From "Interview with David Dabydeen"KWAME DAWES : Your poems that deal with sexuality and sexual relations appear to be marked by deeply complex interracial tensions which lead, very often to a certain impotence or dysfunctional sexuality. This idea of racial disquiet as imaged through the metaphor of interracial sexuality is at once provocative and deeply pessimistic--in many ways it reminds me of the peculiar sexual dynamics in Naipaul's Mimic Men . My question may sound like one about your sexual experience, but it isn't, the problem is simply that you deal with racial dynamics through the situation of sexual relations. I am interested in your thoughts on the racial dynamics that operate for an artist "of color" in Britain. Is the racial landscape as festered with aborted fetuses and impotence as your poems seem to suggest? DAVID DABYDEEN : It's what's most obvious about what I write, the inter-connection of racial, historical and sexual themes. It's partly autobiographical and partly not autobiographical. I mean, I feel as if I'm an abortion, at times. I feel like the still-born child in "Turner," definitely. Or even worse than that, I feel like an abortion, messy and bloody and unborn, and that's partly because of a racism, where other people are trying to reduce you to nothing all the time and erase everything that you brought with you, or else they remind you of what you could have brought with you had they not taken it away. But it's also a kind of general human feeling, we all feel deeply pessimistic at times, the greatest emotion is really the sense of the tragic rather than the sense of the comic, which is why King Lear is better than any of Shakespeare's comedies. The tragic sense is what galvanizes all of us. We switch the television on and we see people dying in Rwanda--tragedy is much more and always with us. So that's partly it. The other thing is that I suppose I wanted to explore the idea that the "Empire" was a pornographic project, it wasn't just an economic or a sociological or a political project, it was also a project of pornography. And Wilson Harris in providing a blurb for Coolie Odyssey talks about the ways the poems reveal the disturbing pornography of Empire. I suppose that's all I wanted to say, that ultimately, the plantation experience had severe and traumatic psychic impacts that had to do with the loss of, or the traumatic changes, in epistemologies and philosophies, but overwhelmingly had to do with what is the very ground of our being, which is our body. Now, that's how I've seen it, but believe me, other people don't see it like that--and thank God, right? Then again, it's always been easier for me to write the morbid and the tragic than it is for me to write something else. I don't know why. That's all there is. I wouldn't want what I write to be a manifesto of colonial feelings. Yes, it has a dimension of truth, but there are other truths which should compete with it. There are deeply autobiographical moments as well. I grew up without a mother, so that the absent mother is probably what moves me very deeply and creates writing. "Turner" is really about the absent mother, too. So there are those moments of autobiography. So when one speaks of an abortion, one is also speaking of the absent mother; the absence is the mother, not the life in the child. Then there are autobiographical moments that are also related to the disgust that I felt when I was young in Guyana, at men beating up women. Some of my most painful memories of Guyana are of men beating up women; not just in my own family, but neighbors, and women crying late at night. I was trying to highlight things that moved me for a variety of reasons--certain social experiences, certain family experiences, certain deeply personal experiences that create a mood of, at times, disgust and, at times, bleakness. But I certainly wouldn't want it to be used as a manifesto of black/white relations or male/female relations. |