A Multidisciplinary Research Journal - Devanga Arts College

‘Melting Pot’ or ‘Salad Bowl’? : A Study of
Cyril Dabydeen’s Jogging in Havana (1992)
Dr. D. Parameswari
Senior Professor& Head,
Department of English and Comparative Literature,
Madurai Kamaraj University, Madurai – 625 021.
Diasporic writing addresses issues related to amalgamation or disintegration of cultures.
An expatriate writer anchored in two cultures, the one of origin and the other of settlement, either
i) carves a new identity synthesizing the old and the new, and thus blurs the discriminating
margins of the two, often polarized sociocultural mileaus – a phenomenon referred to by critics
as ‘melting pot’ syndrome, or, ii) he reluctantly bids farewell to his native soil. Internalising
nostalgia and suffering a forced amnesia, he endeavours to establish an identity which appears as
a remote possibility since he is immersed in the oddities of the soil wherein he has sought refuge.
Here, margins adamantly obstruct; confluences of the binaries become a distant dream, as the
past intrudes and the present dominates. The picture is that of a ‘salad bowl’ where the
components exist with distinct identities without any scope for merger. In the context of
‘melting pot’, the writer finds a new and comfortable home, whereas in the ‘ salad bowl’ he
suffers bicultural pulls, and hence, a stranger in his new home, unable to relate himself to the
centre and cross over from the old to the new. He is a frustrated writer, settled in a community
foreign to him in terms of race, ethnicity and complexion.
1 ISSN 0976-8130
Cyril Dabydeen, a Guyanese – Canadian writer who immigrated to Canada in the year
1970 has authored several volumes of poetry, short-stories and novels. The present paper
focuses on Jogging in Havana, one of his short-story collections brought out in 1992.
Dabydeen, in his essay “India in Me: Reflections” proclaims that he will “continue to write
(about) India while longing for a real home or place” (2000, 138). Canada, on the other hand,
has fed him, has “nourished and brought to fruition his professional skill as a narrator” (Begum
65). If so, what is Dabydeen’s attitude to India/Guyana and then to Canada? Does he interact