Cyril Dabydeen’s new collection of stories, North of the Equator, looks at the polarities of tropical and temperate places. Acclaimed novelist Sam Selvon (The Lonely Londoners) says, "Dabydeen is in the vanguard of contemporary short-story writers, shuttling with equal and consummate skill from rural Guyana to metropolitan Canada." Dabydeen’s characters occupy the spaces in between. They live in limbo, stretched between two worlds: one, an adopted home in Canada; the other, a birthplace in the islands scattered across the equator.

North of the Equator

Literature & Fiction

Dabydeen, Cyril

Contemporary

Dundurn Press

The definitive collection of short fiction by one of today's most important and original writers in post-colonialism and multiculturalism.

Play A Song Somebody: New And Selected Stories

Mosaic Pr

Stoning the Wind

Poetry

TSAR Publications

The world of the West Indian defies boundaries, as disclosed with poignant realism in these fine stories set in Canada, the West Indies and New York. Dabydeen uses a language and style distinctly his own, combined with humour and open-eyed wonder, to probe a diversity of situations and consider with understanding and generosity the foibles and idiosyncracies of his characters and their remarkable endurance and will to survive.

Black Jesus and Other Stories

Literary

These closely observed stories, with their gritty poetic descriptions and finely ironic twists, confront Dabydeen?s Asian and Caribbean-South American identity with his experience of life in Canada, where he has lived for over three decades.

My Brahmin Days: and other stories

A finely observed comedy of manners, this novel presents an imaginative and poetic play on the symbols of Hinduism in a secular and cosmopolitan society. Devan, a teacher of Hinduism to rural Indians, finds his life turned upside down when he leaves his village and family and heads to the urban, cosmopolitan capital of Georgetown, Guyana. In a city that is ethnically diverse, he meets members of the wealthy and politically cynical Indian elite—an experience at odds with the ardent simplicities of his teaching—Devan is exposed to the dangers of religion when it is made to serve the needs of ethnic assertion. With a blend of humor and sobering insight, this novel explores the friction between religious fundamentalism and cosmopolitanism.

The Wizard Swami

Humor & Satire

Peepal Tree Press Ltd.

Folk belief confronts rationalistic science in this poetic fable that sees events through both European and village eyes. Set in the remote Canje region, the villagers feel that they have only the most vestigial remnants of their original Hindu world view. They have indeed absorbed much of the local mix of Amerindian/African folk beliefs, like the existence of the legendary massacouraman. What they still have is a residual Hindu view of the interconnectedness of all living things, though, in their state of rootlessness, this sometimes expresses itself in feelings of mutual hostility and unwarranted cruelty.

Dark Swirl

United States

When Columbus arrived in the Caribbean in 1492 he believed that he had landed on the coast of India. Cyril Dabydeen's ancestors came from India to the Caribbean in the nineteenth century as indentured labourers. This is an irony of history that appeals to him. Since then, like many of his fellow Guyanese, Cyril Dabydeen has moved on again to settle in Canada. His poetry grows out of consciousness of a world made up of layers of journeyings and settlement, of the meeting of heterogeneous cultures and the results of their mingling. Cyril Dabydeen writes as the voice within the convergences begun by Columbus's mistake.

Discussing Columbus

My Undiscovered Country

Genre Fiction

Mosaic Press

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Books by Dabydeen, Cyril