"magnificent . . . a further masterwork"

Review of Sweet Li Jie by David Dabydeen (Leeds: Peepal Tree, 2024) 166pp
by Michael Mitchell

Readers coming to David Dabydeen's magnificent new novel Sweet Li Jie only having seen online summaries or the publisher's blurb may well share the puzzled reaction of at least one reviewer, for it is not a naturalistic account of Chinese emigration to the Caribbean in the nineteenth century, as might have been written by, say, an Amitav Ghosh. Anyone familiar with Dabydeen's unique brand of writing, on the other hand, will recognize a further masterwork in a series of explorations of human vicissitudes, and for new readers with open minds a treat is in store.

This is not to say there is anything mendacious about Dabydeen's use of geographical, cultural and political settings; Dabydeen, besides being a novelist, has had a career as a distinguished academic as well as a diplomat, spending several years as Guyanese Ambassador to China. So it is hardly surprising that he has intimate knowledge of the situation in China during the Opium Wars, the conditions on board ships transporting indentured labourers and the social and economic state of the plantation economy of Demerara, British Guiana. The first two epigraphs — comments on China in 1860 and British Guiana under indenture — illustrate these. However, as hinted at in the third epigraph by Jorge Luis Borges, it is Dabydeen's mode of presenting these settings and the characters who move through them, which I have described elsewhere as 'realist magicalism', that is perhaps the source of the misunderstanding.

At the centre of Dabydeen's art is the act of storytelling. This is evident from the first page: the reader's introduction to Sweet Li Jie herself. The description of her fall from her bicycle from Li Jie's perspective is conveyed in poetic prose, gorgeously rhythmic and spiced with perfectly chosen and deliciously appropriate epithets. But then, as the fall knocks Li Jie unconscious, the tale unexpectedly branches, revealing that she is not sweet at all but depressive, and showing the inequality and superstition of the residents of this village in pre-industrial China: Butcher Shen, Quack Doctor Du Fu, or landlord Rich-Beyond-Dreams Wang Changling. It tells, too, how Li Jie got the bicycle from Suitor Jia Yun, towards whom Li Jie shows no sign of affection. Jia Yun is leaving for British Guiana, not under indenture but as a free merchant's assistant, from which he hopes to return 'with glitter and sackfuls' from the dream destination of El Dorado.

Li Jie's mother, Ma Hongniang, though she welcomes the gift, has her eyes to the main chance, hoping for richer presents from future suitors. She provides a link to the wider context of the British military presence, as her husband was killed in reprisals for the murder of a British soldier, after which she and her daughter fled to the village. But it is typical of the irony always lurking in Dabydeen's storytelling that the murdered soldier had been trying to integrate and treat the locals with respect, learning Mandarin and offering to marry the girl he made pregnant. The locals, while they accept looting and raping by armies as natural, cannot tolerate attempts at integration. The stories that Dabydeen tells never conform to orderly frames. As with the efforts to hold back the sea by the engineer in his early novel Disappearance, they confound all attempts at regulation or progress towards an ending, happy or otherwise.

The stories roughly divide into two groups: those which take place in British Guiana and those set in China which mostly centre on Wang Changling and his schizophrenic need to keep brutal order in his domains while harbouring a love of books and a desire to be a writer. He is fascinated by a shockingly brutal tale he reads about a handsome young courtier, Yang Lun, who becomes a favourite of the Emperor Wu and then leads a doomed rebellion against him. He is also captivated by the Emperor's favourite concubine, Ying Ying, who pleads for Yang Lun's life. He tries to write himself into these stories, and while writing and reading he hires a deformed former circus knife-thrower, Baoyu, to deal with recalcitrant villagers. The stories about Baoyu, how he came to be in the circus, how he left it and his subsequent adventures, and stories about his knife-throwing assistant, the circus director's daughter Swallow Tail, make up the bulk of these Chinese sections. They are told from the point of view of the characters in a Rabelaisian cascade of grotesque, touching, shocking episodes with a cast of extras that might have come from tales of Hindu deities or a Fellini film. Their fortunes randomly fluctuate at the apparent whim of the story's turbulence.

So what is the 'truth' of these stories? Readers will note, for example, that for all their vivid scenarios, the relating of Swallow Tail's adventures is entirely a product of her own fantasy. So may not the other stories about Baoyu and the freak show or the tales of violence and abandonment not be equally fictitious, as indeed they are, being the product of the author's imagination? The worlds of outer reality and inner space become related in a different way, just as Changling is 'gazing into the distance, which was within' (p. 27). Though the stories are told in a realistic way, the truths behind them are magical.

The Guianese stories are told through the persona of Jia Yun in the form of letters to Sweet Li Jie. Though they pay tribute to the tradition of epistolatory novels, there are no replies — Li Jie is presumably illiterate — and the practice of dating the letters is later dropped, so they really represent an inner monologue by one of the only characters who displays decency and consistency, besides a certain business acumen. As a result the reader finds him more convincing as a narrator and is more prepared to accept what he reports about his voyage to Demerara and his dealings in the colony. He inherits the textile business from his revered master, Yu Hao, who dies of cholera on the ship, and refers to himself several times as a 'man of cloth'. The play on words is deliberate, as he is an almost saintly avatar of the author's more serious purpose.

The doctor on board, who selflessly treats the patients and succumbs to the disease himself, is named Dr Richmond. He also makes 'indelicate' sketches of naked Chinese women, teaching Jia Yun the Latin words of Terence, that 'nothing human is alien to me' and that his sketches are to 'forestall the cruel acts that fantasies hatch' (p. 35). Both of these quotes might equally apply to the subjects of Dabydeen's work. That Richmond can be seen in a positive light may also reflect on the real doctor on the first indenture ship to Guiana, Theophilus Richmond, whose diaries Dabydeen co-edited for publication.

Names are not entirely random in Dabydeen's work, and often refract people who he has known well or admires (or occasionally dislikes). Thus Joseph Countryman makes a frequent appearance, as does Harris (in honour of the sometimes obscure Guyanese genius Wilson Harris). Here the Afro-Guianese Harris is Jia Yun's loyal helper, who explains the country to him and tries to introduce him to the wonders of the rainforest, which terrify Jia Lun, reminding him of predation and death. Harris has also developed his own philosophy about the creation and destiny of the universe, part of which features a worm which infects the woman who produces the first man. One is reminded of Blake's sick rose. Worms appear in similar contexts elsewhere in the book. Jia Yun is also impressed by Indo-Guianese Gurr, who is also based on an acquaintance of Dabydeen's in Berbice. The various heterogeneous populations in the colony are astutely observed by Jia Yun, who also personifies the reason Chinese traders were often respected as honest and reliable, and for their willingness to give credit. Other Chinese, however, do not come across so positively. The first man he meets in Georgetown, Mr Fu, subsequently named 'Glutton Fu', is ruthlessly exploitative, and the pastor Reverend Choy, who founds a utopian community called Prospect Town, which fills Jia Yun with a sense of foreboding, recalls Jim Jones' utopian nightmare of Jonestown.

As well as worms, ants often appear, and it is hard not to see here an allusion to the ants in Derek Walcott's Omeros, which lead Ma Kilman to a cure for an unhealed wound. Walcott's ants are connected to the figure of the mother, and it is striking how often the stories in Sweet Li Jie return to mothers, often absent or lost. A previous title for the novel considered by the author was 'Chinese Mothers'. This archetypal lack is one of the drivers of the stories, as is the archetypal yearning for the figure of the Muse,  whether it be Ying Ying, Swallow Tail or the title figure here, Li Jie (whose name, I am led to believe, means 'beautiful one'). This in turn suggests connections that run throughout the disparate stories in the book, and indeed it is striking that though the book is neatly divided into different parts and chapters, each with a superscription giving its contents, they tend to leak into one another, so that a description of the visions Baoyu sees when he is drunk for the first time are echoed exactly by the hallucinations that plague Jia Yun during a bout of malaria; similarly, a woman in Swallow Tail's fantasy whom she renames Pioneer and sends off to Demerara turns up in the Guianese section as a woman who tries to seduce Jia Yun.

The novel as a whole is a brilliant and truly West Indian stream of carnival calypso and deep seriousness where all attempts to grasp at stable facts in the current, in the same way that Jia Yun tries to seek solace in numbers and calculation, will end in failure. The caged birds that the Emperor wishes to make slave creatures that will never seek freedom can only be held in death. And if we are to ask what all of this means, the novel offers a perfect illustration. Swallow Tail is trying to describe the glories of the night sky and Baoyu considers a 'jumble of images' and the physical presence of Swallow Tail herself. She asks him:

"Well, what have you to say? You are the only person who knows what I mean."

"Mean? Mean?" he stuttered. "What do you mean by 'mean'?"

She'd opened her eyes and beamed at him. "Oh my bright boy! So bright! You understand everything but you pretend to be dull." (p. 70)

Dr Michael Mitchell

Yesu Persaud Centre for Caribbean Studies, University of Warwick