the shortlist for the highly competitive international award, the IMPAC Dublin Prize, the world’s largest and richest prize for a single work of fiction.
His work as a poet has certainly been outstripped by his achievement and reputation in fiction, but that is even more remarkable when one notes what he has done in poetry. He has so far published three books of verse. With the very first book, Slave Song, he won the Commonwealth Poetry Prize in 1986 and this was followed by Coolie Odyssey (1989) and Turner in 1994. Slave Song and Coolie Odyssey are dominated by Creole monologues and dramatisations which capture two important sides of the Caribbean colonial experience – slavery and indentureship. The first contains dramatised explorations into the mind of the enslaved African on the plantation, while the second includes a parallel suite of poems documenting the saga of the descendants of indentured Indians, their Guyana experience, migration, their aspirations and failed efforts.
Turner (Jonathan Cape, 1994) is Dabydeen’s best, deepest and artistically most sophisticated book of poetry to date. Its piece de resistance is the long poem Turner, occupying 39 pages of the collection that also reprints selections from the two other books. JMW Turner was a nineteenth century English painter whose work includes a number of impressive seascapes. The most famous of these, Slave Ship, was exhibited at the Royal Academy in London in 1840 to high acclaim. Its real title is Slavers Throwing Overboard the Dead and Dying during the horrific Middle Passage. There is a ship on the ocean and in a section of the foreground, just visible, the legs of one of them who had been dumped, his head already submerged. A picture reminiscent of Brughel’s Icarus.
Dabydeen engages that painting in his poem to explore the Middle Passage. But he combines two cosmic spaces to ambiguously intersperse the African with the Indian ethos. He creates an imaginary life existence for the drowned African, confusing the identities and personae, exploring different roles. Turner is also cast in different roles, including that of the slave ship captain. Dabydeen’s interest is in both the African and the Indian groups who crossed the ocean.
Molly and the Muslim Stick is his sixth novel, one of five with an English or partly English setting. Characteristically, it begins dramatically with a graphic account of the rape of Molly by her drunken father in Accrington, Lancashire, setting the tone for a life of further abuse and beatings. It is a fantastic absurdist narrative. Yet, like his other books, it continues Dabydeen’s preoccupation with history and the connections, cultural and mythical, between England and his native Guyana.
His first novel, The Intended, which also provided his first Guyana Prize, starts off these interests. Like so many first novels, it draws on autobiography, since, like the central character in the book, Dabydeen, originally from Berbice, completes his secondary schooling in England, afterwards going off to Cambridge on a scholarship. His experiences take him through some of the seamy corners of London, the kinds of environments he is to explore in the later novel, Our Lady of Demerara. His hero in Disappearance is a Guyanese engineer whose job sends him out to save the English coastline from crumbling away into the sea off the cliffs of Kent. It is an interesting reversal of roles in which the West Indian expert journeys into a crumbling civilisation in a text that draws on Conrad’s Heart of Darkness and Naipaul’s The Enigma of Arrival in a deliberate effort to pay tribute to them. Here, a reference to Wilson Harris’s engineer who goes to measure the heartland in The Secret Ladder is also relevant.
Dabydeen is to return to this kind of intertextual experiment in Our Lady of Demerara in which he draws on Harris by design. In this novel, he again moves between England and Guyana in another tale with the rich echoes of history. The hero is a second rate theatre critic who, in trying to trace a document given to him, ends up in the riverain interiors of Guyana, where his research takes him. In another of his typical dramatic beginnings, Dabydeen starts off this tale in the grimy corners of Coventry where the hero goes for clandestine encounters with prostitutes and the further dangerous suburban backstreets of Tyle Hill where the critic’s family lives.
But this comes after The Counting House, which takes readers from India to British Guiana along with the recruits from impoverished Indian villages who go to work on the Gladstone Estates in Vreed en Hoop. Here, again, is a narrative charged with sex, greed, colourful language, historical precision and the intricacies of indenture in Guyana, including the push factors out of conditions and deceit in India.
His fourth novel enters another sphere of history in which Dabydeen also has great interest. He has researched Hogarth, blacks, sugar and the abolition movement in eighteenth century Britain and made both scholarly and creative use of his findings. He brings to life as a character, Mungo, one of the blacks in Britain featured in Hogarth’s pictures, turning him into a crafty character scheming to inveigle as much as he can get for selling his life story to abolitionists.
This novel has been carved out of Dabydeen’s academic research in this area of British social history and art. As a renowned authority in this field, he is the author of the classic work on the subject, Hogarth’s Blacks. Not many Dabydeen short stories are really known, but this same period and subject of history has provided him with material for at least one already published short story. And, it is perhaps not a coincidence that his next book of fiction now in progress is The Gallery, which will be his first collection of short stories with a title that suggests it has something to do with art.
Yet there is more to the Anthony N Sabga Arts and Letters Award, since Dabydeen won it for excellence as a novelist, as a poet, in documentary film, in the promotion of Caribbean arts and literature, as a scholar, researcher and facilitator. It was also for his priceless contribution to the publication of valuable works of Guyanese literature and history. He rediscovered and reprinted the Selected Poems of Egbert Martin and Theophilus Richmond’s The First Crossing, the very first record ever written of the inaugural voyage across the kala paani in 1838. One of his current projects is the publication and public distribution of ‘The Guyana Classics,’ the reprinting of 30 prominent but out of print works of Guyanese literature, history and culture.
Dabydeen helped found the Dido Press and the Derek Walcott Press to facilitate these publications and created opportunities for publishing and exposure of their work in the UK and Europe for an impressive list of Caribbean writers and academics. His work and example have done a great deal to promote Caribbean literature and scholarship in Europe and deserve this level of recognition.
