Dr. Sandra Paquet of the University of Miami English Dept., a Caribbean scholar, introduces Mervyn Morris. Morris introduces David Dabydeen, who speaks humorously and poignantly about being a Caribbean writer living in England. Dabydeen speaks on the title poem of his book, Turner: New and Selected Poems. He discusses J.M.W. Turner's painting "Slavers Throwing Overboard the Dead and Dying -- Typhon Coming On," and reads the Preface, the beginning of the long poem, and some concluding sections of the poem. He concludes with some thoughts about his motives for writing it. He then reads two passages from his novel Disappearance. The setting is Hastings, an English village whose cliffs are crumbling into the sea. A 35-year-old Afro-Guyanese engineer, a serious, contemplative man, boards for six months in the house of a fiery, elderly Englishwoman. Dabydeen humorously refers to the story as his "idea of Caliban having a go with Prospero's wife rather than Miranda." Dabydeen reads from his novel (then untitled) The Counting House, which comments on Indians and money, greed, and racial antagonism between Indians and Africans. The book is set against the Indian mutiny/war of independence in the 19th century. Rohini and Vidia, growing up in an Indian village, are seduced by tales of Plantation Albion and migrate to Guyana. There they find they have been sold into slavery. Dabydeen answers questions from the audience. He talks about his concern with the artistry of his writing rather than the ideology, and argues that the reader has more responsibility than the author: the writer has an obligation to "the sovereignty of the imagination," and the reader is obligated not to discover political incorrectness in the text when it was not intended to be there. He dismisses writers who "set out to shock" but explains why he would rather write about violence and conflict than "godliness."