At the end of David Dabydeen's poem 'Coolie Odyssey' (1988), the poet, deracinated by education, distance and time from the dirt-poor ancestors he is elegising, considers his British audience:

congregations of the educated
Sipping wine, attentive between courses -
See the applause fluttering from their white hands

Like so many messy table napkins.

The poem's skill is part of its predicament. It raises a question that has preoccupied not only writers from Britain's former colonies, but many of Britain's native writers. How can a literary art, with its highly developed codes, language, conventions and traditions, do justice to those excluded (often deliberately) by those codes? And how can the applause of the self-styled owners of those conventions and traditions be other than condescending and self-congratulatory?

LRB 21 June 2007 | PDF Download