‘For new readers with open minds, a treat is in store’

Review of David Dabydeen’s “Sweet Li Jie”

By Dr Michael Mitchell

Readers coming to David Dabydeen’s magnificent new novel, “Sweet Li Jie”, after having seen only 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, would 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. Besides being a novelist, Dabydeen has had a career as a distinguished academic as well as a diplomat, spending several years as Guyana’s Ambassador to China. So, it is hardly surprising that he has intimate knowledge of the situation that obtained 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, and is 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 sacksful’ from the dream destination of El Dorado. Li Jie’s mother, Ma Hongniang, though she welcomes the gift, has her eyes on 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 reprisal for the murder of a British soldier, after which she and her daughter had 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 had 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 are roughly divided 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 would 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’ (page 27). Though the stories are told in a realistic way, the truths behind them are magical. (TO BE CONTINUED)

“Sweet Li Jie by David Dabydeen” (Leeds: Peepal Tree, 2024) 166pp
Dr Michael Mitchell is from Paderborn University, Germany