WEEK 4: African and Indian Diaspora

"Joseph had become discontent with some of the African pictures...he painted over some figures, added others...a white man sucking on a bone and firing a gun pointlessly in the air took his place among the native savages.  I think he must have been Mr Kurtz."

- David Dabydeen, The Intended pg. 82


When Dabydeen wrote The Intended, he most definitely had Joseph Conrad on his mind.  Like the quote above, many references are directly made to Heart of Darkness.  The title of the his book seem probably the most obvious, as the 'intended' in Conrad's novel is actually a character; more specifically, the wife of Mr. Kurtz, a crazed Belgian explorer who meets a tragic end.  Within Conrad's novel, the wife, or 'the intended' plays the part of the naive westerner, unable to ascertain the truth about those mysterious colonized lands because those that have been there come back with tall tales, fake stories or outright lies.

So who is the 'intended' in Dabydeen's novel?  The problem with this question does not exist in its difficulty, but rather how the intended could be almost anyone in the novel.  We can consider Janet and Monica the intended, two women who date the narrator and Shaz, but must do so behind their parent's backs.  Janet knows hardly little about the narrator's background, and he makes sure that it is kept that way.  On the other hand we can see the narrator himself as the intended.  After leaving the sex shop and taking the bus home in London with his friend Shaz, the narrator marginalizes himself from the Black community on the bus, obviously appalled by the way they are acting.  As if he is speaking to the white passengers, he says to himself "I'm dark-skinned like them, but I'm different, and I hope the white's can see that and separate me from that lot."  Thus, our narrator himself is marginalizing a group of people based on their ethnicity, completely uninterested in why they might be acting the way they are.



David Dabydeen

 Out of many postcolonial fiction, The Intended is perhaps one of the most realistic pieces.  The interesting thing about many postcolonial novels, however, is that they resemble very clearly factual circumstances.  The Intended gives us an idea about life within the interior of Guyana as well as life within Britain.  The similarities between the two places are shocking; Dabydeen does a great job of portraying modern day England as more savage than his former town of Albion Village in Guyana.  The flashbacks to the days leading up to his departure from Albion Village provide the reader with some comparative insight as to life in the interior of Guyana, with which they can relate to the narrator's life in England.

An interesting note about the author: in 2010 David Dabydeen was appointed Guyanese ambassador to China.