Category: Press Clippings

Source: Guyana Chronicle
Date: February 22 2014
Writer: David Dabydeen, University of Warwick

INTRODUCTION

Egbert Martin, who published under the pen name ‘Leo,” was the most accomplished and prolific of Guyanese writers in the nineteenth-century, highly praised by his contemporaries. The great West Indian/American collector and bibliophile, Arthur Schomburg, described Martin as “one of the greatest Negro poets in history.” Nineteenth-century Guyanese journals commented on the quality of his writing. The Daily Chronicle declared him to be “the ablest of the poetical writers of whom British Guiana can boast” and the Berbice Gazette spoke of him as “one whose works plainly bespeak talent and ability of the highest order.” Lord Tennyson was said to have admired his work.
Today Martin is almost totally forgotten, his work routinely ignored in anthologies of Caribbean writing. Only two copies of his first book of poetry, Leo’s Poetical Works (1883), are traceable in libraries worldwide; only one copy of his second collection, Leo’s Local Lyrics (1886), has survived; his collection of short stories, Scriptology (1885), is untraceable.

Very little is remembered and recorded of Martin’s life. He was born around 1861, presumably in the capital, Georgetown. His father, Richard, was a journeyman tailor. No information survives about his mother or any siblings. A. J. Seymour, who described him as “a fair mulatto,” states that “from early youth he was confined to an invalid’s bed, as a result of illness. The Colonist, a Guianese journal, first published his poetry when he was nineteen years of age, and thereafter he was a frequent contributor to The Argosy and Echo. His patrons were James Thompson, editor of The Argosy, and George Anderson Forshaw, Mayor of Georgetown. It was said that Thompson would visit Martin at his home in East Street, Georgetown, to collect his poetry for printing in The Argosy. Martin gained a degree of international prominence in 1887 when he won an empire-wide competition for adding two verses to the British national anthem,an event sponsored by the London Standard to mark Queen Victoria’s Golden Jubilee. He died on the 23rd of June 1890. His death certificate states his age as twenty-nine and the cause of death as “phthisis” (tuberculosis, or ‘consumption’, also known as the ‘White Plague’ because its sufferers appeared markedly pale. It may well be that Martin was a “fair mulatto” because of his medical condition). His death was registered by his cousin Edwin Heyliger, so it would appear that Martin was partly of German ancestry.’

Contemporaries and Cultural Milieu
British Guiana, though a lonely colony in South America, separated geographically from the rest of Britain’s Caribbean colonial possessions, was not a backwater in cultural terms. In 1851, the Athenaeum Society (possibly modelled after London’s Athenaeum Club, founded in 1823 for men of scientific, literary and artistic talent) was established in Georgetown and hosted dramatic performances. The Assembly Rooms, owned by the Royal Agricultural and Commercial Society, was also a leading theatre venue, containing an auditorium which could seat up to one thousand people. In the 1860s, establishments like the Adelphie Theatre and the Philharmonic Hall staged “numerous plays, musicals and operas … by local clubs and foreign theatrical companies.” There were regular performances by members of societies like the Amateur Dramatic Club and the Histrionic Club, and later, the Demerara Dramatic Club and the Georgetown Dramatic Club. On April 17, 1890, two months before Martin’s death, the Georgetown Botanical Gardens was the venue for a program of music, played by the Militia Band, including works by the French composers Daniel Auber and Emile Waldteufel. Literary texts were available in the reading rooms of the Royal Agricultural and Commercial Society and in educational establishments like Queen’s College: N. E. Cameron lists public readings of works by Shakespeare, Horace, Byron, Homer, Racine, and Ovid at Queen’s College in the 1870s. Learned people like Martin’s patrons would have owned personal libraries and made their books available to each other. The cultural milieu of nineteenth-century Georgetown produced local musicians, actors and directors. Among the most notable poets were Simon Christian Oliver and Thomas Don. Oliver was a schoolmaster who was writing and publishing in the 1830s. He was relatively wealthy, his son being a businessman and his daughter receiving an education in England. Don, by contrast, was a former slave, and like African slaves in the New World, he became literate by exposure to the Bible. His book, Pious Effusions, published in 1873, consisted of hymn-like stanzas on religious subjects. These poets belonged, according to P. H. Daly, to “a generation of Spiritual Men … however much they were engrossed with the affairs of their temporal order, they saw only the spiritual side of the synthesis.” The following generations (late nineteenth-century/ early twentieth-century) represented by poets T. R. F. Elliott and J. E. Clare McFarlane nurtured racial pride or protested about social injustices.

Martin’s Poetry
Apart from the odd poem like The Negro Village, which speaks of the African-Guianese history of “toil and struggle” and asserts their humanity, their capacity to love, to form families and to be governed by “nobler passions”, Martin’s poetry is more preoccupied with spiritual matters. Given his frail physical condition, it is unsurprising that he writes extensively on change, disintegration and death. His meditations on the passage of time can be startlingly postmodern in their sense of dimensions beyond the linear.

‘Tis looking back that gives the future colour,
Because, in life, we find
The past analogizes all the future
Upon the plastic mind;
Foreshadowing what “will be,” and what “had been”,
A mingled repetition
Of words and deeds, events, and many a scene,
And fantasy and vision.‘
(‘Looking Back’)

And yet, whilst recognising the ways in which time ravishes the human body, moulding and sculpting past and future together into an aesthetic of suffering, Martin is constantly seeking a perfection of form that transcends the material,that is not, nor cannot be, shaped by time. Sudden moments of natural beauty (‘Thanksgiving’; ‘Along Yon Stretch’) yield intimations of divine truth, and of a space beyond time “Where all that’s rich is permanent/ Where visions bright endure/ Unchanging, blessed and beautiful/ And true for evermore.” The echo here of Keats is diminished elsewhere, for Martin constantly struggles to maintain his faith in the truth of beauty. In ‘Disappointment’, Wordsworthian sentiments about intimations of immortality are dismissed in favour of a Darwinian vision of nature:

‘With hasty hand I tore the flower
And flung it from its place; And since that agonising hour,
For me it lost all grace.
Anon I thought, in pensive mood,
How ‘midst a gem so fair,
In hidden ambuscade there should
Repose a viper’s lair.
(‘Disappointment’)

Martin effects a Christian synthesis between the truth of decay and the truth of beauty: it is through suffering that man is made perfect (Made Perfect Through Suffering’). For Martin, the poet is almost a divine figure — “he weaves a song divine” (The Poet).

‘The poet is God’s alchemist:
He takes into his hands the clay
All shapeless, black and dull, Tears every harsher vein away,
And leaves it beautiful;
Leaves in the place of what had been
A mass of baseless mould, A figure, shape, or fantasy,
Transformed to purest gold.
(‘The Poet’)

Men like Sir Walter Raleigh came to the Guianas in search of gold, but died in penury, for the true gold is the poet’s imagination. The poet creates, through his imagination, but he also perceives the perfection of what already exists:
A golden glow of rippling clouds
Serenely saileth by,
As if the hand of God has writ
A poem in the sky.
(‘Along Yon. Stretch’)

Perfection of form is what Martin’s poetry strives to achieve. His body is that of man, subject to decay, but his poetry is testament to faith in a perfection that survives such decay. Martin is above all a poet. Hence his mastery of the cadences of Victorian verse as well as the network of allusions to English poetry from the Medieval period onwards.
Hence too, his utmost delight in the spaciousness and poetical quality of English words: His poetry is sprinkled with adjectives like ‘umbrageous’, ‘eocene,’ ‘auriferous’ and the like. Martin may have been a Victorian writer in terms of using the language and formal models of his age, but he was also conscious of his role as a Guianese poet. In the ‘Preface’ to Leo’s Local Lyrics (the title of the volume being provocatively “native”) he admits to having been criticised for composing too many precious, universalist poems, and declares his intention of providing a few “tropical studies” for his Guyanese readership. A poem like ‘The Sorrel-Tree’, celebrating the gracefulness and lushness of the Guianese fruit, is, for its time, a radical effort: in the next century Derek Walcott was to confess to a nervousness about introducing local fruits, like the mango, into a poem, since they lacked the English canonical status of, say, A. E. Housman’s cherry (from ‘A Shropshire Lad’). Poems like ‘The Creek’ and ‘The Spirit Stone’ attempt to convey Guiana as the habitation of spirits alien to a Christian worldview. Although he does not name the ghosts (jumbies”, ‘chin-Hes’, ‘or higues’, ‘backoos’, etc.) and in the ‘Preface’ appears to belittle “Creole superstitions and the peculiar beliefs of Indian animism”, his poems still strive to recognise a landscape haunted by non-human presences:
I fear the forest and its rivers clear, I fear its loneliness, its depths I fear,
For spirits live, and moan, and wander there.
(The Spirit Stone’)

It would take some seventy years before Guianese writers Edgar Mittelholzer, Wilson Harris, Jan Carew, Martin Carter, and more recently Pauline Melville and Fred D’Aguiar — began to use as resource the mythical dimension of the Guianese landscape.
In the months before his death, the Guianese newspapers waxed wroth on the impropriety of language in the streets of Georgetown: “it is exceedingly painful to hear and witness the extraordinary amount of indecent language and unbecoming behaviour exhibited by drunken women every hour of the day … in the very face of the police, the most offensive language is used …” (Daily Chronicle, April 18,1890). It was not until the next century that a new poetry arose, based on the thew and sinew of the Creole language of the streets.” The ‘vulgarity’ (diction and tone) of the new writing would appear to be utterly different from Martin’s, but the poetic project was the same: the quest for El Dorado, sifting through the rubble of experience for the gold of the imagination.

Notes
1 The self-naming is ironic, in light of the Classical names — Caesar, Horace, Juno, etc. — given mockingly to slaves; in light, too, of Martin’s frailty.
2 See Eleanor Sinnette, Arthur Alfonso Schomburg (1989).
3 Quotations from newspapers are to be found on the end-page of Leo’s Local Lyrics (1886).
4 According to The Argosy and The Guiana Herald, both quoted in Leo’s Local Lyrics, ibid.
5 A. J. Seymour, in Kyk-Over-Al, Vol. 1, No. 3, December 1946.
6 I am grateful to Evan Persaud for helping me to locate Martin’s death certificate in the Georgetown Registry of Births, Marriages and Deaths (Superintendent Registrar’s District K, Division No. 28, Page 119, Entry 1188). His death and burial at Le Repentir Cemetery Georgetown, are reported in his obituary, in Daily Chronicle, 25th June, 1890. Between 1834 and 1838, 1,300 German immigrants landed in Jamaica to work on the sugar plantations. Others migrated elsewhere in the Caribbean. See M. S. Wokeck, Trade in Strangers. The Beginnings of Mass Migration to North America (1999).
Daily Chronicle, 17th April, 1890. See also Stabroek News, 8th April 2004, pp. 14-15.
N. E. Cameron, A History of the Queen’s College (1951), pp. 25-26.
9 P. H. Daly, Currents in Caribbean Life (1955), p. 37. See too N. E. Cameron (ed.), Guianese Poetry (1931) and A. J. Seymour, The Making of Guianese Literature (1982).
w English novelists like Arthur Conan Doyle, in The Lost World (1912) and W. H. Hudson, in Green Mansions (1904), had already used the Guianese/Amazonian jungle as a setting for mythic fable.
11See my ‘Introduction,’ in Slave Song (1984).

Source: Guyana Chronicle
Date: 24 February 2014

Source:  letter in Stabroek News
Date: Friday September 2nd 2011

http://www.stabroeknews.com/2011/opinion/letters/09/02/not-a-book-launch/

Dear Editor,
Limited as my exposure has been to Clem Seecharan’s authorship, ie, to Sweetening Bitter Sugar, I have been an admirer of his scholarship. All the more reason that I was disappointed to learn from SN of August 21 of the launching of his latest publication: Mother India’s Shadow over El Dorado: Indo-Guyanese Politics and Identity: 1890-1930’s in the presence of what you describe as “a small gathering.”

It occurred to me that as an educationist and historian, Professor Seecharan should recognise that the history of a country’s people belongs to all of them; and that all without exception, should be ‘educated’ about their multicultural heritage – from which we cannot ever be insulated, even though at the same time the implication of ‘shadow’ is hardly a positive reflection.

However coincidental may have been the Professor’s involvement in this discussion, it may be useful to recall that he enjoys a position of leadership that should enable him to guide special interests towards the wider membership of the human village.

It is impossible, for example, to be both ‘Guyanese’ and ‘separate’ at the same time. It is the continual and sincere embrace of our respective identities which contributes to our being wholly Guyanese.

I much prefer therefore that I have misinterpreted the message emanating from SN’s recital. Irrelevantly perhaps, I recall not so long ago, bemoaning the celebration of Shivnarine Chanderpaul as an ‘Indian’ for feats he performed as a ‘West Indian’ batsman.

Yours faithfully,
E B John

Editor’s note
The occasion was not a “launch” of Prof Seecharan’s new book; it consisted of readings of excerpts and a discussion. The work is not available locally as yet, and it is always possible that when it is, there might be an official launch which would be open to the public at large. Moray House, the de Caires family home, accommodates only about 25 people, and the guest list consisted of persons suggested in the first instance by Prof Seecharan, and in the second, by the de Caires children. Prof Seecharan had a long association with the late David de Caires and that association continues with his family. Once it was learned that the Professor was in Guyana on a brief personal visit, the opportunity was taken to arrange an impromptu reading and discussion of  Mother India’s Shadow…

Source: Guyana Times
Date: 8th August 2012

The CineGuyana Film Project is seeking to establish a film commission in the coming months and has been attracting corporate sponsorship from local business entities. Digicel Guyana Public Relations Manager Shonett Moore handed over a cheque of $1 million to the director of CineGuyana Dr Paloma Mohamed at the Courts Main Street branch on Wednesday.

She said her company was impressed with the quality of films coming out of the project so far, as well as the varying and unique storylines. Moore added that Digicel remains committed to the preservation of Guyana’s rich cultural heritage. She is of the belief that the industry has huge potential, and looks forward to more excellent reviews in the coming years. The Georgetown Chamber of Commerce and Industry (GCCI) and Courts Guyana have also contributed $1 million and $250,000 respectively to film projects.

Dr Mohamed, who described the initiative as a leap of faith, said the project has experienced difficulty in securing sponsorship because of its emerging nature. Emphasising the dividends of such investments, she disclosed that some of the productions so far, including eight short films, have already been showcased at film festivals in Nigeria, Barbados, New York and the British Virgin Islands.

Dr Mohamed, who also heads the Faculty of Social Sciences at the University of Guyana, stressed that the creative industries in Guyana are virtually untapped and worth trillions of dollars. She added that the market demand is broad in terms of sourcing novel storylines, new actors, producers and other necessities associated with the film industry.

Dr Mohamed said that Guyana is hoping to have both the legislative and physical framework for the film projects in place by the end of October, and within the space of 18 months, to allow for local film making. She detailed that Trinidadian film specialist Dr Bruce Paddington is expected in Guyana as early as August 17 to assist in establishing a film institute here.
Dr Paddington will be hosting a workshop as well as a public screening at the Moray House Trust, on August 18, on the emergence of the film industry in Guyana and the Caribbean.

“When we started the project, we had no idea what it could turn out to be. However, it has been a touching, moving and enriching experience,” Mohamed said of the eight short films recently produced.

This project, she said, could be the brand to push Guyana forward in a positive light, adding that she was amazed by the number of young people who showed interest.

Dr Mohamed noted that the project would demand not only educational talent, but also technical skills, including lighting, sound, drivers, make-up, stylists and stage management.

She pointed out that over 180 persons were trained last year in this regard.

Georgetown Chamber of Commerce President Clinton Urling said there are many skeptics with regard to the film industry, since it is largely underdeveloped. He noted that the CineGuyana Project is the perfect platform to showcase Guyana’s budding film industry, and erase the air of skepticism. “It’s hard selling emerging industries because there are always skeptics, but I held fast because I knew the quality of the film makers in Guyana,” Urling pointed out. According to Urling, when the chamber of commerce pledged it support for emerging and infant industries, CineGuyana film was one of the first initiatives which actually received support. After attending the premier of the eight short films, Urling said he was definitely wowed into approaching the chamber’s council in order to solicit sponsorship for the film programme.

“I was prepared to go it alone and provide the $1 million just in case I didn’t manage to convince the council to contribute, but I received unanimous support and then I sent out the requests to members of the business community,” the chamber president revealed.

Court Guyana Marketing Manager Tamara Rodney, during brief remarks, pointed to the importance of nurturing culture, showcasing talent and keeping traditions alive.

Title: Copyright and you (Part II)
Source: Guyana Chronicle
Date: 14th July 2012

(Lecture on Copyright, presented by Mr. Teni Housty on Tuesday April 24, 2012, at Moray House, marking World Book & Copyright Day 2012.  The event, titled ‘A Colloquium on Copyright’,  was coordinated by Mr Petamber Persaud. Mr Housty holds a Master of Laws Degree. His areas of expertise spans International Trade, Intellectual Property, Telecommunications, Electronic Commerce, Media Law, Legislative Drafting, Labour Law, and Human Rights and Environmental Law. He is also a lecturer at the University of Guyana in the areas of Human Rights Law and Intellectual Property Law.)

WHAT IS of utmost importance with copyright is the ‘who’: It is your right; it is your private right which you have to appreciate you possess. The scheme that is established allows for that right to be regulated and recognised.

What it does? It says that no one should reproduce, or adapt your work without your permission. That is the basic provision that one would find in any copyright law. It is a law to protect the unauthorised reproduction of a particular work.

In dealing with that, the question of responsibility is raised. Is it my responsibility? Or is it a shared responsibility, dealing with the notion of protection; dealing with the notion of recognition? It starts with you. But you should not be alone in dealing with rights, or dealing with what you have created. In that particular regard, we begin to look at how things are recognised.

There is a scheme in the US that allows for the registration of a copyright work. That framework for registration does not apply in Guyana; it is not part of our framework, hence the protection, which is you, the right holder. Having created the original work, you have to take these steps. That is the hard part; that becomes extremely hard, particularly because there is a lack of recognition of the value of that which is created.
So, the complexity of copyright deals with:

1) A recognition of a work in some material form;
2) a person whose work has been recognised; and
3) ways within which to protect that work.

But more importantly, having expended your labour and having created a work, yes, part of your motivation would be to share that knowledge.  But at the end of the day, a lot of it will have to do with the money.
How do you do that? That becomes part of the challenge.

My observations in this regard sort of step out of the legal framework, because the law creates the environment within which you should work, and goes into some more practicalities; some more responsible or reasonable suggestions.

As creators of works, what is your strategy when you have your work?  Do you have one? Develop a strategy. Who are the persons whom you want to deal with your works.

And as this event progresses, I see, with satisfaction, some of the more strategic and successful persons, in terms of marshalling resources, swelling our ranks. I say nothing further about one of the more successful music producers, and a publisher of a magazine that is reasonably successful in the country.  I also recognise the presence of a successful Mashramani designer. When you look at these examples, there is actually a creative renaissance that is happening in Guyana, started, from my own exposure and experience, within the past six years. We see it more in the musical and entertainment genres, but the renaissance, overall, actually does exists.

Who are the persons that impact you and the things you do? Who are the persons that you have a greater impact on? What is the nature… And, yes, I’m asking the questions to provoke your thoughts. What is the nature of your relationships and interactions with those persons? If you ask for something, would they support you or not? Where do the new opportunities lie?

You look around in Guyana, and there should be opportunities with the opening of the radio spectrum and the television spectrum. And when you look at the shift, there is a bit of challenge, in which books in their original form will face. That’s a technology challenge.

Copyright today is not about what I describe as the field of dreams: If you build it, they will come. It is not about that. It is about recognising that you have created something of value, and finding ways to exploit the value of what you have.

Who are the targets of your particular market? How are you going to set yourself apart from your competitors in that particular market?  The good thing about it all is that there are examples of those who have been able to do that. They may not tell you how they do it, but the examples are there to illustrate that success.

What power do you have if you stop writing, if you stop creating? What impact would that have? I wouldn’t say anything extreme, but we would create a nation of lesser enlightened persons. Think about the technology that is part of our daily lives. I left my phones over there. Oh yes! Two! But that’s another story. Information in electronic form is both a threat and an opportunity. Electronic books will be a reality in Guyana, soon; very soon. Is there a way in which the author of a print book could translate that in some form of value in that electronic framework? You have to be strategic in this day and age. A most important ally and part of what becomes important is: Who will help you; who will guide you? That would be the business community. Are they your partners? Are they your sponsors?
What opportunities lie for you to create that notion of change  in those whom reside the power to create the change?

Right now a particular body [Parliament] should be in session or may not be debating what is actually a substantive copyright work –  our National Budget is such a work. The total implication of that copyright work, not taking it from a purely political perspective but look at the power that single work can have and would you believe that that speech by the Honourable Minister of Finance, Dr Ashni Singh, is already online available for our own review; the details may not be online but this shows the opportunity this technology presents. But how do we change those fundamental stumbling blocks that exist in our reality today. How do we get others to recognise the value of our work.

I saw a few days ago, our moderator, Mr Persaud, was doing a review of some of his past shows on copyright on the National Communication Network (NCN). One of the presenters, a Guyanese artiste, John ‘Slingshot’ Drepaul, asked the question, wouldn’t you get vex if somebody goes into your house and steals from you. You should. It is the same thing you do when you reproduce another’s work without their permission.

What I suggest, therefore, that  is important in Guyana, is a shift or a change in our overall approach to notion of copy(—-). Because there are opportunities out there if we decide to think outside the conventional box.
A colleague of mine who represents a Guyanese artiste in Barbados visited Guyana several years ago and we were talking about the plight of the artistes’ work being played on the internet and pirated onto other sources. That  person said if it is good enough to play, there must be something good about it. From that, other opportunities are created. You have the power to create and make use of those opportunities.

A good son of the soil who has been writing in the papers in recent times is Dave Martins. Do you know that almost all the past Tradewinds songs are available on U-tube right now?
.…shifting the mind-set so as to exploit the opportunities that exist!
I therefore suggest 1) strategic thinking and action, 2) targeting positing in relevant markets, and 3) a mind-set to create change will actually fill in the blank and create copyright for you.

Source: Guyana Chronicle (written by Petamber Persaud)
Date: Friday, 6th July 2012

IT IS not easy to capture the thoughts of a prolific writer whose output already spans more than twenty-five years, and whose bibliography is already running into book-length proportions. It is not easy to analyse those thoughts of that writer, who is also adept at expressing his views in various genres of literature and through various genres of writing. David Dabydeen is such a writer, whose corpus of work is varied, extensive and complex, and therefore not easy to capture and analyse. However, some scholars have made noble efforts at commenting on the writing of Dabydeen. Some of those comments can be found mainly bounded in two books, namely: ‘The Art of David Dabydeen’, edited by Kevin Grant (Peepal Tree Press, 1997) and ‘No Land, No Mother’, edited by Lynne Macedo and Kampta Karran (Peepal Tree Press, 2007).The former book features essays by Mark McWatt, Sarah Lawson Welch, Benita Perry, Magery Fee, Jean Popeau, Mario Relich and Karen McIntyre, along with interviews by Wolfgang Binder, Frank Birbalsingh and Kwame Dawes. The latter book features essays by Aleid Fokkema, Tobias Doring, Heike H. Harting, Madina Tlostanova, Lee M. Jenkins, Pumla Dineo Gqola, Michael Mitchell, Mark Stein, Christine Pagnoulle, and Gail Low. Both books are great scholarship falling short in several regards.

Fortunately, we are now in a better position to appreciate the work of Dabydeen, who has published three collections of poetry and six novels to date. Those works have brought him international attention and recognition, mainly by way of winning numerous literary awards, including The Commonwealth Poetry Prize, The Raja Rao Literary Prize (of India), the Anthony Sabga Caribbean Award for Excellence for Arts and Letters, and The Guyana Prize for Literature (on three occasions).

He also was shortlisted for the IMPAC Dublin Literary Prize, 1997, and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize in 1999. This new position is gifted to us through two new publications concerning Dabydeen, namely: ‘Talking Words’ and ‘Pak’s Britannia’, both of which were edited by Lynne Macedo, published by the University of the West Indies Press, and released (in Guyana) in 2012.

‘Talking Words’ is profoundly academic, and serves its purpose well by showing how Dabydeen writes “to inform yet question received knowledge.” This underlying quality of the man’s writing is of continuing interest to scholars, writers, readers and publishers, because it shows the development of the writer; how he can “complicate a narrative,” and how “publishers and readers have been unsettled’ by his experiments because his ‘application of theory can hide as much as it reveals.

‘Talking Words’ is divided in two parts, namely: ‘Poetic Reappraisals’ and ‘(Re)reading the novels’. There are three essays in ‘Poetic Reappraisals’, the titles of which are easy to interpret. Those three essays are ‘Cultural Hybridity in David Dabydeen’s Poetry’ by Monica Monolachi (University of Bucharest), ‘Living Beadless in a Foreign Land: David Dabydeen’s Poetry of Disappearance’ by Anjali Nerlekar (Rutgers University), and ‘Fresh Names: Audience, Authenticity and the African Imaginary in Turner and A Harlot’s Progress’ by Nicole Matos (Assistant Professor of English).

The seven essays in Part II of the book deal with Dabydeen’s novels, namely: ‘The Intended’, ‘Disappearance’, ‘A Harlot’s Progress’, ‘Our Lady of Demerara’ and ‘Molly and the Muslim Stick’. Six of those essays are reappraisals that move slightly away from the frequently used ‘intertextual precursors’, obviously looking for new ways to look at the writer’s work. The other essay deals with the translation of the novel, ‘The Intended’, by Jenny De Salvo, who focused on three issues in translation.

‘Pak’s Britannia’ is as significant as ‘Talking Words’, but much more intimate, intimating the thoughts of the writer, studied and extemporaneous, and is like primary source material for research. For instance, Dabydeen does not appear too gracious for comments on his work at this early stage. He says he hates blurbs, some of which are “tremendously embarrassing” and ought to come “at the end of one’s career.” Further, he acknowledges that there are some things he has written of which he would not have written but submits it is literature in the making.

Another look at Dabydeen, in his essay, ‘Teaching West Indian Literature in Britain’ gives us his thoughts on finding ‘new ways’ at reading his work and the work of other writers, especially writers of Indian ancestry. Those thoughts stem from referencing to an essay by Sasenarine Persaud. “If we are to deconstruct West Indian fictions, then let us attempt to use vocabulary and concepts derived from Indian aesthetics” that is “refreshingly different from the jargon critics use today, which is almost entirely derived from the West,” and which “we take on board with such ready mimicry.”

‘Talking Words’ and ‘Pak’s Britannia’ are companion books when used together, so I’d like to combine the two books and call the combination ‘The Essential David Dabydeen’. For that’s what these books are. For the first time, his essays and interviews are brought together between two covers, and the excursion into his work continues with this collection of new essays.

The reading of these two books should in no way be substituted for reading the texts themselves. The two books serve as a guide to the man’s writing “how application of theory can hide as much as it reveals.’ More than a writer, it is useful to remember that Dabydeen teaches the theory of writing, and he experiments with form, structure, content/story, point of view, style, tone and theme. But mostly, he experiments with the reader.