Read Ebook {PDF EPUB} The Intended by David Dabydeen Professor David Dabydeen (Emeritus) David Dabydeen has co-edited The Oxford Companion to Black British History (2007) and published in 2008 his sixth novel, Molly and the Muslim Stick (Macmillan). He is working on a neglected 19th Century Caribbean poet, Egbert Martin. His novel, Our Lady of Demarara was published in 2004. He was Consultant to Channel 4's three-part series on interracial sex, Forbidden Fruit , which was broadcast in 2003. His one- hour documentary Painting the People was broadcast by BBC television in 2004. He was awarded the 2004 Raja Rao Award for literature. He is Guyana's Ambassador and Permanent Delegate to UNESCO. He taught on the following MA courses in the Centre: Literary Translation and Creative (Re)Writing in a Global Context. Fictions and History. Literature of Migration. India in the Caribbean in Literature. Recent Publications. Our Lady of Demerara (Chichester: Dido Press, 2004) Lutchmee & Dilloo: A Study of West Indian Life by Edward Jenkins, ed. David Dabydeen (Oxford: Macmillan Caribbean, 2003) A Harlot's Progress (London: Jonathan Cape, 1999) Slavery, Abolition and Emancipation: Black Writers (Pickering and Chatto, 1999) The Counting House (London: Jonathan Cape, 1996) Turner (London: Jonathan Cape, 1995) Disappearance (London: Secker & Warburg, 1993) Black Writers in Britain, 1780-1890 (Edinburgh University Press, 1991) The Intended (London: Secker & Warburg, 1991) Recent News. He was awarded the Anthony Sabga Prize for Literature in 2008. His new novel, MOLLY AND THE MUSLIM STICK was published by Macmillan in 2008. David Dabydeen: The loose-tongued ambassador. Professor David Dabydeen writes fiction and poetry between midnight and four in the morning, sustained by cigarettes and occasional slurps of red wine. Teaching is for the afternoon and early evening. "Going to his lair in the Warwick humanities building is not unlike visiting a rum shop, but without the rum," says his friend John Mair, senior lecturer at nearby Coventry University and a fellow Guyanese. "All human life is there." For now, it's just Dabydeen and myself in the kitchen of the family home in Earlsdon, the Edwardian-Victorian suburb where Coventry's academic and creative community tends to live. It's lunchtime, and on the table between us is a plate of sandwiches provided by his wife, Rachel, an occupational therapist 19 years his junior. Eyeing them longingly is a cat christened Clare Short. "I met Clare when she was still a cabinet minister and I've always liked her," the novelist says. Then he pauses for a moment before adding: "I also like the idea of the vet coming into the waiting room and calling out 'Clare Short'." To quote Mair again, Dabydeen has a "well-developed sense of mischief". His sixth novel, Molly and the Muslim Stick, is published this week. "It's about a white woman who was abused by her father, goes a little mad and starts talking to a walking stick," he explains. "The stick talks back, claiming to have Muslim ancestry. I've set the story at the time of the Suez crisis, which enables me to look with some distance and perspective at issues that are still relevant today - religious fundamentalism, the suffering of the Palestinians and the fear of the Israelis for their own survival. It's a book that seeks to explore rather than condemn or criticise." Critical acclaim. Critical acclaim and at least five awards have come his way since 1978 when, as an undergraduate, he won the first Cambridge English prize with a collection of Creole poems about cane-cutters in Guyana. This month he'll pick up the Anthony N Sabga award for literature, the Caribbean equivalent of the Nobel prize, along with a cheque for £40,000. "In my mind, I've already spent the money several times over," he admits. He has been assured that he could have another £1,000 if he sold on eBay the painting on which the cover for his new book is based. "I wouldn't dream of it," he says. After all, not everyone has the chance to adorn a wall with a Derek Walcott original. The acclaimed West Indian poet became a good friend after Dabydeen invited him to Warwick to give a reading and, afterwards, invited Walcott and the entire audience to go for a curry. As a result, the owner of an Indian restaurant in Earlsdon suddenly found himself with over 100 unexpected customers on an otherwise quiet weekday evening. At the time, Dabydeen was director of the university's Centre for Caribbean Studies. He has since handed on that role and is now one of two professors in the comparative cultural studies department. "Warwick has been very good to me in giving me time to write," he says. Which might help to explain why he has been there since 1984, when he took up a post as lecturer in Caribbean literature. "I'd read a lot of VS Naipaul but not many other West Indian writers at the time," he confesses. "That's when I started devouring the works of Walcott and others. My speciality up to then had been 18th-century art and literature." William Hogarth has been a particular favourite. "He hated the establishment and gave high art to ordinary people," he maintains. Hogarth was the subject of Dabydeen's PhD at University College London, and the inspiration for his novel A Harlot's Progress, which looks at the 1732 series of engravings from the point of view of the black slave boy pictured within them. Dabydeen's own progress is a story that would test the imagination of any artist or writer. He was born in a one-roomed house on a sugar plantation in 1955, and won a scholarship to Queen's College, Georgetown, at the age of 10. "We had a solid colonial education modelled on the public-school system over here," he recalls. "That included Latin and strict discipline. We even had a tuckshop." So it must have come as quite a shock when he followed in his father's footsteps and arrived in south London in 1969. Dabydeen senior, an indentured labourer who had become a village schoolteacher, had gone before him in pursuit of more qualifications. "He finished up with a third-class honours degree in law," his son remembers. "But then he had to do it part-time while working in a cake factory." Racist times. Those were particularly tough times for black and Asian immigrants to the UK. Enoch Powell's 1968 Rivers of Blood speech had stirred up already rampant racism. "When Powell died, 30 years later, I remember feeling quite sad," Dabydeen says mischievously. "Were it not for him, I wouldn't have had the drive to achieve academically. I watched him wipe the floor with opponents in television studios. There was no Paul Boateng or Trevor Phillips at the time to match Powell's erudition and eloquence. I remember thinking 'I'd better get to Oxford or Cambridge'." The fact that he made it to both was something of a miracle, considering that he was placed in care at 15. Not that he stayed too long. "I found myself a room in a house in Clapham, owned by a Pakistani," he recalls. "The social workers weren't too bothered." But his inspirational English teacher was. "He gave up his lunchtimes to teach me Chaucer so that I could get into Cambridge." He likens the culture shock of moving to Selwyn College from the Ernest Bevin comprehensive, Balham, to being "catapulted into privilege". And he disliked it intensely, apart from the library. "I used to have the odd surreptitious cigarette in there," he admits. "You couldn't do it now and I shouldn't have done it then. I could have burnt the place down." He shakes his head in admonishment. By now he has lit up the first fag of the lunchtime. To avoid polluting any room likely to be occupied by his 16-month-old son, Moses, he is standing at the open kitchen door, half in and half out of the house. It seems an appropriate metaphor for someone who has successfully straddled two worlds - the Caribbean and the UK, the poverty of predominantly black areas of south London and the privilege of overwhelmingly white Cambridge. "As a black person, you either surrender to the privilege and be owned by it or you try, very subtly, to make minute changes," he says. "I dropped out in the second year and went back to Guyana for six months to loosen my tongue. When I came back to Cambridge, I felt more confident." Confident enough, indeed, to submit those Creole poems for the English prize, and to win it. All the same, University College London suited him better. "Having the British Library on your doorstep," he says. "Now that really was a privilege." Yet after completing his PhD, he dropped out of academia altogether and went to Wolverhampton as a community worker. "It was Powell's old constituency and I couldn't resist it," he says. "Put it down to youthful idealism. It was 1982. My office overlooked a very lengthy dole queue. Eventually, I concluded that power didn't lie at local level. I needed to get back to where I had a voice." He duly took up research fellowships at Oxford and Yale before moving to Coventry. Since 1993, Dabydeen has been Guyana's ambassador at Unesco, the cultural and intellectual arm of the United Nations. "I get to go to Paris twice a year," he says. Not as much fun as it used to be, since the French also introduced a smoking ban.