Novel
Dark Swirl
Cyril Dabydeen · 1988
Synopsis
In a remote village in the Canje region, an Indo-Guyanese family lives in fear of the massacouraman, the reptile-shaped water spirit that indigenous tradition places at the bottom of the creek. A British naturalist arrives and promises to rid the village of the monster. Between the visitor's science, the villagers' beliefs and the first people whose trace those beliefs bear, everyone must choose what they want to preserve and what they agree to give up.
Context
The author's first novel, it was published by Peepal Tree Press, in Leeds, nearly twenty years after his departure for Canada. The academic Aliyah Khan reads in it a rarely told encounter: the Indo-Caribbean history of indenture and emigration negotiates there not only with the Afro-Caribbean world, but with the Indigenous presence relegated to the margins, in the wake of Wilson Harris. Water, which links the myth of the first inhabitants to the communities that came from elsewhere, is its central metaphor.
Who it is for
A novel in English, with no known French translation. It helps to know what Indian indentured labour was in British Guiana.
Prizes and reception
Studied for the place it gives to Indigenous peoples in Indo-Caribbean fiction, notably in Studies in Canadian Literature in 2015.
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