David Dabydeen's The Intended

Defending the Heritage of the Language is a coded resistance to an English that is being reinvented by its multiple users, and is a sign of disquiet at the challenge which a polyglot and cosmopolitan migrant population presents to the holistic notion of 'the nation' constructed and fortified by a political and intellectual rearguard. Hence the quest of David Dabydeen's Guyanese narrator to redefine his identity through producing prose in Standard English can be read as beseeching entry to a community imagined as being culturally and linguistically homogeneous. His is the standard dream of a bygone colonial elite where to write the oppressor's language with proper attention to grammatical and syntactic rules is to be liberated from a colonized condition: