Fred DâAguiar was born in London in 1960 to Guyanese parents. He was raised in Guyana by relatives in Georgetown, the capital city, and by his grandmother in Airy Hall, a rural village, from 1962 to 1972, a decade that he calls his âformative yearsâ (DâAguiar 2018), during which Guyana was ruled by the dictatorial figure of Forbes Burnham. That specific Guyanese context constitutes, in fact, the historical background to his novels Dear Future (1996), Bethany Bettany (2003), and Children of Paradise (2014), and his childhood memories from that period have served, along with world mythologies, as significant source material for his collections of poems Mama Dot (1985), Airy Hall (1989), Continental Shelf (2009), and The Rose of Toulouse (2013), and, virtually, for all of his novels.
In 1972, DâAguiar returned to Britain in order to train as a psychiatric nurse before pursuing Caribbean and African studies at the University of Kent, graduating with honors in 1985. His experience as a psychiatric nurse, combined with his interest in letters, was formative too, since it induced him to reflect upon the intricate connections that exist between history, ethnicity, trauma, and speech, written or oral. Novels such as The Longest Memory (1994), Feeding the Ghosts (1997), Bethany Bettany (2003), and Bloodlines (2000), his only novel in verse, result from these considerations.
In 1985, in addition to graduating, DâAguiar published Mama Dot, his first collection of poems. In 1986, he obtained a writer-in-residence position at the London Borough of Lewisham and decided to devote his efforts to creative writing, thus giving up plans to attend the University of Warwick and write a dissertation on the works of Guyanese author Wilson Harris â who would nevertheless remain a major influence on his writing. As a result, DâAguiarâs first play, High Life, was produced in 1987. In 1989, after he had accepted another writer-in-residence position at Birmingham Polytechnic, his second collection of poems, Airy Hall, was published.
From 1989 to 1990, DâAguiar became a Judith E. Wilson Fellow at Cambridge University, and then a Northern Arts Literary Fellow from 1990 to 1992. In 1991 his second play, A Jamaican Airman Foresees his Death, was staged. From 1992 to 1994, he was a visiting writer at Amherst College, Massachusetts, where he completed his third collection of poems, British Subjects (1993), and spent time with the Kittitian-British writer Caryl Phillips who, like David Dabydeen, M. NourbeSe Philip, and Pauline Melville, belongs to the same generation of anglophone Caribbean authors.
In 1994, DâAguiar published his first novel, The Longest Memory, which won the Whitbread First Novel Award and the David Higham Prize for Fiction. That
In 2003, DâAguiar took a position as Professor of English, co-director of the Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing, and Gloria D. Smith Professor of Africana Studies at Virginia Polytechnic Institute. In 2007 he was a witness of the mass shooting that took place there, and, as a means of mourning for the victims and trying to come to terms with the trauma, he composed a series of elegies that were included as the central part of his poetry collection Continental Shelf (2009), which was a finalist for the T.S. Eliot prize in 2009. He published another collection of poems, The Rose of Toulouse, in 2013. In 2014 he became a U.S. citizen and published his sixth novel, Children of Paradise, a narrative which, like Bill of Rights, deals with the 1978 Jonestown massacre. Since 2015, he has been working as a Professor of English and Director of Creative Writing at the University of California, Los Angeles.
DâAguiarâs background is, thus, both typically and untypically Caribbean, given the migrations in his life and work. On the one hand, he was not born in the Caribbean, and he is now an American citizen. On the other, he is, like many Caribbean writers, a descendant of the African diaspora, and claims his ongoing attachment to Caribbean âlandâ â not in nationalistic terms, but in imaginary and affective ones that induce him to refer to Guyana as âhomeâ (DâAguiar 2007). These displacements, and that sensibility, coupled with DâAguiarâs imaginative writings, seem to generate a poetics of migration characteristic of much of Caribbean writing, in which tropes play a central role, notably in translating cross-cultural experience with metaphor being the expression of displacement and transformation. The resulting predominance of diversity, movement, and change in DâAguiarâs language precludes discussing his works with assumptions of literal sense and cultural essence. It follows that, in spite of its (implicit or explicit) recurrence in âpostcolonialâ studies, reliance on Sartrean philosophy is inappropriate as a theoretical framework for the study of DâAguiarâs writings since, as will be shown, Sartrean approaches
On the other hand, Martinican philosopher and poet Ãdouard Glissantâs contention that culture is not reducible to monolithic essence (Glissant 1990, 169), or the idea that absolutely nothing is essentially pure or original, as French philosopher Jacques Derrida suggests, notably in his presentations of language as intrinsically Other and metaphoric (Derrida 1974, 1978, 1996), seem to resonate more harmoniously with Fred DâAguiarâs cross-cultural and metaphoric language.1 This seems to be confirmed by Abigail Wardâs reading of DâAguiarâs novels utilizing the ideas developed in Derridaâs âPlatoâs Pharmacyâ (Ward, 131â79; Derrida 1972), and it is as a result of these considerations that we have chosen Derridaâs writings as an ethically appropriate theoretical framework for an exploration of DâAguiarâs writings.
In this sense, this choice should by no means be viewed as Euro-centric, as it is simply pragmatic: Derridaâs works are more âall-encompassingâ than those of Caribbean thinkers like Glissant, Wilson Harris, or Edward K. Brathwaite for that matter, although these intellectualsâ arguments converge. For instance, Glissantâs argument that there is no "prime element of culture" (Glissant 1990, 169) is a specific manifestation of the general fact, demonstrated by Derrida, that origin is prosthetic, always already decomposable (Derrida 1998). It follows that culture, time (presence/the present), and language are always multifaceted: Glissantâs claim that culture is always-already a âcross-cultureâ is only one aspect of the decomposable nature of origin. Other facets of this original impurity are Derridaâs idea of âdifféranceâ (Derrida 1982, 13) in particular â which is, indeed, comparable to Wilson Harrisâ sense of infinite rehearsal (Harris 1987) â and metaphoricity in general (itself deeply related to Brathwaiteâs notion of tidalectics). In addition, and as explained in the general introduction below, Derridaâs life attests to his non-Eurocentric status as a former (post)colonial subject and Algerian Jew. Perhaps, in this light, it is probably not even surprising that his ideas concerning the cross-cultural nature and origins of metaphor, myth, and memory are comparable to those being revealed through DâAguiarâs writings, a reading of which now follows.