Clik here to view.
I’m not through writing about early black settler culture, but I am shifting my focus to the Maritimes today*, and moving a ways down some of those early family lines.
A few years back, I had the privilege of meeting one the descendants of early black settlers — only, he didn’t use the term “early black settlers” to describe either his ancestors or himself, and in the wake of that meeting I tend to use his word whenever I describe that portion of the Canadian population (see: the Day 0 post) unless otherwise directed by individuals within the community.
The name of this descendant of Nova Scotian black settlers is George Elliott Clarke — yes, the writer, poet, and playwright. Clarke even occupied the same post I did a few years back, as Editor-in-Chief of Imprint Publications at the University of Waterloo in the 1980s. (Tangentially, campus lore holds that he got into a ripping good stand-off with student union representatives who wanted to trample all over the fundamentals of free press — so a double huzzah from me there.)
In any case, I was a rarity in the Post-Colonial Canadian Literature class of 2006, which through the excellent efforts of Dr. Linda Warley was fortunate to have Dr. Clarke as a guest speaker, for I alone in that term’s cohort had already read one of Dr. Clarke’s works, the Governor General’s Award-winning Execution Poems, long before taking the class. In fact, Clarke was the first poet I thought of as “famous” whom I’d meet in person, and as such, I was thrilled to a rare level of speechlessness when he read aloud from his other works in class. (He is still, to this date, the most passionate and amiable of readers I’ve encountered.)
So how does Dr. Clarke prefer to describe early black Maritimes settlers and their descendants, including himself? “Africadians” is the term he introduced me to that day: for Dr. Clarke, it’s a logical extension of the reworked cultural geography (“Africadia”) that he sees as figuring more urgently into historical narrative than either root word, “Africa” and “Acadia”, on its own. Indeed, many of Dr. Clarke’s works of poetry and prose expressly convey an interest in developing a new literature, fluid in its redress of the past, for this underrepresented psychological nation-state.
Now, I don’t get (or want) a say in someone else’s self-identification, I know. But I have to say, I really loved this word from the start. I think there’s a tremendous amount of narrative-building power to the word “Africadian”, which both visually and orally conveys the unrelenting conflation of two geo-political terms that truly did lose all clear sense of division in the early Canadian settler context.
And yes, for writers like Dionne Brand and Austin Clarke (more recent Caribbean immigrants by lineage) diaspora theory necessarily features more prominently in their cultural geography, so I in no way mean to suggest that the work of such writers is in any way “inferior” simply because it conveys a later, more fractured migrant context.
But Dr. Clarke’s assertion of a cultural identity that celebrates black presence in Canadian history as much as it decries and deconstructs the injustices that went hand-in-hand is simply remarkable — and possibly even unique in Canadian canon.
I draw that last, certainly debatable conclusion from today’s link, to an interview between Dr. Clarke and Gaspereau Press in 2001. Yes, it’s an older interview, and Dr. Clarke has gone on to publish and present a great many other works of literature since, but the piece still encapsulates many of the central tensions that confronted Dr. Clarke as a writer at the time (and likely still do), and which may reasonably be assumed to confront many others who find themselves in the position of emerging as Canadian artists from marginalized communities. (More on this theme will be touched upon in the Day 3 post, too.)
For now, this interview takes as its starting point Dr. Clarke’s award-winning Execution Poems, which breathed new life into a story from Dr. Clarke’s extended family, of two cousins (George and Rufus Hamilton) hanged in 1949 for the murder of a New Brunswick taxi driver. In Dr. Clarke’s work, is this murder treated like a justifiable extension of Canada’s marginalized histories? No, but the text does plainly raise the question of inevitability:
Rue: Here’s how I justify my error:
The blow that slew Silver came from two centuries back.
It took that much time and agony to turn a white man’s whip
into a black man’s hammer.Geo: No, we needed money,
so you hit the So-and-So,
only much too hard.
Now what?
While those portions of the interview are intriguing, though, it’s Dr. Clarke’s observations about colloquial reception that figure more highly for me. When Christine McNair asks him about the story of a woman he met on the train who told him that his “poetry was good but that ‘it[ wasn't] Canadian”, she hits (for me) precisely upon what makes Dr. Clarke’s writing so striking in the Canadian context: namely, that it is every bit as unwavering as the work of, say, Langston Hughes, and other African-American writers who never once waver in their assertion of black experience as a requisite part of every iconic era in their nation’s literary representation.
Canada simply doesn’t have as many such writers — or at least, it doesn’t have as many such writers prominently entrenched in our social understanding of Canadian literature. I don’t know how to fix that myself (or even where to begin, save by paying better attention to works emergent from traditionally marginalized communities), but if Dr. Clarke is indeed one Canadian writer whose work stands to change all that, then certainly the final word on the problem itself should go to him:
CM: There was a story in the Halifax Sunday Herald about a woman you met on a train who told you that your poetry was good but that “it’s not Canadian.” That must have been frustrating for you.
GC: Well, it was definitely a memorable experience, in terms of all the criticism I’ve received. In fact, maybe some of the criticism I receive does fall into a similar category of basically befuddlement, of saying “oh, this is good work” or recognizing some virtues in the poetry but then turning around and saying flatly at the same time, but “It’s not Canadian”. There’s two different ways to interpret that. One might be simply that, okay, I confess my poetry tends to be boisterous, raucous, lush, and “colourful” and some people find that hard to take or some people don’t identify that as an aspect or as a potential aspect of Canadian poetry. A less charitable view to take of that criticism is that it’s simply saying, “We understand Canada and Canadian to refer to European or people of European heritage and descent or Caucasian heritage or descent and we don’t consider people who come from outside ‘whiteness’ or outside ‘white Canadian-ness’ to be truly part of this country.” Now, I don’t know exactly what my interacter on the train had in mind when she said that, but it certainly did pull me up short, in terms of my understanding that there was not going to be a space completely available for my work in what we describe as Canadian literature, at least not as it stood circa 1990, and maybe not even as it stands circa 2001 – although I do think the space has expanded immeasurably and our understanding of what we can call Canadian literature has expanded. But I still think that for too many critics and too many people, Canadian is a synonym for white or European. And that just certainly cannot stand, that’s just not the case.
George Elliott Clarke’s latest work, the 2009 verse novel I & I, was published by Goose Lane Press, and is available at an internet outlet near you.
*’Today’ meaning yesterday, obviously. I burned out right quick after putting my nephews to bed last night.
Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.
Image may be NSFW.Clik here to view.
