The virtual book launch on November 11 included readings and a conversation between Dennis and Melanie Abrahams, founder of Renaissance One, a multimedia creative literary production company.

Duppy Conqueror, which was Dennis’ third novel, tells the fictional story of Marshall Sarjeant, a young Jamaican at the beginning of the 20th century who is entrusted with a mythical quest to overcome a curse that has been put on his family.He must do this by returning to Africa from where family members were brought as slaves. Marshall’s life turns full circle in his epic mission to defeat the ‘duppy’, or ghost that started him on his voyage, a journey which takes him through historical spaces of black trauma and resistance, including Liverpool, London and Africa.

Dennis, a writer, broadcaster, journalist and lecturer was born in Jamaica and migrated to England with his parents at age eight in the early 1960s. He read sociology at Leicester University between 1975-78, after which he was employed as an educational researcher in Handsworth, Birmingham. He studied for a master’s degree at Birkbeck College, London University and was made Honorary Research Fellow at Birkbeck in 1991. He has lectured in Nigeria and in more recent times taught Creative and Media Writing courses at Middlesex University.

As a broadcaster, he has written and presented numerous talks and documentaries for BBC Radio 4 such as the series ‘After Dread and Anger’ (1989), ‘Journey Round My People’, for which he travelled in West Africa, ‘Back To Africa’ (1990 )and ‘Work Talk’ (1991-92) as well as a television programme about Africa for Channel 4.

Duppy Conqueror, which is being republished 22 year later, is described by the Independent newspaper as ‘packed to the brim with layers of symbolism, individual and cultural memories, and fascinating historical stories.’

Dennis said he got inspiration to write the book from his own journey to Africa in the 1980s when he spent time touring the continent, starting with Lagos in Nigeria then moving on to Nairobi in Kenya, Mozambique, Zambia and Zimbabwe.

He said: ‘I was not a traveller simply concerned with my cultural identity and my roots as the continent itself was also fascinating because it consisted of so many newly independent states wrestling with all sorts of complex issues to deal with building a nation, and how to form a united nations out of so many different ethnic groups.

‘While the book is fictional, I decided to write this story about somebody who returns to Africa, not in the modern period, but early in the century. The novel starts during the period of slavery when a curse is placed on the Sarjeant family who are living in Jamaica. Marshall Sarjeant who comes to Britain before the Second World War, is tasked with lifting this curse and by returning to Africa and confronting the mystics, he will be able to lift it, hence the title Duppy Conqueror.’

Dennis also attributed another influence for the title from famous Jamaican novelist and poet Claude McKay. He said: ‘It was words from one of McKay’s poems “Outcast” which has a line that speaks of “something in me is lost, forever lost . . . and I must walk the way of life a ghost, for I was born far from my native clime under the white man’s menace out of time”. That poem also fed into the idea for the plot of Duppy Conqueror.’

Dennis also feels that while the republishing of the book 22 years after it first came out is purely coincidental, coming at a time which has seen a rise in the Black Lives Matter protests and raised awareness around questionable past Colonial history, it will catch a new audience.

He said: ‘There is a new generation which is becoming aware of some of the wrongs that were done in the past, through slavery and colonization. I had said in a previous novel that each generation will discover this aspect of history and will not only confront it but come to terms with it, just like my generation did. Western European modernity is built on the disposition and displacement of our people in the Americas, the African Continent and the Antipodes: you cannot get away from it and it’s there in the history books. BLM protesters were not trying to rewrite history, they are simply trying to engage with history from the moral perspective of the present day and they find it revolting.’

‘They are saying, “This is not acceptable to us and we will not walk on the high streets in our cities with these cruel and inhuman figures looking down on us in the 21st century.” I think that’s reasonable and they should be applauded. I hope people will get pleasure from reading the novel. The story is generated by quite a serious discourse around black identity and history, but it is a work of fiction at the end of the day,’ he concluded.

George Ruddock,

Editor, The Weekly Gleaner

2020