1The beginning of the new millennium has witnessed an unusual proclivity to reassess relationships, and there has been a corresponding enthusiasm for reconciliation between and among former enemies, opponents, and belligerents; academic conferences have been organized to consider the possibilities and ramifications of reconciliation. In South Africa, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission is endeavouring to resolve conflicts that have arisen during centuries of colonialism and a half-century of official apartheid; in Australia, the government has issued a Declaration Towards Reconciliation that reads, in part, ‘We, the peoples of Australia, of many origins as we are, make a commitment to go on together in a spirit of reconciliation.... Reconciliation must live in the hearts and minds of all Australians’. In New Zealand, in Canada, the national governments are similarly taking steps to bridge the chasms that have separated indigenous and immigrant peoples for so long. Yet much remains to be done in such places as Fiji, Trinidad and Tobago, Guyana, and elsewhere.

2Reconciliation is fundamentally a personal responsibility, and it also applies to our relationship to family, place, nation: we must somehow resolve our individual loyalties and recognise that we ‘belong’ – that we are no longer Other, outsiders beyond the pale. The focus is on inclusion. All of this is implied by a poster just inside the main entrance of the Cathedral of St. Maurice in Angers, which reads: ‘Dieu, notre Père, vous pardonne toujours et vous réunit comme les frères au festin où il n’y a plus d’exclus. Réconcilie-toi et ne pêche plus!’

3Although there are the inevitable minor differences in phraseology, almost all current English dictionaries agree that ‘reconciliation’ means something akin to ‘restoration to harmony, friendship, and communion.’ And this, of course, implies an absence or departure from these three characteristics, either conscious or accidental. Clearly, restoration requires time; and in most circumstances it also requires maturation, reconsideration – a deep feeling of fundamental identification rather than differentiation.

4As a writer matures, the enthusiasms and dogmatisms of youth usually become less pronounced, less idiosyncratic, though the basic themes remain; this phenomenon is to be discovered, also, in politicians. Accordingly, we see a muted feminism in the writing of Germain Greer, a constrained satiric bent in the later A.D. Hope, and a softer, gentler attitude in the more recent works of V.S. Naipaul. Young wines impress; old ones satisfy.

5Cyril Dabydeen, born and raised in Guyana of ethnic Indian parents, has become a significant contributor to contemporary Canadian literature in poetry, prose fiction, and literary criticism. He is the author of three collections of short stories, three novels, twelve books of poetry, and three anthologies of Canadian writing, all of which are concerned with the problems of reconciliation: they impinge on the necessity of re-establishing harmony in communities confronted with the challenges to established hegemonies posed by immigrants from the Caribbean, Asia, and Africa who are no longer content to exist on the periphery of society with dreams deferred indefinitely. Likewise, he is concerned with the maintenance of comity among the various minorities as the balance of races and ethnicities, religions and cultures changes, to the end that a common goal is achieved in the face of difference.

6From Poems in Recession (1972) to Discussing Columbus (1998), Dabydeen has had to come to terms – that is, to achieve reconciliation – with three conditions that affect a great number of individuals, but creative persons in particular; these are (1) alienation in his native country; (2) expatriation from his own homeland; and (3) identification in a new, basically inhospitable, white and Christian dominant-culture environment – in this case, Canada.

7Dabydeen was born and raised in the Canje district of Guyana, an enclave of East Indians in a country of basically African origin; almost from the time of his birth (1945) he experienced racial strife and political instability as a prelude to national independence, and this turmoil understandably influenced his relationship to race, culture, and politics. His family life was likewise in turmoil: his parents divorced; his grandfather, an indentured labourer, had a stroke and was thereafter incapacitated; his grandmother, ‘staunch Hindu that she was’, became the matriarch and – ever practical – stimulated him to take an interest in Christianity, since there were no established Hindu educational institutions and virtually all the schools were denominational.

Secretly I had already started becoming ecumenical, thanks to the wayside Christian preachers, who were mostly African in origin: hot gospelers they were, who came round to village after village... and trumpeted the words from the New Testament... now the world was indeed topsy-turvy, and religion – Christianity or Hinduism – was only a temporary salve.

But even a superficial interest in Christianity was sufficient to offer entree to a teaching position at St. Patrick’s School, where Dabydeen introduced his students to such Guyanese writers as Martin Carter, Edgar Mittelholzer, and even Wilson Harris. With a few other teachers, he founded the Aspirants, a poets’ society, but it soon disbanded, ‘because we damned well knew that there was no publishing house in the region: we were really discouraged, private beings, as we also saw ourselves in an environment where nothing was really private save for our innermost thoughts’ (p. 453). Notwithstanding, he ‘kept going back into the reservoir of the past’ in writing ‘poems of freedom, in a sense emasculating what was identifiably East Indian or parochial. These early poems were a precursor to the other poems of transformation (a catchword for social change’ (p. 451).

• 3 Dabydeen, Cyril, Letter to A. L. McLeod, 25 March 1997.

I felt at home and simultaneously lost. I went not thinking I would experience culture shock. But I did. Yet the longer I stayed there the more I began to feel at home to some extent; and being with academics around me, who after a while called me ‘one of them’, meaning an Indian in the real sub-continental sense. I felt good hearing that. one even said I might even be a Brahmin. I smiled.3

He at last experienced the shock of recognition of his true culture of origin and no longer felt the stigma of indentured labour, of illiteracy, of colonial subjection, of minority status: this, I suggest – though late in life – was a major reconciliation in the writer’s self.

[David] Dabydeen is of South Asian extraction, a fact of which he was ashamed – foreign dress, food, and language were seen as the signals of inferiority. The replacement of that sense of humiliation with one of pride was a painstaking process of intellectual and artistic maturation... there remains a fracture between his sense of being ‘black’ and the meaning of blackness in the context of his ‘Asian-Caribbean’ heritage.

12This singularity, this differentiation from other contemporary West Indian and Caribbean writers living and working in Canada has attracted the attention of students and critics in the past few years. Although Cyril Dabydeen was not mentioned in W.H. New’s History of Canadian Literature (1989) – which nonetheless includes mention of Neil Bissoondath and younger, less prolific West Indians – he has been the subject of several recent scholarly articles, two Canadian theses, and now a book by Jameela Begum, director of the Centre for Canadian Studies at the University of Kerala, India. And some indication of his growing reputation as a writer is his appointment as one of the jurors for this year’s prestigious Neustadt Prize (worth $40,000) awarded by the University of Oklahoma: the contenders included V.S. Naipaul, David Malouf, and Wilson Harris.

13In a publisher’s blurb, Jamaican poet and historian Edward Kamau Brathwaite observes that ‘after a long, quiet, but richly rewarding apprenticeship in the 1970’s and 1980’s, Cyril Dabydeen is emerging as one of the most accomplished voices of the Caribbean diaspora’. This, I think, is true.

14In ‘Poem to Your Own,’ the Seymour award-winning composition, which is addressed to ‘You who dream perpetually / Of meaning beyond the ocean’ and to ‘You who compare... the cascading passion of your heart / With the foreigner’s cold stare’, Dabydeen first truly captures the essence of aspiration, exclusion, otherness, of ‘the lost pride in your soul’ that he sings in most of his subsequent poems and stories. The ‘Your Own’ of the title is clearly the South Asian population of Guyana, but it is also a metonymy for all those who are outsiders, who are ‘other’; and the locale of ‘meaning beyond the ocean’ is ambiguous: it could be India, Britain, the United States, Canada, or elsewhere.

I am in a myriad country now
Facing cold and storms –
Land of no return

It is with these two volumes, I believe, that Dabydeen ceases to be a Guyanese poet (or even a West Indian or Caribbean one) and becomes a Canadian one, albeit a rather atypical one, who preaches a doctrine of national inclusions – of labourers and lesbians and lumberjacks as well as of Hindus, homosexuals, and hybrids. He has opted for a Whitmanesque inclusiveness – but especially, as he says in ‘Residues,’ of

us still with
residues of colonialism
sewage in our blood.

This inclusiveness, this appeal for reconciliation between and among groups frequently antagonistic and void of a sense of community, is extended in This Planet Earth, a compilation of over seventy poems that question the etiology of prostitution, the condemnation of lesbianism, the exploitation of the working class, the incarceration of minor offenders, and the continuation of colonialism. Again the poet’s call for inclusiveness is noteworthy, and his subjects range far: Brazil, Cambridge, Canada, Cuba, Denmark, Edinburgh, Glasgow, Paris, and Windermere. His purview is expansive, ‘A vision / across the horizon, in the glare of the sun.’

19Dabydeen has frequently praised the work of Austin Clarke and Samuel Selvon in preparing the way for his generation of Caribbean immigrants and

in setting the stage for the more recent home-grown Canadian writers’ Caribbean background to influence an evolving literature accommodating themes and argot often appearing unaccustomed to their Canadian readership only a few years ago but now gaining acceptance. the [themes are the] hurts of history (slavery and indentured labour), colonialism, and immigrant marginality, while grappling with the politics of race, ethnicity, and class.

21In A Shapely Fire: Changing the Literary Landscape (1987), an anthology subsidised by the Canada Council and the Ontario Arts Council, the editor, Cyril Dabydeen, writes:

• 16 Mosaic P. (Oakville, Ont., 1987), p. 10.

the reader will be able to observe, feel, and identify with the variety expressed here. One will be likely to experience with all the writers the immediacy of beginnings – in what has been called the there, the place where one came from, seen in terms of the palpable residues of the spirit manifested in powerful feelings, often of nostalgia, or of seeking an enduring identity – coupled with the here, temperate Canada, where the Caribbean spirit asserts itself in the desire to forge a wholesome and meaningful existence, oftentimes in a spirit of quest and in the overall desire to find a shared meaning, a deeper significance in life.16

It is this ‘shared meaning’ in life that Dabydeen has sought throughout his writing life. He has stressed the fundamental importance of harmony, friendship, and communion in society in both poetry and fiction; and he has himself become reconciled to his native land, his adopted country, and to the white international literary community. As he acknowledged recently after his return from a visit to India, ‘I was convinced that I was a full-fledged Canadian’ – that is, an Indian-Guyanese Canadian, one fully reconciled.