Play a Song Somebody: New and Selected Stories

John Walker is a professor of Spanish studies at Queen’s University.

In an illuminating afterword, Guyana-born and long-time Canadian
resident Cyril Dabydeen explains the genesis of this collection. Most of
the older stories come from two early volumes, Still Close to the Island
(1980) and To Monkey Jungle (1988), and the collection manifests
something of the author’s changing identity, as the growing
Canadianness layers itself on and between the Guyanese and Caribbean
elements, essential parts of the man and the writer.

The four stories of Part 1 describe the experiences of the Caribbean
protagonist as he tries to settle down in a West Indian part of Toronto.
Another story tells of a young islander who is forced to choose between
his adoptive mother and his mainland lover. Another captures the tales
of an old ex-sailor as told to the narrator, while another set in
Toronto describes the wedding gathering of a group of expatriates from
Guyana.

In Part 2, we find stories depicting the harsh life of the Guyanese
jungle workers, forest camps, and characters with links to Canada. We
meet a shark-influenced young Guyanese swimmer who is trying to fit into
Canadian pools (and life), and a young Puerto Rican couple in New York,
she hanging onto her island past, he pursuing the American dream.

By the time we reach Part 3, the stories are basically about West
Indians involved in Canadian life, specifically apartment-living in
Ottawa; the politics of Ottawa bar life given the multicultural mix of
the patrons (Indians, Irish, Caribbean, etc.); the vicious rivalry and
racial jealousy of the capital’s many immigrant taxi drivers. The
volume’s final story, “The Auction,” describes the local politics
and corruption involved in renting out places at the Ottawa Byward
Market.

Dabydeen never loses sight of the basic aim of his fiction, which is to
capture the essence of the human condition, the dramas of the heart. The
settings and the characters may vary from country to country, from
tropical to urban, from Guyana to Canada, but his stories all deal with
the same problems of human identity.