Om, the man from the Caribbean in David Dabydeen's Molly and the Muslim Stick, is an Amerindian who appears on Molly's doorstep drenched and in a state of shock, as if he had been plucked by some unforeseen hand from the jungles of Guyana and dropped unceremoniously into a British working-class town.
Question (possibly) relevant to Guyana and the Caribbean: If you take a man out of his pre-modern Caribbean existence, and place him in a modern setting, what would his experience there be like? In Molly and the Muslim Stick,the Caribbean man's experience includes contending with racism, xenophobia, language barriers, and the understandable fear of being alone and out of his element. The man's experience is a heavily exaggerated portrayal of the immigrant experience. Dabydeen makes him absurd, ridiculous, hopelessly out of place, and then (mercifully) the man is deported. Message? Could it be something as plain spoken as this? (Of course not. I'm just letting Stolid see how relevant his rantings may be in relation to Dabydeen's book though. Maybe one of Stolid's stories will involve a modern-day Amerindian character...hint hint).
[Stay tuned for my reviews of Molly and the Muslin Stick, and Wild Maami this weekend...really this time.]
