Introduction by Mariam Pirbhai

Wilfrid Laurier University, Canada

Cyril Dabydeen was born in Berbice County, Guyana. His parents were the descendants of indentured labourers from the Indian subcontinent brought to the British colonies in the aftermath of Emancipation. Dabydeen was raised in the village of Adelphi, in the Canjie, Berbice, home to Rose Hall, one of the largest sugar plantations in Guyana, as well as the major township of New Amsterdam, birthplace of Wilson Harris and Edgar Mittleholzer.

Like other writers from the Land of Many Waters, Dabydeen was infused with the creative spirit and energy of his tropical surroundings which, like the majestic Kaieteur waterfalls or the seawall protecting the nation’s capital, stands at the threshold of many worlds: the Amazon, the Amerindian hinterland, Latin America, the Caribbean, the Great White North, Africa, Asia, Europe. Here, Dabydeen would immerse himself in the poetry of Martin Carter, the heady excursions of Wilson Harris, and the tragicomic wit of Trinidadians V.S Naipaul and Sam Selvon, while schooled on a menu of British and American staples like Jane Austen, Somerset Maugham and T.S Eliot.
This early appetite for literature dovetailed into a career in education at the youthful age of sixteen. Throughout the 1960s, a period marked by Guyana’s tumultuous transition to independence, Dabydeen taught at St. Patrick’s Anglican; a school mainly serving the children of sugar factory workers from Rose Hall. The memories of youth spent on one or other side of a colonial education system, or connected to the struggles of plantation labourers against the colonial and neocolonial machinery, would provide a rich source or material for stories like The Pugilist and God Save the Queen. In a monograph devoted to Dabydeen’s oeuvre, Jameela Begum describes the inescapable impact of the Guyanese environment on Dabydeen’s craft;
The freedom of the spirit and the place Canje were intertwined for Dabydeen and they became constantly the spirit of human endeavour and liberation irrespective of race and colour.
Dabydeen’s experiences and impression s of Rose Hall on the bank of Canje river, one of the largest sugar plantations in the East Canje river, amidst the smell of rotten sugar cane, the aroma of molasses, the sight of molluse, crab and shrimp along the Guyana coast, and the throbbing of the gigantic cane factory became an inseparable part of his poetic imagination.

Dabydeen is a rare breed in his ability to straddle genres with equal dexterity, and his numerous national and international awards speak to this effortless movement between poetry and fiction. As Dabydeen himself has commented, “the good story combines the poet’s sense of style and the novelist’s sense of drama. At 19, Dabydeen won the Sandbach Parker Gold Medal for Poetry, launching himself into a literary career that began with a chapbook publication, Poems in Recession (partly influenced by Martin Carter’s poetry), and continues in recent collections such as Unanimous Night. Similarly, Dabydeen saw the publication of his first short story “A Tide at Beach-head,” in the Guyana Chronicle in 1970, and, earlier, he was a prize winner for his story ‘Pillon’s Corner’ in a national creative writing competition focusing on human rights. Cyril Dabydeen’s prolific output to date as a poet, novelist, essayist and editor includes sixteen poetry collections, eight short story collections, two novellas, one young adult novel asn a full-length novel. He has been anthologized in over twenty collections, including The Penguin Book of Caribbean Verse (1986), Heinemann’s Caribbean New Wave: Contemporary Short Stories (1990), and The Oxford Book of Caribbean Verse (2004), and has appeared in over sixty literary magazines.
Arriving in Canada in the fall of 1970, Dabydeen first lived in Thunder Bay, Northern Ontario (Lake Superior region), finally settling in Ottawa, the nation’s capital. Dabydeen’s contact with rural Canada sets him apart from the majority of immigrant writers whose physical and imaginative orbit is generally restricted to Canada’s metropolitan centres. Dabydeen’s unusual trajectory as well as his experience as a tree planter in the Canadian heartland (a summer job while Dabydeen was a university student pursuing a degree in English Literature) has cultivated in the author a heightened awareness of Canada’s own “many selves. This was also the author’s first-hand experience of the pioneer or frontier sensibility deeply rooted in the Canadian aesthetic, and captured by early Canadian poets such as E.J. Pratt and Isabelle V. Crawford, or in Canadian fiction produced in the early twentieth century. Dabydeen’s reflections on settler subjectivity would be channeled into the short story ‘The Outsiders,’ an ironic inversion of the insect-ridden tropical rainforest: Mosquitoes, blackflies swirled. I handed him the fly repellent, the thick grease I rubbed on my arms, neck, face and other exposed parts. He seemed filled with a strange rage, and was it because of the woodpeckers?
Since this time, Dabydeen had been infused with the two major landscapes, north and south of the equator, that have nourished his life and career. In both his poetry and prose, Dabydeen’s writing evokes what he lyrically refers to as the “historic mind” of the diasporic subject, that is, the individual who is enmeshed within a hybrid and cross-referential cultural, geographic and ancestral framework. Perhaps it is Daydeen’s global citizenry and diasporic consciousness that infuses his work with the spirit of a humanist, which is also emblematic of his work on race relations and human rights issues for the Canadian Government and for his innumerable contributions to the Arts. Indeed, Dabydeen was part of a literary movement, from the seventies onward, that would transform the very terms of citizenship that have come to define Canada’s literary identity. As editor of ground-breaking collections Another Way to Dance: Asian Writers in Canada and the USA as well as A Shapely Fire: Changing the Literary Landscape (an anthology of black and Caribbean-born writers in Canada) – Dabydeen has played an integral role in forging a multicultural literary community that looks to differences in ethnicity, race and perspective as the basis for cultural and national enrichment.

Unfragmented Wholeness
This collection brings together a selection of Dabydeen’s short stories written primarily in the 1970s and 1980s. Most of the stories were first published in Caribbean or Canadian literary journals, and later appeared in Dabydeen’s numerous short story collections, including Still Close to the Island, Black Jesus and Other Stories and Jogging in Havana and Other Stories. The last story in the collection, “Sleeping in Delhi,” is unique insofar as it was written in the late 1990s and has never appeared in earlier collections. Dabydeen has continued to produce fiction in subsequent years, including a full-length novel, Drums of My Flesh.
The stories are arranged in two parts: the early period, and the middle to later period, charting a chronological movement that parallels the changing contours of the author’s craft. The stories also move in setting and enveloping action to capture a geographical or diasporic odyssey that mirrors Dabydeen’s migration from Guyana to Canada, and his real and mythical forays into India, the site of ancestral memory. The late Sam Selvon, also privy to the peculiar juxtapositions inherent in the émigré’s plight in North America, would come to say of Dabydeen: ‘(He) is in the vanguard of contemporary short story writers, shuttling with equal and consummate skill from rural Guyana to metropolitan Canada.
But Dabydeen’s characters movements are more than the predictable shuttling back and forth between north and south, or natal and adoptive homeland. His characters inhabit in mind, spirit and being various other worlds to which they are also intimately connected. Thus, in ‘Going Places,’ a story in the first half of the collection, a distracted father-to-be whose wife’s labour pains are comically syncopated with a nation’s genesis as a socialist government, looks to Cuba, Moscow or some other faraway country for a new phase. Ironically, the young father’s reputation as a seasoned traveler is derailed by the sudden awareness that fatherhood (like statehood, perhaps?) is about to terminate such freedom of mobility. Similarly, in ‘To Speak of Leopards, a Canadian poet Bellamy’s fantastical escapades through South America bring home to the narrator the discreet transference of knowledge and symbol, such that the Montreal-born humanitarian Norman Bethune comes to be heralded by a group of young South American revolutionaries via their schooling in the Chinese Cultural Revolution rather than in Canadian or North American history. To Speak of Leopards also underscores the writer’s ability to move beyond Guyanese and Canadian themes, with South America or, more broadly, Latin America figuring sometimes implicitly and at other times prominently as a central part of the writer’s awareness.
It is these flashes of interconnection that counteract the isolation of the exile, revealing in their stead invisible bridges or at least the kaleidoscopic movement of ideas, people and knowledge across vast expanses. These are the interstitial spaces of self-discovery and awareness found in chance meetings with other kinds of Indians, steeped in or stripped bare of their mythological or colonial miasma, in the Guyanese hinterland (Amerindians) or the Great White North (The Outsider): in other kinds of Caribbeans, washed up like sun-drenched driftwood, on the frigid shores of the cosmopolis (Mammita’s Garden Cove or All the King’s Men), in other kinds of outsiders (To speak of Leopards or Ain’t Got No cash), reinventing the art of survival in unlikely bonds of companionship; and, coming full circle as it were, in encounters with the Self as Other (Homecoming or Sleeping in Delhi), be it in the émigré’s prodigal return to family and nation, or the reversal of epic journeys across the Kala pani, back to the Indian Subcontinent.
Perhaps this is the Jungian vision at the heart of Dabydeen’s fiction. Taking as his point of departure Sigmund Freud’s theory of psychological determinism, Carl Gustav Jung averred that “anything psychic is Janus-faced…it looks forwards and backwards,” and that behavior is best understood not only by causality but also teleology (“intentions, aims, plans, predictions and premonitions”). The simultaneously backward-and forward-looking movement promulgating the self’s search for wholeness and unity is central to Dabydeen’s musings, and is nowhere better typified than in the leit motif of the jaguar – the “most indigenous of South American animals” – which prowls the pages of Dabydeen’s poetry and prose. In a poem found in his 1995 collection Born in Amazonia, the jaguar takes centre stage “In a séance/in the silence/of the forest.” Whether the jaguar is a mystical symbol of “the bottomless pool of origins” in its evocation of memory, ancestry and interiority (see ‘Amerindians’), or a trickster figure that throws past and present into dizzying confluence, the jaguar is a ubiquitous signpost of a character’s “many selves”. And the jaguar itself is a mutable trope transformed by other locales and other perspectives, as is witnessed in ‘Sleeping Delhi,’ where the “Bengal tiger from the Sunderbans with incandescent eyes” keeps a jet-lagged Guyanese traveler in a state of perpetual “dreaminess” as a strangely familiar denizen in an Indian guest house.
Dabydeen’s readers are always nudged, ever subtly, to consider these stories of migration and exile with a healthy dose of skepticism – or, looked at in another way, a new-found optimism – insofar as the singular voice of the émigré invariably betrays a trans-historical and trans-national consciousness that is never entirely without anchor somewhere in the world. This, as Guy Hamel in the prominent The Fiddlehead magazine has noted, is Dabydeen working “back through consciousness or history to describe an original condition of unfragmented wholeness,” the fundamental kernel at the core of every story.

Story of process:
Dabydeen’s philosophy of writing is captured in the oft-quoted statement by Virgina Woolf: “life is not a series of gig lamps symmetrically arranged; life is a luminous halo, a semi-transparent envelope surrounding us from the beginning of consciousness to the end.” This credo is further enlivened if not wholly complicated by the transplanted writer’s awareness of the jagged asymmetry of life as an émigré. The new subject-position fractures the writer’s sense of place, voice and identity, each of which fall to renewed critical scrutiny in the adoptive land, itself the arena of different conventions, expectations and habits of mind. For Dabydeen, as for other members of the diaspora in the western metropolis, such dislocations have not only forges new points of identification with other émigré’s but also a self-reflexive subjectivity that is so often the exile’s particular forte as an insider/outsider. To this end, Dabydeen comments: “By now I’d begun seeing myself as a transplanted writer grappling with my ingrained West Indian consciousness, sustained by unique rhythms and close acquaintance with immigrant people’s lives around me, and in me.”
Not surprisingly, in Canada Dabydeen found himself attuned to the “unique rhythms and close acquaintance with immigrant people’s lives.” In particular, Sam Selvon and Austin Clarke – fellow Caribbean writers in Canada – would come to have a substantial influence on Dabydeen’s creative evolution, if not in stylistic or formal terms, at least in each writer’s uniquely articulated struggle to captuire he ebb and flow, rhythm and cadence of the West Indian consciousness as it is continually hybridised and transformed in the diaspora. Of Clarke, he write: “The Barbadian-born Austin Clarke’s stories and novels I also read around this time: the way Clarke captures the verisimilitude of Caribbean immigrants’ existence in Toronto with his genuinely authentic voice and dialectual energy, unmatched by any other ‘Caribbean’ writer.” Similarly, the cathartic carnivalesque humour of Selvon’s “Moses and the boys” resonates in Dabydeen’s ‘All the King’s Men.’ The story pivots around a mock celebration held in honour of Starkie Peterson Mulligan’s freshly acquired anglo-Canadian pedigree as a “Bachelor of Arts,” and ends in the tragicomic flourish characteristic of Selvon’s Moses trilogy, with a souced Starkie, self-proclamation “leader of the black race,” passed out in a “white-white snow-laden land.”
Migration would also bring about a shift in emphasis, in Dabydeen’s stories, from a consideration of how one positions oneself in the world to how one is (re)positioned by others. In aesthetic terms, such re-focalization prompted the question as to whether character and dramatic effect alone could determine and sustain his craft. Dabydeen’s post-modernist reconceptualization of the short story as “process, a form not always with a finite end” is indicative of this critical andcreative evolution. Here, the indelible imprint of Canadian icon Margaret Atwood on Dabydeen’s stylistic and aesthetic reinvention warrants comment. The post-modernist sets out simple to tell a story but “to tell the story of how stories are told and created. Of, as Atwood would put it, in her oft theologised story ‘Happy Endings,’ “that’s about all that can be said for plots, which anyway are just one thing after another, a what and a what and a what. Now try How and Why.”
For Dabydeen, meaning is similarly released from the grip of omniscience or the self-authorising 1; the reader is at once catapulted into the dramatic epicenter – the traditional story-teller’s penchant for beginning in medias res – only to find him or herself dangling somewhere between epiphany and renewed suspense, even the moments of illumination foreclosing the possibility of resolution or stasis. Specifically, readers might notice questions resurfacing as closing lines (e.g., Los Toros ends with the question “Or was it at Kaiso?”). Or endings might upset linearity in their ironic inversion of setting, atmosphere and states of mind. For instance, ‘Homecoming’, which starts with a lover’s excited discovery of a new tropical environment (“her first night in the tropics with him and she hadn’t slept much”), ends with her partner’s equally anticipated reunion “in suddenly bitter cold.” Trinidadian-Canadian novelist H. Nigel Thomas best captures the spirit of experimentation in voice, structure and form that is central to Dabydeen’s artifice:
“In the welter of erudite detail, which makes rereading necessary if one is to savour the richness of these stories, the stories are characteristically Dabydeen’s. Moreover, they embody Dabydeen’s technique of forging situations or images as pivots and then moving out in different directions to pull in details that illuminate or expand the pivot while conferring ambiance, tone and texture to the story. When such techniques work, the result is finely wrought, multilayered fiction”.
Suffice to say, the structural design of many of Dabydeen’s stories implicitly favour the quintessentially post-modernist maxim that the unity of the whole can be found in fragmentation – or the integrity of its parts – thereby resisting the tyranny of over-determination and closure.

Any introduction to Dabydeen’s stories would be incomplete without some discussion of language, “Orality being all.” For one, the lyrical commingling of his poetic and dramatic voice is apparent in the texture and tenor, rhythm and phrasing, synergy and synesthesia that fuel description and atmosphere. Moreover, the diction and dialogue that animate his characters are indefatigably expressive of a creole sensibility, affirming a Caribbean poetics enlivened by such quotidian imagery and sounds as “liming by a runshop.” As Frank Birbalsingh comments, “Vivid physical descriptions of people and places combine with dialogue of pungent, idiomatic local speech patterns…confirm(ing) the author’s skill in reproducing social manners.”

The narratives themselves are propelled by the aesthetic energy and rhythm of Caribbean speech, captured in the kind of pithy phrasing characteristic of the “poet’s sense of style,” and exploding with the imagery, orality and pulsating tempo of Caribbean life: “Dominoes clapping, a rhapsodic sound like short-lived thunder.” Or, again, in the “novelist’s sense of drama,” streaming with the innate speech rhythms not only reflective of land and region but also of community and ethnos, as can beseen in the following heated exchange between Sumintra and Rohini, an Indo-Guyanese mother and daughter, the former riled by her elder daughter Delsa’s rebellion and the latter emboldened by her elder sister’s courage:
“Rohini, you hear me? Come out! Or else I will tell your pa!’
Sumintra knocked on the door.
‘Go tell he. See wha’ he can do!’ Rohini fired back.
‘Ow me Gawd, Rohini – come out from dere!’ bawled Sumintra.
Rohini kept thinking of one day going abroad…if only Delsa would help her.
‘Delsa na wicked,’ Rohini shot back at the keyhole.
‘Wha’ you say?’ screeched Sumintra, unable to cope with the insolence.
‘You get hotmouth!’

This is the language that Dabydeen poetically refers to as Black English. It is worth quoting Dabydeen’s treatise on language at some length, clarifying as it does not only the creole sensibility that is central to Dabydeen’s aesthetic but also what I have previously referred to as the trans-national and trans-historical consciousness underpinning his creative vision:
“Black English is also the core of ‘nation language’ aimed at reclaiming dignity because if history’s caravel coming through the Middle Passage, if only aided by the north star and birds like the albatross slanting in the sun and guiding a vessel along in the ocean. Now who’s really below deck? Elmina Castle too, as I hear echoes coming from Ghana’s hovels of despair, or from a nigger-yard or bound-coolie yard distant Caribbean sugar plantations, more than lore. Orality being all, or historian-poet Kamau Brathwaite’s tidalectics. Do I hear ancestors speaking? Not just my grandma’s dialectical grammar, even if unpredictable…as my stoning the wind?…”

Though couched in the nomenclature of race, Dabydeen’s “Black English” nonetheless provides an apt metaphor for a more fluid, inclusive and porous cultural identity, one that is attune to the Hindi or Bhojpuri-inflected English Creole of a Guyanese township as much as it is the “Jamaican lilt” of a Rastafarian chant, or the “hip-talk” and “jive” of the western metropole.
Dabydeen’s stories often demand a rereading because of their highly impressionistic quality. And readers might very well struggle with, as much as they might delight in, the unconventionality or unique voice in Dabydeen’s prose. The stories are filled with the concrete and sentient immediacy of time and place, imbued as they are with the tropical residues of a “sugar plantation self” or under assault as they are by other “surreal neighbourhoods.” They are stories that will surely plunge the reader into the symbolic or mythopaeic layers of the human psyche, a Jungian logic that often bends or eschews convention to find expression. But the intensity of image and emotion, the memorable dysfunction of characters living at the edge of strangely intersecting worlds, and the hybrid influences so indicative of a cross-cultural imagination tell a story, like that of a literary career, that continues to move forward, albeit paradoxically, “into sold fragments of memory.”