Writer David Dabydeen, originally from Guyana, belongs to a group of contemporary British West Indian writers who are replacing stereotypes with the complexities of Black lives and the colonial experience. He was recently in India to participate in a conference on ‘Nation and Imagination: the changing Commonwealth’ in Hyderabad. TWF correspondent Shoma A. Chatterji catches up with him at the British Council, Kolkata

An acerbic sense of humour belies David Dabydeen’s unapologetic approach to his writing- highly influenced by his ‘black’ roots. His first book of poems, Slave Song (1984) was awarded the Commonwealth Poetry Prize and the Quiller-Couch Prize.

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Is it true that your forefathers were from India?
I discovered that my great-great-great grandfather was a Bengali who migrated to the West Indies in 1855. I was born in Guyana hundred years later. During the process of making a documentary for the BBC entitled The Coolie Odyssey, I chanced upon my Bengali roots. I have heard that my ancestor was part of the massive migration that took place for satisfying the demand for cheap workers in the sugarcane fields in the West Indies as cane cutters and coolies. Some came from South Africa, some came from Fiji and many came from India.

And then, history repeated itself?
That's right, in a manner of speaking. When I was around 13, there was a great migration from the West Indies to England. I landed in this country with my parents in 1969. We were brought in to help England rebuild the country after World War II and replace the Africans who worked as slaves because slave labour had ended by then. Like my ancestor, I too worked in very lowly paid jobs. My studies were supported by scholarships because I was a good student. I admit that my writing is strongly influenced by the whole experience of the coolies and the cane-cutters as migratory labour in the West Indies. Britain, which was a colonial power, needed labour in its tea plantations too. So, cheap labour was sent to Assam and West Indies to grow tea during the time my ancestor went to there.

How did you gravitate towards writing?
I had always wanted to be a writer and nothing else. It has been a childhood dream and a conscious adult decision. I am grateful to a very good teacher I had in the school in Guyana who instilled in me the love for reading and writing. Guyana had an excellent library for children. This was a rich source for my reading.

Considering that you are a migrant into the UK, how did you master English as a literary language?
Most Indians who migrated to the West Indies between 1838 and 1940 did not know to read or write English. My grandfather, for instance. My generation, on the other hand, had the advantage of learning two languages - English, which was the official home language, and Creole, considered to be a 'lower' language in the language hierarchy. Creole is a mixture of Afrikaans, Indian and English. It is more of a phonetic language than a literary one and is written in Roman phonetically which means it has no standardisation. I know both languages and have been in love with English ever since I began to read it.

Your writing seems deeply inspired by the works of painters rather than of writers. Your long poem Turner, for example, reflects your perspective on the diaspora.
Turner was inspired by the painting Slave Traders Ditching the Dead and the Dying with Hurricane Approaching by the English painter William Turner (1775-1851). John Ruskin, the famous art critic, possessed this picture for a while, but he found the scene so horrifying that he traded it for another painting. The horror is a part of my 600-verse poem. It tells the story of a still- or nearly still-born, child of a slave girl and a slave-trader captain, a little boy thrown overboard and either drowning or surviving, either below or above the sea's surface, coming ashore from time to time and living the life of a slave, or joining the followers of an African prophet. My poem focusses on the sunken head of the African in the foreground of Turner's picture. In Turner's seas (and in those of other painters) it has been drowned for centuries. When it wakes up, it can only partially recall the sources of its life, so it invents a body, a biography, and it populates an imaginary landscape.

You are known for writing beautiful, lucid English and yet you say that the British owe a lot to migrant writers like you, instead of it being the other way round. Is that right?
Would you put the same question to V.S. Naipaul who has been a strong influence on me as a writer whose roots are the same as mine? Yes, I do believe that Britain has heavily depended on us for its material and cultural development. I admit that I, - meaning not just myself but the tribe - have had an important say and influence in their development. The sense of belonging only comes if the British acknowledge this. In this respect, there is no strain. At the end of the day, one arrives at some kind of outlook: over the centuries our cultures have become so interwoven that you can't be a Guyanese without being a Brit, and you can't be a Brit without being a Guyanese, or a Caribbean.

Tell us a bit more about your novels.
My first novel, The Intended (1991) is about a young Asian student abandoned in London by his father. The book won the Guyana Prize for Literature. Disappearance (1993) centres on a young Guyanese engineer working on the south coast of England who lodges with an elderly woman. The Counting House (1996) is set at the end of the 19th century and narrates the experiences of an Indian couple whose hopes of a new life in colonial Guyana end in tragedy. The story explores historical tensions between indentured Indian workers and Guyanese of African descent. A Harlot's Progress (1999) is based on a series of pictures painted by William Hogarth in 1732 and develops the story of Hogarth's Black slave boy.

Through the character of Mungo, I have tried to challenge traditional cultural representations of the slave. My latest novel Our Lady of Demerara is set in Ireland, Coventry and Demerara (Guyana.) The novel has two eccentric Irish priests arguing about science, theology and the nature of women. I always come back to my grassroots diasporic identity in my writings and I do not feel apologetic about it at all. In fact, it defines my identity, as a writer and as a human being.