The Intended

The narrator of The Intended is twelve when he leaves his village in rural Guyana to come to England. There he is abandoned into social care, but with determination seizes every opportunity to follow his aunt's farewell advice: '...but you must tek education...pass plenty exam'. With a scholarship to Oxford, and an upper-class white fiancee, he has unquestionably arrived, but at the cost of ignoring the other part of his aunt's farewell: 'you is we, remember you is we.' First published almost fifteen years ago, The Intended's portrayal of the instability of identity and relations between whites, African-Caribbeans and Asians in South London is as contemporary and pertinent as ever. As an Indian from Guyana, the narrator is seen as a 'Paki' by the English, and as some mongrel hybrid by 'real' Asians from India and Pakistan; as sharing a common British 'Blackness' whilst acuately conscious of the real cultural divisions between Africans and Indians back in Guyana.