Voyeurism or Social Criticism? Women and Sexuality in David Dabydeen's The Intended, The Counting House and Our Lady of Demerara

Abstract

There is a substantial body of academic literature analysing David Dabydeen's fiction and poetry as postcolonial writing, but much less critical attention has been paid to his treatment of gender. In some ways, his approach to this issue makes for uncomfortable reading, giving rise to a desire to gloss over its substance as well as its implications. However, if Dabydeen is courageous enough to write so explicitly and honestly about misogyny in colonial and postcolonial contexts, an unflinching examination of this aspect of his work is long overdue, and it is in this spirit that this article approaches his three novels which deal most directly with the West Indies (specifically his native Guyana): The Intended (1991), The Counting House (1996) and Our Lady of Demerara (2004). There is a sense in which these three novels, taken together, can be seen as a relentless catalogue of men's historical and contemporary brutality to women in Guyana, Britain and India. Dabydeen's fiction exposes in ruthless detail not only the nature of gendered violence, but also the conditions which exacerbate it, the lies men tell themselves to justify it, and the ways in which women respond to it. He suggests links between violence, sexual desire, misogyny and the commodification of women in colonial and postcolonial societies.