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. "I used to like those cafes where you could sit writing with a cigarette and a glass of wine," he reminisces as Clare Short finally leaps on to the table and pads purposefully towards what's left of the sandwiches. Curriculum vitae. Age 52. Job Professor in the Centre for Translation and Comparative Cultural Studies at Warwick University. Also novelist, poet and Guyana's ambassador to Unesco. Before that Director of Warwick's Centre for Caribbean Studies. What does Dabydeen mean? David Dabydeen is nonchalant when asked about his surname. “We know nothing about our name. It’s an empty space,” says the Guyanese writer of Indian descent. He has done his share of delving into family history and discovered that his grandfather left Calcutta in 1855 as an indentured labourer in the ship SS Appollinaire , but the origin of the name, a possible oral corruption, has eluded him. For Dabydeen, diasporic cliches war with a life lived in intensity (picture above with wife and child by Sanat Kumar Sinha) . He will tell you that “Bollywood movies are trash”; that he plans to name his eight month-old son “Ganesh” in a Hindu ceremony; that in a similar ceremony he was given the name “Ganpat” at a temple in Tirumala last year. But he will also talk with feeling about the “ramshackle library” in Berbice, Guyana, a window to the outside world, and England, “the land of books where everyone knew Shakespeare, and thugs who grunted racial abuse”. The 52-year-old professor at University of Warwick is the author of works like The Intended , The Harlot’s Progress and the poem Turner , which tries to salvage a past for the drowned slave in J.M.W. Turner’s painting Slave Ship . His works dwell on the search for identity, a quest that has been his own. “The Caribbean islands are a space of annihilation,” he says. His childhood is conflicted, with similarities to the narrator of V.S. Naipaul’s Miguel Street (“the first Caribbean book I read”): a young boy who manages to leave behind post-war Port of Spain for Britain and its promise of a future. “In Guyana, we celebrated Diwali and also went to an Anglican church. But we were a bit ashamed of our Hindu names,” he admits. He does not believe in clinging on to the past. “I tried to google my grandfather’s caste. For Caribbeans, the loss was the beginning of a brotherhood.” The high point of the adolescent years was watching “Bombay movies”. “We often watched a movie more than seven times. We would go home humming lines from the songs. It didn’t matter that we didn’t understand a word,” he recalls. Singer Lata Mangeshkar was a major draw, as were actors Raj and Shashi Kapoor. He left Guyana for England at the age of 13. It isn’t right to overuse the idea of ‘exile’, for people banished from home, and more importantly, language, feels Dabydeen. “It is rather a sense of discomfort. I am not at ease here: I don’t understand the language. In Guyana, I go back as an expatriate living in a hotel.” England is home for him today. He would rather delve into the unconscious that skirts definition. His forthcoming work Molly and the Muslim Stick is about a sexually abused girl who talks to a stick, which in turn has its own history, having evolved from a seed planted in the Middle Ages during the Crusades. David Dabydeen (Dabydeen, David) More editions of Hogarth's Blacks: Images of Blacks in Eighteenth Century English Art: Hogarth's Blacks: Images of Blacks in eighteenth century English art: ISBN 9788788213102 (978-87-88213-10-2) Hardcover, Dangaroo Press, 1985 Hogarth's Blacks: Images of Blacks in Eighteenth Century English Art: ISBN 9780719023170 (978-0-7190-2317-0) Softcover, Manchester University Press, 1987. French. Founded in 1997, BookFinder.com has become a leading book price comparison site: Find and compare hundreds of millions of new books, used books, rare books and out of print books from over 100,000 booksellers and 60+ websites worldwide. The Intended in Heart of Darkness. The Intended is Kurtz's fiancée who stays snug in Belgium (probably eating delicious Belgian waffles and French fries with mayonnaise, hmm, is it lunch time yet?) while Kurtz sails off to gather ivory. She's beautiful and often connected with imagery of light and heaven: This fair hair, this pale visage, this pure brow, seemed surrounded by an ashy halo from which the dark eyes looked out at me. Their glance was guileless, profound, confident, and trustful. (3.53). Check out that halo and the "pure brow": it matches her naïve and idealistic view of Kurtz, who she sees as a kind of saint, whose "goodness shone in every act" (3.70). She's utterly infatuated with Kurtz and believes herself the single most definitive authority on his character: "I am proud to know I understood him better than any one on earth" (3.59). Um, no. The Intended is essentially a stand-in for every woman, everywhere. (Well, every white, European woman). Her value is measured by her beauty and idealism, and Marlow says that "We must help them to stay in that beautiful world of their own lest ours gets worse" (2.29). In other words, men need women to be beautiful and dumb so there's some bit of goodness in the world. Excuse us while we gag. But we think it's more complicated than that. (Of course.) Marlow sees women as naïve, idealistic, and gullible—in other words, able to turn blind eyes to the bloody realities and brutalities of imperialism. (Who do you think is wearing all that ivory?) They end up standing in for all Europeans. Like the Intended, white men want to believe in the good and civilizing characteristics of the pilgrims sent into the interior. They want the illusion, and the ivory—not the reality of African slaves worked to death.