David Dabydeen is of Indo-Guyanese descent, and Coolie Odyssey is his second collection of poems. Coolie Odyssey recounts the journeys of the indentured laborers from India to Guyana to England and back to Guyana. Historically, “coolie” denotes the millions of laborers from South Asian colonies, transported by the British as indentured workers to the Caribbean, Africa, and the Pacific Islands. By juxtaposing a pejorative term (Coolie) and the title of an epic, Dabydeen undercuts the triumphalism of Odysseus’s return voyage from Troy to Ithaca with the poignancy of the indentured laborers’ banishment from their subcontinental homes across the Kalapani (the black water). Thus, he appropriates an exalted Western poetic form to express the disparaged historical content.