Women: A Cultural Review

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Voyeurism or Social Criticism? Women and

Sexuality in David Dabydeen's The Intended, The
Counting House and Our Lady of Demerara

Elizabeth Jackson

To cite this article: Elizabeth Jackson (2015) Voyeurism or Social Criticism? Women and
Sexuality in David Dabydeen's The Intended, The Counting House and Our Lady of Demerara,
Women: A Cultural Review, 26:4, 427-442, DOI: 10.1080/09574042.2015.1106256

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Published online: 25 Mar 2016.

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 w E L I Z A B E T H J A C K S O N
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Voyeurism or
Social Criticism?
Women and
Sexuality in David
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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

............................................................................................................................................................................
Women: a cultural review Vol. 26. No. 4.
ISSN 0957-4042 print/ISSN 1470-1367 online © 2015 Taylor & Francis
http://www.tandfonline.com http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09574042.2015.1106256
 428 · WOMEN: A CULTURAL REVIEW
............................................................................................
suggests links between violence, sexual desire, misogyny and the commodification of women
in colonial and postcolonial societies.
Keywords: commodification of women, The Counting House, David Dabydeen, gendered
violence, The Intended, misogyny, Our Lady of Demerara

I hope I don’t invest in the pornography of empire; you really have to be

dreadfully honest about what seems to me to be at the heart of empire,
which is … callousness to the female which expresses itself in a variety
of violent ways … I’ve never really wanted to write in the politically
correct ways about women; but, maybe, I wanted to write about certain
experiences of growing up in a colony that revealed itself to me in terms
of cruelty towards women. But then, I don’t want to write about cruelty
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to women in a kind of poignant way either. So, yes, it’s difficult territory
to discuss … There’s always a problem of men writing about women,
anyway. You can never do it to everybody’s satisfaction. (Zimra 2011: 153)

Investing in the ‘Pornography of Empire’ or Trying to

Understand It?
David Dabydeen’s apparent discomfort with the topic of women’s victimi-
zation in interview contrasts strikingly with his shockingly graphic—some
would say pornographic—fictional treatment of it in his novels. There is a
substantial body of academic literature analysing Dabydeen’s fiction and
poetry as postcolonial writing, but much less critical attention has been
paid to his treatment of gender. I suspect that this is partly because his
approach to this issue makes for uncomfortable reading and 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 I approach
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. The Counting House, for example, is
a historical novel telling the story of the young married couple Rohini
and Vidia, who, like thousands of other desperate peasants from India,
migrate to Guiana as indentured labourers during the nineteenth century,
hoping in vain for a better life in the West Indies. Notwithstanding the
 VOYEURISM OR SOCIAL CRITICISM? · 429
............................................................................................

novel’s portrayal of the casual brutality of peasant life in India, the unmis-
takable impression is created that violence towards women is greatly aggra-
vated by the harsh conditions of indentureship in Guiana. As Stevi Jackson
and Sue Scott (and others) have pointed out: ‘routine sexual exploitation,
coercion and brutality towards women have been very much a part of the
history of slavery and colonialism’ (Jackson and Scott 1996: 18). After
slavery was abolished throughout the British Empire in 1833, indentured
labourers were brought from India to the West Indies to work on the
sugar plantations. Under both slavery and indentureship, there are numer-
ous historically documented cases of white men who ‘used their positions as
owners or managers of the subaltern to render colonized women sex objects
over whom they could exercise power’ (Shepherd 2007: 31).
In addition to their exploitation (sometimes including sexual exploita-
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tion) at the hands of their colonial ‘masters’ and overseers, there is also evi-
dence that many enslaved and indentured women were subjected to abuse
within their families (Shepherd 2007: 42). Much has been written about the
exploitation of the male colonial subject, who seeks to compensate for his
humiliation by dominating the women in his family, often brutally. While
domestic violence is by no means limited to the colonial context, Michael
Kaufman has suggested that it functions, in many cases, as a man’s ‘denial of
social powerlessness through an act of aggression’ (Kaufman 2007: 33). If, as
Kaufman argues, the family ‘becomes the place where the violence suffered
by individuals within their work lives is discharged’ (45), it stands to reason
that colonized men’s humiliating experiences of slavery and indentureship
encouraged a culture of violence against colonized women within the
home, adding to their already vulnerable position as commodities within
the wider plantation economy.
This historical legacy of male brutality towards women has continued
long after the end of slavery and indentureship, as Dabydeen himself has
affirmed in interview: ‘One of the more painful features of being a child
in the Caribbean was witnessing incidents of violence towards women,
since male violence to women was normal’ (Gramaglia 2011: 174).
This ‘normalization’ of the victimization of women is seen also in his
semi-autobiographical novel The Intended, in which the narrator-protagonist’s
memories of his childhood in Guyana include shocking instances of
wife-beating and casual misogyny.
In Our Lady of Demerara, Dabydeen portrays male brutality towards
women in Europe as well as the West Indies, drawing connections
between gendered violence and exploitation in colonial Ireland, postcolo-
nial Guyana and contemporary Britain. He also places these issues in a
longer historical time frame by narrating a conversation during the early
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twentieth century between two priests in England, who find that the women
they remember from church history are all victims, like St Catherine, St
Cecelia, St Margaret, Veronica and Eustacia. As Father Harris puts it,
they are all ‘martyrs to men’s power’ (Dabydeen 2004: 199). Interestingly,
theological scholars have pointed out that, historically, female martyrs
were held in even greater reverence than male martyrs: ‘The image of a
weak female made glorious through pitiful suffering seems to have been a
very powerful one’ (Kirwan 2013). The implication is that, since women
were constructed as the weaker sex and excluded from positions of auth-
ority, spectacular suffering was their only means of being recognized and
valued within the church (and to some extent within the wider society),
as Father Harris affirms: ‘That’s why we remember them and all we remem-
ber of them, the ways men broke them. We know little about them and
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we’re not even interested in knowing anything beyond their martyrdom

at our hands’ (Dabydeen 2004: 199–200). Father Harris is suggesting that
the nature of men’s interest in women’s lives is limited to a prurient and
voyeuristic engagement with the nature of their victimization.
Whether or not this is true, Dabydeen’s relentlessly explicit descriptions
of male violence towards women (with an emphasis on sexual violence)
throughout his fiction imply that he does not exempt himself from this judge-
ment. Indeed, he seems to be implicating the male reader in voyeuristic
enjoyment of gendered violence, so that much of his fiction makes uncom-
fortable reading for many male and female readers alike, much as one might
admire his courage and honesty. 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 post-
colonial contexts.

The Commercialization and Commodification of Women

All three of the novels place the commercialization of sex within a wider
framework, linking it not only with violence against women, but also
with pornography and casual misogyny in contemporary popular culture,
as well as overarching ideologies of women’s bodies as objects of economic
transaction throughout history, in all societies. These ideas have been much
explored in feminist theory. Applying Marxian economic theory to the con-
dition of women, Friedrich Engels identified the emergence of the concept
of private property and its appropriation by men as the central historical
events from which the modern social order and systematic gendered
 VOYEURISM OR SOCIAL CRITICISM? · 431
............................................................................................

violence emerged: ‘In this model, women are economic dependents; even-
tually defined as the property of fathers or husbands, they are subject to the
violence that accompanies the status of slaves’ (O’Toole et al. 2007: 4).
Given that patriarchy predates recorded history, it is difficult to trace its
origins to a single causal factor. However, Laura O’Toole et al. have empha-
sized that it began (and in some contexts still continues) with the idea of
women as property:

A central fact acknowledged but generally underanalyzed by historians is

that women were the first slaves. In the quest for women, invading clans
would kill adult males on the spot and enslave their women and children.
Rape and other forms of physical and psychological violence were used
to control women in their new communities … Both violence toward
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women and the elaborate social structures that develop around such prac-
tices serve to … institutionalize patriarchy. Over time, overt and covert
forms of violence come to characterize ‘normal’ gender relations, institu-
tionally and interpersonally. (O’Toole et al. 2007: 6–7)

Overt forms of gendered violence emerging from the concept of women as

property include rape, domestic violence or ‘wife-battering’, dowry deaths
and ‘honour’ killings. Examples of more subtle forms of coercion are
located along the continuum between arranged and forced marriages, and
between sexual harassment and ‘date rape’, in pornography, in prostitution
and in numerous other enactments of male domination, all of which are
reinforced by a culture that objectifies the female body. O’Toole et al.
have argued persuasively that:

Contemporary capitalist market economies provide the context for an

increasingly complex commodification of sexuality. In a culture that
promotes the belief that basic human needs can be met by purchas-
ing the right products, it is no surprise that a huge sex entertainment
industry emerges. The buying and selling of sex through prostitution,
‘gentlemen’s clubs’, telephone sex services, chat rooms, and explicit
videos are logical outgrowths of a profit-oriented market economy
in a society that is preoccupied with sex. (O’Toole et al. 2007:
76–7)

Given the cultural construction of women as what Jackson and Scott

have described as ‘objects for male use and pleasure’ (Jackson and
Scott 1996: 21), it is not surprising that, in this sex entertainment indus-
try, the buyers are predominantly men. Perhaps its most worrying aspect
is that:
 432 · WOMEN: A CULTURAL REVIEW
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The more women are seen as objects … the easier it is to violate them.
The regular degradation of women and portrayal of coerced sexuality
in explicitly pornographic materials, as well as in mainstream movies, tele-
vision shows, music videos, and computer games, provides a backdrop for
rationalizing gender violence in everyday interactions. (O’Toole et al.
2007: 77)

In the colonial and postcolonial contexts, Jackson and Scott further point
out that:

The racism which is often a feature of pornography is … the product of

the double objectification of black women as objects to be used by their
white masters. The master–slave imagery, so often used in pornography,
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and which positions the male spectator as master of what he surveys,

would have no cultural or erotic significance without the history of
white imperialism. (Jackson and Scott 1996: 22)

With these theoretical considerations in mind, one of the interesting aspects

of Dabydeen’s fictional writing is his extensive and sustained engagement,
from a male perspective, with the radical feminist idea of sexuality being
the basis of women’s oppression. Even more interesting, perhaps, is his
uncompromising approach, which seems to suggest that all men (or at
least all heterosexual men) are capable of cruelty towards women in particu-
lar environments and particular circumstances. The commercialization of
women’s bodies is repeatedly emphasized in Dabydeen’s fiction, from
1970s London in The Intended, to nineteenth-century India and Guiana in
The Counting House, to early twentieth-century and contemporary Britain
and Guyana in Our Lady of Demerara.
The narrator of The Intended, a Guyanese migrant loosely based on the
author himself, notes that:

All of us growing up in London were swamped with images of sex which

had no bearing on morality, or indeed any kind of value at all, apart from
the commercial … The billboards we passed on our way carried provoca-
tive photographs of fleshy lips sucking at a cigarette, or teenage girls in
black tights sprawled on the bonnet of the latest motor car. (Dabydeen
1991: 19)

The teenage narrator and his friends are seduced, in varying degrees, by the
debauched environment of their insalubrious neighbourhood, though the
narrator himself, with his taste for canonical literature and a ‘respectable’
girlfriend named Janet, is contrasted with his friend Shaz, who pimps for
 VOYEURISM OR SOCIAL CRITICISM? · 433
............................................................................................

his prostitute girlfriend Monica. Shaz, the son of Pakistani immigrants,

develops a taste for pornographic magazines which portray misogynistic
images and narrate misogynistic fantasies (121). Boasting of his sexual enjoy-
ment of Monica and ‘sparing no detail’, the narrator notes that ‘the
language of his descriptions was straight out of the magazines’ (123). Not
surprisingly, Shaz has become shockingly misogynistic, seeing all women
(even in the literary texts the narrator is studying) as nothing more than
instruments of sexual gratification for men (124). He takes the narrator to
the centre of London’s sex industry, full of sex shops, massage parlours, porno-
graphic cinemas and ‘large billboards of women offering their naked flesh to
us’ (125), and, on another occasion, to a prostitute (129–32). When the
narrator finally questions Shaz about the direction in which he is going,
Shaz insists that sex is ‘a business like any other’ (133). This view appears
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to be shared by their other friend, Patel, who sells pornographic films in

the family video shop, and the narrator naively wonders how the father
could allow it:

How could the father sell all that sex stuff which went against all their
Indian beliefs? Indians were family people, everybody knew that. The
men watched over the family, especially the girls whom they kept from
dirt and who saved their virginities for marriage. (135)

At this point in the novel, the narrator’s wilfully idealized vision of Indian
family life has already been belied by his own experiences. Moreover, his
view of ‘virginities’ as gifts to be ‘saved’ for future husbands is, of course,
another version of the commodification of female sexuality, implying
that the husband has an exclusive lifelong ‘right’ to his wife’s body, even
before they have met each other.
Women’s bodies as objects of financial transaction is a recurring trope in
The Counting House, in which Rohini is told sneeringly by the man recruiting
Indian peasants as indentured labourers that a passage to Guiana would cost
her ‘one rupee and your scunt’ (Dabydeen 1996: 54). The reflections of
Rohini’s mother, too, draw attention to the commodification of the
female body in India, in which young women were (and often still are)
designated as financial liabilities to their natal families because of the
social obligation to provide expensive weddings and a dowry (16, 19).
After successfully persuading her new husband, Vidia, to migrate with
her to Guiana in the vain hope of a better life, Rohini gradually becomes
aware of herself as a commodity. Like countless other women in every
culture throughout history, she decides to make this knowledge a source
of power instead of a source of despair: ‘In the three long months to
Guiana and the two long years following, she met only with the sickness
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of greed. That was all there was, though, and she might as well find a way of
profiting from it’ (67). However, Rohini is too aware of the ephemeral
nature of her own desirability to mix with the ‘coolies’:

She knew there was a shortage of women on the plantation, that many of
[Vidia’s] fellow cane cutters would scheme with money to bribe her, or
with poison to kill him, if only she consented to it. But what would she
gain by them, these uncouth coolies who would throw a few coppers her
way and expect to devour her in return, then when she had grown shabby
and exhausted, put her out to work for other men? (66–7)

Instead she decides to use her power over them as a source of power over her
husband: ‘Although she would not dream of rejecting Vidia for such men,
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she still tormented him with the prospect of betrayal’ (67). With a heigh-
tened sense of her sexuality as a source of power, she begins rubbing oils
into her skin and curling and making bright headbands for her hair: ‘By
these means she would goad Vidia into achievement … In exchange for
his labour she would maintain her body and make children for him, not
many … one boy, perhaps another, then she would stop before growing
misshapen and outworn’ (67). As Gail Low rightly argues:

Not only does The Counting House revolve around money and the
exchange of money for services that enable the accumulation of
wealth, it also shows how commodification reformulates, manages and
regulates individual desires. In this climate, sexual desire is not exempt
from the system of exchanges: Rohini represents her lovemaking with
her husband as an exchange for Vidia’s labour. Both Rohini and
Miriam work in the Great House and gain small rewards and privileges
for their services; both compete for the Master’s little favours … Both
also jostle each other for Gladstone’s sole attention, sole ownership.
(Low 2007: 211–12)

Low also contends that this situation is somehow caused by ‘the relentless
march of global capitalism’, which ‘restructures and translates not only indi-
vidual labour, but also individual desires, into a system of exchanges, equiv-
alences that allow the progress and expansion of capital markets outwards
from developed nations’ (211). However, as we have seen, the commodifi-
cation of women predates the colonial expansion of capitalism. True, it is
during the rise of global capitalism that such commodification gains a
truly global force, though, as Dabydeen’s novels also show, it takes on
different forms in different environments. From this perspective, it is
worth noting that, although ‘the drive to imperial expansion must be
 VOYEURISM OR SOCIAL CRITICISM? · 435
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explained as one element in the whole process of capitalist development’,

slave plantations themselves are considered to be pre-capitalist formations
(Brewer 1990: 2, 1). If capitalism is ‘the division of classes between proper-
tyless wage-earners and entrepreneurs who own capital’ (Inikori 2001: 5),
then slaves, serfs and housewives are, in a sense, external to that system
because they are not wage-earners; on the contrary, they are economic
dependents who exchange their labour for maintenance. Ironically, the
growth of industrial capitalism in Britain was largely financed by the
profits from imperial expansion, including the slave-based Atlantic
economy (Inikori 2001: 15). Some feminists have also argued that capital-
ism was (and in many cases still is) supported by unpaid female domestic
labour, which ‘frees’ the male worker for wage labour outside the home
(Delphy and Leonard 1992). Thus, the development of capitalism was
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heavily dependent on the exploitation of women, including slave women,

who functioned as agricultural labourers, ‘breeders’ of the labour force
and often (literally) sex slaves for their masters.

Violence, Sexual Desire and Misogyny

The concept of misogyny (loosely defined as negative attitudes towards
women) has been much discussed and debated in feminist theory. Kate
Millet has suggested that it is both a cause and a result of patriarchal
social structures (Millett 1970). The connection between violence, sexual
desire and misogyny is explored most fully in Our Lady of Demerara,
which begins with the narrator, Lance (whom the cover blurb accurately
describes as ‘a seedy wreck of a man’), trawling the backstreets of Coventry
for prostitutes. He ruthlessly describes the routine brutality of clients
(including himself) towards prostitutes and spares the reader none of the
gory details of his sordid experiences with sex workers, including brutality,
disappointment, being robbed, sexual impotence and hearing the prosti-
tutes’ narratives of their wretched lives. Even more horrifying is his explicit
account of the aftermath of the savage murder of his favourite prostitute (a
teenager who does not walk the streets) by an unknown assailant, followed
by the newspapers’ pandering to the appetites of prurient readers: ‘Dark-
haired beauty raped and drowned, the headline announced to the world’
(Dabydeen 2004: 45). Gleefully flaunting the gruesome photographs, the
reporter who broke the story was excited by the implications for his own
career (45–6).
Some insight into the peculiarities of Lance’s attitude towards women is
revealed in his accounts of his relationship with the teenage prostitute, who
dresses in traditional Indian clothing and calls herself Rohini outdoors,
 436 · WOMEN: A CULTURAL REVIEW
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while calling herself Corinne and wearing a ‘blood-red English dress’

indoors (51). Her speech and behaviour are shockingly coarse, but ‘her
foul language was only bravado, I decided, for our lovemaking was shy
and awkward’ (52). Notably, this is the opposite of his wife, Beth, who
speaks like a lady but enjoys sex in an uninhibited way—which disgusts
Lance. It is made very clear to the reader that Lance’s desire for Rohini/
Corinne is based on a combination of paedophilia and a desire for colonial
‘mastery’ of the racial ‘other’: ‘There was crazed delectation of her dark skin
and child’s body. Shame should prevent me from confessing it but I was
wildly excited by the imagining of her past’ (62). Her past is that of a
child prostitute in India, and we are given an account of how her
adopted uncle, Samaroo, found her:
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He was distressed by the squalor and dereliction of the temple, especially

at its throng of prostitute children. He had picked Rohini out from the
massed bodies. Saving her from brutality would be his way of thanking
the gods for his mother’s privileged life. (56)

He then adopted her and brought her to England not out of compassion,
but out of a sense of religious duty, having originally seen her as part of
the general squalor of the temple in India. Unaware that Rohini is continu-
ing to work as a prostitute (with Lance as her client) after she has supposedly
been ‘saved’, Samaroo’s attitude towards her is now limited to disappoint-
ment at her lack of decorum, and it is precisely this lack of decorum (com-
bined with juvenile vulnerability) which Lance finds so exciting. Thus,
although Lance and Samaroo have different relationships with this girl,
they both view her as a product, never seeing her as a damaged human
being with emotions and needs of her own.
With obvious intertextual references to Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Dark-
ness, Lance later undertakes a journey to Guyana, retracing the earlier
journey of a missionary priest as his inspiration for a more wholesome
life. His journey into the ‘wilderness’ and the ‘horrors’ he encounters
there recall a similar physical and psychological journey made by Marlow
in Heart of Darkness. Travelling upriver through the jungle, Lance arrives
at a seedy boarding house to find that ‘I had come to this godforsaken
spot hoping for a miracle but the boatman had abandoned me to the
memory of my sinning’ (79). Rajah, who runs the boarding house, tells
Lance that Arawak women come along to offer commercial sex to what
he calls ‘Negro pork-knockers’ (81). Encountering a silent Arawak woman,
Rajah says: ‘She don’t talk. They stay dumb even if you kick them. Is
because they know what we can’t even imagine. They see and dream
things which still them’ (92–3). At last beginning to develop some awareness
 VOYEURISM OR SOCIAL CRITICISM? · 437
............................................................................................

of things other than his own desires, Lance later reflects that: ‘Rajah’s expla-
nation of her silence was deceitful. She was no creature awed into speech-
lessness by the mysteries of the spirit world. Years of abuse by pork-
knockers had reduced her to her condition. She kept returning to them
out of ordinary poverty’ (94). While Rajah interprets the woman’s silence
as a connection with the spirit world and Lance interprets it as trauma,
the silencing of women in general has a long history. Because patriarchal
societies have always given priority to male speech, Justine McGill has
argued, female reticence is often ‘the effect of a culture that is to varying
degrees hostile to or dismissive of women’ (McGill 2013: 197). Again
echoing Heart of Darkness but with more explicit detail about atrocities com-
mitted in the jungle, the narrative goes on to relentlessly describe the torture
of an Arawak woman, with Rajah as ‘a high priest of debauchery’ , and
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Lance writes in his final letter to Beth: ‘Who am I to judge them? Am I

any better than them?’ (Dabydeen 2004: 96).
The second half of the novel is Lance’s narrative written from Guyana,
inspired by the life of the young Catholic priest, as well as his own experi-
ences and reflections. In this fictional account, Lance imagines the priest’s
childhood and adolescence in an Irish monastery as unremittingly
austere. Significantly, in Lance’s version (and perhaps in the priest’s own
account, which is not included in the narrative), the young boy accepts
and even approves of all of the privations, but abhors the ministrations
of three old women, who wash the boys every morning and mend their
clothes. He refers to them as ‘the three witches’ and, despite the brutal chas-
tisement by the monks, the strict regime, the lack of food and the utter joy-
lessness of monastic life, he says that: ‘but for the three witches the cup of
my childhood would have brimmed over with happiness’ (118). Unlike the
monks, these three women are never harsh towards the boys, and they are
the only people in the monastery attending to the children’s basic needs.
And yet Lance’s young narrator despises them, apparently because of
their age and femaleness, interpreting their every action as full of
‘venom’, even when one of them gives him a coin as a parting gift,
despite her own poverty (137).
So, if young women are incessantly lusted after in Dabydeen’s fictional
world, old women are routinely regarded with contempt by men and
women alike, apparently on the basis that they are no longer sexually desir-
able. In The Counting House, the newly married Rohini reflects that ‘men
worked hard only to end up with … a scowling fat clumsy wife like Droo-
patie who had long forgotten, once she bore the children, how to give
love to her husband’ (Dabydeen 1996: 54). This contrasts with Miriam’s
reflection towards the end of the novel on the conditions that produce
 438 · WOMEN: A CULTURAL REVIEW
............................................................................................

increasing unhappiness in married women as they age. She sees that, as an

old woman:

[You are] squatting in plantation mud, folding your loose skin around
you to stay warm, and watching across the road your husband cavorting
in the rumshop, wasting money on drinks for everybody, boasting like
any young man of all the fucks he did with so many mistresses and
how many more he could do with the money he had hidden away
from his wife. (128)

The irony—which none of Dabydeen’s novels shy away from—is that if older
women are despised for their lack of sexual allure, younger women are
despised for their possession of it. This is, perhaps, a logical outcome of
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what Jackson and Scott describe as ‘the prioritisation of male sexual

“needs”’ and the corresponding reduction of women to their physical sexu-
ality (Jackson and Scott 1996: 21). It is expressed through all forms of
culture, from the popular to the literary to the religious. We have seen
the effects of pornography on Shaz in The Intended, and Our Lady of Demer-
ara calls attention to the misogynistic nature of much contemporary
popular music: ‘“Slash me bitch up, slash the black motherfucker,” the
lyrics announced repeatedly’ (Dabydeen 2004: 16). In the monastery of
Lance’s re-imagined narrative, the only available books are the Bible and
other religious texts, but these too are rich sources of misogynistic tales.
The boy and his friend in the monastery enjoy reading lurid biblical
accounts of young women being ravished and then brutally punished
(sometimes even murdered by their own families) on the basis that they
are now ‘spoilt’ (127). Blaming the victim is, of course, a time-honoured
practice in misogynistic thinking, but as Our Lady of Demerara also illus-
trates, prostitution is never a ‘career choice’; on the contrary, it is the last
resort of desperate women, who are driven to it (often unwittingly) and
then blamed for it.

Women’s Responses
If the ‘fallen women’ in Our Lady of Demerara are reluctant to share their life
stories with the priest’s apprentice, the novel as a whole is not so coy and, in
Lance’s fictional rewriting of the priest’s manuscript, he tells the tale of a
woman he names Corinne, after the murdered teenage prostitute. His fic-
tional Corinne of the early twentieth century is resistant to revealing infor-
mation about herself, seeing her personal history as the only thing she has
left which is truly hers: ‘Men—magistrates, constables, warders of
 VOYEURISM OR SOCIAL CRITICISM? · 439
............................................................................................

almshouses, usurers of her body—had interrogated her throughout her life,

but she had deceived them all, taking their chastisement or their charity
without ever yielding up her true self’ (Dabydeen 2004: 231). However,
now that she is at the end of her short life, she gradually reveals her story
to the curious young boy.
As in The Counting House, the narrative here traces the thoughtless
destruction of vulnerable young women’s lives not only to the abuse of
money and power by men who simply want to gratify their own selfish
desires, but also to the women who collude with them out of desperation.
With many parallels to The Counting House, Corinne’s mother, a young
widow, had been a domestic servant in a great house in Yorkshire. Again,
like Miriam and Rohini in The Counting House, Corinne’s mother had
been awed by the Marquess’s money and power, flattered by his attention,
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and hoping to improve her wretched life by gaining his favour. One of Cor-
inne’s childhood memories is of the Marquess throwing her mother onto
the kitchen floor and having ‘his way with her’, and, when the child
quietly leaves, her mother’s only concern was that she did not curtsy to
him (Dabydeen 2004: 232). Corinne’s account of the Marquess’s treatment
of herself is more metaphorical:

I wouldn’t have his cherries, though he ordered me to, then begged, then
threatened, then begged, but I wouldn’t, until one day he lost his head,
grabbed me by the hair, squashed my cheeks and shoved them into my
mouth. He could have done it to me like that in the first place, but no, he
wanted me to have them by my own choice, but I wouldn’t, so in the end
he had to force me. ‘Take,’ my mother told me, ‘take from him,’ she said,
shaking me, shouting at me, because she wanted to be left alone. If I took
from him she’d be let off what he kept doing to her, he’d leave her be.
(233)

Corinne ran away from the great house when she was a young teenager,
taking shelter in an alcove in the Roman walls of York and inevitably
falling prey to men, who paid her for sex (234–6). She passed on to all of
her clients a venereal disease bequeathed to her by the Marquess, and
‘the sickness of the Marquess’ is also, of course, his predatory behaviour
(236).
One day, a silent man, whom she called Enoch, arrived and began to
watch over her every night, never touching her. She grew to despise
Enoch because he was ‘beyond her power to corrupt. In her youth, it was
her only defence against the depravity of men, this ability to taint them’
(239). Thus Corinne takes pleasure in her power to destroy:
 440 · WOMEN: A CULTURAL REVIEW
............................................................................................

How many marriages I broke up, how many blighted wives because of
me, how many orphans I made, how many suicides, how many ruined
estates and spoiled inheritances, I can’t begin to number or weigh or con-
ceive in words. I wore down the world to the skeleton you now see when
you look at me. (240)

There is, of course, a problematic relationship between Corinne’s self-pro-

claimed power and widespread popular perceptions of the links between
women and ‘disease’, especially sexual disease. Indeed, prostitutes have
for centuries been ‘blamed for carrying disease and infecting men—thus
absolving men from having infected them in the first place’ (Jackson and
Scott 1996: 25).
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Corinne ran away, but Enoch kept following her, and she began to
suspect that ‘he’s an angel come to avenge all the sins I’ve visited on
mankind’ (Dabydeen 2004: 242). But, of course, it is ‘mankind’ who have
visited sins on her, which she, by her own admission, turns against them.
To emphasize this point by showing once again the original source of the
‘sins’, the narrative has Corinne return to her mother, only to find her
with a three-year-old daughter fathered by the Marquess:

Her livelihood was secure, and her work lessened to odd kitchen tasks of
her choosing. The Marquess had lifted her burden by employing other
servants. She now had money and sufficient clothing.
I opened my mind to how she had bettered herself, but there was no
longer a place for me. She hugged the little girl to herself instead. I
looked at the two of them pairing up to get through the days and
nights with provisions ample enough to make life bearable, as I used
to. I turned away so they couldn’t see me reddening in my eyes. (244)

Thus it is emphasized that women like Corinne and her mother are com-
pelled to sell themselves (including their labour and/or their sexuality) to
men in order to survive, whether the men to whom they sell themselves
are wealthy and powerful like the Marquess, poor and not necessarily
kind like the men they could marry, or simply opportunistic like the men
on the street who pay them for sex. The end of Lance’s narrative is the
end of the novel, with Corinne’s death and the young priest’s departure
for Guiana.
In the other Dabydeen novels, the victimization of women is often
resisted by the female characters—for example, by Auntie Pakul in The
Intended, who arrives at the narrator’s impoverished childhood home in
rural Guyana after a severe beating of his mother by his father. Seeing the
 VOYEURISM OR SOCIAL CRITICISM? · 441
............................................................................................

mother’s swollen lips, Auntie Pakul beats up the father and sends him away,
telling him never to return (Dabydeen 1991: 40). Miriam, in The Counting
House, is portrayed as similarly tough. Asked about portraying his female
characters as stronger than the males, emotionally and sometimes phys-
ically, Dabydeen, in keeping with his refusal to idealize, replied: ‘I guess
it is not that the women are stronger than the men; it is just that the men
are weaker than the women’ (Kanaganayakam 2011: 140).

Conclusion
Keith Jardim has written approvingly of Dabydeen’s illustrations of ‘the
West Indian talent for the most obscene and vicious cursing’ (Jardim
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2011: 61). This brand of humour may not be to everyone’s taste, but it is
part of a realistic portrayal of West Indian life, and it does provide some
bawdy comic relief from the bleak vision of Dabydeen’s novels. The insis-
tently misogynistic quality of his characters’ obscene language also
reinforces his portrayal of what he has described as ‘callousness to the
female’ in the West Indies and elsewhere (Zimra 2011: 153). If Dabydeen
paints a bleak fictional world, it is tempered not only by humour, but
also by compassion for both the perpetrators and the victims of man’s
inhumanity to woman, along with his refusal to idealize or demonize
anyone. His novels are full of both voyeurism and social criticism—the
one inextricably bound up with the other—so that he approaches his
material with courage, honesty and a fearless desire to understand the
dark forces underlying heterosexual relationships in colonial and postcolo-
nial contexts.

Disclosure Statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

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