The Intended - Softcover

David Dabydeen

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1845230132 ISBN 13: 9781845230135

Publisher: Peepal Tree Press, 2005

Synopsis

The young narrator of "The Intended" is twelve when he leaves his village in rural Guyana to come to England. There, he is abandoned into social care, but with great determination and self-discipline seizes every opportunity to follow his aunt's farewell advice, 'but you must take education...pass plenty exam' and wins a scholarship to Oxford. With an upper-class white fiancee, he has unquestionably arrived, but at the cost of ignoring the other part of his aunt's farewell: '...you is we, remember you is we.' Through remembering his Guyanese childhood and youth in working class Balham, the narrator's older self explores the contradictions, the difficulties implicit in his aunt's advice and the cost to his personality of losing that past. At one level a moving semi-autobiographical novel, "The Intended" is also a sophisticated postcolonial text with its echoes of 'Heart of Darkness', its play between language registers and its exploration of the instability of identity. As an Indo-Guyanese, the narrator finds himself seen as 'Paki' by the English, and as some mongrel hybrid by 'real' Asians from India and Pakistan; as sharing a common British 'Blackness', yet acutely conscious of the real cultural divisions between Guyanese of African and Indian origins.

About this title

Review:

"Painfully beautiful and true." --Maya Angelou

"Utterly serious, painfully honest and combining, with some originality, the light and the dark, the sweet and the bitter." --Anita Desai, author, "The Clear Light of Day
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"We badly need novels about the immigrant experience in Britain and this is the best I've read for a long time--vivid, perceptive, funny and moving." --Penelope Lively, author, "The Photograph"
"Essential reading. [Dabydeen] narrates his painful story with a deft and often humorous touch, and provides us with some startling insights into poverty-stricken Guyana and multi-cultural London." --Caryl Phillips, author, "A Distant Shore
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About the Author:

David Dabydeen is the director of the Center for Caribbean Studies and a professor at the Center for British Comparative Cultural Studies at the University of Warwick. He is also Guyana's ambassador-at-large and a member of UNESCO's executive board. He is the author of "A Harlot's Progress" and "Turner," and the poetry collection "Slave Song," which won the Commonwealth Poetry Prize.

About this edition

• Publisher: Peepal Tree Press
• Publication date: 2005
• ISBN 10: 1845230132
• ISBN 13: 9781845230135
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 3
• Number of pages: 246