In the context of the 2015 meeting of the Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences in Ottawa, Ontario, two academic associations––the Canadian Association of Commonwealth Literature and Language Studies (CACLALS) and the Association for Canadian and Québec Literatures (ACQL)––hosted a collaborative event to honour the work of Ottawa-based poet Cyril Dabydeen. Cyril read from God’s Spider, which was published by Peepal Tree Press in 2014.ACQL and CACLALS are grateful to the Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences for their financial support of this event, and I am personally grateful to Dorothy Lane, then president of CACLALS, for her willingness to collaborate in order to bring the reading to fruition.As then Vice-President of ACQL, I was happy to introduce Cyril to a room full of scholars, writers, community members, and friends:“Born in Guyana, Cyril immigrated to Canada in 1970. His forty-five-year residence in Canada coincides neatly with the histories of both ACQL and CACLALS, both founded in the mid 1970s (1975 and 1973, respectively), and the coincidence speaks to the multiple ways in which Canada’s literary cultures have changed in the wake of Cyril’s arrival. Comprising a significant body of short stories, novels, and poetry, Cyril’s writing is particularly intriguing for its meditations on the intersections of Guyanese, Indian, and Canadian identities.As an anthologist, Cyril has also been an active shaper of literary culture: his Shapely Fire (an anthology of Black and Caribbean writing in Canada), Another Way to Dance (which collects the work of Asian poets in Canada), and Beyond Sangre Grande: Caribbean Writing Today have been important tools in the teaching of an increasingly diverse selection of writers in Canadian classrooms and are key compilations of contemporary diasporic writing. In addition to his active career as a poet who is widely recognized for his contributions to Canadian and Caribbean writing, Cyril is also a teacher: he has taught creative writing here at the University of Ottawa for many years.”Jody MasonAssociate ProfessorDepartment of English, Carleton University
The research trends of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences Research at the University of Zululand, 1994 - 2008
