[Word Count: 746] DAVID DABYDEEN

[Word Count: 746] DAVID DABYDEEN David Dabydeen (1955- ) is an Indo-Guyanese novelist, poet, critic, and scholar. Born on December 9, 1955 in present-day Berbice, Guyana—formerly British Guiana— to a family of Indian heritage, Dabydeen moved to England in 1969. He read English at Cambridge University and received a doctorate from University College London, writing a dissertation on British painter and engraver William Hogarth (1697-1764). After completing graduate study, Dabydeen was a post-doctoral fellow at Oxford University. Since 1984, he has taught in various capacities at the University of Warwick, including serving as director of the Centre for Caribbean Studies. He is currently Guyana’s ambassador to the People’s Republic of China, a position he has held since 2010. Dabydeen is the author of three collections of poetry, including: Slave Song (1984), winner of the Commonwealth Poetry Prize and Quiller-Couch Prize; Coolie Odyssey (1988); and Turner (1995). More recently, he has turned his attention to prose fiction, a body of work comprising seven novels: The Intended (1991), awarded the Guyana Prize for Literature and shortlisted for the John Llewelyn Rhys Prize; Disappearance (1993); The Counting House (1996), shortlisted for the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award; A Harlot’s Progress (1999), awarded the Guyana Prize for Literature and shortlisted for the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for Fiction; Our Lady of Demerara (2004), awarded the Guyana Prize for Literature; Molly and the Muslim Stick (2008); and Johnson’s Dictionary (2013). For his career-spanning work, Dabydeen has also received the Raja Rao Award for outstanding contributions to the literature of the South Asian diaspora (2004), the Hind Rattan Award for outstanding contributions to the literary and intellectual life of the Indian diaspora (2007), and the Anthony N. Sabga Caribbean Award for Excellence (2008). In 2000, Dabydeen became the second West Indian writer (after V.S. Naipaul) to be made a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. In his poetry, fiction, and scholarship, Dabydeen largely focuses on four subjects: visual art; histories of the African and Indian diasporas in the British Empire; vernacularity; and sexuality. Dabydeen maintains a special interest in eighteenth-century engraver William Hogarth, the subject of his dissertation and two subsequent scholarly books. He would later revisit Hogarth in his novels A Harlot’s Progress—a reimagining of the artist’s 1732 eponymous series in which the young Black slave depicted in Plate II becomes the protagonist Mungo—and Johnson’s Dictionary—in which the slave Cato completes paintings left unfinished by a drunken Hogarth. Dabydeen’s long poem Turner responds to Victorian painter J.M.W. Turner’s famed “Slavers Throwing overboard the Dead and Dying—Typhon coming on” (1840), taking as its subject a slave’s partially submerged body in the foreground of the painting. The author’s thematic interest in the African and Indian diasporas under British colonial rule—especially the intertwined histories of enslaved and indentured or “coolie” labor—largely derives from his upbringing in Guyana, where Indian indentured servants replaced African laborers in the immediate aftermath of slave emancipation. Between 1838 and 1917, over half-a-million coolies—often lured by deceitful recruitment tactics—were brought from South Asia to the British West Indies. This history is taken up in his second poetry collection Coolie Odyssey, as well as in his novel The Counting House, in which a young Indian couple leaves their village for work as bound coolies in nineteenth-century British Guiana. Dabydeen also treats subsequent waves of immigration between England and its (former) colonies in several novels: his quasi- autobiographical first novel The Intended follows an Indo-Guyanese student navigating contemporary London; Disappearance recounts a young Guyanese engineer’s efforts to shore up an English coastal village; in Our Lady of Demerara, a theater critic pursues a young Indian prostitute in present-day Coventry; and in the surrealist Molly and the Muslim Stick, a young girl, a walking stick, and a Black boy venture across England. The use of vernacular diction is also central to Dabydeen’s work. His poetry collection Slave Song is written entirely in Guyanese creole, with accompanying commentaries and translations into Standard English. He associates vernacularity with sexuality and obscenity, writing that the subject of his work “demanded a language capable of describing both a lyrical and a corrosive sexuality. The creole language is angry, crude, energetic.” From anxieties and fantasies of interracial sex in Slave Song and The Intended, to the homoeroticism of Turner and Johnson’s Dictionary, to the young prostitutes inhabiting A Harlot’s Progress and Our Lady of Demerara, Dabydeen’s work affirms his claim that “The British Empire… was as much a pornographic as an economic project.” Bibliography Binder, Wolfgang and David Dabydeen. “David Dabydeen.” Journal of West Indian Literature 3.2 (1989): 67-80. Dabydeen, David. “On Not Being Milton: Nigger Talk in England Today.” In The State of the Language, edited by Christopher Ricks and Leonard Michaels. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990. ---. Pak’s Britannica: Articles by and Interviews with David Dabydeen. Edited by Lynne Macedo. Kingston: University of the West Indies Press, 2011. Karran, Jampta and Lynne Macedo, eds. No Land, No Mother: Essays on the Work of David Dabydeen. Leeds: Peepal Tree Press, 2007. Ward, Abigail. “‘Word People’: A Conversation with David Dabydeen.” Atlantic Studies 11.1 (2014): 30-46. Nicholas T Rinehart .

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