Searching for a namesake?

The Telegraph, Calcutta, (April 15, 2007) recently published an interview with well known novelist, critic and poet David Dabydeen while he was visiting India. He has stated thet he wanted to name his son Ganesh in a Hindu ceremony; last year, he had been named Ganpati at a temple in Tirumala. It was intriguing to me that Dabydeen who teaches at the University of Warwick and directs their Caribbean Studies Centre and who has gone on record saying that he is comfortable with the concept of England as home would want such a rite of passage for his son. David Dabydeen was born in British Guyana and travelled to England when he was 13 where he has lived ever since. If on the face of it, his connections to India had seemed tenuous, his given name for his son and the choice of naming ceremonies made me think again. It highlighted all those questions about identity in another context. What does it mean for David Dabydeen to be Guyanese and British and how is his Indian heritage connected to all of these plural identities? If identity is a name given to the process of positioning ourselves in the narratives of the past, then Dabydeen’s quest for identity seems to be linked not only with the name of his grandfather, but almost in a reverse move, with the name and naming of his son. He has, in order to excavate a history for himself, associated his past with his future.

>Dabydeen’s actual search for his ancestral name has drawn a blank. What he has discovered is that his grandfather sailed from Calcutta as indentured labourer on the ship SS Appollinaire (ironic connotations of reaching for the moon?). He tried to google his grandfather’s caste but to no avail. Dabydeen has to be satisfied with conjectures that his name is probably an oral distortion and cannot be traced now. So here he is, with an Indian heritage that cannot even be substantiated beyond a point. Gogol in Jhumpa Lahiri’s The Namesake felt burdened by the name of a literary genius. Dabydeen, with more literary credits to his name -- he is the only West Indian other than Sir V.S. Naipaul to be awarded the title of Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature -- can merely talk about an empty space that he has inherited. Gogol could come back to Calcutta and re-connect with a history and a language that was still accessible to him. But Dabydeen admits to feeling discomfort in India where he does not understand the language; in Guyana he feels like an expatriate who lives in a hotel. So, in this history, twice removed, how do David Dabydeen and other Caribbeans of Indian descent insert themselves? It is not a history that can assert itself through daily rituals or through language or even daily customs. How does one connect to a history that is taking place elsewhere and can only be made accessible to you through memories – other people’s memories?

In literary terms, Dabydeen has tried giving a voice to the silence and the silencing of his ancestors. In The Counting House, the young couple Rohini and Vidia, troubled by caste prejudices in rural India, are easily tempted and misled by the recruiter’s promises of plenty. The reality in British Guiana is a stark contrast where the local population is hostile and life as a coolie is hard. The promised El Dorado is conflicted territory barely emerging from practices of slavery. Even more poignant is his epic poem, Turner based on the acclaimed painting of J.M.W Turner – “Slavers Throwing Overboard the Dead & Dying.” Reading it while negotiating my life as a student in the U.S., I had found it extraordinarily powerful. In this moving poem, Dabydeen, re-writes a history for the drowning slave, articulating his covert desires; his peculiar amnesia does not however, allow him to create an idyllic past for himself as he can still recognize himself as “a nigger.” The dual themes of alienation and the inescapable burden of history run through Dabydeen’s works.

Growing up in British Guiana, the only English speaking place in South America, was an alienating experience. They were separated from the other Caribbean countries, if not by language, certainly by the rainforest topography. He remembers celebrating Diwali and being members of the Anglican Church. But identity is never a source of comfort – he was ashamed of his Hindu name and of women wearing saris and speaking in Urdu. Cultural identities are continuously re-made and never essentialist and David Dabydeen’s journeys vindicate that. He has obviously travelled a long way from that shame. His ancestors’ homeland has conferred upon him the Hind Rattan Award and he was invited to Delhi to receive it. He, in turn, has not taken any easy short cuts. I mean, he could have named his son Peter or Martin and be done with it. It would be easier certainly because everyone around us seems to be saying that national identity is passé in the age of globalization. It is one thing to impart history to a literary creation and another thing to try and reclaim a past for your child who can turn around and question your motives. Courageously, Dabydeen forges a link to his past that connects the personal, political and the representational.