Bøker av David Dabydeen

Set on the eve of the First World War, the novel is told chiefly through the eyes of a travelling textile merchant, Jia Yun, who leaves Wuhan, China to join the great exodus of migrants fleeing poverty, most of them indentured to work in the canefields of Demerara, Guyana.

Songs of frustration and defiance from African slaves and displaced Indian laborers are expressed in a harsh and lyrical Guyanese Creole far removed from contemporary English in these provocative Caribbean poems. An insightful critical apparatus of English translations surrounds these lyrics, shedding light on their meaning, while at the same time cleverly commenting on the impossibility of translating Creole and parodying critical attempts to explain and contextualize Caribbean poetry. Twenty years after the initial release of this work, the power of these poems and the self-fashioned critique that accompanies them remain a lively and vital part of Caribbean literature.

Issues of caste, slavery, racism, and the immigrant experience in the early 19th century are addressed in this novel. Rohini and Vidia, a young married couple struggling for survival in a small, caste-ridden Indian village are seduced by a recruiter's persuasive talk of easy work and plentiful land. They sign up as indentured laborers to go to British Guiana and discover their harsh fate as "bound coolies" in a country only just emerging from the savage brutalities of slavery. In their problematic encounters with the Afro-Guyanese, hostile to immigrant labor, they confront the truths of their uprooted condition and learn to live with their fate.

This novel that echoes the styles of Joseph Conrad and V. S. Naipaul follows a young Guyanese engineer appointed to help save and shore up a Kent coastal village's sea defenses, and his relationship with the old woman with whom he lodges. Learning more about the village's history through his relationship with Mrs. Rutherford, the narrator discovers that underlying the village's Englishness is a latent violence that echoes the imperial past, forcing him to not only reconsider his perceptions of himself and his native Guyana, but also to examine the connection between land and memory.

Exploring rites of passage in London's Asian community, this semiautobiographical novel follows a young Indo-Guyanese narrator from his South American village to Great Britain. With determination and self-discipline he seizes opportunities of education and upward mobility, but struggles to keep his cultural identity alive through memories of his childhood. This sophisticated postcolonial text links language and character to reveal the social divisions, educational obstacles, and self-exploration of a struggling foreigner in the mid-20th century.

A HARLOT'S PROGRESS reinvents William Hogarth's famous painting of 1732 which tells the story of a whore, a Jewish merchant, a magistrate and a quack doctor bound together by sexual and financial greed.