Directions Home: Approaches to African-Canadian Literature 9781442666511

Citation preview

Directions Home Approaches to African-Canadian Literature

The latest work from pioneering scholar George Elliott Clarke, Directions Home is the most comprehensive analysis of African-Canadian texts and writers to date. Building on the insights in his critically acclaimed Odysseys Home, Clarke passionately analyses the beautiful complexities and haunting conundrums of this important body of literature. Directions Home explores the trajectories and tendencies of African-Canadian literature within the Canadian canon and the socio-cultural traditions of the African Diaspora. Clarke showcases the importance of little-known texts, including church histories and slave narratives, and offers studies of autobiography, crime and punishment, jazz poetics, and musical composition. The collection includes studies of significant contemporary writers such as George Boyd and Dionne Brand, as well as trailblazing African-Canadian intellectuals such as A.B. Walker and Anna Minerva Henderson. With its national, regional, and historical perspectives, Directions Home is an essential guide to African-Canadian literature.

george elliott clarke is E.J. Pratt Professor of Canadian Literature at the University of Toronto.

This page intentionally left blank

Directions Home Approaches to African-Canadian Literature

George Elliott Clarke

UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO PRESS Toronto Buffalo London

© University of Toronto Press 2012 Toronto Buffalo London www.utppublishing.com Printed in Canada isbn: 978-0-8020-9153-6 (cloth) isbn: 978-0-8020-9425-4 (paper)

Printed on acid-free, 100% post-consumer recycled paper with vegetable-based inks

LIBRARY AND ARCHIVES CANADA CATALOGUING IN PUBLICATION Clarke, George Elliott, 1960– Directions home : approaches to African-Canadian literature / George Elliott Clarke. Includes bibliographical references and index. isbn 978-0-8020-9153-6 (bound) isbn 978-0-8020-9425-4 (pbk.) 1. Canadian literature – Black Canadian authors – History and criticism. 2. Black Canadians in literature. 3. Race in literature. i. Title. ps8089.5.b5c55 2012

c810.9′896071

c2012-902221-7

University of Toronto Press acknowledges the financial assistance to its publishing program of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council.

This book has been published with the help of a grant from the Canadian Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences, through the Awards to Scholarly Publications Program, using funds provided by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. University of Toronto Press acknowledges the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund for its publishing activities.

For Geraldine Elizabeth Clarke 1939–2000 For William Lloyd Clarke 1935–2005

This page intentionally left blank

The true, the good and the beautiful always exist by contrast with the false, the evil and the ugly, and grow in struggle with the latter. Mao Zedong, Four Essays on Philosophy

I want beauty to be me. Jael Ealey, ‘My Upside-Down Black Face’

This page intentionally left blank

Contents

Acknowledgments

xi

Divagation: Approaching African-Canadian Literature (Again) Passport: Essays

3

17

1 ‘This is no hearsay’: Reading the Canadian Slave Narratives 19 2 A.B. Walker and Anna Minerva Henderson: Two Afro–New Brunswick Responses to ‘The Black Atlantic’ 30 3 Introducing a Distinct Genre of African-Canadian Literature: The Church Narrative 46 4 Afro-Gynocentric Darwinism in the Drama of George Elroy Boyd 58 5 Seeing through Race: Surveillance of Black Males in Jessome, Satirizing Black Stereotypes in James 68 6 Raising Raced and Erased Executions in African-Canadian Literature: Or, Unearthing Angélique 78 7 Let Us Compare Anthologies: Harmonizing the Founding African-Canadian and ItalianCanadian Literary Collections 91 8 The Idea of Europe in African-Canadian Literature 102 9 Does (Afro-) Caribbean-Canadian Literature Exist? In the Caribbean? 116 10 Voluptuous Rapine: The Viscous Economy of ‘Vice’ in the Short Fiction of H. Nigel Thomas and Althea Prince 132 11 Repatriating Arthur Nortje 143 12 Locating the Early Dionne Brand: Landing a Voice 154 13 Maxine Tynes: A Sounding and a Hearing 164 14 Bring Da Noise: The Poetics of Performance, chez d’bi.young and Oni Joseph 176 15 Frederick Ward: Writing as Jazz 190 Notes 207 Bibliography 275 Permissions 301 Name Index 309

This page intentionally left blank

Acknowledgments

It was, I think, 2005 when I approached Siobhan McMenemy of the University of Toronto Press with the idea that the press consider publishing a second set of my essays on African-Canadian literature. She did think that it would be possible, and so I set about assembling a manuscript, which was first submitted to her in the fall of 2007. However, it was a mess of various wordprocessing formats, and so I delivered it to Ms. Heather Sangster, of Strong Finish, to conduct a preliminary edit and reformatting of the work. She achieved this purpose marvelously, and so I was finally able to deliver the prepared manuscript to Ms. McMenemy in January 2008. That autumn, anonymous readers accepted the manuscript, and Ms. McMenemy requested that I undertake another round of editing, and pursue permissions requests. These tasks occupied summers – that most vital academic resource – and so it was not until the fall of 2010 that I was able to submit the final manuscript and a list of permissions achieved. During the long process of manuscript preparation, Ms. McMenemy has been the model of sagacity and wit and has provided positive critiques. I thank her as well for her patience, and I thank Ms. Sangster for her diligent and smooth (initial) computerization of the manuscript. In February 2011, Ms. Frances Mundy addressed to me the copy edit of the manuscript, conducted with infinite care by Ms. Barbara Tessman. Not only is Ms. Tessman precise in scrutiny, she is sympathetic to the subject, and her queries about grammar, quotations, and bibliographical fact served to clarify my thinking about African-Canadian literature. Ms. Mundy and I also had productive conversations about the font, the colophon, and the fulfillment of the copy editing queries. I thank her for her great humour and discipline in ushering this work on to its publication. I also need to acknowledge here the anonymous scholars who first read a much longer manuscript, and accepted this book with enthusiasm as well as fine suggestions for toning its bulk. In addition, I also thank heartily the various universities and scholars who invited me to offer lectures or to participate in conferences, the audiences who audited and questioned my papers, as well as the various anonymous referees and journal editors who accepted articles for publication. In 2002, the Department of English at the University of Toronto created the position – intended for a poet – of the E.J. Pratt Professor of Canadian Literature. In 2003, following the publication a year earlier of my Odysseys Home: Mapping African-Canadian Literature, I became its inaugural holder, which carries with it an excellent annual stipend, provided jointly by Victoria University and Dr. Sonia Labatt. Their grant allows me licence to travel and purchase books,

xii

acknowledgments

both for scholarly as well as literary purposes. I am grateful to Dr. Labatt, Victoria University, and my Department of English for all their support. In 2005–08, I was privileged to receive the Trudeau Fellows Prize from the Trudeau Foundation. This substantial award also allowed me to travel widely and write and research, and so several of the essays herein owe something to this provenance as well. The prize was also a godsend, utterly ‘out of the blue,’ and I thank the Trudeau Foundation for this honour. I thank students in my undergraduate and graduate courses at the University of Toronto for their stimulating queries and debates. They have also demanded that I give account for my judgments and visions. Finally, I recognize that my investigations and insights owe something to the inspiration of artists such as Bob Dylan (1941–), whose song ‘Like a Rolling Stone ’ (1965) includes a refrain that my book title ludically alludes to.

Directions Home Approaches to African-Canadian Literature

This page intentionally left blank

Divagation – Approaching African-Canadian Literature (Again) For John Fraser (1928–)1

Orientation Odysseys Home: Mapping African-Canadian Literature (2002a) – my first and the first extended foray into the new field of critical study of African-Canadian literature – was, as I wrote in its introduction, an accident. I did not enter graduate school or join the professoriate to meditate on ‘African-Canadian literature.’ Yes, I was an African-Canadian writer, and my doctoral dissertation, for Queen’s University, in Kingston, Ontario, examined the developments (with attendant arguments) in African-American and (Caucasian) English-Canadian poetry. I did not begin to muse on African-Canadian literature until I took up a teaching post at Duke University, in Durham, North Carolina, in 1994. Living – for the first time – outside Canada, amid a sizeable population of African Americans, I found myself attracted to the absorptive, anthemic strength of that glorious culture, but also resisting its pull, due to the Canadian nationalism that still coloured my thinking. The pleasure and stress of feeling divided between nations (I was easily African American – though officially a U.S. ‘alien’ – but, in Canada, I was an at-face-value ‘alien’ though actually a native), plus the search for a scholarly niche that would allow me to reconcile my intellectual interests and philosophical tendencies, urged my concentration on delineating a literary field I termed ‘African-Canadian.’2 True: Others had penned books and articles about specific African-Canadian writers, usually Lillian Allen, Dionne Brand, Austin C. Clarke, Claire Harris, and M. NourbeSe Philip, but these analyses had slotted them as Caribbean writers with Canadian addresses. Other scholars had taught courses on – or scribed critiques of – African Diasporic authors, tacking on, on the margins of syllabi or monographs, a nominal Canadian or two. Still others had assembled bibliographies or anthologies, whose purpose was to list ‘black writers in Canada’ (not ‘black writers of Canada’). But I chose to take a different approach, perhaps because of the scholarly epiphany I experienced when, in the Public Archives of Nova Scotia, in spring 1990, I unearthed a pamphlet, The Book of the Bible against Slavery, a slave narrative by John William Robertson, published in Halifax in 1854. That find spurred on my then-project of assembling a two-volume anthology of Africadian3 literature (Fire on the Water: An Anthology of Black Nova Scotian Writing [Clarke 1991a, 1992]): Now I could name Robertson and others as antecedents for myself and other contemporary African–Nova Scotian writers. It was vital to be able to say – to report – We are not the first. But discovering Robertson’s narrative was also decisive for me because it proved

4 directions home

that African-Canadian literature did not – and does not – begin with the publication of Austin Clarke ’s first novel in 1964. Although my tyro scholarship had focused on early Afro-Maritime writing, once I moved south of the Canadian-American border, I felt compelled to extend my compass nationally (and internationally), to begin to ponder the contours and continuities of an African-Canadian literature. My Duke University–sponsored adventurism – or opportunism – spawned a would-be canonical anthology of African-Canadian literature (Eyeing the North Star: Directions in AfricanCanadian Literature [1997a]); a substantial, archives-based bibliography (‘Africana Canadiana’ [in 2002a]); and an original monograph in the field, Odysseys Home: Mapping African-Canadian Literature (2002a). The reviews of the latter were positive, even laudatory, in most cases. But Odysseys Home and my approaches to African-Canadian literature do (or did) attract their detractors. In his 1999 article, ‘Rhetorics of Blackness, Rhetorics of Belonging,’ Rinaldo Walcott (1999) criticizes me for emphasizing history – especially that of the landed African-Canadian communities whose roots go back to slavery and the struggle against slavery and latter-day restricted social mobility. (These communities have been, historically, largely rural and African-American in derivation.) He brands me a ‘nativist’ (14) who privileges the historical African-Canadian tradition over that of the contemporary, citified, and numerically dominant Afro-Caribbean immigrant experience.4 Walcott’s depiction of my position has persuaded some. In her essay, ‘“Their Blood Is There, and They Can’t Throw It Out”: Honouring Black Canadian Geographies,’ Katherine McKittrick (2001) echoes my own 1997 article, ‘Honouring African-Canadian Geography: Mapping Black Presence in Atlantic Canada,’ but then misreads me as ‘negating “other” black geographies – those that are, as he explains, more urban and recent …’ (31). She, too – though without Walcott’s wily umbrage – misinterprets my foregrounding of a rural Black Maritime Canadian geography and history as denoting an eradication of Black Canadian metropolitan communities. I have refuted this charge of ‘nativism’ (read ‘primitivism’) in my scholarship, but I attack it again: I do not grant that literary scholars can read African-Canadian (or Black Canadian) literature adequately unless they are also able to accept the historical (or ‘indigenous’) African-Canadian population and its cultural production as a constitutive element. Indeed, in part, what I have attempted to do, stating mere facts, is dislodge the ignorant idea that the historical African-Canadian peoples were a clutch of illiterate victims whose cultural works could safely be expunged from any scholarly accounting of the whole. In tandem with this effort, I have also argued that black immigrant authors should be read within a Canadian frame of reference as much as within an African Diasporic or Caribbean-centric one. Introducing Odysseys Home, I said as much: ‘Certainly, African-Canadian literature encompasses the new and the old, the come-from-away and the down-home, the urban and the rural, the pull of the regional and the equally irresistible seductions of African-American and Afro-Caribbean culture ’ (2002a, 11). Although I think these protocols reasonable, my expression of them was sometimes accompanied by a chip-on-my-shoulder passion that struck some of my critics as a kind of territorydefensive violence. I do now hereby apologize for any inadvertent rudeness. I think both the provocation and the reaction were mistaken. Hence, writing of Odysseys Home, Terry Goldie opines that the ‘key’ to African-Canadian literary ‘culture is the ongoing confrontation’ between myself and Walcott, and then avers that my chastisement of some of Walcott’s views opens me to like rebuke: ‘while some essays are substantial and convincing, the book as a whole is both amateurish and fuddled, vaguely con-

divagation

5

nected’ (2004, 483).5 Goldie’s confession of having writ a tit-for-tat review is one indication of the consternation generated by my elementary pointers for reading African-Canadian literature. Observes Richard Almonte, ‘The Walcott-Clarke debate, as crucial as it is to the emerging field of Black Canadian studies, appears … to be less useful as time goes by and the camps become entrenched in their positions, stifling further debate’ (2002, 149). But Almonte ’s solution to the vaunted conflict is to posit that ‘“Black Canadian” literature, constituted by “Black” authors is not possible ’ (149), for receptivity to, or cognizance of, or reproduction of, ‘black experience ’ is not dependent on skin colour. Theoretically, he’s correct. Yet, ‘blackness’ has never been only about flesh, but also about lived experience – especially as we ‘blacks’ have been resisting recipients of enslavement, racism, and colonial exploitation. Yes, white writers can write poignantly, convincingly, and authoritatively of ‘black experience’; but that skill does not render them black writers. For his part, David Chariandy senses I utilize ‘“traditional” ethnonationalist cultural paradigms, though “radically” affirming the cultural hybridity and plurality of Africadian and, more generally, African Canadian literature,’ while Walcott ‘works from contemporary Black Atlantic debates, arguing that the complex intra- and international identifications in Black Canadian culture can both advance and critique Black diasporic theory’ (2002, 210). Good. Yet, Chariandy’s distinction collapses, for he also says I portray ‘An Africadian Atlantic’ (198), a project that must also see me participate in ‘contemporary Black Atlantic debates,’ et cetera. But Chariandy’s analysis was, defensibly, an overdetermined reaction to my ‘cultural nationalism.’ True: In my essays in Odysseys Home, I stated a debt to English-Canadian nationalist and conservative philosopher George Grant. Yes, definitely. But I also listed, as prime influences, the French-Canadian liberal philosopher and statesman Pierre Elliott Trudeau, the MartiniquanAlgerian philosopher of anti-racism and anti-imperialism Frantz Fanon; and the African-American radical public intellectual and orator Malcolm X. Certainly I uphold Grant’s view that no minority culture can articulate or preserve itself without endorsing a degree of nationalism. But I defend Trudeau’s position that majoritarian ethnic nationalism imperils minorities. I accept Fanon’s argument (in Black Skin, White Masks) that one must think beyond ‘race ’ and struggle for the liberation of humanity (a liberal ideal). Yet, I admire X’s insight that black people are oppressed for being black and should adopt both Pan-Africanism and cultural nationalism to repudiate white racism and Western imperialism (see Clarke 2002a, 13–14). Although I name Grant, Trudeau, Fanon, and X as my intellectual guides in reading African-Canadian literature, some critics fixate on my Grantian ‘nationalism,’ seeing it as retrograde. Hence, Goldie questions, tacitly, the ‘very term “odyssey”’ (483); it is, he feels, ‘a conservative one. It suggests that classical mythology provides a frame for understanding the world’ (483). The implicit criticism is fascinating, for it appears to deny that all mythologies – including our contemporary postmodern and postcolonial dogmas – seek, really, to ‘understand the world.’ In contrast, Chariandy is balanced in his approach to my work, finding that ‘an explicitly nationalist vein of criticism can manage to effectively inscribe and recognize the cultural plurality within its borders’ (2002, 201). Another reviewer, Susanne Marshall, asserts that my ‘“vision” is ‘“essentialist” enough,’ but is ‘modified by an acute awareness that the essences upon which such allegiances are based are artificially constructed and continually shifting’ (2004, n.p.). Still, I gotta concede, I did seem preposterous for championing a historically anchored African-Canadian literature: I seemed oblivious to the withering away of the nation-state before the forces of capitalist-driven ‘globalization.’ How quaint I was to delineate an African-Canadian literature at the moment when local cultures were supposed to disappear in the wake of ‘border-

6 directions home

less’ economic expansion, allowing corporate logos to replace patriotic slogans. However, those who dislike my (or any) ‘nationalism’ need to justify how they can blithely talk about black and Canadian identity when any competent globalist ethos must mandate the erasure of the specificity of African-Canadian experience. For that matter, post-structuralists who think the ‘state ’ a myth and ‘politics’ cant cannot rationally expect to confront state depredations and political deprivations. Nor can they articulate materially their (historical and cultural) existence. (They seem to forget that even identity theorists must pay taxes, and, occasionally, real cops put them under actual arrest.) I hold that Canada cannot be banned from African-Canadian texts; or, rather, to omit this essential context is as much an intellectual fault as believing in racial superiority. If I am a cultural nationalist, I embrace that sign with a cosmopolitan passion.6 But I am driven, really, I trust, by common sense. Yes, an African core – plus history (slavery, colonialism) – connects African-heritage peoples in the diaspora, but all of us are also shaped consequentially by national cultures. An Afro-Jamaican is not identical to an African American, and neither may be mistaken for an Afro-Québécois francophone of Haitian parentage.7 This statement is, I predict, unchallengeable. Let doubters face Fanon the sage: ‘Negro and African-Negro culture broke up into different entities because the men who wished to incarnate these cultures realized that every culture is first and foremost national, and that the problems which kept [African-American writers] Richard Wright or Langston Hughes on the alert were fundamentally different from those which might confront [African intellectuals and politicians] Leopold Senghor or Jomo Kenyatta’ (1968, 216). This assertion, true in 1968, is truer now, when, African-American troops (representatives of a military superpower) may be dispatched to slaughter Africans and Asians at the behest of an African-American president. To pretend geopolitical divisions do not exist, to wish them away out of fealty to the diaspora, is to surrender realism for surrealism, Machiavelli for Mickey Mouse. Thus, I laugh off the ‘nativist’ smear. Yep, I do ask that scholars of African-Canadian literature document its existence within an actual set of cultural imperatives reflecting a distinct sociopolitical history. Sure, Canada is not Uganda, but it is not England – or France – or even the United States. Hence, if it is sweet to interpret the songs of Bob Marley via Jamaican Rastafarianism and anti-colonial, anti-racist, and anti-poverty struggle, so is it meet to put Afro-Ontario novelist Lawrence Hill in dialogue with the provincial Ontario governments he has lived under, as well as the co-existing federal Parliaments and their negotiations of multiculturalism, FrenchEnglish linguistic and cultural policies, and Aboriginal struggle. I do not deny Hill’s salient interactions with pan-Africanist thought and African-American culture. Yet, to focus on these relationships alone is to deny the relevance of Hill’s birth and maturation within a decolonizing (English) Canada undergoing several ‘quiet revolutions’ simultaneously, including the efforts (unfinished) of racialized minorities to attain greater political and economic power. Likewise, to request, for instance, that scholars attend to the données of African–Nova Scotian – or Africadian – culture, does not frustrate the obvious descent of that particular branch of African-Canadianité from African America as well as from, to a lesser degree, the Caribbean, but also Britain (Scotland) and the Norman French and German diasporas.8 Nicely, other scholars have begun, in fact, to interrogate Afro–West Indian–Canadian, or simply, African-Canadian literature within a postcolonial and Canadian context. An exemplary practitioner is Maureen Moynagh, whose edited volume, African-Canadian Theatre: Critical Perspectives on Canadian Theatre in English (vol. 2, 2005), considers, ensemble, playwrights with

divagation

7

roots in various locales of the African diaspora. Precedent to Moynagh’s volume of criticism is prize-winning playwright Djanet Sears’s two-volume anthology, Testifyin’: Contemporary African Canadian Drama (2000, 2003), which, again collectivizes – or nationalizes – authors of varied national origins as Canadian. Tracking Sears and Moynagh, H. Nigel Thomas provides a comprehensive grouping of African-Canadian authors in his edited series of interviews, Why We Write: Conversations with African Canadian Poets and Novelists (2006). Nagged by my notion that all African Canadians (not only Africadians) identify with their ‘home ’ regions in Canada (even if only with a metropolis like Toronto), Karina Vernon wonders, ‘Is there a way … to theorize a black-inflected consciousness that has been shaped (and misshaped) by location without reinscribing the geographic determinism of regional discourses?’ (82 n7). Her question is valid, but Vernon also demonstrates the validity of my reasoning: Her own scholarship focuses on Canadian ‘Prairie Blackness’ (67), a project that echoes Wayde Compton’s ‘race ’-regionalist anthology, Bluesprint: Black British Columbian Literature and Orature (2002), a work indebted to my decade-earlier Fire on the Water. Any inquiry into Black Canadian writing and writers of yore must exhume the catacombs of provincial archives, libraries, and historical societies across Canada – no matter the extra-provincial provenances or extra-regional allegiances of the subject author or authors. Indeed, Afua Cooper’s The Hanging of Angélique: The Untold Story of Canadian Slavery and the Burning of Old Montréal (2006), a proof of excellent archival research, restores Marie-Josèphe Angélique to us as a Portuguese native and executed slave in New France (palimpsest to Quebec). But Cooper also depicts Angélique as a subject of transatlantic imperialism, and, through her ‘confession,’ as a mother of African diasporic literature – and that of Afro-Francophone Canadians. Commenting on my Africadian ‘regional’ interests, Taiwo Adetunji Osinubi figures (rightly I say) that this scholarly direction is ‘best understood as part of [my] urgent demonstration of over two centuries of African-inflected cultures in Canada …’ (2004, 102). In her monograph, African Nova Scotian–Mi’kmaw Relations, Paula C. Madden charges that my espousal of ‘Africadian’ identity is, although ‘an innocent notion,’ still ‘a statement of claim against the land and territory of Mi’kma’ki’ (2009, 100). She ignores, though, the imbrication of this identity with both the historical, European naming of present-day Nova Scotia and New Brunswick as Acadia/Acadie and the derivation of the suffix cadie from, likely, Mi’kmaw roots. Moreover, she neglects to consider both Acadian identity and territorial claims and their intricate ties to Mi’kma’ki and the truth that many Africadians – like me (a member of the Eastern Woodlands Métis Nation Nova Scotia) – claim a part-Aboriginal heritage. I believe that the latter point permits an association with Aboriginal peoples, not a negation, whether there is ever any official recognition of Africadian Métis – or even ‘Black Mi’kmaq’ – people or not.

Departure Due to my dancing (i.e., cavorting) among principalities and jurisdictions, theories and concepts, I probably appear perilously unprincipled and quixotically unclear. But my philosophical flexibility and discursive dexterity are necessary to allow me to alight upon a nation that is shadowy (Canada) and a notion that is nebulous (blackness). Upon reflection, maybe the confusion that greeted Odysseys Home (in some quarters) was about who I was, exactly: Was I a Canadianist? If so, what convincing commerce could I have with Afrocentrism or pan-Africanism? If I was a postcolonialist, how could I fixate on Canada

8 directions home

– a European-constructed, settler society (still headed by a European monarch)? Was I, in fact, just a proxy (African) Americanist? Certainly, I was trained as a postcolonialist, and I accept that moniker, even while I agree with Stephen M. Finn that ‘“postcolonial” … essentially gives the impression of the overthrow of the colonial,’ which is false, for ‘the major former occupying power might have been physically removed, but another is still hanging on’ (1993, 2). Reed Way Dasenbrock also disputes the efficacy of postcolonial criticism, proposing, ‘Since it seems as if there is not a given group of people on the planet who have not been dominated by others at some point in their history, then there is probably no society which is not in some sense post-colonial, including the imperial powers themselves’ (2001, 112). Dasenbrock grants that ‘the forty or so countries which were once part of the British Empire and which are now independent are post-colonial’ (ibid.), but he questions the term’s applicability for First World economic powers. (See Canada, with its English- or French-speaking majority, within an officially multicultural society, yet maintaining a constitutionally Canadian – yet British – monarch. Is Canada really comparable, meaningfully, to, say, Hong Kong, a semi-anglophone, First World economic enclave within a Third World dictatorship?) I respect the astute reservations of Finn, Dasenbrock, and others. But I deem Canada postcolonial, for its modern history issues from the power struggles between discrete empires (first British and French, then British and the uppity American colossus), and always the conflicts between settlers/colonists (and descendants) and First Nation peoples. Permit me to assert that Canada is, weirdly, like Australia, a postcolonial state without an absolutely final independence (given that it maintains a foreigner as its constitutional head of state). Yet, it has also acted as a demi-imperial power in its own northwest territories (and the Arctic) and in the Caribbean (a ‘sphere of influence’ subcontracted to Canada by Britain).9 Fundamentally though, postcolonial does describe an ongoing process of complex interchanges between ex-empires and the territories they annexed, exploited, conquered, settled, and then were either expelled from, or permitted to exit quietly, while leaving behind the treasure – and time-bomb – of their eccentricities (laws, faiths, ideologies, arts, and customs). But the term also suits African-heritage populations in not only black-majority societies in the Caribbean and in Africa (where ‘black’ may lack any substantial political meaning), but also in the minority context in Canada and the United States. Those who were slaves – and then officially ‘Coloured’ and ‘Negro’ Others – were first colonial subjects within colonies and then within nations. Since the political liberalizations and rights-movements of the 1960s, they are now, increasingly, unapologetic proponents – of First World economic, cultural, and military might, even though treated, at times, as secondary citizens. The 2008 election of Barack Hussein Obama – an African American – as the forty-fourth president of the United States of America, the most powerful office on the planet, is irrefutable proof of the increasing enlistment of black people as wielders of – and enthusiasts for – First World clout, prestige, and wealth. Strangely (or, then again, given our postmodern, ahistorical manias, not), my scholarship preceding and incorporated within Odysseys Home was occasionally ‘dissed’ for its interest in history, for naming authorial ‘firsts,’ and delineating textual genealogies. Hear Walcott here: Black Canadian intellectuals should ‘refuse the seductions of “firstness” and engage in critique, dialogue, and debate, which are always much more sustaining than celebrations of originality’ (R. Walcott 1997, xiv). Riskily, such a proviso pauperizes the value of delineating chronologies of struggle and achievement. I believe we owe our ancestors – and our descendants – this reckoning. Too, one purpose of criticism is ‘to rescue vital literature from oblivion’ (Cookson

divagation

9

2001, 214). Thus, I oppose M. NourbeSe Philip’s statement that early African-Canadian writing – sermons and religious tracts – is ‘not literature’ (1997, 73n22). True: History informs identity construction in destructive ways (as Walter Benn Michaels attests10). But it is also crucial for illuminating a cultural literature’s constitutive and unique properties.11 Hence, the publishing history I set out in Odysseys Home registers that the creators of African-Canadian literature are multicultural persons in transit – refugees, exiles, immigrants, pilgrims – and that, often, they self-publish, and write generally in isolation from ‘home publics,’ and that they tend to take African-American exemplars and ring changes upon them. Although history has a gravitational tendency to gell into myth, it is a record, albeit questionable, of a community’s attempt at sociopolitical articulation.12 Fanon tells his insurgent anti-imperialists, ‘You must go back into history, that history of men damned by other men; and you must bring about and render possible the meeting of your people and other men’ (1968, 293).13 My realist bias urges me to scrutinize African-Canadian literature for what it is; hence, I must also ponder what it has been. Therefore, I note that it is the settler-descended African-Canadian cultures that have generated many community and church histories: these productions usually celebrate land ownership, church membership, and educational aspiration.14 If we accept such writings as literature, we should understand how they both correspond with and differ from the creative writings of later, urban-settled immigrants. So we must go spelunking into a few archives – including those housed in old folks’ attics or garages, or mouldering away in their basements. Of course, such hands-dirtying research is sensible only if one trusts that the ancients have a history – or experiences – worth preserving. I do. I wager that knowledge of our cultural history is mandatory for its would-be scholars. It is racist to pretend that African Canada has no history that anyone is bound to respect.15 Thus, scholars who fail to insist that African-Canadian history be witnessed serve to enable a practice of cultural genocide – the denial of the long residence of African-heritage peoples in Canada.16 Only by understanding the development of African-Canadian community as a totality can we attain the power to create ourselves in our own objective images. Notice: I do not say history is blood. No, history is blood, freeze-dried: it cannot be tapped to provide anyone any nourishment now. It may only be consulted – and only so that the labelling may be updated or changed. Though it cannot remedy any current pain, its contemplation may allow greater self-comprehension. Yes, I try to offer some historical argument in Odysseys Home. I wanted to recall and remember some writers who had been segregated out of (Caucasian) Canadian canons. I did not go far enough, or I went too far; I was ignorant, or I was too indulgent. I should speak to these flaws, for, as Mao Zedong asserts, ‘the basic method of self-education is criticism and self-criticism’ (1968, 90).17 I look back at Odysseys Home and I see a militant book, a loud volume. Yet, I do not look down upon it. Rather, I turn away now to look forward here.

Deviation In the summer of 1978, aged eighteen, I let my Afro explode, and I strode up and down the streets of Halifax, dreaming of revolution and insurrection, spouting – anachronistically – Malcolm X and Bob Dylan. One foggy night, a slightly older black man drove me up to the top of Citadel Hill, which, with its fortress, is the defining summit in Halifax, and declared, ‘Black people built

10 directions home

this hill!’ A shiver thrilled me: I understood that my city owed a debt to black people – perhaps to my ancestors. Later, I learned about slavery in Nova Scotia, and I realized that whips and chains and all the paraphernalia of racist brutality belonged just as much to the Halifax waterfront as they did to, say, Mississippi, or, for that matter, Barbados. I have never viewed Citadel Hill or the port naively since. Yet, this social studies lesson – that blacks helped to construct a British fortress in colonial Canada – has no practical application. It merely underlines the truth that the struggle for justice is endless, to be taken up by each new generation. Fanon puts it this way: ‘The body of history does not determine a single one of my actions.’ No: ‘I find myself suddenly in the world and I recognize that I have one right alone: That of demanding human behavior from the other’ (1967, 231, 229). Political scientists will recognize in Fanon’s Black Skin, White Mask precepts a liberal philosophy, and, because I agree that my being is not (pre)determined by history, I am – righteously – a liberal. Yet, a reader of Fanon’s Wretched of the Earth discovers therein a militant socialist (of Maoist and Leninist fervour), and, given that I believe the oppressed may exercise collective rights to power and revolution, I am – assuredly – a leftist.18 I announce these tendencies openly, so as to discourage critics who wish to categorize my essays herein as either individualist paeans to Capitalism Rex or as nostalgic, ‘roots’ rants. To put this statement another way, I am comfortable with my ‘black’ identity – as ‘mixed’ as it vertiginously is (Aboriginal partly, African partly, West Indian partly) – and I want to see black (Negro) people empowered, even within white-majority societies. This position is conservative. Nevertheless, I reserve the right to reject all ‘race’ cabals and secretariats that would limit my personal liberties and cultural affiliations and affinities.19 This position is liberal.20 Let me say this yet one more way: I applaud Malcolm X for voicing unblanching, black empowerment, and I salute Pierre Elliott Trudeau (that Napoleonic neo-Platonist) for hollering the joys of democratic cosmopolitanism.21 I recognize, with Bina Toledo Freiwald, that ‘identity discourses are the very air we breathe as subjects, they are the medium and idiom of our self-fashionings as both interpellated selves and subjects capable of energy’ (2002b, 33). The politics of these discourses is inescapable because ‘they carry … the power to effect that shift from “I” to “we” that is a necessary condition for the articulation of a collectivity’ (ibid.). Yet, I hope my politics are not inflexibly Spartan, but rather fluidly Byzantine, always inching, glacially towards – yeah – Paradise – apricus.22 I pray, then, my essays are not rigidly ideological dictates, but rather pragmatic (I mean, unprogrammatic) attempts to see writers – and texts – as clearly as I can.23 My distinct instinct is to interpret ‘blackness’ – as if through a prism, dazzlingly, as a rainbow union of multifarious cultures and ‘colours.’24

Disorientation One curious experience of being an African-Canadian writer is opening a work of African diasporic criticism or of primary fiction, drama, or poetry tossed off by some offshore scribe and discovering a reference to Canada. The moment is disorienting – yet definitive, for one is accustomed to the omission of Canada in most international commentary on the African diaspora or, simply, the ‘Black’ experience.25 One could fashion a fascinating anthology of these episodes wherein our people are simultaneously invoked and revoked – either painted white or cast as a black error, a presence best off as an absence.

divagation

11

For instance, in The Fire Next Time (1963), African-American writer James Baldwin muses that a Black Muslim–carved up United States, without blacks and without the South, would result in ‘the white people of the United States and Canada [finding] themselves marooned on a hostile continent …’ (1964, 103). Baldwin does not trouble himself to consider the black minority in Canada: presumably they would migrate south to join with the new black (Islamic) republic imagined by Elijah Muhammad and Malcolm X. Likewise, A. James Arnold, in his Modernism and Negritude: The Poetry and Poetics of Aimé Césaire, closes his examination of Césaire ’s work by declaring Césaire ’s dream of a ‘Martinican Martinique’ (as opposed to a France-controlled one), while politically ‘ineffectual or simply mystifying,’ as being ‘not any less significant or relevant, as a glance at the recent history of Québec should demonstrate ’ ([1981] 1998, 282). Arnold connects Césaire ’s aspirations for Martinique with those of Québécois nationalists for Quebec, implying that no matter how fanciful Césaire’s dreams may be, they still have political consequences, a point also true for the indépendantistes of Quebec. Of course, Arnold does not ponder the history or destiny of Afro-Québécois, nor may he, for they and their predilections are likely as much a mystery for him as they are for white Québécois. Canadian scholar Diana Brydon has noted that, ‘in 1997, Peter Childs and Patrick Williams could still assert confidently in An Introduction to Post-Colonial Theory that “Unlike the United States,” countries such as Canada “have never been a part of Paul Gilroy’s black Atlantic”,’ indicating their belief that Canada had no black history or population worthy of consideration by postcolonialists (2001, 95).26 Then again, as Canadian governments and media outlets keep declaring (so loudly that their propaganda is obvious), Canada is not the United States, which is a short-hand way of alleging that Canada has little racism and no history thereof.27 Yet Canada is a country in which whiteness counts and blacks are shortchanged.28 Where whites may expect luxury, blacks must tolerate loss – and, as good (non-) citizens, must never complain. The Canadian arts canon – whether French or English – consists dazzlingly of white folks talking to – and about – each other.29 White supremacy – in everything – is such a scathing fact, even in pop music, that AfricanCanadian singers, composers, and musicians are practically absent from the airwaves – and the awards shows.30 Surely, they are not deficient in talent; no, they are blacklisted and whited out: they are denied access and, thus, success – unless they shade themselves as African American – or achieve recognition offshore.31 The reason for my bleak diagnosis is the different role that ‘race ’ plays in Canada as opposed to – ahem – ‘America the beautiful.’ Here ‘race’ is explored in news and documentary forms because Canadians reject all local knowledge and memory of the concept. Occurrences of blatant racism in Canada are always ‘news’ because they are projected as bizarre, as ‘beyond the pale,’ as an outrageous violation of civil and polite behaviour, and as an ahistorical aberration. In contrast, in the United States, ‘race’ features as drama or as sitcom because it constitutes the social dynamic of the republic. In Canada, ‘race’ is always opera; in the United States, it is always soap opera. I ain’t lyin’: Euro-Canadian scholar Daniel Coleman provides a compelling analysis of the operation of White Canadian racialism in his study White Civility: The Literary Project of English Canada: ‘the Canadian nation is seen not to reject specific individuals or to reject specific races as races; rather, it is seen to disallow generalized groups of people whose social backgrounds ill suit them for assimilation to the norms of White, British values.’ The grounds of exclusion are formulated as moral ‘(e.g. vengeance, avarice, alcoholism),’ thereby forestalling the need for racist barring: A person or a group may be discriminated against, dispassionately, because he – or she – or them are seen as exhibiting a moral flaw incidentally connected to a

12 directions home

cultural heritage. This ‘slippage’ between the categories of moral and racial permits Canadian agents – either the state or its empowered allies and extensions – to exercise, in the right circumstances, racial exclusion for moral reasons – with a clear conscience (2006, 180). Simply put, white Canadian racism is sophisticated; its public face is seldom Dracula, smiling fangs, but the Invisible Man (not Ralph Ellison’s hero, but H.G. Wells’s protagonist), his mummy-like, bandaged visage bearing a royal expression of pained refusal. For this reason, Black Canadian writers who wish to war against this racialism must eschew the blunt, polemical attack in favour of irony and satire:32 Otherwise, they will seem, to scandalized auditors, either pitifully deranged or, at best, atrociously impolite. The African-Canadian, or Black Canadian, writer is an artist inaudible in African diasporic discourses and inconsequential to Canadian national articulation. His or her work, whatever its apparent purpose, serves always, if indirectly, to remind African Americans (and other foreign Negroes) that they are not the only black people on Earth (nor is their experience the only one that matters) and to remind (White) Canadians they inhabit a polychromatic society, not Her Britannic Majesty’s Reserve of European-Caucasian privilege.33 African-Canadian writers thus figure an exotic literature … Yet, these authors are only provisionally ‘black’ and only nominally Canadian.34 Pleads Nadia L. Hohn, ‘I think being black in this country is so full of contradictions. At times we are excluded and invisible, others we’re given only negative attentions’ (2004, 103). In contrast, Yannick Marshall announces, ‘I don’t believe in African-Canadians. I believe we are AfriKans [sic] living in foreign reserves, in this case Toronto; thus, I write from the “Nomad” perspective.’ (2004, 81). But heronJonse (the pseudonym of Kevin Jones) comments, ‘My style is influenced by Caribbean culture, Canadian culture, and American culture ’ (2004b, 160). The African-Canadian style is a fusion. Elsewhere, heronJonse forwards an Afrocentric sensibility (2005, 63). In the end, the Negro Canadian writer is one whose would-be indelible ink strives against two constant erasers: 1) the spillover of African-American letters; 2) the bureaucratic Canadian tendency to reach for the cultural ‘White Out.’ What does this mean? To hijack a phrase from U.S. historian Theodore H. White, we are constructing a literature ‘as unprecedented as it [is] resistant to analysis’ (1975, 129).

Summit To sum up the state of criticism of African-Canadian literature now, as I offer this fresh set of essays, I would say that Moynagh’s genre monograph, Sears’s anthologies, Thomas’s interviews, and Donna Nurse ’s anthology Revival: An Anthology of Black Canadian Writing (2006) continue – correctly – to group disparate authors, of heterogeneous cultural backgrounds, under the rubrics of ‘African Canadian’ or ‘Black Canadian.’35 Compton’s anthology, Cooper’s history, and Vernon’s scholarship continue to point to the regional and provincial as locales for fresh perspectives into the ways of Canadian blackness. I am pleased to note, too, that these editors and scholars, along with Brydon, Chariandy, Freiwald, Barbara Godard, Peter Hudson, Ric Knowles, Enoch Padolsky, Winfried Siemerling, Jerry Wasserman, and many others, understand ‘African/Black Canadian’ as a collectivizing phrase that allows them to group and discuss ensemble writers descended from the historical African-Canadian communities as well as those rooted in the post-1955 immigrant experience. Yet, there still exists a Canadian tendency to erase blackness, even if inadvertently, and Al-

divagation

13

monte ’s ‘race ’-discarding liberalism and Coleman’s White studies monograph are two opposing examples. While Almonte believes that ‘the end of “race”’ necessitates a dethronement of ‘easy assumptions’ based on skin colour (2002, 154–5), Coleman’s work foregrounds ‘whiteness’ and its origins in British (Scottish) imperialism and opposition to aboriginality as being the central determinants of ‘racial’ construction in Canada. However, he only scantily references analyses by scholars ‘of colour’ (see G. Clarke 2008). Yet, other scholars and public intellectuals pretend that any discussion of racism – especially that pertaining to white Canadians – is the whiny claptrap of ‘victims,’ which must be most deservedly voided (i.e., silenced).36 To re-assert some of the principles enunciated in Odysseys Home and to respond to the Eurocentric or ‘universalist’ gambits of other scholars (these hereinbefore-mentioned situations of intellectual emmerdement), I have assembled another set of interventions … Or so I should like to consider them.

Pilgrimage Directions Home: Approaches to African-Canadian Literature fields another fifteen essays, all written between 2001 and 2007, treating various elements of the literature.37 They begin where almost all African diasporic literary criticism and literatures begin: slave narratives. In ‘“This is no hearsay”: Reading the Canadian Slave Narratives,’ I document the existence of narratives by slaves from colonial Canada – as well as by those who arrive later from the United States. I suggest that Canadian literature and political philosophy owe much to the narratives and arguments found in these eighteenth- and nineteenth-century texts. Hence, they should be read as foundational discourses in Canadian – not only African-Canadian – literature. In ‘A.B. Walker and Anna Minerva Henderson: Two Afro–New Brunswick Responses to “The Black Atlantic,”’ I examine the intellectual work of two Afro–New Brunswick writers, both situated on the margins of Paul Gilroy’s ‘Black Atlantic’ space, yet also both deeply entangled with its European (British) civilization ideals, and also with notions of African ‘redemption.’ My analysis establishes that early-twentieth-century African-Canadian writers, though bereft of a local audience of their peers, positioned themselves at the centre of ongoing, international debates over imperialism and the project of racial equality. Like the opening two essays, ‘Introducing a Distinct Genre of African-Canadian Literature: The Church Narrative ’ insists that the literature possesses a genealogy of publications – slave narratives, self-published tracts and poems, and, yes, community church chronicles – that merit scrutiny. (Clearly, my theme is inclusion.) The paper canvasses several authors and their publications, positing that these ‘little books’ yield specific African-Canadian theologies and historiographies. One artist who emerges from this ‘landed,’ religious milieu is Africadian playwright George Boyd, who scrutinizes, with passionate irreligion, the tragedies resulting from black familial conflict as black males attempt, destructively, to overcome white racism. In ‘Afro-Gynocentric Darwinism in the Drama of George Elroy Boyd,’ I read his plays as demonstrating that AfricanCanadian women defend and advance the community that selfish and disillusioned black males endanger. Boyd indicates the law-and-order collisions between the Euro-Canadian state and society and its African-Canadian male strivers. In ‘Seeing through Race: Surveillance of Black Males in

14 directions home

Jessome, Satirizing Black Stereotypes in James,’ I identify the ways in which a European-Canadian journalist, Phonse Jessome, despite his avowed disapproval of clichés related to black male sexual exploitation of white females, ends up retailing them. Because of the continued cultural currency of these stereotypes, the black comic work of Darius James offers a powerful – if incidental – critique of what might be termed the ‘fear of the black phallus.’ In ‘Raising Raced and Erased Executions in African-Canadian Literature: Or, Unearthing Angélique,’ I witness the treatment of crime and punishment in the literature, noting that, in general, the black ‘criminal’ is absent from the works of African-Canadian authors, whether as martyr or as plain-and-simple miscreant. The major exception is Marie-Josèphe Angélique. An eighteenth-century slave in New France, tortured and executed for having allegedly incinerated, by arson, a chunk of colonial Montreal, she features in several African-Canadian texts, albeit in contrasting ways that reflect their authors’ differing opinions of Canada. ‘Let Us Compare Anthologies: Harmonizing the Founding African-Canadian and ItalianCanadian Literary Collections’ uses ‘official multiculturalism’ to examine two 1970s anthologies that act to establish the respective (separate) realities of two distinctive, ‘hyphenated’ Canadian literatures. While African-Canadian anthology contributors seek to articulate a pan-African consciousness almost oblivious to Canadian space, and Italian-Canadian writers argue for inclusion (not assimilation) in the Anglo-Saxon- and Gallic-dominated cultural institutions of Canadian society, both groups end up adopting each other’s outsider-insider desires. ‘The Idea of Europe in African-Canadian Literature’ scrutinizes the influence of European ideologies and ideals on African-Canadian writers, primarily André Alexis, Kim Barry Brunhuber, Claire Harris, Suzette Mayr, and Mairuth Sarsfield, all who have set narratives partly in European space. I also muse on African-American authorial passion for Europe, while concluding that the continent is, for African Canadians, too much like Canada to arouse ardor. If Europe is too Canadian to stand as a ‘significant other’ for African-Canadian authors, the Caribbean is surely different. Undoubtedly, it is an obsession – because it is the immediate ‘home ’ of many African-Canadian authors. Yet, as I probe in my essay, ‘Does (Afro-) Caribbean-Canadian Literature Exist? In the Caribbean?’, African-Canadian writers of Caribbean descent address a ‘homeland’ where they are, significantly, unread. I speculate on reasons for this absence, and protest it, pointing out that the Caribbean nations and Canada share a history of colonization and decolonization – as well as the unexamined history of Canadian imperialism towards the Caribbean. ‘Voluptuous Rapine: The Viscous Economy of “Vice” in the Short Fiction of H. Nigel Thomas and Althea Prince ’ analyses the ways in which Thomas and Prince, two Caribbean-born authors, ponder the moral dilemmas of post-colonialism in societies where virtue is preached, but vice is profitable. The striking amorality (or counter-morality) of their Caribbean protagonists is the most effective means these characters possess to maintain dignity, win a living, and stave off enemies. Yet, some characters disgust, while others delight. In ‘Repatriating Arthur Nortje,’ I bid devotees of African-Canadian literature adopt Nortje – a part-Boer, part-Dutch, part-Jewish, and part-African (‘Colored’) South African – formally as one of our own, regardless of his high status in his birth nation’s literature. Here I propose that, being of mixed-race background, Nortje possessed several potential ‘homelands.’ Yet, the only new ‘homeland’ he actually adopted was Canada (1967–70). Nortje committed suicide in England in 1970, but he was a radiant presence in African-Canadian literature of the 1970s, and perhaps even an influence – or example – for Dionne Brand.

divagation

15

‘Locating the Early Dionne Brand: Landing a Voice’ explores the evolution of her work between her first extant publications in the early 1970s and her forging of a mature style in the mid1980s. I attempt to tease out a central, repetitive thematic: the struggle between revolutionary desire and romantic dream. In ‘Maxine Tynes: A Sounding and a Hearing,’ I position the African-Nova Scotian poet as the un-Maritimes poet, for her work almost dogmatically avoids the conventional Atlantic-Canadian content of ‘land and sea,’ ‘fauna, flora, and fish,’ and steel mill, coal mine, and forestry (lumbering plus pulp-and-paper). Rather, radically, Tynes foregrounds mass media and mobility. Her ‘region’ is not so much ‘East Coast’ as it is television and radio, her cane and her car. Maxine Tynes is celebrated, too, for her riveting public recitation of her work. For some critics, though, so-called Spoken Word, or dramatically delivered poetry, is automatically ‘lesser than’ page-bound verse. In ‘Bring Da Noise: The Poetics of Performance, chez d’bi young and Oni Joseph,’ I explore the racial dynamics of this artistic prejudice, while offering a defence, plus reading, of the fine performance-oriented poetry of young [sic] and ‘Oni the Haitian Sensation’ – a.k.a. Oni Joseph. Frederick Ward, the American-born, once-student of jazz pianist Oscar Peterson, has also been slighted by learnèd – yet dullard – dismissal of music-inflected poetry. In ‘Frederick Ward: Writing as Jazz,’ I review the inability of critics to ‘hear’ jazz in poetry or prose, while also ‘sampling’ Ward’s work to demonstrate that he is one of our finest writers – Canadian or AfricanAmerican – because of his ability to weave phonemes and ‘the sound of music’ into phrases, poems, and paragraphs of immense beauty.

Direction In her study of American poet Ezra Pound, U.S. scholar Mary Ellis Gibson asserts the vitality for him – and for herself – of ‘the Confucian command cheng ming, rectify the terminology’ (Gibson 1995, 1). In this spirit, I should explain my usage of Africadian, African-Canadian, Black, black, Negro, as well as of White and white. Africadia is my coinage (c. 1991) for the land-base of the historical black communities of the Canadian Maritimes, especially Nova Scotia and New Brunswick, and particularly Nova Scotia. Hence, those who inhabit or descend from these communities are Africadian. I prefer to employ African-Canadian to describe Black Canadians, of whatever national origin or derivation, to grant ourselves the dignity of an initial-majuscule-letter designation and to connect us to Africa. Although I do use ‘African’ as a practical synonym for ‘Black’ and ‘black,’ I am well aware that Africa, as a continent, consists of people of many ‘racial’ heritages. (Similarly, when I refer to European-Canadians, I do so to provide a more accurate and less offensive way than simply discussing ‘whites.’ I also recognize that Europe is multiracial and multicultural, regardless of the predilections of some of its vociferous racialists.) I employ the majuscule-initial-letter Black when referring to peoples or formal concepts (for example, ‘Black Canadians’ or ‘Black English’), but the miniscule-initial-letter black when I am using it primarily as an adjective (for example, ‘black music’ or ‘black community’).38 Negro is, for me, a quasi-scientific way of identifying black people of African heritage. I do not use it as a synonym for African-American (that’s an African-American practice). As for White and white, I utilize, generally, the miniscule-initialletter word. However, I follow Daniel Coleman in using White Canadian and White Anglo-

16 directions home

Saxon / Celtic to identify instances of white supremacist articulation or merely as a Trudeauvian (or Maoist) ‘counterweight’ to Black Canadian. Moreover, critics who attempt to ally political positions to punctuation choices deserve all the sorry contempt they arouse: In other words, Black is – and always has been – a perfectly fine descriptor, save for the regrettable fact that, in most media and publishing ‘style ’ guides, it is almost always black. But African-Canadian is even more practical a term because it is more definitive.39 I must trust that my terminology will seem clear in the context of my arguments. I do rue the centuries of racist (and imperialist) thinking that have forced upon us these categorizations, and I share the frustration of the reader over engaging with the literature of a Canadian community whose political nomenclature shifts – really, with each new generation. However, I would remind the reader that this state of affairs reflects our mutual inheritance of European (and Canadian and American) imperialism and African enslavement. The names of Negroes in the African Diaspora are not clear of these histories. No one’s is. Pity.

Envoy When I began to teach, as a sessional instructor at Queen’s University in the spring term of 1994, my model as a teacher was not any academic; it was African-American soul-singer James Brown (1933–2006). His example – the idea of the black male as performer – inspired me to go out and buy, on a grad student’s limited budget, as many blazers and suits as I could (ill) afford.40 As much as I respected and admired my dissertation supervisor, that very proud AustralianCanadian Dr. John P. Matthews – an inventor of the very field of postcolonial literature – I called instinctively upon my African-American roots to provide me with a classroom role model. But I also chose Brown out of my respect for my mother, Geraldine Elizabeth Clarke (1939–2000), who came all the way from Nova Scotia in October 1993 to see me graduate from Queen’s University, with an earned doctorate, thus making me, at that point, one of the very few Africadians to have taken that degree in our more-than-two-centuries of ‘Canadian experience.’ My mother was grievously ill, but she stood with tears in her eyes at the moment of my convocation, as did my feisty Aunt Joan Mendes and my stalwart Uncle Rex Mendes (a Jamaican native). Later that day, as we celebrated, I played James Brown records, remembering back to when I was a boy of ten, and my mother had taken me, on the train from Halifax, up to Montreal with her, because she wanted to see James Brown’s show. (I was a touch oblivious to her passion. My boyhood hero was Albert Einstein.) I acknowledge my father here too. William Lloyd (‘Bill’) Clarke (1935–2005) loved Beethoven more than he did Brown. Yet, he was the first artist – a painter – I ever knew, and he was a worker – a ‘prole,’ but one who read everything: James Baldwin and Ian Fleming, George Grant and Henry Miller, Norman Mailer and Anaïs Nin, and, too, fundamentally, the Holy Bible. CBC Radio was his drink; conversation was his meat. Even when merely a baggage handler for the railway, he would drive his motorcycle down to New York City to see Broadway plays. I have maneouvred into the academy through the trapdoors of imagination and art that my parents pointed out to me. Those good people are gone now, but this book exists because of them. Shall we not, then, do our best to do our damnedest? Let us go on…

Passport Essays

This page intentionally left blank

1 ‘This is no hearsay’: Reading the Canadian Slave Narratives For Linda Hutcheon1

I. Admitting the ‘Fugitive’ U.S. Genre to Canadian Literature The Canadian slave narrative is ignored as a genre of Victorian-era, Canadian literature (1837– 1901) because it seems not to exist. North American slavery is so profoundly identified with the ‘Great Republic’ that the slave narrative is eyed, in Canada, as an exotic species of Americana, one having only incidental and abstract engagement with British North America and, post-1867, that infant state – the Dominion of Canada. Furthermore, African-American scholars have long asserted the organic Americanité of this prose genre, one principally defined by first-person-narrated memoir and autobiography. Introducing The Classic Slave Narratives, editor Henry Louis Gates, Jr. declares, with chauvinist triumphalism, that, ‘in the long history of human bondage, it was only the black slaves in the United States who … created a genre of literature that at once testified against their captors and bore witness to the urge of every black slave to be free and literate ’ (1987b, ix). Insouciantly here, Gates omits Exodus and other Hebraic texts about captivity, enslavement, and, eventually, liberation and reconciliation to God, and he identifies ‘the African person’s enslavement in the New World’ with, specifically, ‘black slaves in the United States’ (ix), so that African itself is conflated with American. Gates acknowledges that the four narratives included in his edited compendium were ‘written or related by one African, one West Indian, and two Afro-Americans’ (xviii), but he claims them all as providing a skeleton for ‘the Afro-American literary tradition’ (xii). Sagely, Gates states, ‘No group of slaves anywhere, at any other period in history, has left such a large repository of testimony about the horror of becoming the legal property of another human being’ (ix). But, he Americanizes this necessarily international writing, scotching the truths that some U.S.-born, ex-slave authors spent crucial parts of their lives in other countries, while still other black anti-slavery writers were not African American at all. As stereotypically annexationist (or ‘globalist,’ a synonym) as Gates may be, he is not the only African-American scholar to insist on the innate American-ness of the slave narrative. Witness the great African-American literary historian, Blyden Jackson. He is compelled to adopt odd cartographical and historiographical contortions to patriate the West African–born, West Indies–settled, and British-identified Olaudah Equiano,2 the author of The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano (1789). ‘His America was much, much more the Caribbean than it ever was the colonies which have become the United States. Yet in the eighteenth century

20 directions home

the English possessions in the Western Hemisphere constituted a unit … In his Narrative it is clear that Equiano feels himself … as much at home … in continental, as in Antillean, America’ (B. Jackson 1989, 60). Although Jackson admits ‘the degree and kind of Equiano’s Americanism must … always be subject to qualification,’ he asserts that Equiano ‘probably still does remain continentally American enough to be permitted in a pantheon of continental America’s black authors’ (1989, 61). Such lawyerly expansion of the boundaries of the United States permits Gates to include Equiano’s text as one of his four classic – that is, American – narratives. When Gates writes, blithely, ‘The narratives of ex-slaves are, for the literary critic, the very foundation upon which most subsequent Afro-American fictional and nonfictional narrative forms are based’ (1987b, xii), the astute ‘literary critic’ must answer that slave narratives belong to more than one national literary tradition. Equiano’s narrative, for instance, is a fount of Anglo-African writing (because he seems to know, and may have been raised in, Africa) as well as of Black British writing (because he lived in England). Similarly, History of Mary Prince: A West Indian Slave (1831), another entry in Gates’s quartet of classic narratives, belongs to both a Black British and an African-Caribbean literary tradition. Yes, slave narratives support ‘the very foundation’ of ‘the Afro-American literary tradition, especially its canonical texts’ (Gates 1987b, xii). But they also inform the origins of other New World African literatures, even that of Canada. While John William Robertson’s The Book of the Bible against Slavery (1854) belongs, for example, to African-American literature (for Robertson was native Virginian), it also adheres to African-Canadian and Canadian literature by virtue of its publication in Halifax, Nova Scotia, the city of Robertson’s refuge. Despite such enumerations of colonial Canadian publications of narratives of African-American fugitives, many Canadian literary critics prefer to classify the slave narrative as American and alien. Thus, Canadian scholar Richard Almonte, in his 2000 edition of Thomas Smallwood’s A Narrative of Thomas Smallwood (Coloured Man) (1851), urges, ‘simply,’ that ‘the slave narrative is a literary genre of the United States’ (2000, 16).3 In his History of Canadian Literature, W.H. New devotes a single paragraph to black history in Canada. He surveys slavery in New France, the arrival of Black Loyalists in 1783, and the flight of African Americans to the Canadas via the ‘Underground Railroad’ between 1833 and ‘the 1860s’ (1989, 32–3). Then, New classes American author Benjamin Drew’s compilation of transcribed, oral memoirs of African-American fugitive slaves and ex-slaves, A North-Side View of Slavery; The Refugee; or The Narratives of Fugitive Slaves in Canada (1856),4 as an ‘anthology’ of their ‘stories’ (33). New does not inscribe these testimonies, however, as types of Victorian Canadian literature, even though Drew identifies his interviewees as ‘colored Canadians’ ([1856] 1981, 16, my italics). In a later work, however, Encyclopedia of Literature in Canada, New includes a brief entry entitled ‘Slave Narratives’ (New 2002, 1054–5), one that contradicts Almonte ’s canard that only one slave narrative – that by Thomas Smallwood – was written and published in Canada (a mistake repeated in the anonymously penned encyclopedia entry on ‘Black History in Canada’ [New 2002, 122]). Here, in fact, New’s Encyclopedia cites ‘James’ – Jim – Henson’s Broken Shackles (1889), while also referencing Drew’s A North-Side View of Slavery as a fully Canadian text. In spite of such progress, slave narratives remain absent from most anthologies of and guides to Canadian literature. George Woodcock’s entry ‘Biography and Memoirs in English’ in The Oxford Companion to Canadian Literature (Benson and Toye 1997) contains not a hint of the insurgent, black Victorian memoirs. Nor do Douglas Daymond and Leslie Monkman, in their

‘this is no hearsay’

21

generous selection Literature in Canada, volume 1, reprint any slave narrative or excerpt – although they trace ‘the evolution of Canadian literature from the narratives of exploration of the sixteenth century to the poetry, fiction and drama of the nineteen-seventies’ (1978, ix). Their bibliography for Susanna Moodie, the avatar of the High Victorian Anglo-Canadian writer, allows that Prince ’s History of Mary Prince and Ashton Warner’s Ashton Warner, A Native of St. Vincents (1831a) and his Negro Slavery Described by a Negro (1831b), all published in England, are ‘attributed’ to Moodie (really, the transcription and editing of the narratives). But, one may note, with John Thurston in New’s Encyclopedia, that Moodie was not only the author of ‘a founding text in the literature of English Canada,’ her own Roughing It in the Bush (1852), but also an anti-slavery editor (Thurston 2002, 753). (Given Moodie ’s status as midwife to Prince ’s History, it may be possible to read Roughing It, intertextually with Prince, as a displaced ‘slave narrative ’ of a genteel, pioneer English woman, toiling in the bush country of Upper Canada. But such a ‘stealth’ reading must underline, again, the invisibility of the slave narrative in English-Canadian literature.) Robert Lecker’s masterful catalogue, English-Canadian Literary Anthologies: An Enumerative Bibliography (1997), a copious list, misses Drew’s assembly of ‘fugitive texts,’ perhaps because a clutch of transcribed oral memoirs of unlettered ex-slaves does not compose a ‘literary anthology.’ In their article ‘Life Writing,’ prepared for The Cambridge Companion to Canadian Literature, Susanna Egan and Gabriele Helms (2004) canvass materials on ‘Immigration’ (219), ‘Family memoir – generations’ (223), and even ‘Trauma – national, communal, and personal’ (227), but cite not one slave narrative. Despite the appearance, then, of some estimated ‘6000 published narratives’ by ex-slaves, most of them African American and many of them brief transcriptions from interviews, and despite their publication in the ‘hundreds’ in ‘American and British journals’ (Robinson 1999, 1718),5 they are marginalized in mainstream Canadian literary scholarship. American historian Robin W. Winks notices the smug Canadian attitude towards African-American fugitive slaves and their texts in this disparaging sentence: ‘In 1901, when a black sensationalist, William H.H. Johnson, published in Vancouver an essay filled with bloodhounds, mutilations, attempted rape, incest, floggings, and sudden discoveries of long-lost sons – the whole a potpourri of the fieriest of abolitionist tracts – Canadians reminded themselves, quite properly, of the irrelevance of this tale to their experience ’ ([1971] 1997, 291). Winks’s upholding of white Canadian dismissal of black Canadian complaint reveals a suspicion that lurid, black protest literature was illegitimate in post–Underground Railroad Canada.6 In Canadian literature – and history – then, the slave narrative, whether indigenous or imported, seems literally out of place, always exilic, always exotic. It is a silently painful wound, an anthology of the unspeakable that cannot enter into our anthologies. It bespeaks prolific violence that suffocates speech, depleting it of any national consequence, so that the fomenters and cementers of canons cannot hear or see its relevance. Its chronicles of suffering must not be suffered. For what (ex-) master needs to hear his (ex-) slave ’s sad, mad voice?7 No matter the snowy camouflages and inky smokescreens that our critics and historians throw over Canada’s own heritage of slavery, History abhors lacunae, and so Literature rises to answer back, to shout out what had formerly only been whispered and sighed. For this reason, every honest bibliographer must recognize the host of slave narratives, written or spoken and transcribed – and sometimes published – in Canada, dating to pre– and post– U.S. Civil War periods, that are (or, rather, should be) integral to conceptions of the canon of Victorian Canadian literature. To list only those published during Queen Victoria’s reign is to

22 directions home

confront a daunting array (including the one-hundred-plus mini-memoirs Drew presents in A North-Side View of Slavery): • Mahommah G. Baquaqua, Biography of Mahommah G. Baququa (1854)8 • Henry Bibb, Narrative of the Life and Adventures of Henry Bibb, an American Slave, Written by Himself (1849) • Paola Brown, Address Intended to Be Delivered in the City Hall, Hamilton, February 7, 1851, on the Subject of Slavery (1851) [a plagiarized version of David Walker’s Appeal (1829)]9 • Lewis Clarke and Milton Clarke, Narratives of the Sufferings of Lewis and Milton Clarke ... (1846) • Benjamin Drew, ed., A North-Side View of Slavery; The Refugee; or The Narratives of Fugitive Slaves in Canada … (1856) • Jim Henson, Broken Shackles (1889) • Josiah Henson, Life of Josiah Henson, Formerly a Slave, Now an Inhabitant of Canada, Narrated by Himself (1849) • Samuel Gridley Howe, comp., The Refugees from Slavery in Canada West: Report to the Freedmen’s Inquiry Commission (1864) • William H.H. Johnson, The Horrors of Slavery (1901) • Israel Lewis, Crisis in North America: Slavery, War, Balance of Power and Oregon (1846) • Jermain Wesley Loguen, The Rev. J.W. Loguen, as a Slave and as a Freeman … (1859) • John William Robertson, The Book of the Bible against Slavery (1854) • Moses Roper, A Narrative of the Adventures and Escape of Moses Roper … (1838) • Thomas Smallwood,. A Narrative of Thomas Smallwood (Coloured Man) (1851) • [Theophilus] Austin Steward, Twenty-Two Years a Slave, and Forty Years a Freeman … (1856) • William Still, comp., The Underground Rail Road (1872) • William Troy, Hair-Breadth Escapes from Slavery to Freedom (1861) • Samuel Ringgold Ward, Autobiography of a Fugitive Negro … (1855) • Lavina Wormeny, ‘Narrative of the Escape of a Poor Negro Woman from Slavery’ (1861) These texts are Canadian in terms of the once-and-past or future residency of their authors or speakers, and almost half – those by Brown, the Hensons, Lewis, Johnson, Robertson, Smallwood, and Wormeny – were actually published in Canada.10

II. Liberating the Canadian Slave Narratives In addition to these U.S.-reflective slave narratives that belong, regardless, to Canadian literature, scholars must also address the mass of memoirs treating African slavery in pre-Victorian Canada. However, these records do not fill books or spark pamphlets; instead, they exist in newspaper articles and trial documents:11 these are the sources of the narratives of African ‘Negro’heritage persons enslaved in colonial Canada, in either New France or British North America prior to the British Empire’s abolition of the institution in 1834.12 For instance, the chronicle of the life and 1734 execution of the Montreal slave Marie-Josèphe Angélique, for arson, does not appear in some literate ‘confessions’ cobbled together by her in prison, but rather in the

‘this is no hearsay’

23

transcribed, oral ‘confession’ tortured out of her during her imprisonment.13 If not for such prejudicial and tainted trial statements and gallows-humoured recollections, the witness of AfricanCanadian slaves, their wit, and even their very language, would languish. Naturally, in reading our Canadian slave narratives, we approach a literature of propaganda that attacks the pro-slavery arguments of white slaveholders and their allies, particularly their allegations of black inferiority and depravity. In Slavery and Race in Popular American Culture (1984), William L. Van Deburg delineates that, under slavery, blacks were depicted as ‘feeblewilled noble savages, comically musical minstrel figures, and dehumanized brutes.’ So pervasive – and popular – were such caricatures that ‘even … white sympathizers, the antislavery spokepersons, were not free from entrapment in a culture which seemed determined to forward slave images derogating black humanity while soothing majoritarian fears of a black rebellion’ (xi). This Negrophobic discourse is the American accompaniment to slavery. But colonial Canada was just as titillated by the tomfoolery and antics of burnt-cork-defaced blacks, terrified by the rages and outrages of cutthroat blacks, and entertained by the placid pastoralism of uncomplaining, choral blacks. New affirms ‘certain black stereotypes continued during the nineteenth century to be the subjects of humour in Canadian writing’ (1989, 33). For proof, one need look no further than the checkered oeuvre of that imperial-colonial, Planter-Loyalist-descended, Tory Plato-Punchinello, Thomas Chandler Haliburton, who trafficked ruthlessly in images of comic or homicidal or shiftless blacks throughout the course of his empire-wide literary career, between 1836 and 1865. Originally a progressive philosophe to his fellow Nova Scotians, Haliburton became, as the popularity of his ‘frontier’ idioms grew, increasingly conservative, to the point of scribing slavery apologia. For him, slavery was one of the buttresses of Western civilization and its inherent ideal of white superiority. Thus, he penned vitriolic humour to extol its extollers and to denigrate its ‘ingrates.’14 In one passage, Haliburton’s persona, Sam Slick, offers the opinion that ‘niggers … those thick skulled, crooked shanked, flat footed, long heeled, wooly headed gentlemen, don’t seem fit for much else but slavery’ (1836, 176). Such views could only buttress slavery. Van Deburg recognizes that ‘it was historians’ acceptance of this decision to equate blacks with slaves and slaves with blacks which foreclosed historical possibilities that might have served as a liberating force toward ending black bondage before it became embedded in the American past’ (1984, 9). Proto-Canadian authors such as Haliburton, by mouthing the pseudo-scientific racialism of European imperialism and Caucasian-operated slavery, united with American slaveholders in using ‘the grotesque nature of the comical black character [to provide] whites with living, breathing reasons for maintaining racial separation’ (ibid., 24). Even after slavery was defeated in the United States, ‘armed with images of blacks as natural slaves, feeble exotics, and comical imitators, writers sought to turn the tentative plantation visions of previous years into convincing – and entertaining – human and institutional portraits’ (25). Given the wide debasement of blackness itself in North American cultures, the slave narrative authors or orators, even in British imperial Canada, had to focus upon ‘two areas which were underdeveloped by whites – slave achievement and the interconnection between prejudice and bondage’ (53). In the Black Atlantic15 world, then, the slave narratives sought to reveal how ‘whites had become slaves to their own brainwashing’ (Van Deburg 1984, 128). Thus, a formulaic rhetoric scores these texts: the delineation of Sadean vileness and violations (tortures and terrors), the underlining of moral and economic contradictions (bankrupt behaviour and profiteering potentates), the appeals to reason and compassion, the rationales for fighting and flight, and the docu-

24 directions home

mentation of the ex-slaves’ excellent humanity, signalled by a heartfelt Christianity, a labourer’s ‘prosperity’ (thrift and industry), and a lust for literacy. The germ of these rhetorical strategies is exhibited in Olivier Le Jeune ’s 1632 riposte to his French-Canadian master, Jesuit missionary Paul Le Jeune, and the claim that ‘all men were one when united in Christianity.’ Olivier Le Jeune answered: ‘You say that by baptism I shall be like you: I am black and you are white, I must have my skin taken off then in order to be like you’ (quoted in Winks [1971] 1997, 1). Hilaire L’Amour, a Montreal black and recent ex-slave, states his de facto opposition to slavery by formally freeing Catharine, his wife, on December 26, 1787, after having purchased her just a few weeks before: ‘I do hereby renounce all right of property which I had, or might have had or might have claimed to have by virtue of the said purchase … Declaring her from this moment Free and released from all servitude as a slave by these presents’ (quoted in F. Mackey 2004, 14). By voyaging with other so-called Black Loyalists from Nova Scotia to Sierra Leone in 1792, Lydia Jackson escaped a violent indentureship – really, enslavement – to the Nova Scotia household of one Dr. Bulman, who got her with child, then beat her so viciously that she miscarried.16 To explore fully these accounts of Negro slavery in pre-abolition, colonial Canada, intensive archival research is mandatory. Even so, the memoirs of African-American ‘fugitives’ in the Victorian era present clear examples of the persuasive arts catalogued above. Robertson’s Book of the Bible against Slavery is typical. He lists the agonies and atrocities of slavery: This is the way slaves are treated in the United States, by persons in power without mercy or moral feeling … They are overworked, not over fed, most wretchedly clad and lodged, besides have insufficient sleep. That they are often made to wear round their knees, iron collars, armed with prongs to drag heavy chains and weights at their feet, while all work in the field, and to wear yokes and bells, and iron horns; that they are often kept confined in the stocks, day and night, for weeks together. Also, to wear gags in their mouths for hours or days, the effects of which in some cases, has been the means of breaking teeth and otherwise torn out, so that they may be easily detected when running away. That they are perpetually flogged with terrible severity, have Cayenne pepper rubbed into their bruised flesh, and also spirits of turpentine poured over the lashes to increase the torture of these unfortunate people. That in some cases they are striped [sic] of their clothes naked, and their backs and limbs cut and scared [sic] with knives, and otherwise bruised in various ways. That their bodies can be tortured. That they are also often hunted by blood hounds and shot down like the wild animal of the forest, and torn to pieces by the dogs; in some cases suspended by the arms, whipped and beaten until they faint, and when revived by restorative, beaten again until they faint again, and in some cases may come to or die. That their bones are broken, their eyes put out, their ears often cut off, their flesh branded with hot irons, maimed, mutilated, and burnt to death over slow fires.17 (G. Clarke 1991a, 61)

Robertson’s hypnotic and disgusting anatomy of the ills of slavery seeks, like most slave narratives, to prod the audience to rebel against the cold-blooded hypocrisy of the nominally Christian society that allows such cruelties.18 Its realism and forceful iteration exemplify the reportage of oral witness come to print. (Robertson had been illiterate when he landed in Halifax, in 1852.) His style encourages his readers and auditors to imagine slavery for themselves, thereby undercutting its apologists. Robertson also reveals the innately anti-slavery, economic wisdom of the bondsmen: ‘I remained … with [“my master and owner as a slave”] until my

‘this is no hearsay’

25

spirits became brightened by the influence of God, which was in the year of our Lord 1852. It dwell on my mind that it should come to pass, by me as with many others, that I should start and cut grass for myself ’ (ibid., 58). Rather than continue to sweat to fatten another man, at no profit for himself, Robertson elects to run off. In the first, apocalyptic paragraph of his poetic pamphlet, he justifies his decision by scathingly denouncing the false religious arguments of slavery’s backers: The spirit of Slavery never seeks refuge in the Bible of its own accord; the horns of the Altar are its last resort, seized [sic] only in desperation as it reaches and rushes from the avenger’s arm, like other unclean spirits … ‘Goaded to phrensy [sic] in its conflicts with conscience and common sense and reason, denied all quarters, and hunted from every convert, it vaults over the sacred enclosures, and courses up and down the Bible,’ seeking rest and finding none; the law of love glowing on every page, flashes around in omnipotent anguish and despair, and shrinks from the hatred [sic] light, and howls under the consuming torch, as demons quailed before the Son of God, and screeched aloud, ‘torment us not.’ At last it shrinks away under the types of the Mosiac system, and seeks to borrow [sic] out to sight as among the shadows vain hopes. Its asylum is its sepulchre, its city of refuge the city of destruction; it flies from the light into the sun, from heat into devouring fire; and from the voice of God into the thickest of his thunders … (ibid., 58)

Robertson’s fierce, urgent oratory, his flamboyant and hard-earned self-righteousness, is almost the special province of slave narratives, which resemble newfangled scripture, add-on apocrypha intended to bridge Exodus and Revelation, or Lamentations and the Gospels. Having ‘voted with his feet’ against the Perverse Institution, Robertson ended up in Halifax, where he proceeds from ignorance of ‘a letter in the alphabet’ to attaining a ‘small share of education’ to writing and publishing, perhaps at his own expense, his short but significant narrative. All that remains for him is to endeavour ‘to improve with the help of God’ (ibid., 64). Robertson’s narrative concludes not only in a manner befitting a nineteenth-century Anglo-Protestant, but also in deference to the Victorian ideals of social uplift, especially deliverance by the exertion of independent manliness, moral fibre, perseverance, and work and study. (Another salutary effect of Robertson’s narrative is to introduce Halifax as an ‘Underground Railroad’ port, thus expanding to the eastern seaboard a narrative of escape more usually situated in the Great Lakes centre of the continent.) While Robertson’s narrative typifies those of the era, and while it maintains the necessarily parasitic relationship of African-Canadian literature to its African-American precursor, it also begins to articulate some of the differences of a Canadian positioning. For instance, Robertson utters an explicit condemnation of his homeland, which, while not unusual in slave narratives, assumes a Canadian nationalist colouration in the supra-border environment: ‘All these [tortures] are perpetrated in the United States, where slavery is allowed, and carried on, which can be proved beyond doubt by many hundreds of persons of good repute ’ (ibid., 61). Absent here is any citation of the slavery practised legally in British North America until 1 August 1834, nor is there any mention of the appalling poverty and opprobrium to which African-American fugitives and ex-slaves were treated in this dissident ‘America.’ Robertson’s text is a model, in every way, of how exiled African Americans / proto–African Canadians denounced American slavery but, simultaneously, supported the creation of a Canadian nationalist anti-Americanism that, while suitable for abolitionist purposes, also legitimized the repression of the reality and history

26 directions home

of Euro-Canadian racialism. (The import of this black-and-white mythography still shapes racial discourse in Canada. By training their righteous anger so squarely on the squalid inadequacies of the American Republic, the proto-African-Canadian slave narrative authors helped to obscure European-Canadian racism and, worse, justify Anglo-Canadian [British] imperialism. Their writings supported and inspired white Canadian paternalism, sentimentality, and romanticism regarding African Americans, attitudes still au courant today.19) In harmony with this ‘blame America’ strategy, Drew’s compilation, A North-Side View of Slavery, is as much anti-American as it is anti-slavery.20 The publisher, John P. Jewett and Company, in its prefatory ‘Advertisement,’ advises that ‘the statements of the Fugitives from Slavery’ compose ‘a valuable and permanent contribution to American Literature ’ (Jewett [1856] 1981, n.p.). For Drew himself, though, as compiler and editor, the fugitives’ words ‘reveal to the ears of pitying indignation, the secrets of the prisonhouse’ (Drew [1856] 1981, 1), or, rather, of the Republic-as-jail. Crucially, these narratives are meant to be heard in the United States, and merely overheard in British North America.21 Thus, in his ‘Author’s Preface,’ Drew tells us that ‘the citizens of this Republic should feel an interest in [the] fate and fortunes’ of the ‘fugitive slaves of the United States’ (n.p.). Furthermore, his opening paragraph replicates the militant oratory of the Declaration of Independence, the document of 4 July 1776 in which thirteen British American colonies declared their revolt from their imperial parent. Where that paper begins, ‘When in the Course of human events it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another,’ and explains this ‘necessity’ as being the result of oppressive actions of once-Sovereign power (Cayne 1988, 249), Drew echoes its sentiments with his first sentence – or broadside: ‘When in any State, the oppression of the laboring portion of the community amounts to an entire deprivation of their civil and personal rights; when it assumes to control their wills, to assign them tasks, to reap the rewards of their labor, and to punish with bodily tortures the least infractions of its mandates, it is obvious that the class so overwhelmed with injustice, are necessarily, unless prevented by ignorance from knowing their rights and their wrongs, the enemies of the government’ ([1856] 1981, 1). Just as Thomas Jefferson’s Declaration justifies the insurrection of the American people against an extra-territorial, monarchical ‘tyranny,’ so does Drew insist that African-American slaves have the right to contest a territorial, caste-based despotism: ‘To them, insurrection and rebellion are primary, original duties,’ as well as, as Drew adds, flights from ‘evil’ (ibid., 1). Clearly, Drew aims to inspire anti-slavery fervour among democratic European-American ‘patriots,’ but his fund of vehemence also spills over Anglo-Canadian discourse, freshening springs of anti-Americanism and pro-British imperialism. With avid discipline, then, Drew, as the regulator and animator of his escapee speakers, prompts a regular discourse from his subjects that blasts, blackens, the republic while exalting the accidental Canaan of the Canadas and the relative Eden of British Crown–derived law and liberty. Drew accents this irony, asking his presumed American readers, ‘What circumstances have led [ex-slaves] to prefer a monarchy to a republic?’ (Drew [1856] 1981, 14).22 In dozens of the narratives, the interviewees view monarchical Canada as a true, free land opposing the ‘United Slave States of America’. In such imagery lies, in part, the roots of our imagined moral superiority vis-à-vis the United States. For instance, the Rev. Alexander Hemsley, once a slave in Maryland and later resident in St. Catharines, Canada West (southern Ontario), recalls his arrival, indigent, in ‘a small inferior place,’ and his subsequent bare ability to make ‘both ends meet.’ Still, he resolved ‘that salt and potatoes in Canada, were better than pound-cake and chickens in a state of suspense and anxiety

‘this is no hearsay’

27

in the United States.’ So enamoured is he with British North America and its guarantee of ‘the freedom to work for oneself ’ to all, that Hemsley exclaims, ‘Now I am a regular Britisher. My American blood has been scourged out of me; I have lost my American tastes’ (Drew [1856] 1981, 39). This statement marks the effect that Canadian space has on exiled Americans: to replace their hypocritical republicanism with the virtues of true, British liberty. (One spies in such claims the enthusiastic patriotism of Red Tory Canuck nationalists such as George Grant.23) The Rev. Hemsley’s healthy pro-British sentiments are amplified by another St. Catharines resident, William Grose, once a slave at Harpers Ferry, Virginia: ‘Here’s something I want to say to the colored people in the United States: You think you are free there, but you are very much mistaken: if you wish to be free men, I hope you will all come to Canada as soon as possible ’ (ibid., 86–7). Grose ’s Canada is Paradise: ‘I have been through both Upper and Lower Canada, and I have found the colored people keeping stores, farming, etc., and doing well’ (ibid., 87). Grose adds to his celebration of being ‘a true British subject,’ one who has ‘a vote every year as much as any other man,’ by insisting, ‘I am not prejudiced against all the white race in the United States, – it is only the portion that sustain the cursed laws of slavery’ (86). Even so, he sketches out a rudimentary sociology of African-Canadian life that doubles as Canadian nationalist propaganda: ‘As a general thing, the colored people are more sober and industrious than in the United States: there they feel when they have money, that they cannot make what use they would like of it, they are so kept down, so looked down upon. Here they have something to do with their money, and put it to a good purpose ’ (87).24 In Galt, Canada West, Henry Gowens, another ex-Virginian, says he plans ‘to publish the whole history of my life to the people of the United States and Canada’ (Drew [1856] 1981, 142).25 Still, he uses his interview with Drew (or vice versa) to proclaim, again, the superior virtues of the Canadas:26 ‘But in Canada, all are really free and equal. Color is not recognized in the laws of the land. During all the time I have lived in Canada, no white person has suffered any inconvenience, or had cause to complain, because I am placed on an equality with him’ (142). Sounding like the Moses of the spirituals, Gowens wonders, ‘How much longer, in the name of God, shall my people remain in their state of degradation under the American republic?’ (143). According to ex-Virginian J.C. Brown, a fellow citizen of Cincinnati, Ohio (where he resided before settling in Chatham, Canada West), told him ‘every [black] that I took off to Canada was a sword drawn against the United States’ (ibid., 245). The heroic John Little, hailing from Murfreesboro, North Carolina, and latterly, Queen’s Bush, Canada West, appeals to his AfricanAmerican brethren to quit their racist presidents for the bounty bestowed by British royalty: ‘To them I say, go into the backwoods of Queen Victoria’s dominions, and you can secure an independent support’ (ibid., 219). Canada’s very air is a moral cleanser: The man who was ‘a bad nigger’ in the South, is here a respected, independent farmer … The ‘nigger’ who was so ‘BAD’ among Southerners, as to be scarred with whips, put in the stocks, chained at his work, with ankles sore from the irons, … put in jail after jail, hunted by hounds, – stands up here at the North, a man respectable and respected. I don’t ask any one to take my word for it, merely. Ask the people of Peel, Wellesley, Woolwich, and Waterloo – those are the places where I am known … (ibid., 219–20)

Little ’s eloquence supports both the Canadian vision of our moral supremacy over the United States, but also the aspirations of emigrationist African Americans to locate a new and comfortable homeland.27 The success of such positive depictions of ‘Canada’ has entailed the marginali-

28 directions home

zation of slave narratives as essentially American literature by and for Americans, bespeaking an experience – slavery and slave resistance – supposedly alien to our ‘Peaceable Kingdom.’ Pro-British and anti-American statements thus fill Drew’s compilation. But there are a few admissions of the practice of anti-black or other racism in Canada West. A striking commentary is that of Sophia Pooley, another Queen’s Bush resident, ‘now [in the 1850s] more than ninety years old’. She testifies that ‘I was stolen from my parents when I was seven years old, and brought to Canada; that was long before the American Revolution.’ She believes ‘I was the first colored girl brought into Canada,’ where she was sold to Aboriginal leader Joseph Brant to be his slave in the Niagara region of present-day New York and Ontario (Drew [1856] 1981, 192). Eventually, her Aboriginal master sells Pooley to an Englishman ‘for one hundred dollars.’ She remains with him, in southwestern Ontario, for seven years, until she simply claims her freedom and leaves (194). Her story is an intriguing snapshot of Native, African, and European socio-economic relationships on the Niagara frontier. A North-Side View of Slavery reconfigures the map of Victorian North America along AfricanAmerican lines, giving prominence to just three areas: the South, the North, and Canada. The first two locales represent iniquity, while the third is the home of truth. (But Canada – really, in this case, southern and southwestern Ontario – is also the home of veritable African-American colonies. Introducing his interviews with fugitives in St. Catharines, Drew observes, ‘we will … look at St. Catharines as the peaceful home of hundreds of the colored race ’ [17]). To cite the words of St. Catharines’s James Adams, ‘We [slaves in the United States] all the time talked to each other about how we would get away, and what we should do if the white folks tackled us; that was all our discourse ’ (24). Drew’s interlocutors resemble African Lears who have fled from false Pericles, now revealed as the most dissolute and heartless Macbeths.28 Thus, A North-Side View of Slavery is a kind of reply to Comte Alexis de Tocqueville’s De la démocratie en Amérique (1835–40), one that proves the absence of true democracy in America but also flaunts its purportedly functioning reality in Canada West.29 Yet, as Abigail B. Bakan registers, while ‘the British North American colonies served as a safe space for fugitive slaves as a result of realpolitik; racism and a culture of hegemonic whiteness were endemic to the early origins of the Canadian state ’ (2008, 3). Fundamentally, our slave narratives are anchored in a Victorian temperament, one that holds, as Roy Daniells posits, ‘a widespread belief in the value of continuing tradition to a nation beginning its independent course,’ such as, for instance, using ‘the English poetic tradition in order to interpret the Canadian scene’ (1974, 42, 46). In his narrative, then, Thomas Smallwood waxes as painterly as Pater to accent the elect nature of his times: ‘Not in the full blaze of Assyrian glory and strength, from Nimrod to Sardinapolis, extending over a period of nearly fifteen hundred years, have so many extraordinary events taken place as are concentrated in the last half century.’ Aye, ‘We live in an age of epochs – every year, every day, yea every moment, is an era within itself ’ ([1851] 2000, 23). To preface his narrative, Smallwood quotes or alludes to the then-extant ‘liberal’ British Pantheon of John Milton, Edward Young, Samuel Johnson, abolitionist orator Henry Lord Brougham, William Wordsworth, John Philpot Curran, William Cowper, Thomas Campbell, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Lord Byron, Robert Burns, and William Shakespeare plus, two token Americans, Daniel Webster and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (23–8). Smallwood thus supports African-American literary critic Joan Sherman’s insight that, in the nineteenth century, African-American poetry (and, I would add, other literature) was ‘influenced not by other black poets [or writers] but by such white American contemporaries as Longfellow, Whittier, and Riley, or by the British writers Shelley, Goldsmith, Scott, Byron, and Tennyson’ (1992, 3–4). Too, like these European and Euro-American poets, and like black writers, Smallwood accepts ‘the

‘this is no hearsay’

29

century’s dictum that poetry’s province is to convey truth, to teach, uplift, reform, and, secondarily, to give pleasure ’ (Sherman 1992, 4). Even so, Smallwood’s style is closer to racy Algernon Swinburne than it is rarified Matthew Arnold. Treating the probable martyrdom of the AfricanAmerican abolitionist publisher David Walker, Smallwood writes, in royally purple ink, ‘When the fame of [Walker’s] book reached the South, the poor, cowardly, pusillanimous tyrants grew pale behind their cotton bags, and armed themselves to the teeth’ (Smallwood [1851] 2000, 32). Just as prettily worded is his denunciation of ‘Northern Colonisationists’ – that is, those who wish African Americans to relocate to Liberia: ‘[They are] the great merchants, manufacturers, and aristocrats of the North, who suck their riches from the South, off from the sweat and blood of the African race, with as little reason and humanity as the stall-fed hog sucks the swill that is poured into his manger’ (38). Happily, these capitalist hypocrites will fall: ‘I believe the long suspended blow against that republic and the final emancipation of their victims are close at hand, and will be attended with a terrible and bloody breaking up of their present system’ (69). Smallwood’s style may obey the influences of Byron and Sir Walter Scott, as Benjamin Brawley argues was the tendency among nineteenth-century African-American writers (1935, 11), who delineated a heroic universe where liberty was sought. The slave narrative exhibits, then, the stuff of historical romance, as well as the murky, labyrinthine, Gothic terror demanding the stoic, yet active, heroic response. Thus, Drew ([1856] 1981) produces the mini-sagas of J.C. Brown (239–48) and John Little (198–224). However, if Sir Walter Scott was the South’s favourite novelist (Petesch 1989, 139), and thus a model for African-American writers, he was also a long-lasting influence for Anglo-Canadian authors. In 1954, Lister Sinclair observes, ‘there is always Sir Walter Scott, who remains the great model for so many of us, both in verse and in prose ’ (1954, 236). For both African Americans and English Canadians of the Victorian age, Scott communicated ideals via romance and melodrama, two aspects of literature essential, asserts Northrop Frye, ‘in consolidating a social mythology’ (1976, 350). Given the similar influences upon African-American slave narratives and colonial AngloCanadian writing, and given that some of the slave narratives were shaped here, we must find some continental continuity between these ‘national’ expressions. Indeed, we should note, in their mutual responses to estrangement and stranding, the articulation of the identical impulse: to imbue imperial forms with local associations. And, in some cases, we must hear the voice of the colonial African-Canadian slave speaking in terms and tropes not unknown in African-American literature. In the end, the supposedly American slave narratives are far more Canadian in their polemical thrust than we have tended to recognize. To cite Drew’s interlocutor Thomas Hedgebeth, ‘This is no hearsay’ (Drew [1856] 1981, 278), though it may be heresy… Certes, what remains suspiciously heretical is the notion that early African-Canadian orators and writers – that is, intellectuals – were cognizant of, and engaged with, philosophical questions larger than slavery and political debate wider than those within the confines of British North America / Canada or, for that matter, of North America. But careful bibliographical inquiry will turn up figures such as attorney and pamphleteer Abraham Beverley Walker and civil servant and poet Anna Minerva Henderson: the former advances, at the dawn of the twentieth century, a pre-Garvey Afrocentrism, while the latter composes staunchly Anglophilic poetry. The differences between them seem to be black and white, yet, read in tandem, their positions blur and become nearly indistinguishable. As the chasing chapter attests, both Walker and Henderson – just like their international Negro contemporaries – tussle with the meaning of African uplift in the context of global Anglo-Saxon power.

2 A.B. Walker and Anna Minerva Henderson: Two Afro –New Brunswick Responses to ‘The Black Atlantic’ For Anna Minerva Henderson (1887–1987)1

The Black Atlantic Laps New Brunswick Over a century ago, in 1903, the great African-American sociologist W.E.B. Du Bois (1868– 1963), in his classic study The Souls of Black Folk, speaks of the African American’s possessing a ‘double-consciousness’ that allows ‘him’ to feel ‘his twoness, – an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings’ ([1903] 1995, 45). Citing U.S. literary critic Robert A. Bone, Haitian-Québécois scholar Max Dorsinville maintains that the result of this psychological division is the finding that ‘the Black man, in life and in literature, is alternately attracted by the two polar opposites of Assimilationism and Nationalism’ (Dorsinville 1974, 21). Though one may term this dialectic simplistic, British scholar Paul Gilroy’s influential study, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness, inveighs against ‘ethnic absolutism,’ ‘Africentricity,’ and ‘Americocentricity’ (1993, 5, 191). Gilroy prefers to celebrate black cultural figures ‘who begin as African-Americans or Caribbean people and are then changed into something else which evades those specific labels and with them all fixed notions of nationality and national identity’ (19). Gilroy concludes his study by arguing for ‘the wisdom generated by developing a series of answers to the power of ethnic absolutism that doesn’t try to fix ethnicity absolutely but sees it instead as an infinite process of identity construction’ (223). Another way to understand this contest between nationalism and cosmopolitanism among African diasporic peoples is to classify it as a contest between conservatism and liberalism, or between independence and integration (which is a manoeuvre I have performed in previous essays,2 following directions laid out by Canadian philosopher George Grant [1918–88]3). No matter which terms one prefers, it is incontestable that many African diasporic intellectuals have felt competing predilections, for intra-group advancement as well as for individual transcendence of the terms of ‘race’ and even of nationhood. Although the saga of African America’s centuries of struggle for emancipation, equality, and opportunity is both oft heard and well spoken of, African-Canadian history, particularly of the intellectual variety, remains muted and obscure. No less an authority than U.S. historian Robin W. Winks acknowledges, in his The Blacks in Canada: A History, that the Canadian ‘chapter of the Negro’s story has been ignored by historians of both Canada and the Negro’ ([1971] 1997, ix). Yet, if other African diasporic peoples, in the United States, the Caribbean, and Britain –to name just three locations – could and did ponder their predicaments and theorize solutions in-

A.B. Walker and Anna minerva henderson

31

volving assimilationism and nationalism, patriotism and exile, imperialism and pan-Africanism, so could and did those who found themselves landed in Canada, stranded far from Africa and even the American South, and left to acclimatize or disappear. In previous scholarship, I have demonstrated that African-heritage peoples in Canada have attempted to articulate a sense of local belonging to community, province/region, and even country, while also following closely African-American – and now Caribbean – politico-cultural models and dreaming, now and then, of Africa. Introducing my two-volume anthology, Fire on the Water: An Anthology of Black Nova Scotian Writing, I assert, ‘Africadian … literature has existed since the founding of the community [in the 1780s]’ (1991a, 11) and that, in this canon, ‘history is a narrative which must issue in the attainment of justice and liberty’ (12). Later, concluding my essay ‘A Primer of African-Canadian Literature,’ I argue that the literature ‘worries identity issues surrounding race, gender, class, language, religion, and region’ and add, ‘Perhaps its most persistent quality has been its tendency to appropriate the “colonial” and to transubstantiate it into native forms …’ (2002a, 337; ellipsis in original).4 In addition, my research has presumed that the historical creators of Africadian and of African-Canadian literature, engaged, implicitly and explicitly, in political debate around notions of blackness, Britishness, Frenchness, and American-ness, as well as religion, gender, slavery, freedom, colonialism, nationalism, and imperialism. Moreover, these authors came to voice and articulate their philosophies wherever Black Canadians existed in numbers: in, among other locales, Toronto, Windsor (Ontario), Halifax, Montreal, Victoria, Vancouver, and Saint John, New Brunswick. Through their intellectual activities, then, Black New Brunswick could be conversant with Black New York, even if any resultant African-American influences had to be modified by the laws and mores of a majority culture obeisant to the wills of the Houses of Commons in London and in Ottawa. The two early Afro–New Brunswick (or Africadian) intellectuals who are my subjects here are Abraham Beverley Walker (1851–1909)5 and Anna Minerva Henderson (1887–1987). Walker, a native of New Brunswick6 and a barrister,7 was a mature man by the late 1870s, when he plunged into New Brunswick Conservative Party politics.8 When his law practice, further studies, and political endeavours failed to earn him a coveted appointment as Queen’s Counsel, he began to publish a ‘monthly’ journal, or, really, in literary terms, a ‘little magazine,’ titled Neith: A Magazine of Literature, Science, Art, Philosophy, Jurisprudence, Criticism, History, Reform, Economics, whose writ ran from February 1903 to January 1904, seeing five issues released.9 In 1905, the restless Walker removed, apparently to Boston, Massachusetts,10 but not before publishing A Message to the Public, to promote his African Civilization Movement (really a back-to-Africa colonization scheme) in 1905. By 1907, he had returned to New Brunswick, where he sought, unsuccessfully, an appointment as a provincial King’s Counsel.11 He was touring Ontario to promote his African Civilization Movement ‘when he was overtaken by the pulmonary tuberculosis, which led to his death’ (Cahill 1994b, 1067). For her part, a native of Saint John, New Brunswick, Henderson worked in Ottawa for many years as a civil servant, but took time to publish her poetry in Canadian Poetry Magazine in 1937 and 1939 as well as in an anthology, New Harvesting: Contemporary Canadian Poetry, 1918–1938 (1938), edited by Ethel Hume Bennett. At age eighty, in commemoration, perhaps, of the Canadian centennial year as well as of her own fine age, she published her chapbook, Citadel (1967),12 which thus became the first collection of poems to be released by an African-Canadian woman. At first glance, Walker is, as Winks declares him to be, ‘a Negro separatist and an early advocate of black power’ ([1971] 1997, 398). In contrast, Henderson strikes a ‘raceless’ – almost

32 directions home

bloodless – stance in her poetry, addressing her auditors as just another British-descended, Anglophile, loyalist New Brunswicker; that is to say, she writes like an assimilada. Walker’s interest is international; he seeks an audience with other interlocutors and evaluators of British and European imperialism, in respect to ‘race’: I mean, the contest against Caucasian racism and the battle for Negro advancement, with the United States of America, the Caribbean, and Africa viewed as the arenas of analysis. His Saint John residency seems incidental to his argument and an accident of his life. In stark contrast to Walker’s racialism, Henderson’s poetry avoids, save for two surreptitious moments, any statement of racial surveillance, and her verse is centred on the presumably white Anglo ‘Home’ of New Brunswick and her fidelity to the white-run British Empire and its ‘daughter,’ the white-dominated Dominion of Canada. Despite the obvious and classic differences between the ‘pro-black,’ status-seeking lawyer and the ‘white-identified’ lady poet, it would be facile to declare Walker beholden to Gilroyesque ‘ethnic absolutism,’ or to class Henderson as an unrepentant integrationist. However, identity is always complex. Thus, one must recognize the ways in which Walker is also a neo-British imperialist, perhaps to counter the then-rampant Canadian Imperial Federationists as much as African-American leader Booker T. Washington and his accommodationist strategies.13 For her part, Henderson may participate, at a remove, in the often ‘colourless’ African-American women’s writing of the Harlem Renaissance, not to mention the ‘race ’-evasive poetry of English-Canadian verse. Strikingly too, though committed to schemes of Negro advancement, Walker says little about Saint John’s African-heritage peoples. Henderson is also silent on their presence, though her poetry exults, in Saint John – and London, England, the imperial capital. Read closely, Walker is ‘whiter’ than he first appears, while Henderson appears ‘blacker.’ Nevertheless, their respective literary careers, undertaken in New Brunswick’s port city (a vital window on the North Atlantic reaches of the empire), establish that, even if Afro–New Brunswickers were overlooked by other blacks in the so-called Black Atlantic, they rallied nevertheless to articulate different visions of belonging – both to the larger African diaspora as well as to English-speaking, monarchical Canada. Furthermore, their philosophical options remain au courant.

Winking at Walker Winks eyes Walker with the usual professional sneering that he reserves for most of his African-Canadian subjects. Although Dr. Walker, B.A., LL.B, D.C.L., was one of the few learnèd African-Canadian personages of his time, and though he was ‘the only Negro barrister in the Maritimes,’ he earns only Winks’s scorn for believing that, having delivered ‘the black vote to Sir Charles Tupper, who in 1896 briefly became the federal prime minister,’ he ‘should be elevated to the position of Queen’s counsel for his efforts’ ([1971] 1997, 399). Following Tupper’s defeat later that year and the ascension of Sir Wilfrid Laurier (1841–1919) to the federal premiership, Walker received word that Laurier would indeed consider him for the desired appointment. This news delighted Walker, and he replied with a letter of extravagant praise, wherein Laurier was likened unto ‘leaders in jurisprudence, leaders in divinity, leaders in philosophy, leaders in poetry, leaders in romance, and leaders in oratory’ – among them Montesquieu, Descartes, Hugo, Balzac, and Molière – and declared ‘the first statesman in the Dominion.’ For Winks, Walker’s epistolary rhetoric was ‘so [ridiculously] fulsome that Laurier appears not to have taken up the correspondence again.’ (399) Yet, a more open-minded reader of Walker might be moved

A.B. Walker and Anna minerva henderson

33

to empathize with the ecstasy of a black intellectual and lawyer who has been promised that he will be considered for public advancement without a concern for his race. I can only speculate that such a promise, from Laurier, the most powerful elected official in the nation, was a joyous sign to Walker that not all high-status whites opposed Negro progress. Furthermore, we must set Walker in his time – one of mass black illiteracy. New Brunswick historian W.A. Spray, in his The Blacks in New Brunswick, writes, ‘From evidence available it is clear that not as much was done in New Brunswick to educate Black children … [and] there is little evidence to suggest that education helped the Black children to obtain better jobs. Most continued to work as labourers and servants.” Spray notes that ‘the first Black man to attend a New Brunswick university was Arthur Richardson, who had lived in Bermuda before coming to Saint John to live with his uncle… Richardson entered the University of New Brunswick in 1883 and graduated with honours in classics in 1886’ (1972, 60). The first Black woman to accomplish university graduation in New Brunswick was Mary Matilda Winslow of Woodstock, ‘who entered the University of New Brunswick in 1901 … [and] graduated with honours in 1905 and won the Montgomery-Campbell prize’ (61). Walker was not likely a close associate of either Richardson or Winslow, for both left New Brunswick to pursue teaching opportunities in other parts of Canada and in the United States. Similar fates befell contemporary black intellectuals in Nova Scotia. Edwin Howard Borden (1869–1953) was the first black graduate of Acadia University, earning a B.A. in 1892 and an M.A. 1896, but he made his name and career in the United States, where he became known as the dean of Negro Baptist preachers in Texas (Sealey 2001, 215–17). Born in 1846, Halifax’s William Harvey Goler, once a mason, took a Doctor of Divinity degree from Pennsylvania’s Lincoln University in 1881, then rose to become president of Livingstone College in Salisbury, North Carolina (G. Clarke 2002a, 330). In short, Walker, a black, multiple-degreed journalist and flamboyant orator, would have been startlingly unique in the Saint John of a century ago. But Walker was not completely isolated. He would have been aware of the first blackauthored book to emerge from the Maritimes, namely, A Brief History of the Coloured Baptists of Nova Scotia (1895),14 by Peter E. McKerrow (1841–1906). He should have known The Jim Crow Car; or Denouncement of Injustice Meted Out to the Black Race (1898), by Rev. John Clay Coleman (b. 1876), a protest against the segregationist South, for the author was the ‘Presiding Elder and General Superintendent of the African Methodist Episcopal Church in the Maritime Provinces of Canada’ and the secretary-treasurer of the African Civilization Movement, an organization of which Walker was president (A.B. Walker 1905, 1). Given that other titled members of his organization – Rev. T.W. Johnson and Rev. E.L. Coffin (d. 1904) – were ministers based in New Brunswick and Nova Scotia (ibid., 1, 31), one may presume that Walker was aware of upand-coming divinity students such as William Andrew White (1874–1936), a Virginian (also my paternal great-grandfather), who would graduate from Acadia University in 1903 (Sealey 2001, 87). In Maritime churchly circles, Walker would have happened upon a pamphlet, The Future of the Canadian Negro, by Rev. Adam S. Green (b. 1858),15 circulated in 1904, or, very likely, a booklet of songs, Hymns Sung at the Services (1903), compiled by Rev. Wellington N. States (1877–1927). More worldly, yet also involved in local black church leadership, James Robinson Johnston, born in Halifax, in 1876, graduated from Dalhousie University with a Bachelor of Letters (1896) and a Bachelor of Laws (1898) and was admitted to the Nova Scotia bar in 1900 (G. Clarke 1991a, 170).16 Surely Walker could not have been ignorant of the presence of Johnston, another dynamic black attorney – and Conservative Party activist – in nearby Hali-

34 directions home

fax. While he may have felt himself a solitary thinker, Walker was part of a nexus of AfricanCanadian intellectuals in the Maritimes, consisting of churchmen such as Coleman, McKerrow, Green, and States, as well as community tribunes and leaders such as White and Johnston. While Walker must be located within the Africadia – or the African Maritimes – of a century past, one must also set his work within the larger African–North American world. At this level, the resonant address of the African-American leader Booker T. Washington (1856–1915) at the Atlanta Exposition of 1895, where he condoned segregation and Negro economic and legal subservience, but advocated industrial training,17 is one touchstone for Walker. But another is Washington’s work Up from Slavery: An Autobiography (1901). Still another is Du Bois’s Souls of Black Folk, which pledges, ‘so far as Mr. Washington apologizes for injustice …, does not rightly value … voting, belittles the emasculating effects of caste distinctions, and opposes the higher training and ambition of our brighter minds, – so far as he, the South, or the Nation, does this, – we must unceasingly … oppose them’ ([1903] 1995, 94). Du Bois observes that, among the critics of Washington’s program of ‘Thrift, Patience, and Industrial Training.’ are those who ‘hate the white South blindly and distrust the white race generally, and so far as they agree on definite action, think that the Negro’s only hope lies in emigration beyond the borders of the United States’ (89). In a speech published as Message to the Public, Walker reveals no such opprobrium, though he does propose emigration: The object of this organization [the African Civilization Movement] is to discuss and investigate all matters which relate to the welfare of the African race, and to promote a feeling throughout the world leading to the bringing of Africa within the pale of Christian civilization; or, in other words, it is our aim to open up a way to the founding in some part of British Africa, not already largely occupied by white people, a colony of an intelligent, educated, industrious class of English-speaking Negroes drawn from English-speaking countries. (A.B. Walker 1905, 1–2; my italics)

Far from openly critiquing Washington in Du Boisian terms, Walker tells us that his African Civilization Movement ‘will establish an up-to-date industrial college, on a basis similar to Prof. Booker T. Washington’s industrial college in the South [Tuskegee Institute], in which will be taught all the useful trades, occupations, and handcrafts, and in which will be studied all the mineral, agricultural, and sylvan resources of Africa, and also the fundamental principles of commerce and business’ (ibid., 8). Pointedly though, this college is not to be set up in Fredericton or in Saint John, but in Africa, thus implying that North America (North and South, Canada and the United States) is irremediably inhospitable for African-heritage peoples – despite Washington and his notorious ‘Atlanta Compromise’ (as his 1895 speech came to be known) and despite Canada and its British parliamentary traditions. In the portion of his speech entitled ‘Now Is the Time to Move,’ Walker claims that ‘now’ is ‘when all the educated and patriotic leaders and teachers of the Negro race, its wise men and women everywhere …, should unite … in trying to work out or devise some strong, sound, practical plan of action and direction, by which Africa may be reclaimed, civilized, and eventually moulded into a great and powerful Ethiopian Empire ’ (6–7). Here Walker voices Ethiopianism – ‘a literary-religious tradition common to English-speaking Africans, regardless of nationality’ and based on ‘an inspiring Biblical passage: “Princes shall come out of Egypt; Ethiopia shall soon stretch out her hands unto God” (Psalms 68:31)’ (Moses 1988, 156–7).18 Thus, he echoes Du Bois, whose Ethiopianism, says Wilson Jeremiah Moses, ‘typified the nationalistic thinking of black middle-class

A.B. Walker and Anna minerva henderson

35

intellectuals during the first two decades of the twentieth century’ (168). Through this early form of Afrocentrism, ‘the theme of the rise of Africa became a tradition of reinterpreting the Biblical passage to speak to the experiences of the Anglo-African peoples’ and to foresee ‘the decline of the West’ (158–9). Ethiopianism is explicitly heard in Du Bois’s mythopoeic description of Negro history as ‘the shadow of a mighty … past [flitting] through the tale of Ethiopia the Shadowy and of Egypt the Sphinx’ (Du Bois [1903] 1995, 46). But it is also subtly present in Du Bois’s discussion of ‘the permanent uplifting and civilization of black men in America’ (126). Walker’s bold amendment of Du Bois is to interpret Ethiopianism not as the advancement of Negroes in North America, but as the spreading of ‘Christian civilization throughout the whole of Africa’ (A. Walker 1905, 2). For, ‘the moment [Africa] gets a good foothold on the advanced institutions of Christendom, it will rise equal to all occasions.’ First, however, it must be ‘brought within the pale of Christian civilization’ (8) via a policy of African diasporic imperialism that will result in ‘the ultimate, triumphant nationalization of the race.’ That is to say, the natives of Africa will be asked, by their black betters, ‘for their benefit and welfare,’ to do their bit to help ‘in working out the destiny of Africa’ (10). From Walker’s perspective, Ethiopianism should ‘bleach’ Africa in order to save it… Walker’s precocious fascism is no accident. A like attitude bedevils Du Bois’s Souls as well, where he numbers ‘the American Negro’ among ‘backward peoples’ (Du Bois [1903] 1995, 128) and calls for their direction by a ‘Talented Tenth,’ meaning here black university and college graduates (136). In his Message to the Public, Walker exults that African-heritage peoples ‘are raising up among us, day after day, all over the earth, a splendid, resolute type of scholars and thinkers.’ It will be their task to remake Africa so that Negroes will become, ‘before many generations, a mighty people, a people of valor, refinement, and dominion’ (A. Walker 1905, 7). The African Colonization Movement will consist of ‘the best types of civilized Negroes from civilized countries’ (9). Similarly, Du Bois’s text demands ‘trained Negro leaders of character and intelligence …, black captains of industry, and missionaries of culture; men who … comprehend and know modern civilization, and can take hold of Negro communities and raise and train them by force of precept and example, deep sympathy, and the inspiration of common blood and ideals’ ([1903] 1995, 195). Ideally, opines Walker, the American Negro should strive ‘until he attains knowledge …, and all the virtues, and graces …, on a par with the very best types of the AngloSaxon’ (A. Walker 1905, 16). Du Bois asks that Southern colleges produce yearly ‘a few white men and a few black men of broad culture, catholic tolerance, and trained ability’ ([1903] 1995, 118). For both Du Bois and Walker, elitism is de rigueur; populism is dangerous. Moses states Du Bois was likely ‘influenced … directly by German nationalism’ and that, along with 1920s Jamaican pan-Africanist Marcus Garvey (1887–1940) (who actually tried to fulfil the Back-toAfrica ideas Walker voices), ‘Du Bois represented the culmination of a tradition that conceived black nationalism in European terms.’ Du Bois’s adherence to ideas advanced by ‘early Christian black nationalists’ (Moses 1988, 133) and his policy of ‘authoritarian collectivism’ (134) also show up in Walker’s imperialism towards Africa. Displacing the romantic Garveyite rhetoric of ‘Africa for the Africans’ with a slogan that could have read ‘Africa for the English-speaking, foreign-born, Christian Negroes,’ Walker takes as his model for success the United States, ‘one of the wealthiest and most powerful nations on the earth – a nation that defends and stands for all the sacred traditions of the grand and mighty Anglo-Saxon race, a royal and magnificent breed of men…’ Just as that nation began with a small band of religious-minded settlers, so too can a small band of repatriated Christian

36 directions home

blacks ‘redeem’ Africa (A. Walker 1905, 2). Thus, Walker and his supporters will make a Negro colony in Africa ‘British in the strictest sense of the term’: ‘To have everything about it and in it British. To adopt British laws and traditions. To have the system of education British. To follow British ideals of life. And to pattern after British models of society… And our common schools will be copies of the best common schools in Anglo-Saxon countries’ (8-9). Walker’s Anglophile utterances echo what Moses describes as Du Bois’s ‘Anglo-chauvinism’ (1988, 135). Even so, Walker’s African Civilization Movement would pursue Anglo-imperialism, mainly British but partly American, to ‘bring Africa within the pale of Christian civilization,’ and thus ‘eventually solve the Negro problem all over the whole earth’ (A. Walker 1905, 26; my italics). However, the dream of ‘laying the foundation of nationhood and empire in the land of [our] forefathers,’ the vision of ‘the civilization or nationalization of Africa [as] one of [the] great world problems,’ and the belief Negroes must be redeemed ‘from the bondage of barbarism and heathenism’ (27), could all justify the savage repression of indigenous peoples. Let us never forget this maxim of C.L.R. James: ‘there is nothing so fierce as an imperialist in the colonies’ ([1938] 1963, 375). Although his investment in Anglo-Saxon American and British ways may seem unorthodox for an Afrocentric imperialist, Walker may also mean to appeal rhetorically to the Anglo-Saxon chauvinism of Canadian Imperial Federationists who dreamt – before, during, and after the Boer War (1899–1902) – of Canada taking an equal role with Britain’s other ‘daughter’ dominions – Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa – in governing and policing the empire.19 Nevertheless, Walker critiques British South Africa for its oppression of the ‘natives,’ who are ‘crushed, and crushed, and crushed, under the heavy heel of tyranny’ and whose territory is now being opened to ‘Coolie labor’ (1905, 24), a policy Walker terms ‘impolitic and un-British’ (25). What South African natives need ‘to bring them in touch with the impulses of Anglo-Saxon energy and progress,’ says Walker, ‘is … a compulsory system of industrial and common schools’ (24). For Africa in general, there must be an end to the policy of encouraging or allowing ‘other races – European, Semitic, Hindu, or Mongolian – to go there in large numbers to settle ’ (25). Walker’s imperialism with a coloured face bears the Anglo-chauvinism of Du Bois, the industrial-training credo of Washington, while yet foreshadowing the racial chauvinism of Garvey. His Message to the Public is a contradiction – it weds New World African imperialism to the globalist white supremacy articulated by backers of an ‘Anglo-Saxon union’ between Great Britain and the United States (Logan 1923, 25).20 But it is also Walker’s own Canadian restatement of Du Bois’s famous proclamation, ‘the problem of the Twentieth Century is the problem of the color line ’ ([1903] 1995, 41). Finally, it is prophetic of the poetry of Henderson, who seemingly bleaches her ‘Negro soul in a flood of white ’ – to use Du Boisian terms (45) – Anglo-Saxonism.

Henderson: Is She or Isn’t She? Born in 1887, Anna Minerva Henderson would have been seventeen or eighteen years old when Walker published his Message to the Public, then decamped, not for Africa, but the American and Canadian lecture circuits. Being a literate black woman in Saint John, she likely chanced upon Walker’s squibs. Like Walker, Henderson lived in a milieu where ideas from the transAtlantic African diaspora washed ashore, delivered by itinerant preachers and politicized sailors. Perhaps, too, she perused copies of Walker’s journal, Neith,21 or a copy of his 1890 speech The Negro Problem; or, the Philosophy of Race Development from a Canadian Viewpoint. In this address,

A.B. Walker and Anna minerva henderson

37

Winks tells us, Walker ‘urged all Negroes to make “periodical visits to Great Britain and Ireland,” the centers of civilization, where there was no racial prejudice, and he felt that all should emulate the virtues of English gentlemen, who are “a chosen people who cling to [God’s] Right Hand’” (Winks 1997, 398). But if Henderson did read Walker, it was not for his pan-Africanism, but for his Anglo-Saxonism. One can only guess at Henderson’s familiarity with African-American women poets such as Phillis Wheatley (ca. 1753–84) and Frances Ellen Watkins Harper (1825–1911) or, for that matter, the most famous African-American poet of her time, Paul Laurence Dunbar (1872–1906), revered for his Negro dialect verses about plantation life.22 His Lyrics of Lowly Life (1898) and Lyrics of the Hearthside (1899) would have turned up in even Saint John homes, for, a century ago, as one scholar declares, Dunbar was ‘the most popular poet – black or white – in the United States’ (Bruce 1989, 57).23 African-Canadian readers in New Brunswick would surely have possessed copies of Dunbar’s works, as would have those European-Canadian readers fascinated by half-comic, half-sentimental depictions of ‘Dixie.’ But whatever her acquaintance with AfricanAmerican poets, Henderson must have known Anglo-Canadian ones, especially such revered voices as Charles G.D. Roberts (1860–1944) and Bliss Carman (1861–1929), whose associations with the University of New Brunswick and with Fredericton are now marked by the Poet’s Corner plaque that graces the campus in that city. Thanks to the labours of African-Canadian scholar Adrienne Shadd (1996), we know that Henderson obtained a teacher’s certificate, taught school in Nova Scotia, and then, in 1912, at age twenty-five, was hired into the federal civil service after writing an entrance test and earning the third-highest grade in the dominion. Henderson started out as a stenographer in the Dominion Lands Branch of the Department of the Interior, but by 1938 was working as ‘the principal clerk in the Immigration Branch, Department of Mines and Resources.’ While in Ottawa, she wrote a column for the Ottawa Citizen titled ‘The Colyum’ or ‘Just among Ourselves’ (3). By the time she was fifty, Henderson was actively publishing her verse in little magazines. The biographical note attending the publication of her sonnet ‘Parliament Hill, Ottawa’ in Canadian Poetry Magazine (June 1937) allows only that she is unmarried (‘Miss’) and ‘a civil servant of Ottawa.’ A year later, when this poem is reprinted in New Harvesting: Contemporary Canadian Poetry, 1918–1938, edited by Ethel Hume Bennett, the ‘Biographical Notes’ remain magisterially laconic: ‘Anna M. Henderson, of Ottawa, has published verse in periodicals and magazines’ (1938, 194). (An enterprising scholar will have to scour all of English-Canada’s century-ago little magazines to find Henderson’s poems.) When Henderson self-publishes Citadel, a slim booklet of thirty-one pages, in Fredericton in 1967, at age eighty, she does not offer us either a ‘collected’ or a ‘selected’ poems. Indeed, one of her best poems, ‘Parliament Hill, Ottawa,’ is missing from the collection. The latest dated poem in the book is from the winter of 1965 and the earliest (presumably) refers to 18 May 1947. Yet, some of the poems appeared before 1947. This fact indicates that Citadel is a crafted chapbook focused on Saint John’s cityscape and history, the British connection, faith, and the strife between artist and critic: it is neither a hodge-podge of musings nor a select batch of the author’s ‘best.’ Before we examine Citadel, however, ‘Parliament Hill, Ottawa,’ in its 1937 appearance, demands attention as an example of Henderson’s poetics. A Shakespearean sonnet, its Ottawa setting and its form cannot help but recall Archibald Lampman (1861–99), the first major European poet of the capital. Irrefutable resemblances tie Henderson’s sonnet to Lampman’s Petrarchan version, ‘In the City’ (1900). Her poem opens:

38 directions home Like a departing conqueror, the sun Goes trailing crimson banners down the sky, Taking the pointed towers, one by one, With a grave loveliness in passing by. The twilight shadows deepen on the snow … (51)

Lampman begins ‘In the City’ with these lines: I wandered in a city great and old, At morn, at noon, and when the evening fell, And round my spirit gathered like a spell Its splendour and its tumult and its gold … (375).

Henderson is more descriptive than Lampman – perhaps a result of the modernist influence on her Victorianism – but both present a voyeur watching a city’s features alter with the flaming pall of dusk. The most striking similarity between the two poems is the transcendentalist philosophy they unfold. For Henderson, something of the life that throngs the street – The essence of its laughter and its pain, Of mounting dreams and triumphs and defeat – Is woven in the carillon’s refrain, And lifted through the starlight, clear and high, Is flung, transformed, a song against the sky! (51).

Lampman’s sonnet also concludes with the evening enfolding his speaker within humanity via music: And whereso in that mighty city, free And with clear eyes and eager heart I trod, My thought became a passion high and strong, And all the spirit of humanity, Soft as a child and potent as a god, Drew near to me, and rapt me like a song. (375)

Henderson is superior to Lampman in this pairing, because her imagery is more striking. His sonnet is a mass of abstractions, especially in the second quatrain’s enumeration of the qualities of the city: The mysteries and the memories of its years, Its victors and fair women, all the life, The joy, the power, the passion, and the strife, Its sighs of hand-locked lovers, and its tears (375).

In contrast, Henderson delivers what Lampman delivers in his better poems, I mean, vibrant details:

A.B. Walker and Anna minerva henderson

39

the young moon swings, a slender, golden arc Above the town; and yellow street lamps glow Like crocuses against the purple dark. (51)

In such lines, Henderson shows her mastery of Lampman and her apparent mastery of the tenets of imagism.24 Her whole sonnet is not as vivid as these lines (though the description of the sun as ‘a departing conqueror’ is notable), but where she displaces Lampman with images worthy of Amy Lowell (1874–1925) or Isabella Valancy Crawford (1850–87) or her contemporary, Marjorie Pickthall (1883–1922), she achieves writing of power. (In its appearance in Contemporary Canadian Poetry, ‘Parliament Hill, Ottawa’ attracts the grace note of an accompanying drawing by the volume ’s illustrator, J.M. Donald.) Of course, in Henderson as in Lampman, race is an evacuated subject, one present only in its absence.25 But Henderson cannot be read as straightforwardly as Lampman here. According to Maureen Honey, editor of Shadowed Dreams: Women’s Poetry of the Harlem Renaissance, ‘Poetry was the preferred form of most Afro-American women writers during the 1920s’ (1989, 1), the period of the African-American arts revival, centred in New York City, and titled the Harlem Renaissance. Still, these women writers seemed to conform to a ‘genteel school of “raceless” literature, having largely confined themselves to the realm of private experience and the natural world. Known primarily for their lyrical, pastoral verse, [they] have been judged as imitating European traditions’ (2).26 Clearly, Henderson could be cast in such a camp. Adrienne Shadd explains that, by ‘adopting a “raceless, genderless” public discourse, Henderson was merely playing by the standard rhetorical rules deemed appropriate to the creation of great art’ (1996, 16). However, in defence of these writers and their aesthetic, Honey observes, their ‘poetry uses the landscape of nature and romantic love to affirm the humanity of women rendered invisible by the dominant culture ’ (1989, 3), and their use of classical poetic forms such as ‘the sonnet, the ode, the elegy’ reflected their sense that such modes were ‘politically neutral vehicles through which Black culture could be made visible’ (6, 7). Honey finds further that writers of the Harlem Renaissance generation ‘saw no contradiction between social activism and the production of nonracial literature because the two were fused in their minds: artistic achievement moved the race upward’ (5).27 One may speculate that Henderson felt delicious frissons in seeing her poems – those of a New Brunswick ‘Negress’ (the term some would have used to describe her) – appearing in a magazine edited by E.J. Pratt (1882–1964), along with an essay by Lorne Pierce (1890–1961), the literary editor of Toronto’s Ryerson Press, and poems by Arthur Stringer (1874–1950) and the young Ralph Gustafson (1909–95) (Canadian Poetry Magazine, June 1937, ‘Contents.’).28 One may imagine she enjoyed some small thrill of vengeful subversion by appearing in a major Canadian anthology alongside luminaries such as Charles Bruce (1906–71), Robert Finch (1900–95), Dorothy Livesay (1909–96), Pratt, Sir Charles G.D. Roberts (1860–1943), Duncan Campbell Scott (1862–1947), F.R. Scott (1899–1985), and A.J.M. Smith (1902–80), all the makers of a modern English-Canadian verse tradition (Bennett 1938, [xiii-xvii]). Here was one are(n)a where Henderson could seize a veiled equality. Recall Du Bois’s own exaltation in the democratic essence of literature: ‘I sit with Shakespeare and he winces not. Across the color line I move arm-in-arm with Balzac and Dumas, where smiling men and welcoming women glide in gilded halls’ ([1903] 1995, 139). If Honey’s perception is right that African-American women poets of the 1920s signalled their concerns regarding ‘race ’ and racism obliquely, chose deliberately to use the standard forms of

40 directions home

the British canon to demonstrate their intellectual parity with whites, and wrote lyric poetry ‘because it transported both poet and reader to a place where women could feel safe, unbound, and powerful’ (1989, 14), there is every reason to suspect that Henderson penned her verses in a similar mode for similar reasons. Honey agrees with scholar Michael Cooke that ‘self-veiling [was] a major stage in the development of Afro-American literature, one that occurred in the early part of the century and extended through the 1920s’ (Honey 1989, 17). In her poetry, too, the reclusive Henderson, so sparing in her issuance of autobiographical details, and almost never hinting at ‘race,’ is also ‘self-veiling.’ Shadd believes Henderson typified ‘the “I am Black but we will pretend I am not and that I am like everybody else in every way” approach … a typically Black Canadian coping mechanism’ (A. Shadd 1996, 19). But the poetry itself, as Shadd sees, sings a different song. If Walker’s pan-Africanism prefaces a ‘blackface ’ British imperialism, Henderson’s ‘racelessness’ may represent black deception of the clearest sort. It is time to examine Citadel, Henderson’s slim booklet of twenty-two poems, to uncover her strategy of invisible visibility. In ‘Market Slip,’ a poem consisting of two Shakespearean sonnets – one subtitled with the date 18 May 1783, the other with 18 May 1947 – the poet hurrahs the landing at Saint John of British American Loyalists fleeing the just-established ‘Great Republic’. Neither sonnet refers to ‘race ’; it is possible to treat the whole poem as a simple anthem. The sonnet titled ‘May 18, 1783’ praises those who, ‘Voyaging … came at last to land / Here in this sheltered inlet of the bay, / Curved like the hollow of a mighty hand …’ The speaker, standing on a pier near the Saint John City Market, marvels at the site of the historic landfall, off the Bay of Fundy, in a ‘hollow’ prepared, apparently, by divinity. But one line troubles this easy reading of the sonnet. Henderson describes the archetypal pilgrim Loyalist as possessing ‘The cherished dream of freedom as his goal.’ The immediate sense here is that the speaker values British constitutional monarchy over rude Yankee Republicanism. But such a reading, while valid for a patriotic ode, relies too much on an elaborate, poli-sci distinction between the virtues of King and Country and those of ‘We the People.’ Henderson’s line makes better sense if it is understood as referring to ‘Black Loyalists’ who truly were, in abandoning the still-slaveholding United States, electing to enjoy physical liberty within a hierarchically organized monarchy over experiencing continued enslavement within a violent, white-supremacist democracy. Indeed, the British promise of ‘land and liberty’ for African Americans who rallied to its flag did not have to be extended to the Crown’s white supporters. They knew that, win or lose, they would keep their slaves (euphemistically termed ‘servants’), and gain prime land tracts, wherever the British flag still flew. The concluding trio of lines in ‘May 18, 1783’ drops the third-person-plural and third-person-singular pronouns (‘they’ and ‘his’) of the rest of the sonnet to assume a dramatic, second-person-singular address: You took the challenge of the woods and seas And captured in a single classic phrase The moving story of those valiant days. (1967, 9)

These lines could refer to Loyalists, black and white. Yet, whatever the valour of governmentassisted white Loyalist settlers, that of the poorly provisioned, landless, despised, and ignored black brethren must have been greater still.29 Henderson’s second sonnet in ‘Market Slip’ is headed with the date of ‘18 May, 1947,’ marking the 164th anniversary of the Loyalist landing in Saint John. It is an eccentric anniversary date,

A.B. Walker and Anna minerva henderson

41

unless one notes that 1947 marked Henderson’s sixtieth year of life.30 It seems she desires, in the poem, to connect the Loyalist birth of New Brunswick (the colony was formally sundered from Nova Scotia in 1784 so that Saint John River Loyalist settlers would not ‘be governed from Halifax’ [Spray 1972, 16]) and its growth with her own life experience. Shadd reminds us that Henderson ‘retired from the civil service in 1945 and returned to Saint John, where she worked for three years as a stenographer in the law firm of Fairweather and Stephenson’ (A. Shadd 1996, 4). Presuming that the firm’s offices were near the City Market and thus the waterfront, Henderson may have had occasion to visit the market slip and feel inspired to pen her paean. Certainly, in honouring the Loyalist – and Black Loyalist – arrival, she also honours her own ancestry and successes.31 In her fine analysis of ‘Market Slip,’ Shadd emphasizes, ‘1783 is a pivotal year in Canadian Black history. In that year, almost three thousand Blacks – 10 percent of all Loyalists – sailed to Nova Scotian shores (which at the time included New Brunswick) in search of freedom. With this migration, the first free African communities in North America were forged’ (1996, 6). Interpreting the second sonnet, Shadd explains, ‘Henderson makes the point here that just as African migrants from America sought freedom on these shores over two hundred years ago, so have hundreds of thousands of European immigrants sought peace and freedom during and after World War II’ (7). I also suspect that lines promising newcomers, ‘Tempered in the New World’s alembic,’ will ‘build a future of broader vision,’ permitting Canada to attain ‘The beauty … of freedom and of power’ (Henderson 1967, 9), hint that Canada, in 1947, possesses a restricted social vision. Thus, in the first poem of Citadel, Henderson gestures towards immigration and multiculturalism as policies that will serve to liberalize Canada, even racially. Shadd holds that ‘only the tone of hope and optimism itself [in the poem], and the plea that Canada live up to its image as a place of opportunity for all people is suggestive that Canada was not [in Henderson’s mind] all that it could be ’ (1996, 8). Although Shadd and I tease out potential black inklings in Henderson’s otherwise race-erased verse, the fact remains this sounding is not obvious. But Henderson’s subtlety is a strategy engaged by many early-twentieth-century African-American women poets. Honey alerts us that, for these poets, the ‘search for roots and identity led inward, moved backward to an imaginary Eden where sensitivity could survive and even flourish.’ She cites Bernard Bell’s perception that Harlem Renaissance Romantic pastoral poetry ‘might best be understood as ancestralism, arising from a desire to reconcile the urban present with a rural past’ (1989, 18). Arguably, the two sonnets of ‘Market Slip,’ one singing of pioneers landing in a virginal-forested bay and the next praising the growth of a city, achieve this reconciliation. Shadd reports that Henderson’s barberfather, William, was likely a fugitive slave – that is to say, immigrant – from the United States, while her schoolteacher-mother, Henrietta, a New Brunswick native, had parental roots extending back, possibly, to the Black Loyalist colonialists (1996, 2).32 ‘Market Slip’ allows Henderson to laud her ancestors abstractly, even as she praises explicitly the Loyalist, wood-and-water origin, and immigration-propelled, urban growth, of Saint John and Canada.33 Another Henderson sonnet, ‘The Old Burying Ground,’ refers, Shadd submits, to ‘the Black Settlement Burial Ground in Willow Grove, a one-time Black settlement on the outskirts of Saint John’ (1996, 14). However, the poem speaks of ‘sloping walks with leafy shade ’ where ‘Old men on benches talk the hours away’ and where ‘the hallowed dead’ have left ‘their legacy of faith and dreams / Forever graven on the city’s heart.’ These details, along with the play on grave and the placement of the cemetery at the ‘city’s heart,’34 establish, indubitably, that the poem’s setting is

42 directions home

the Old Loyalist Burial Ground in central Saint John, uphill from the harbour, and overlooking both it and the market. But ‘race’ may haunt the last image of the poem, where the delegating dead – ‘A paradox of life and death, … pass / As light and shadow drift across the grass’ (1967, 11). Here the reader encounters explicit ‘ancestralism.’ Too, one must remember Honey’s theory that, in black women’s poetry of the era that shaped Henderson, images of light and dark, day and night, white and black, and shadow and brilliance are frequently allegorical (1989, 8-17). Read in light of this perception, ‘The Old Burying Ground’ becomes a site of ironic racial integration, where the spectres of white and black settlers, Loyalists and slaves, now free of all fleshly or worldly prejudices, drift fraternally in mingling ‘light and shadow’ (Henderson 1967, 11). Henderson’s ‘Corner Grocery Store,’ a poem wherein her persona discovers a London shop that reminds her of a Saint John corner store she knew in childhood, asserts, ‘Oceans do not divide us, but unite. / It was like coming home when all was said.’ A.B. Walker could have authored this poem: it seems a perfectly Anglophilic pronouncement. Yet, the ‘us’ that ‘oceans’ unite is not just Canada and Britain, or Canada, the United States of America (the poem opens with a reference to Boston), and Britain, or even the British Commonwealth: it is also Africa, Europe, Australia, Asia, and the Americas. Certainly, the London ‘grocery store ’ is a ‘counterpart’ to one in Saint John, or in Boston, but, ‘with its goods from everywhere,’ it provides ‘A jolly place to learn geography!’ (Henderson 1967, 14). The London shop is a locus of British imperialism (now translated into a global supply of consumer goods for ‘home ’ consumption) and of the worldwide extension of English civilization.35 Even were Henderson ignorant of the role of African slavery in establishing the Anglo-Saxon imperium, her ‘home ’ – or the experience of finding a sense of ‘home ’ in a ‘borderless’ store, whether in London, or Boston, or Canada, or Africa – is utterly the result of the forced migration of Africans and coerced migration of Asians and Europeans. Given that Britain once ‘ruled the waves’ (and still presumed to do so when the poem was written), it was under its blood-coloured banner (the British naval flag – or Red Ensign – Canada’s official flag until 1965) that the Arctic, Atlantic, Pacific, Indian, and Southern Oceans were, metaphorically, ‘united.’ Henderson’s vision of ‘home ’ and ‘coming home ’ is more complicated than it first appears. Her ‘us’ names all who use English – the global language, one established by imperial (British) and semi-imperial (American) domination.36 The single poem in Citadel that seems almost unabashedly ‘black’ in tone and subject is ‘Prayer-Meeting.’ This ten-quatrain lyric narrates the decision of Sister Susie Gray to stand outside in a blizzard to avoid hearing the prayers of the deacon with whom she has just quarrelled. As usual in Henderson, there are no direct references to race in the poem. However, some details in description and language conjure up images of black church folk. One notes the ‘brightly-lighted meeting-house,’ the church or chapel so vital to rural black communities, an oasis of ‘comradeship and singing’ (Henderson 1967, 26), especially ‘down East’ (27), where Africadians are isolated from the larger current of African–North American life. One reads that ‘from her seat and down the aisle, / Marched Sister Susie Gray’ (26), and that one plain verb and noun sets before the mind’s eye a transplanted, ‘Southern’ black woman, bustling, with mighty energy and powerful determination, through the church (an institution nominally mastered by black male preachers, but almost always, in reality, staffed and overseen by black women). Sister Susie’s name is not African, of course, but its quadruple appearance in the poem and its associations with African diasporic communities37 serve again to suggest the lyric’s black origin and intended destination. Henderson allows Susie only a fragment of speech – ‘Susie said / She ’d never listen to his [the deacon’s] voice / Though she “should be struck dead”’ – and it cannot be

A.B. Walker and Anna minerva henderson

43

described as ‘Ebonics’ in any sense. Even so, just as one finds in other Henderson poems, the context deepens if the lyric is read blackly. Too, if Henderson’s lines ‘The tangy salt sea breeze down East / preserves a hardy folk’ (27) are permitted to denote Afro–New Bruswickers (or Africadians) as much as they denote any New Brunswick villagers, one accords black settlers the same courage and dignity automatically accorded white ones. (This ‘two-toned’ reading jibes with those I grant ‘Market Slip’ and ‘Pioneer.’) Finally, Shadd has found a letter Henderson addressed, on November 19, 1967, to Robin Winks. In it, Henderson reveals the genesis of ‘PrayerMeeting’ as having been her once teaching school ‘in a “colored Baptist community” in Nova Scotia at the age of nineteen (which would have been in 1906) and attend[ing] a revival meeting in the Baptist church’: ‘Everyone went to revivals. I boarded in a house a good half mile from the main road, in a spot surrounded by evergreen trees and I was afraid to stay there alone at night, so went along too!’ (quoted in A. Shadd 1996, 11). ‘Prayer-Meeting’ is the only poem Henderson claims ‘as being a direct reflection of the Black community.’ Justly, Shadd wonders, ‘How many more [Henderson] poems are [really] about the Black Canadian experience?’ (1996, 12). ‘Prayer-Meeting’ and its ‘back story’ suggest Henderson’s actual black consciousness and her feelings of connection to a wider black community. Yet, her work had to find its place within what Québécois nationalist Henri Bourassa terms ‘cette mer immense … saxonisant’ (1918, 49) – or, in her case, a sea of bleach, that is to say, an Anglo-Saxon dye. Henderson’s poem ‘Crow and Critic’ is her most sophisticated statement about herself. It is ‘A Portrait of the Poet as a (Closeted) Black Woman.’ Moreover, in a gesture towards modernism, it rejects rhyme and metre, and, in a nod towards postmodernism, it is self-conscious about its own artifice. The poem begins with the speaker describing the arrival of spring with ‘Patches of soft green’ appearing ‘Between the red bricks of the street,’ a sky ‘cloudlessly blue, and the air / Laden with the fragrance of growing things,’ and seeming ‘all colour and light.’ The sky – and the page – is intruded upon by a crow that ‘Contrary to the usual opinion of crows / … could be called beautiful.’ Immediately, one may consider the crow a symbol for the poet herself, now an elderly black woman, but beautiful in her creative soul. The lyric continues, positioning the crow ‘On the steeple bell of the old Lutheran Church’ from which ‘the singing / In great waves of glorious sound / Came to me in my window.’ Enraptured by the scene and the sound, the speaker muses, ‘The crow, looking down with its head on one side / Listened intently and – could it have been? – / With intelligence and enjoyment’ (1967, 28). If the crow is read as a familiar of Henderson herself, then, in three deft lines, she rehearses the rejection of black writers by white critics who refuse to credit blacks with faculties of intelligence and imagination, feeling and subtlety. Perhaps Henderson is even alluding to the ‘race’-blinded criticism that Thomas Jefferson offered African America’s first major poet, Phillis Wheatley: ‘Religion indeed has produced a Phyllis Whately [sic]; but it could not produce a poet. The compositions published under her name are below the dignity of criticism’ ([1782] 1955, 140).38 This possibility is strengthened when one considers what feels like the second part of ‘Crow and Critic,’ where the speaker defends the poem that resulted from her observations of the ‘Spring day at its best’ and ‘what I saw from my window, / Including, of course, the crow.’ Her defence is necessitated by a critic who has charged, ‘The Crow flapping seems to be / A digression. What does it really contribute / To the meaning of the poem?’ In reply, Henderson’s persona states, ‘I might have quoted Archibald MacLeish / “A poem should not mean, but be.”’39 The persona tells her critic instead: ‘It was part of the picture / I saw from my window, so I put it in’ (1967, 29). In the name of spiritual wholeness, she must integrate her pleasures in God’s

44 directions home

spring day, (white) Lutheran singing, and the behaviour of the savvy black crow (whose ‘feathers glistened and scintillated in the sun’ [28]). The poet adds to her response to ‘The Critic’ by noting that Welsh poet Dylan Thomas has included a crow in one of his poems: ‘I was glad it was part / Of the picture he saw from his window, / And that he, too, “Put it in.”’ Finally, she writes, in seeming opposition to an assertion in the Thomas poem, ‘I am not, however, buying a blind / For my window’ (29). As a black-identified, black woman, Henderson has room for the crow in her modernist poem, and appeals to the work of two modernist poets to support her inclusiveness. Given that ‘Crow and Critic’ follows immediately after ‘Prayer-Meeting,’ one may hear here the poet’s Declaration of Independence, her own Ars Poetica: I will write of blackness as spectrally or as opaquely or as clearly as I wish. I will write wholly of the world as it appears to me.40

At least this black reader wants to read this assertiveness into Henderson’s poem and into all of her poetry.41 Peering at Citadel, one recognizes its ambitious, formal sweep. Henderson applies Miltonic neoclassicism (perhaps under the sway of Wheatley) to her Shakespearean sonnets (see ‘Market Slip’), updates the organic imagery of the spiritual (see ‘Pioneer’), employs Wordsworthian Romanticism (see ‘The Old Burying Ground’), tackles ‘Negro dialect’ verse by omitting dialect (see ‘Prayer-Meeting’), and reveals herself to be a wily and allusive modernist in the ragged rhythms and Poundian (pugnacious) artiness of ‘Crow and Critic.’ She tries on all of these forms in a slender – no, skinny – self-published chapbook. In her little offering, she attempts to replicate the entire African-American, Anglo-American, and Anglo-Canadian aspiration to rewrite British poetry in their – I mean, our – own terms. Her endeavour is daunting, but she is undaunted. Henderson’s veiled references to blackness and her own cultural heritage are poignant in their opacity. Yet, she may still be deemed insufficiently subversive. While her verse is open to blackfocused or Afrocentric readings, she is curiously silent about the presence of Others – Acadians, francophones in general (despite all her years in Ottawa), and Mi’kmaq and other First Nation peoples, not to mention other African peoples – in the Maritimes or in Canada. Then again, as Shadd opines, Henderson participates in an African-Canadian (and Canadian) tradition of ‘masking’ race: ‘At a time when one did not wear one’s “Blackness” on one ’s sleeve, AfricanCanadians cultivated a “just people” approach to manoeuvre through the unspoken but blatant daily affront to their humanity’ (1996, 21).

Conclusion The intellectual careers of Walker and Henderson, despite their differences, underscore the dilemmas of African-Canadian literature and culture. Walker is as ‘out’ in his ‘blackness’ as Henderson is ‘masked’ in hers, and these tendencies – one Afrocentric and the other liberal ‘universalist’ (pose M. NourbeSe Philip versus André Alexis) – remain competing influences. Yet, Walker and Henderson are closer and further apart than they were ever able to know. Walker wants to ‘civilize ’ Africa, and to do so like a swaggering Anglo-Saxon. His imperialism is blackoriented, but white-originated. Henderson establishes that good Canadian ‘Negroes’ can write

A.B. Walker and Anna minerva henderson

45

verse of genteel civility. She assures her questioning readers that she (or we) will not smash teacups when invited, finally, to tea (utilizing the Saint John–based Red Rose brand of course). But she also wants to civilize British imperialism, to convert it to integrationist liberalism. Nevertheless, her voice is, even with its glaze of invisible blackness, accommodationist, Washingtonian, thus opposing Walker’s Du Boisian bravado and proto-Garveyite militancy. Still, both Walker and Henderson share Christian belief, even if his is of the muscular Protestant persuasion, while hers is more ecumenical and catholic. In the end, though, both were products of New Brunswick and its Atlantic orientation. Walker peers across the ocean to Africa (albeit through an ‘English’ telescope), while Henderson looks across that expanse to Britain (Big Mama to Canada, the United States, and the white-dominated dominions, but also, via imperialism, to Africa, the Caribbean, and a good swath of the so-called Third World). An examination of the writings and thought of Walker and Henderson verifies that ‘blackness,’ as an intellectual position, while always regional (i.e., its conceptualization is always based on one ’s location), is never provincial (i.e., its conceptualization is always international). But one question persists: Why do both Walker and Henderson fail to address directly other ‘Negro’ – or Black or African – Canadians? I think the answer is, they were waiting for us to declare ourselves. They speak, though, with an ethereal patience that is another guise of faith. Surely they knew their projected voices would not be heard until a self-consciously African-Canadian audience and a commensurate intelligentsia came into being. They did not despair for this prophecy, for they were themselves the products of the ‘roots’ scholars had already established in AfricanCanadian churches, a legacy the next essay explores.

3 Introducing a Distinct Genre of African-Canadian Literature: The Church Narrative For Edith Johnson (1939–2005)1

Finding the Word During the long genesis of African-Canadian2 literature, from that first offshore squib of American-born John Marrant, The Narrative of the Lord’s Wonderful Dealings with John Marrant, a Black (Now Going to Preach the Gospel in Nova Scotia) (1785), up to the ‘modern’ novels of Austin Clarke and Jan Carew (in 1964 and 1958 respectively), creative writing remained phantasmal until the 1960s.3 The first published play, by Lennox Brown, did not appear until 1965, and while Nathaniel Dett published the first volume of African-Canadian poems in 1911, no woman followed suit until 1967, when Anna Minerva Henderson’s chapbook-sized Citadel appeared. If, prior to the liberalizations and immigrations of the 1960s, African-Canadian plays, fiction, and poetry were scarce, one ostensibly nonfiction genre was popular, if only at a local level: I refer here to church narratives. These histories of specific churches – or religious associations – were penned and usually self-published, not principally by ministers, but by disciples, and, frequently, lay women,4 and were as much about community genealogy as they were about folk theology and transcribed oral history. These texts are, I submit – with apt proselytizing, faux-Pentecostal fervour – deserving of close reading, and should be accepted as a distinctive contribution to the African-Canadian literary canon.5 To be precise, these histories may be more valuable to us as literature than as history (even though these categories – genres – are not, finally, distinct). That is to say, the African-Canadian church historians are, simultaneously – and, perhaps, preeminently – writers, and may have more of lasting interest to say as creators of fascinating texts than as pedantic interpreters of communal faith and affairs.6 Certainly, the African-Canadian church history is a genre that insists the founders of AfricanCanadian communities knew that they were inhabiting a ‘Canaan’ – Canada – not an oasis of liberté, égalité, fraternité, (the bywords of the French Revolution) or even of Peace, Order, and Good Government (the slogan of Canadian constitutionalism), yet, a place nearer these ideals than was the clear hell of the United Slaveholders of America.7 Reading these humble texts, these little books, often no more than scanty pamphlets printed poorly on bad paper, and fecund with typos or exuberantly inventive orthography and grammar, one discovers a resistive historiography and a radical theology: in short, the sentiment that, no matter how downtrodden – in actuality – a community may be, it is, for its Afro-Canuck Christian scribes, a blessèd realm of shared belief and fellow/sister feeling, a settlement granted by God and constructed by faith.

Introducing a distinct genre

47

Frequently too, these communal offerings scorn academic historians for their haughty dismissals of African-Canadian culture. They offer ‘grassroots’ rebukes of ‘Ivory Tower’ ignorance. Intriguingly, this paper originates in the chance circumstance (or blessing) that, in July 2001, in a Nova Scotia shopping mall, I met Donna Byard Sealey, who sold me, on the spot, a copy of her fine, brand-new book, Colored Zion: The History of Zion United Baptist Church and the Black Community of Truro, Nova Scotia (2001). Just a few days earlier, I had acquired, from my Aunt Edith and Uncle ‘Sock’ Johnson, of Hantsport, Nova Scotia, a copy of Cherry Paris’s just-published Windsor Plains United Baptist Church: A Brief History (2001). To find, twice in one month, new publications of Black Canadian church narratives, authored by women affiliated to the same church association (though at opposite ends of the provincial Truro–Windsor Highway 215), was a coincidence I could not ignore. I felt compelled to consider the import of these communal and ecclesiastical histories as well as their status, in some intellectual economies, as black-market histories, as suspect literary and ideological contraband.8 ‘Contraband’ is not too strong a word; assuredly, these sometimes roughly authored histories attract more derogation than acclaim, for their origins appear crude. But their eccentricity, their outsider position, establishes precisely their charm and their import. The church histories are mainly the property and product of people excluded from prominent, pedagogical discourses. Lest we forget, however, in New World African communities, from Nevis to New York to Nova Scotia, folks have had to do their own documenting and dissertating – in their own ad hoc academies of church hall, night club, jail cell, lunch room, boxing ring, and sewing circle.9 Nevertheless, ex-centric scholars and marginal historians – such as those of African Canada – seek to transform chronology into spirituals, to turn history into song and un songe, to respond to the silences and omissions of the official record.10 The act of claiming to write or speak history – within a suppressed community – is always one of deploying or redeploying its subjectivities in either recognizably classic or startlingly original garbs. Rightly supposes Thomas Posey, ‘One must study the AfriCanadian [sic] Church if he [sic] desires to understand the Black Canadian’ (1983, 14).11

A Few Africadian Clerical ‘Evangelicals’ Let us now turn, then, to the church historians of the African United Baptist Association of Nova Scotia (AUBANS), founded, in 1853, as the African Baptist Association of Nova Scotia (ABANS). In their historiography, they imagine an Africanized Nova Scotia – or Africadia (to use my neologism)12 – with its own lingo; coverage of events that parallel Bible narratives; treatments of native archetypes, heroes, and saints; and discussions of an apocalyptic geography of disappeared – but undead, haunting – settlements (Africville, Delaps Cove, Granville Ferry, etc.). Their spirited imaginings attempt to answer the repression and distortion of African–Nova Scotian – or, to use my preferred noun and adjective, Africadian – history in social science discourse. Such (re)writing of history is protest art of the homeliest sort. It asserts a laudable – if invisible – past.13 In The Black Identity in Nova Scotia: Community and Institutions in Historical Perspective (1985), Canadian historian James Walker recognizes that, according to the publications of ‘a small but influential band of social scientists whose writings, mostly published in the 1970s, still dominate the academic literature on the subject,’ Africadians have been submissive and ‘a dependent lot, a

48 directions home

set of underachievers.’ These 1970s scholars essay the negative view that African Nova Scotians lack ‘the competitive tradition and aggressive initiative to lay claim to their rights’ and are ‘factionalized and divisive ’ (1). Walker explains that African Nova Scotians have been ‘framed’ in this manner, not because they are victims of ‘biology; genetics; race ’ (2), but because of ‘conditioning. History has made you this way.’ Walker appreciates that the new scholarly arguments utilize Africadian ‘historical experience … to explain and elaborate a contemporary condition of inferiority’ (3). However, it is precisely these pejorative histories that Africadian church writers protest. Thus, Peter E. McKerrow’s A Brief History of the Coloured Baptists of Nova Scotia, and Their First Organization as Churches, A.D. 1832 (1895),14 the first15 church history in African-Canadian literature, insists that the original Coloured Baptists16 – the War of 1812 Black Refugees – ‘when enquired how they got their religion, would frankly tell you, in the forests, behind the stone walls, in the cane breaks, in the cotton fields, and in the rice swamps’ ([1895] 1976, 11). McKerrow revels in a description of these archetypal, Southern- and frequently slave-born Africadian Christians as natural Believers who practise their faith in the wilds and who, during their bondage, when outdoors as field slaves, kept a watch for ‘the approach of the [slave] driver whilst a company of penitents would go up yonder and pray’ (11). More or less free in Nova Scotia, these special disciples imprinted Nature itself with the fact of their faith: ‘The tracks of their footprints have been often marked in the snow that paved the roads of Preston, Beech Hill, Hammonds Plains, and Fall River’ (67). To reinforce this picture of a native – almost natal – faith, McKerrow cites a verse that an anonymous ‘they’ often sang: ‘God has not gone to some distant star, / He ’s in the fields where the toilers are’ (11). These lines establish that those who conducted their prayers ‘in the fields’ were that much closer to God as a result. In a few suave sentences and one quotation (from what may be an early spiritual), McKerrow sketches the basic interests of Nova Scotian African Baptism. In other words, he produces a down-to-earth theology. Walker backs this claim: ‘Untrained in formal theology, lacking perhaps a firm grasp of the bible ’s contents,17 the black Christians were satisfied that theirs was a sanctified religion and even a superior one to that taught in the white churches… Religion made the blacks aware of their distinctiveness …, for it bound them together as a select all-black group against the encroachment of outsiders, considered sinful or at least less pure’ (1985, 10–11). The great Africadian church historian Pearleen Oliver (1917–2008) also upholds McKerrow’s naive nationalism. In Song of the Spirit (1994), her history of the Beechville United Baptist Church, Oliver cites the identical verse McKerrow quotes, and she stresses, equally, the natural setting of African–Nova Scotian Baptism: ‘The 150th Anniversary of the Beechville Church in 1994, celebrates the Divine intervention of God in the deliverance of a remnant of Afro-American slaves to the cold and rocky shores of Nova Scotia’ (7). Oliver cheers their passage ‘from the torturous slave fields of the Southern United States to the chilly woodlands of Nova Scotia.’ For once-slaves, the ‘difference’ between these locales was not merely a matter of ‘climate,’ says Oliver, ‘but … freedom to think, to develop, to be human, to pray to God, their Deliverer’ (104). Next Oliver quotes McKerrow’s passage, cited above, about the newly arrived Coloured Baptists’ having acquired their faith in forests and swamps. Thus, Oliver reiterates McKerrow’s theology almost a century after his work appeared.18 Moreover, in an introductory poem, Oliver credits Richard Preston and James Thomas, the founders of the ABANS: ‘The escaped slave Preston and the Welshman Thomas / Led the way through the wooded wilderness. / Thus the first Beech Hill Church was established’ (8). Willard Parker Clayton (1922–2007), in What-

Introducing a distinct genre

49

ever Your Will, Lord (1984), his history of the Emmanuel Baptist Church of Upper Hammonds Plains, Nova Scotia, also reinforces McKerrow’s insistence on the efficacy of ex-slave religion: ‘Emmanuel Baptist Church evolved out of a deeply religious experience which was common to a dedicated group of ex-slaves one hundred and forty years ago. All were sojourners, strangers, and pilgrims in a land of hope disfigured by the in-humane [sic] existence which seemed to be their destiny’ (6). However, these Believers overcome difficulties and establish communities because ‘God has brought them “a mighty long way”’ (ibid.). Clayton’s citation of the title of a much beloved hymn in the AUBANS, ‘A Mighty Long Way’ (Traditional),19 foreshadows Cherry Paris’s own usage of the phrase in 2001. In her Windsor Plains church history, she declares its purpose ‘is to focus the mind and heart on a people who in their own words “have come a long way – a mighty long way”’ (2001, 7). Too, whether consciously or unconsciously, Paris follows McKerrow – and Oliver and Clayton – by insisting that the founding Africadian Christians developed their faith amid homely circumstances: ‘Early gatherings probably had their beginnings in the fields, barns, farm kitchens – “meeting houses,” schools before small buildings could be erected. Cleared places in the forest were often referred to as sacred spots’ (36). Like McKerrow, Paris employs geographic metaphors to situate the Africadian community: the people possess ‘a heritage of hills and valleys.’ More realistically, their history embraces male labour ‘in the gypsum quarry’ and female ‘domestic service’ (11). Paris’s writings support the claim of her literal brother, the Africadian theologian Peter J. Paris, that ‘relative to biblical symbolism, black Canadian theology seems to focus more on the theology of the wilderness than that of the promised land’ (1989, 20). The value of such spiritual realism is that it foregrounds Africadian socio-economic awareness of deprivation and oppression, while also insisting that ‘God will bring us a mighty long way.’20 Secular – and extra-communal – historians dwell too much on dysfunction and discrimination, or so the revisionist offerings of Africadian church scribes suggest. Rather, all should note the miraculous survival and faithfulness of this small, isolated group of black Believers.21 Then again, professional social scientists may commit intellectual sin. Witness Canadian sociologist Frances Henry’s argument in ‘Black Music from the Maritimes’ (1975) that Black Nova Scotians lack any recognizably black popular musical tradition. This assertion is doubtful, at least from the perspective of Africadian church narratives. In her Beechville Church history, Oliver states that the War of 1812 Black Refugee immigrants to Nova Scotia – those whose muscles actually served to construct many of the churches of the ABANS ex nihilo22 – ‘sought spiritual help and guidance through their small churches where they could sing their spirituals of joy and sadness.’23 Oliver muses that these ex-U.S. folks desired ‘to erect their small chapels, and sing their spirituals of deliverance ’ (1994, 13). Soon, she records that Portia White ‘was widely acclaimed as a contralto soloist. She made her New York debut in 1944 and then sang throughout Central and South America, and coast-to-coast in the United States and Canada’ (56). Oliver also makes note of ‘sister Louisa Bailey who was active in evangelism, and a great singer,’ circa 1906 (42). She reports, too, that, following Rev. A. Bailey’s sermon in 1878, ‘with one accord, the congregation began to sing spirituals, “which seemed as though the Heavenly arches rang in response.”’ At the same service, the mortally ill Rev. James Thomas ‘led the congregation to the Lake beside the Church, where with the joyous singing of the spirituals echoing across the Lake, [assisted] one candidate … down into the Baptismal waters’ (34). In her introductory poem, Oliver’s persona registers that, ‘Bruised, broken and in despair / [Ex-slaves in Nova Scotia] lifted united voices in Spiritual Songs’ (8). For his part, Clayton tells us that, during baptisms at Emmanuel

50 directions home

Baptist Church, ‘spirituals were sung at those services as at no other time. Sometimes, melodies, long forgotten, save by elderly Christians, were revived’ (1984, 33).24 Celebrating Walter Kenneth Marsman, his church’s longest-serving organist, Clayton recalls, ‘It was exciting, as a young person, to see Mr. Marsman playing music this “special way;” the usual way of playing being that of finding the desired chord and then “playing by ear”’ (53). In Colored Zion, Donna Byard Sealey scruples to record the name of every single organist at the Truro church (2001, 49–52), the titles of favourite hymns (52–3), and the factoid that, between 1897 and 2001, the Zion United Baptist Church went through four organs (53). The Zion choir was even acclaimed as ‘the best colored choir “north of the Mason Dixie [sic] Line.”’ (52)25 Exquisitely, the best rebuke to Henry is the Black Cultural Society of Nova Scotia / Canadian Broadcasting Corporation recording Lord You Brought Me a Mighty Long Way: An African Nova Scotian Musical Journey (1998), with its mixture of spirituals, folk songs, and contemporary – but gospel-flavoured – songs.26

B(l)ack Talk from the ‘AfriCanadian ’ Church Fortunately, other ill-grounded pronouncements of other ‘doctored,’ tenured historians have also run afoul of Africadian and African-Canadian church scholars. Indeed, the most damning assessment of the Black Canadian church must be credited to Robin W. Winks, whose epic chronicle, The Blacks in Canada: A History (1971), is fat with excavated facts – and riddled with interpretative faults. Alleges Winks, the African-Canadian churches are ‘divisive, schematic, petty feudatories based upon isolated and impoverished followings’ ([1971] 1997, 344). The Africadian church, in particular, ‘was relatively more backward at the end of the nineteenth century than at the beginning’ (340). Winks crucifies the ‘Negro Canadian’ church with this spiteful polemic: ‘Begging ministers, poverty-stricken churches, and a narrow anti-intellectualism contributed to a sense of separation from the Christian community as a whole; Negro associations and separate Negro sects heightened the sense of distance on both sides of the color barrier; illiterate preachers who … indulged in “religious burlesque” – all these hurt the Negro in his slow climb toward acceptance’ (361). Even optimists must weep to read such ‘scholarship’ (or, rather, propaganda). Vitally, however, Winks’s disdainful assessment of the African-Canadian church has inspired a succession of ripostes from its, no-doubt, tea-drinking gents and chatelaine laity – I mean, scholar-heroes. Thus, in her work, The AfriCanadian Church: A Stabilizer (1983), Dorothy Shadd Shreve seems almost to answer Winks directly: ‘This account has been written to present the positive role of the Black Church and its leaders.’ Gamely, she asserts, these saints were ‘limited in educational opportunities’ but ‘were known to have laboured tirelessly under tremendous hardships in a hostile world.’ Also in their favour is this fact: ‘In the realm of Black history, known to be composed largely of blanks, the writers of church history are more fortunate than writers of secular history’ (7). For one thing, the clergy and their clerical helpmates kept records, thus allowing contemporary historians ‘to record, for posterity, truths relevant to the benefits of a religious experience in the lives of our pioneer Black settlers’ (8). Moreover, these church histories provide impressive evidence of black struggle – ‘race uplift’ – and progress. Introducing Shreve ’s book, Thomas Posey declares, ‘The AfriCanadian Church is the oldest[,] most influential and stable institution in the lives of its people’ (1983, 13). This first sentence of Posey’s introduction is yet another rejoinder to Winks’s scathing – but errant – attack. In Colored Zion, Sealey

Introducing a distinct genre

51

also rectifies Winks. His chapter on the church is subtitled, ‘A Source of Strength?’ Sealey opens her account of Zion Church by attesting, positively, ‘A source of strength, support, power, and protection, Zion Baptist Church is where the people celebrated their time together in the presence of the Lord’ (2001, 16). Sealey also engages Winks by noting that her biographical sketches of ministers ‘should dispel the myth that black preachers were uneducated and untrained; or it should show that Zion’s ministers were a cut above the rest’ (12). Further resistance to Winks’s critique of Afro-Canadian Christianity appears in African-Canadian denunciations of white racism plus Caucasian Christian hypocrisy, but also in celebrations of the glories of a distinctive, black experience–centred faith. Thus, Shreve writes, proudly, ‘Fugitive slaves [in Ontario] … displayed much competence… Upon arrival, they immediately assembled for worship in the log-cabins hastily erected for shelter while building meeting-houses or churches’ (1983, 42). Posey limns the social betterment aspect of African-Canadian religion: Although the major function of the church is to serve their spiritual needs, it also serves as the centre of the social, recreational and educational activities of its members. But equally important to many, the church was a place where they could participate with dignity, pride and freedom. Where they could forget the menial, demeaning jobs during the week as maids, street cleaners, hodcarriers, cooks, cleaning women and janitors in a dominant and hostile white society. On Sunday in the church they became deacons, deaconess, the lead tenor or soprano in the choir, or superintendent of the Sunday School. In short, they became somebody, all brothers and sisters, sons and daughters of God. (1983, 13)

Peter Paris points out that black churches ‘emerged out of the condition of American slavery as the primary institution for social organization and cohesion among their respective peoples.’ Crucially too, ‘in comparison with white churches, they represented then and now an alternative understanding of Christianity and its implications for the construction of a just social order’ (1989, 2). Paris then enumerates the four major uses of the institution – to provide: (a) a political space wherein [members] could experience the necessary conditions of human existence, namely freedom and equality; (b) a moral space wherein individuals could expect to be treated with respect and dignity befitting their nature as ‘children of God’; (c) a socio-cultural space wherein the people could enjoy themselves, express their many and varied talents, and compete for social status; (d) a sacred space wherein the people could discover the ultimate source of meaning for their lives in the midst of their suffering and oppression. (3–4)

Herein lies a rejection of the liberal gradualism and white paternalism implicit in Winks’s suggestion that the ‘Negro’ in Canada faced (or faces) a ‘slow climb toward acceptance ’ ([1971] 1997, 361). Instead, Shreve, Posey, and Peter Paris prefer the existence of a ‘separate ’ black church. As does Sealey: ‘Belonging to Zion helped one to “make a way, to keep up, and to git over.” Its presence is basic to the progress and achievements of Truro’s black citizens’ (Sealey 2001,16; italics in original). Peter Paris supports a ‘separatist’ – or cultural nationalist – interpretation of the function of the Black Church in the Americas: ‘Throughout North America blacks expressed the desire for their own separate churches not only because they preferred their own preachers and worship styles, but, also, as a sign of their moral and religious indignation toward white Christians whose

52 directions home

theological beliefs and moral practices were consonant with pro-slavery sentiments, racial prejudices and discrimination’ (1989, 9).27 Thus, he seconds Frank Stanley Boyd’s argument, in his 1976 edition of McKerrow’s history, where Boyd ‘links the rise of a certain type of African church with what might be called an African ethic, a philosophy of freedom through self-determination’ (1976, 105).28 More directly, Boyd counts the development of the ABANS as a ‘separatist’ phenomenon (iii), and a positive one, thereby disputing Winks’s view that the ‘association of [separate] Baptist churches served to take Negro Baptists in Nova Scotia outside the mainstream of general Baptist development in the province just as the sect was beginning to experience an intellectual flowering’ ([1971] 1997, 340).29 Notably, Sealey establishes that Truro’s Zion Church was created when, in 1896, blacks withdrew from a white congregation, specifically so they could have their own church (2001, 25). Sealey reprints a significant letter, addressed to the white members of Truro’s Prince St. Baptist Church. Here is its opening sentence: ‘We the coloured members in fellowship with you, having come to believe that the number and needs of the coloured population of Truro require their own, we request that you will dismiss us to organize a regular Baptist Church’ (quoted in Sealey 2001, 25). Polite, politic, deferential, reverential, unpretentious, and unassuming, these sentiments constitute, nevertheless, a proclamation of independence. Cherry Paris also promotes an indépendantiste history. ‘Black churches began at a time of great social and political upheaval, a time when black people were considered of no more value than one ’s possessions’ (2001, 36). Hence, ‘churches were segregated, in the beginning by [white] design, later by choice of the [black] members’ (32). James Walker concurs with Cherry Paris, commenting, ‘Once segregated off into a separate congregation, it was a relatively small step to declare independence as a distinct black church’ (1985, 9–10). By the early 1820s, then, reports Walker, ‘separate black churches had been founded in virtually every black community’ (15).30 In Ontario, by the 1850s, ‘Black settlers’ (Shreve 1983, 38), now ‘either Baptists or Methodists’ (42), ‘were property owners with firm roots in Canadian soil’ (38). Too, the founder-organizer of the ABANS, Richard Preston, an ex-slave and War of 1812 refugee from Virginia, dreamed that his association of churches would flourish in its separation – or, to use the just synonym – independence. If his eulogist, Rev. James Thomas, is credible, Preston’s deathbed hope in 1861 was of the ABANS churches ‘rising up and taking a stand upon one common platform amongst the great nations of the earth’ (Minutes, 1861, 5; my italics). This vision is daring, grandiose, and triumphalist. Perhaps we may diagnose Thomas – or Preston himself – with suffering a bad case of megalomania. They dreamt, apparently, that ‘a small group of [ex-]slaves, most of them illiterate and destitute, weakened in body, mind and spirit, having survived the torture and torment of slavery in the Southern United States of America’ (P. Oliver 1994, 13), would forge, nevertheless, a church body that would rank on par with Great Britain, the United States, France, Spain, and other global powers of the era.31 It is a conception as divine as the ‘prophecies’ of William Blake and as magniloquent as the rhetoric of revolutionists and constitutionalists. It is also a grand assertion of freedom and equality.

Preston: Imagining a Saint Africadian church narratives achieve their most persuasive literariness in their narration of the life and works of the ABANS (and AUBANS) founder, Richard Preston.32 Strangely, yet helpfully Christ-like in its biographical implications, Preston is a mystery. He landed in Nova Scotia

Introducing a distinct genre

53

in 1816; he sailed to England in 1831 to win ordination from London Baptists and to secure funds to construct an independent African Baptist Church; he wrought marvels (building an association of two-dozen actually existing black churches in the face of white Christian [hypocritical] hostility); he preached, exhorted, and organized; he declared the existence of the ABANS, at Granville Mountain, Nova Scotia, in 1853; he died in 1861. He left no writings, no undisputed likeness, and no descendants. However, he did leave disciples, followers, and ideological heirs (whose rivalries precipitated a fracture in the ABANS following Preston’s death). These bare bone ‘facts’ about Preston have allowed Africadian church historians to resurrect, as it were, his ‘dry bones,’ re-animating him as the First Saint of the community of African Baptist believers. Depictions of Preston verge on hagiography. McKerrow (who was Preston acolyte James Thomas’s son-in-law) opens his chronicle of the foundational pastorate of Preston (1816–53) by discussing the preacher’s awe-inspiring reunion with his mother. McKerrow’s depiction of this sanctified moment merits full quotation: Among those who were liberated [from U.S. slavery during the War of 1812] and cared for was Father Preston’s mother, who arrived [in Preston, NS] several years before him, … all hopes of ever seeing him again had passed from her memory. [At] length an opportunity presented itself and he made good his escape. [Richard] knew she had gone to Canada, but to what place [he did not know. After some time] he arrived in Halifax; [he heard that she resided in] a district by his own name. [He] decided to look her up. Years of separation caused her recognition to grow somewhat dim [because he had] grown into manhood. On his arrival at her home [he pretended33 to be seeking lodging. As she was alone,] she refused him. Until a peculiar mark … on one side of [his] face, was made visible to her [she had no way of knowing] that he was her long-loved absent son. The embracing of each other was long and lasting, and more than all, he was a converted man, and an exhorter of righteousness of no mean order. (McKerrow 1976, 11–12)

The scene recalls the reunification of the Israelite Joseph, in Egyptian expatriation, with his brethren (Genesis 45). However, its immediate Afro-Christian literary antecedent is the 1785 report by Black Methodist missionary John Marrant that, after some years of captivity among the Cherokee, during which time he adopted ‘Indian stile’ dress and wore his hair ‘in the savage manner, with a long pendant down my back’ ([1785] 1991, 45), he was not recognized by his own mother when he returned to her (47).34 The godly working of fate in Preston’s life has become a de rigueur element in later Africadian Baptist historiography.35 In her Coloured Baptist history, Pearleen Oliver builds on McKerrow’s narrative. She verifies her Christian belief by letting churchy interjections sugar her text: One young [Refugee Negro] had a very different goal, he came [to Halifax] seeking his mother. He had heard in Virginia that she had been taken to Canada and resolved to make his escape and find her. Canada, he soon found out, was a very large country and so he decided to start his search at his point of landing. Making a few enquiries in Halifax he was told of a large settlement at Preston and since his name was Preston he decided to start there. On the long, lonely walk to Preston he prayed that God would prepare a place for him to stay that night. Soon darkness fell and the young lad stopped before a small dwelling. He knocked. A woman slowly opened the door. The young man asked for a night’s lodging. The woman being alone and

54 directions home fearing to take a stranger in urged him to try further on in the settlement. He turned away making visable [sic] to her a peculiar marking on his face.

‘Wait,’ she called, ‘What is your name?’ ‘Richard Preston, ma’am, just landed today from Virginia.’ There was a cry and a sorrowing mother fell to her knees. The first door he had tried in Canada had given him his mother. Wonderful are Thy ways, O Lord. (1953, 22)

In his history, Clayton repeats the story of Preston’s ‘miraculous’ maternal reunion – and in cinematic detail: Our young people, who will have likely heard little about Father Preston, other than his role as founder of the African Baptist Association, and organizer of several Black Churches, would do well to be reminded of the very human story involving his mother being forcibly taken from his side and brought to Canada, eventually settling in Preston; her never-ending prayers of anguish for her son; his miraculous escape from a slave market in Virginia; his long and painful voyage to Halifax; his trek to Preston; is knocking at the ‘nearest’ door, seeking simple shelter for the night; the door being the first one he knocked at; the woman who answered the door, turning him away until having asked Father Preston his name and examining a mark on his face, she knew the lad was her long-lost son. (1984, 16)

Peter Paris’s version of the story is its simplest: ‘Among these newcomers [War of 1812 Black Refugees] was a young man named Richard Preston, who long separated from his mother, had come in search of her whom he knew had come to Nova Scotia. Upon arrival he inquired where she might be and was told to go to the place that bears his name, Preston. As the story has been told, the first house he visited in Preston was that of his mother who recognized him by a facial birthmark’ (1989, 11).36 Shernera D. Colley presents another elementary version of the story in Reflections: The East Preston United Baptist Church on Its 150th Anniversary. However, she adds a carnivalesque, Prodigal-Son-Returned detail: ‘When he landed in Halifax, Richard was determined to find his mother. As he was travelling to Preston, he sought shelter at a home along the way… When Richard came to an old hut, the woman living there was Richard Preston’s mother. She recognized him by the scar on the side of his face and that night there was a big party in the Preston area’ (1996, 22). This Africadian ‘Passion play’ is crucial to African Baptism, for it speaks to the religion’s roots in the experience of mass emigration – exile, really – to escape American slavery, but at the high price – often paid – of further familial separation. Implicit in the Preston story is the whispered promise that God will reunite slavery-sundered clans.37 After all, as Oliver observes, the early African Baptists ‘believed the power of God and unseen angels had delivered them from the savagery of slavery’ (P. Oliver 1994, 38). Yet, Preston is not only the prophet of unification; he is also the tribune of liberty. McKerrow dubs him ‘the apostle to the African race’ ([1895] 1976, 44). In her Beechville Church history, Oliver reprints the 1861 ‘Funeral Oration Delivered on the Death of Father Richard Preston,’ wherein Rev. James Thomas recalls Preston talking about ‘the Churches of our connection’ becoming internationally prominent (P. Oliver 1994, 18). Too, Oliver dubs Preston ‘the prototype Moses’ (13) and asserts that, ‘historically and spiritually he appeared as a prototype of Moses’ (6). (The notion that Preston is the model for the biblical Moses, not vice versa, alerts us that the

Introducing a distinct genre

55

adverb ‘historically’ is, for Oliver, more closely related to magic realism than realism.38) Cherry Paris testifies that, though desolately poor, War of 1812 Black refugee settlers ‘had their freedom and they had their God’ (2001, 37; italics in original). In her booklet history of the Inglewood (Bridgetown), Nova Scotia, community and Baptist church, Inglewood My Community, Edith Cromwell advises that, for Black Loyalists, ‘survival and freedom were ultimate goals’ (1993, 3).39 Assuredly, Clayton, Cromwell, Oliver, and Cherry Paris reiterate McKerrow’s stance: freedom is another miracle, one that God entrusts to His Believers. However, Preston’s miracle working does not conclude with either the magical reunion with his mother or his anti-slavery cum evangelical/prophetic movement leadership. It is also apparent in his dynamic, urgent, incessant travels with ‘his brethren … through the Province ’ and his appointment of elders ‘in each county where there [was] an assembly of saints’ (McKerrow [1895] 1976, 12). Paul-like, Preston, despite meeting ‘great opposition, … went fearlessly along and planted churches in every county between Halifax and Yarmouth included’ (16). Yet another wonder, for McKerrow, is Preston’s ascension ‘from the tobacco fields of Virginia to preach and lecture before the nobility of England’ (13). Not only is Preston a redoubtable ‘planter’ of churches, he is also a gifted orator: McKerrow relates the fascinating anecdote that Preston was an ‘admirer of the late [Nova Scotian] Governor [Joseph] Howe who delighted in getting him into an argument, when he would oppose him merely for a display of his talents’ (17). On another occasion, as a McKerrow correspondent reports, Preston applied his life-altering rhetorical skills to miscreants, who soon found themselves ‘standing in the need of prayer’: A large skeptical crowd had assembled, when several of the respectable ruffians agreed not to allow [Preston] to preach. [F]or fear of creating a fracas, his brethren thought best to postpone the meeting. Said [Father Preston, ‘W]e will go outside as the [G]grace of God gives me sufficient power over men and devils; hence I fear neither.’ At first [the crowd] thought to have matters their own way, but after [Father Preston] got to work, [praying] for the power of the Holy Spirit, both saint[s] and sinners were rejoicing. [A]ll was perfect peace. Tears were shed in abundance from strong men; courage failed them. Many who for the first time heard him, felt themselves in need of a Saviour. (McKerrow [1895] 1976, 48–9)

That homely phrase ‘got to work’ portrays Preston as a sleeves rolled-up, ‘hands-on,’ activist, muscular speaker: a preacher whose sermons were as sweat-producing (and tear inducing) as a show by the now late, always great, African-American singer and dancer James Brown. No wonder then that Rev. Thomas’s 1861 eulogy says of Preston, ‘His voice would act as a charm upon their ears’ (P. Oliver 1994, 20). Thus, Thomas states, sentimentally, ‘There was a dark cloud of sorrow hovered over the churches on the 16th of July, 1861, when they heard that our brother [Preston] was not, for God had taken him, and very many of the [ABANS] members wept aloud and cried, “My Father, My Father …”’ (ibid., 20). (One almost feels here that ‘him’ merits a majuscule ‘H’: Preston is transfigured veritably into Christ.)

The Poetic of ‘Witnessing’ McKerrow’s veneration – nay, pseudo-beatification – of Preston establishes an arch AfricanCanadian poetic: the power of spontaneous ‘flow,’ of organic, ‘rapping’ witnessing. Thus, Rev.

56 directions home

John Hamilton of Hammonds Plains Baptist Church earns praise for his ‘uneducated’ ability to ‘tell in plain language, and plead in earnest terms with the unconverted men and women to accept Jesus as their Lord and Saviour’ (McKerrow [1895] 1976, 65). This bias is also evident in Clayton (1984), who likewise admires Rev. Hamilton (25–6), ‘exhorters’ – or lay preachers (48), their ‘exposition of the Scriptures, unhampered by academic polish’ (51), and the ‘witness given by unlettered men and women’ (32). These persons ‘stand much closer to the spirit of our forefathers than is evident at first glimpse, for they like Father Preston, who came to the work with scarcely any formal training, demonstrate fully the success in the Lord’s work is “not by might, nor by power, but by my Spirit, saith the Lord”’ (51). Thanks to such vernacular testifying, ‘the Bible came alive during revival, it being not unusual for messages to be brought from it by the inspiration of the Holy Spirit’ (33). Such evangelical inspiration moved Beechville ’s Louisa Bailey to pen her verses. To whit: And you poor sinners, though last, not least, Come bow before the mercy seat; [A]nd pour out there your sad complaints For God can turn you into Saints. (quoted in P. Oliver 1994, 42)

Cherry Paris confesses that her historiography reflects God’s ‘will,’ leading her to ‘search … for anything and everything I could find on Windsor Plains and her neighbours’ (2001, 6). Clayton credits emotive truth-telling for connecting contemporary congregations to ‘the forefathers of Emmanuel Baptist,’ who, ‘long after general approval had diminished for the old-fashioned form of revival; when it had … fallen victim to “educational evangelism,” … still persevered in the belief of the preaching of the gospel of salvation through the shed blood of our Saviour’ (1984, 33). Gothic Romanticism colours such utterances. Thus, Clayton even suggests that, in the ruins of the ancestors’ chapels and homes, ‘something springing from them inspires us.’40 ‘Crumbled foundations, long abandoned roads, ancient grave-sites…, homesteads long forsaken; all are held sacred for it is out of these ruins that Emmanuel Baptist has risen’ (1984, 6).41

Appeals for Education The beauty of the African-Canadian and Africadian church narratives is that they delineate the desires of ex-slaves to enjoy four L’s: Liberty, Literacy, Land, and ’Ligion. Thus, as much as writers such as Clayton and McKerrow exult in Spirit-driven, spontaneous preaching and singing, there is also an emphasis, as in all the church histories, on schooling. Nostalgic paeans to untutored religious feeling are presented in tandem with considered petitions and protests regarding inequitable access to secular education. To ‘shout’ because one has the ‘Spirit’ is good, but being able to study, even if silently, is a prerequisite for attaining real equality. Thus, each church history includes a discussion of education – or its lack. In this regard, Cromwell’s Inglewood My Community notes that Africadian high school graduates ‘went on to become professionals in the fields of Canadian Armed Forces, Provincial Health Inspector, Public Health Nurse, Social Worker, Meteorologist, Dietician, Lab Technician, Scientist, Land Surveyor, Soil Analyst, Computer Programmer, Teachers, Physiotherapist, Probation Officer, Research Scientist,

Introducing a distinct genre

57

Executive Secretaries, Police Constables’ (E. Cromwell 1993, 23): It is a list of updated, medieval guilds.42 Sealey’s Colored Zion, with its detailed biographies of many ministers and prominent church members, proves that many Zion Baptist ministers were, in fact, college graduates, thus disputing Winks’s stereotype of universal illiteracy among African-Canadian congregations. Rev. Adam Simpson Green, B.A, M.A., for instance, spoke in 1904 at Cornwallis Street Baptist Church, Halifax, on ‘The Future of the Canadian Negro.’ His published address indicates that he utilized French as well as Latin quotations.

PARENTHETICAL MATTER Harvey Amani Whitfield proposes that Richard Preston chose his surname after finding his mother in Preston, Nova Scotia (2006, 1). However, Whitfield cites no evidence for this belief, which is contradicted by McKerrow’s history (McKerrow [1895] 1976, 11–12).

Finish Lawrence W. Levine ’s excellent monograph, Black Culture and Black Consciousness: Afro-American Folk Thought from Slavery to Freedom, holds, ‘It is time for historians to expand their own consciousness by examining the consciousnesses of those they have hitherto ignored or neglected’ (1977, ix). Levine posits that such an examination must take into account folklore. I agree, but add that literary critics, too, especially Canadian ones, must scrutinize folk creations, including, as this essay insists, church histories. Like Levine, I know that ‘the folk are not historians.’ But also, like Levine, I believe they are ‘the products and creators of a culture, and that culture includes a collective memory’ (389). This collective memory is operative in the church narratives whose writers return, over and over, to the heroic struggle of black refugees and immigrants to build new homes and new homelands and to seek justice and education and redemption, and who recall illustrious, exemplary ‘saints’ such as Richard Preston and James Thomas.43 For them, as it is for us, the past, whether in history or in literature, is never some vanished or vanquished entity, but is, rather, a constantly provocative manifestation of adventure and adversity.44 The church narrative authors know that no one truly writes a history, just an allegory of the present.45 Nevertheless, we cannot accept, on faith alone, the African-Canadian religious-Romantic construction of African-Canadian history: Yes, never. Rather, we must accept the irretrievability of any past – that is to say, the real impossibility of writing any history. As soon as we try to pinpoint causes and origins, we find ourselves rewriting Genesis, beginning with obscurity, and all the subsequent light reveals shadows. The only escape for African Canadians from this dilemma is to imagine that we may imagine the past.46 This act requires a faithful doubting. The wise, classic, black, church historians empower us to make this judgment: history is literature, not science, and that is the only history that makes sense. The original Homers of African-Canadian literature must be, then, the church-and-community chroniclers: closer to bards than they are drabs (prosaic historians), they are, as scribers of congregational memory, latter-day versions of the anonymous crafters – makers, poets – of the spirituals. But writers are often secular historians as well as sociologists and psychologists. One such scribe is Africadian playwright George Boyd, the subject of the following essay.

4 Afro-Gynocentric Darwinism in the Drama of George Elroy Boyd For Ayanna Black (1939–2009)1

Preliminary (Playful) Polemic Nationalism and fascism begin at home and take their sustenance from the family undergoing a crisis, particularly one of identity. Given the brutal tragedy of the four-century-long transatlantic African slave trade (with its bloodily efficient exploitation, sexual and economic, plus often liquidation, of its human capital), its diasporic survivors, especially intellectuals and artists, focus necessarily on the situation – read plight – of the black family. Certes, the nouns family, identity, and crisis are virtual synonyms in the literature of the African Atlantic, a cultural geography that includes Canada (as much as it does the better known ‘neo-African’ spaces of the United States, the Caribbean, Latin America, and western Europe). Of course, a signal balm for these familial identity crises involves the efficacy – and risks – of cultural nationalism. Thus, two dramas by African–Nova Scotian – or Africadian – playwright George Elroy Boyd depict black familial strife that provokes acts congruent with nationalism – and fascism. Boyd’s teleplay Consecrated Ground ([1992] 1996) relates the struggle of a black woman, Clarice, to bury her dead infant son in black community space despite the objections of a white-controlled metropolis. His play Gideon’s Blues (1996) narrates the events that prod a black mother to murder her adult son and only child. Boyd examines the African-Canadian family and its race, class, and gender issues to excavate the tensions between an attractively protective cultural nationalism and a sorrowfully deranging, self-destructive fascism. Boyd traces trajectories – dramatic arcs – always patent in New World African scholarship. Hence, introducing the collection Colored Contradictions: An Anthology of Contemporary AfricanAmerican Plays, co-editor and African-American scholar Harry J. Elam, Jr., scrutinizing plays exploring ‘the Black family in crisis,’ insists that ‘external and internal forces threaten the security and the values’ – that is, identities – ‘of the families in each of these … works’ (1996, 12). Elam’s perception confirms the perspicacity of Black British scholar Paul Gilroy’s insight that ‘the trope of family which is such a recurrent feature of [African-American] discourse is itself a characteristically American means for comprehending the limits and dynamics of racial community’ (1993, 191). Elam’s rhetorical strategies produce, then, not ‘Africentricity,’ but what ‘might be more properly called Americocentricity’ (ibid.). Such scholarship contributes, alleges Gilroy, to ‘the great ethnocentric canon of African-American literature ’ (186) and ‘the lure of ethnic particularism and nationalism’ (4).

afro-gynocentric darwinism

59

Throughout The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (1993), Gilroy wars perpetually against the ‘ever-present danger’ of ‘African-American exceptionalism’ (4) and ‘ethnic absolutism’ (5); yet, his fear that African-American cultural nationalism may morph into narrow particularity is apt. Twentieth-century history shows that nationalism regresses, potentially, into fascism, that ideology claiming, ‘to fulfill both the aspiration of the “left” for an egalitarian community and the demand of the “right” for order and authority’ (Hatlen 1985, 148). Explains U.S. scholar Burton Hatlen, fascism seeks ‘a principle of community’ founded upon ‘the nation’ (149), thus fusing ‘a “socialist” egalitarianism with a “conservative” authoritarianism’ (150).2 The peril inherent in Afrocentrism, then, is that it may assume fascist hallmarks such as ‘militarism’ and attempts ‘to recover authentic community and legitimate authority’ (Gilroy 1993, 152). Specifically, for Gilroy, fear for the fate of black males may drive their advocates to champion fantastic, fascistic ‘panaceas.’ Gilroy is wary, then, of speech wherein ‘the social and economic crises of whole communities become most easily intelligible … as a protracted crisis of masculinity’ (194). Almost as if to flout Gilroy’s liberal nervousness, Elam uses the rubric ‘Black Men at Risk’ (that is, in crisis) and comments that the plays denominated ‘explore issues of black male identity’ (1996, 5).3 Elam commits, then, in Gilroy’s eyes, a grave sin: ‘The integrity of the race is thus made interchangeable with the integrity of black masculinity’ (Giroy 1993, 194). Nevertheless, African America is not the only site where ‘the contemporary political and economic crises of blacks … are [portrayed as] crises of … self-identity’ (ibid., 194). Black cultural nationalism, in its racialist and patriarchal modes, also speaks to disaffected African Canadians. Boyd’s plays engage profoundly with the supposedly American trope of family and its ‘familiars’ of identity and crisis. They demonstrate that, in Canada too, pace Gilroy, ‘the symbolic reconstruction of [black] community is projected onto an image of the ideal heterosexual couple.’ Here, too, ‘the patriarchal family is the preferred institution’ (1993, 194). Indeed, African Canadians, like African Americans, address an existential dilemma that American literary critic Robert Bone describes as the alternation of our ‘deepest psychological impulses between the magnetic poles of assimilationism and Negro nationalism’ (1969, 4). African-Canadian writers and intellectuals also balance what Gilroy cites as ‘the unsatisfactory alternatives of Eurocentrism and black nationalism’ (1993, 186). Still, Boyd’s dramas articulate both an American-style racial chauvinism and a Canadian dissent thereof. While the plays bemoan the absence of strong, self-empowered, ‘race ’-identified, black males, they stress the presence of strong-willed, self-empowering, black females – or, to employ the anachronistic designation of a century ago, ‘race women,’ those who mean to ‘uplift’ black people. Boyd thus fulfils the tendency of Canadian literature, in contrast to that of the United States, to emphasize ‘the weak-male/strong-female syndrome’ (Lipset 1990, 64), as American sociologist Seymour Martin Lipset terms it in Continental Divide: The Values and Institutions of the United States and Canada. Citing Gaile McGregor’s idea that ‘“the Canadian literary hero seems to demonstrate a distinctly [female] gender aspect,” while the American is masculine ’ (ibid., 64), Lipset agrees that ‘“the Canadian heroine … is strong” and dominant within the family, while the reverse is true in American fiction.’ He also points to a study of ‘the story content of EnglishCanadian films’ that finds, ‘through many different scenarios …, “the radical inadequacy of the male protagonist – his moral failure, especially, and most visibly, in his relationships with women.”’ In contrast, female characters possess ‘“greater authenticity,” having “the power to love and trust and commit themselves without adding up the cost”’ (64). While Boyd adumbrates an African-American-style cultural nationalism, he differs by foregrounding women, not men,

60 Directions home

as its primary exponents. His plays enact, then, an Afro-gynocentric Darwinism in which black women represent ‘the survival of the fittest,’ while the primary black male characters appear as sly, cringing, obsolete sell-outs.4

The Playwright Born in Halifax in 1952 and raised as a member of the more than two-centuries-old Africadian community, journalist Boyd first achieved national prominence in Canada as an anchor of Canadian Broadcasting Corporation’s Newsworld television channel in 1992. His first play, Shine Boy, treating the life of Africadian pugilist George Dixon (1870–1908), debuted at Halifax’s Neptune Theatre in 1988 to fine reviews. His teleplay version of Consecrated Ground, which deals with the destruction of the sesquicentarian Africadian community of Africville in the 1960s, has never been produced, but a stage version played Halifax’s Sir James Dunn Theatre to acclaim in 1999. Then, a published version of the stage play (1999) was nominated for a Governor-General’s Literary Award for English-language Drama in 2000. Boyd’s Gideon Blues, a play delineating the consequences of the development of a crack cocaine cum prostitution economy among members of the black community in inner-city Halifax in the 1980s, was produced under the auspices of Upstart Theatre and presented at the now-defunct Cunard Street Theatre in Halifax in 1990, and then revived at the Neptune Theatre in 1996. Boyd is an African-Canadian playwright of the first rank, and his staged demesne – marginalized, black urban Nova Scotia – constitutes a major, distinct form of African-Canadian culture, namely, that which may be classed as the classically unitarian. Given this fact, his decision to populate his plays with stern women, meeching men, absent fathers, and dead babies exhibits an unsparing, sociological account of contemporary urban African Canada. Our reality, according to Boyd, is communal disintegration, a fate expressed via the collapse of black male loyalty to the self, the family, and the ‘nation.’

Boyd’s Black ‘Boys’ Boyd’s teleplay, Consecrated Ground, opens with the sounds of a ‘howling, snow-cluttered’ wind and ‘a baby crying, weakly.’ This contrast between a mighty, white-shaded wind and a frail black infant – Tully, the baby boy of Clarice and Willem Lyle – foreshadows other imagery emphasizing the emasculation of black males, and the masculinization of black females, within the inclement context of a white male-dominated society. Thus, while viewers of the teleplay hear, over the opening credits, the hymn ‘Faith of our Father[s],’ we see, ironically, not a man, but a woman, Clarice, ‘pumping vigorously’ – in a parody of male coital performance – to draw water from a well.5 However, an ominous futility – or sterility – is figured by her production of only a ‘trickle of water’ from the phallic ‘spout’ of the pump. ‘The Faith of our Fathers’ – despite the best efforts of a literal mother – has almost run dry – right beside the ‘bleak, sea-scraped landscape ’ in which Africville is situated (G. Boyd [1992] 1996, 12). This image of ironic aridity foresees that moment when, during a battle with her husband that dissolves into ‘crying in wild embraces and kisses,’ Clarice does not yield to him in love, but, rather, tells him to leave: ‘Willem … I don’t … I don’t wantcha here, anymore’ (29; ellipses in original). Clarice ’s first words in the teleplay,

afro-gynocentric darwinism

61

spoken during a blizzard, accent her frustrating position as a black mother in a snow-white environment where the faith of the ancestral patriarchs cannot produce enough water to provide sustenance for the new – and last – generation of Africville residents: ‘Momma’s comin’, Tully. Momma’s comin’.6 I’m just gettin’ some water for your formula, baby. Momma’s comin’ …’ (13; ellipsis in original) Tully is, in truth, the last of the line. He is an only child born in a black community, located on the extreme north end tip of peninsular Halifax, that is being slowly razed by bulldozers representing white urban planning and social engineering, forces that have declared Africville a ‘segregated slum’ and ordered its demolition. Thus, when Clarice, responding to the final, shattering wails of her hungry infant boy, runs into her house and sees a ‘shadow dart away from the top of [Tully’s] crib’ and rats ‘scurry’ (13), these pests that have fatally bitten her child appear as kin to the bulldozers ripping apart Africville itself: ‘A rat, perched atop a pile of debris, scurries away as a bulldozer starts and idles nearby’ (16). Truly, the rats’ white teeth that penetrate Tully’s black flesh mirror the bulldozers – ‘Those destroyin’ creatures’ (19) – tearing through Africville residents’ homes. Too, in the instant just before Clarice retrieves her dead – or dying – son, ‘a rat runs between her legs’ (13), an action that anticipates the later motion of a bulldozer passing ‘through the frame ’ (16) of a shot of Africville. Both images reflect the violation – or desecration – of the community. Just as rats ‘reap’ – or ‘rape’ – the final offspring of the Africville patriarchs, so do bulldozers violate the homes that, as Clarice says of her own, ‘Granddaddy built … with his bare hands’ (24). But only Clarice resists the aggression of the bulldozers. Her husband, Willem, recognizes that official Halifax ‘ain’t buildin’ no monuments. They tearin’ the memories down’ (21). But he is more a foe to Clarice – or Leasey, as he calls her – than ally. To frustrate her plan to bury their son in Africville, he secretly sells their property to the City of Halifax (23). In vivid contrast to his forceful wife, whose name evokes that of a ‘masculine ’ horror film heroine,7 Willem is deceitful and weak-willed.8 Though Africville matriarch Sarah James tells Willem that his wife ‘needs you. She needs your strength, son. Now you got to be strong. Strong enough for the both of ya’ (18), and though Willem infantilizes Clarice by calling her ‘baby’ incessantly, it is she who displays ‘determination’ (19). When she tells the white city employee Clancy, ‘They’re scared of you and yer bulldozers. They’re plain scared, and that’s why they signed their land away’ (26), she embodies communal courage. Boyd submits, in his prologue, that the teleplay is ‘the story of a proud and strong woman, who refused to acquiesce…’ (11; ellipsis in original). Clancy, too, soon knows that Clarice can ‘feel … strongly’ (27). Clarice ’s strength contrasts with Willem’s capitulation to white authority. She wants Tully buried in Africville, but Willem protests that, because Clancy objects, it cannot be done. Willem is cowed by ‘the white man,’ who has his ‘ordinances … and … by-laws – and […] the police behind him’ (19). Intriguingly, Willem conflates the phrases ‘white man’ and ‘the man,’ thus implying that manliness and its popular attributes – power, determination, strength – are consonant with whiteness.9 He lectures Leasey, ‘The man say you gotta have consecrated ground to bury someone. And there ain’t no consecrated ground in Africville ’ (20). His declaration – the proof he has internalized marginality – summons this answering sermon from Clarice: ‘My ancestors, they consecrated this ground. All the baptisms down at the beach […] I watched ‘em consecrate it. This is where they lived and died … where … where they LOVED, Willem … (starts to cry) … AIN’T NOBODY ON THIS EARTH TELLIN’ ME AFRICVILLE AIN’T CONSECRATED GROUND!!’ (19). Following these exclamations, Clarice scorns white-male

62 Directions home

power: ‘Ain’t no Mister-Clancy-city-white man tellin’ me. I saw it … I lived it … Africville is consecrated ground.’ Clarice backs up her sentiment both by throwing ‘Willem’s jacket at him’ (20) and by shortly, metonymically, demonizing Clancy as ‘murderin’ hands’ (21). She names him a killer: ‘You killed my child. You killed Tully the day you [the City of Halifax] built that dump on our doorsteps’ (26). She also deems Clancy ‘the devil’ (25) whose bulldozers are ‘desecratin’ the land, tearin’ up people’s lives. You and your machine ’s desecratin’ their souls’ (26). Defiant, she affirms that ‘Tully’s gonna be buried in Africville where he belongs’ (21). Others flee; Clarice fights. For all her swagger and energy, though, Clarice is nearly thwarted by her spineless husband. Constantly belittling himself and other blacks, Willem feels he must give way to the city’s ‘big plans’ involving ‘big industry’ (22). His cowardice is a form of ‘penis envy.’ The white phallus – pictured as lucre, bulldozers, and ‘the man’ himself – seems indomitable. Thus, in the flaccid posture of bowing his head ‘as if in prayer,’ Willem is ‘seduced’ into signing over his wife ’s ancestral land to Clancy (23). The ‘Quit Claim Deed’ that Clancy then hands Willem symbolizes the latter’s surrender, and his abjection is emphasized by his signing of the papers on, as Clarice complains, ‘our baby’s casket’ (28).10 He has been dispossessed twice: once by rats, now by laws; he and Clarice are now ‘a childless couple’ (23), landless, and soon homeless. When Clarice learns how fully she has been dispossessed by her husband’s treason, ‘a look of dreaded realization possesses her face’ (1996, 27), and she confronts the Bible-reading, church deacon Willem, calling him a ‘black … bastard. You black, ungrateful, sonofabitch,’ here utilizing race-sex epithets that, metaphorically, accent his bastardized status as childless father and unsexed husband. Willem retaliates by denouncing Clarice as a ‘stupid, goddamned bitch,’ but, when she attacks him physically, he does not resist: ‘Clarice lashes at him, repeatedly slapping his face. Willem takes it, not raising a hand to defend himself.’ Here too Clarice seems masculine, symbolically unmanning her husband by ‘slapping him,’ and he is ‘feminine,’ remaining passive. Clarice ’s assault on Willem culminates in her raced dismissal of his behaviour: ‘the white man takes advantage of stupid niggers and you are a stupid nigger, Willem’ (28). This comment positions the white man as man and Willem as his antithesis, a non-man, a ‘stupid nigger.’ Thus, even when blows melt into caresses, Clarice does not accept her husband again, but rather says, ‘I want ya to leave … to go …’ Although Clarice allows herself a rare moment of defeatism (‘Don’t be ashamed of us, Willem […] we all … they allow us to be …’ [29]), she ejects her husband from their marital bed – and from the land she has inherited, but that he has surrendered over the body of their heir apparent. In the final scene of the teleplay, the Lyle family is reconstituted in the instance of Clarice ’s triumphant burial of her dead son, his body wrapped only in a blood-soaked blanket, with Willem helping her to dig the grave with their ‘bare hands.’11 Yet, the burial occurs secretively, at night, with a bulldozer growling, threateningly, in the near-distance. This ‘triumph’ is, then, empty, for the Lyle heir is dead and Africville is dying. Ironically, the teleplay’s opening hymn, ‘Faith of Our Fathers,’ plays again in the background. Although Reverend Miner,12 the black Baptist minister who conducts an impromptu burial service, proclaims, ‘I do consecrate this holy and sacred ground,’ his words are almost ‘drowned’ out by the ‘noise of the bulldozer.’ Reciting Psalm 8, Miner intones, ‘Out of the mouths of babes and sucklings thou hast ordained strength, oh Lord, because of thine enemies’ (32; my italics), but his words apply best to Clarice, not Willem. Her strength is what survival requires. She affirms the principle of Sarah James’s nostrum: ‘I guess, really, if yer a nigger in this country – ya gotta learn how to be agile or you’ll perish’ (31).

afro-gynocentric darwinism

63

Veritably, the Promised Land of Africville becomes a dumped-on graveyard, a ghost town of memories. If the ending conjures up John Milton’s Paradise Lost, we do not see here Adam and Eve, ‘Our ling’ring parents,’ with the ‘World … all before them,’ ‘hand in hand with wand’ring steps and slow, / Through Eden [taking] thir [sic] solitary way’ (Milton [1674] 1962, XII, 638, 646–8), but, rather, two childless parents, Clarice and Willem, ‘digging’ a grave at night with their bare hands in likely very cold, very hard soil. Boyd shows us a diabolical paradise. In Milton’s epic, Adam learns that, though he must quit Eden, he ‘shalt possess / A paradise within thee, happier far’ (XII, 586–7). In Boyd’s teleplay, Sarah tells the Adamic Clarice, ‘Africville lives in here (gestures to her heart) … And you’ll see, baby, Tully’ll live in here too’ (G. Boyd [1992] 1996, 31). But it’s a bleak vision of a post-mortem Eden. Worse, the black male ‘Adam’ in this story of a failed paradise, where ‘the sun sets majestically on the … Africville [garbage] dump’ (16), is a philistine father and a eunuch husband. Clarice is – or will be – better off without Willem, who stands exposed as a cowardly gravedigger of ‘the race ’ … Boyd’s Consecrated Ground closes with a funeral that precludes any continuance of the Lyle patrimony. Gideon’s Blues opens with one that signals the termination of the second generation of the three-generation Steele clan. Indeed, when Louise13 – Momma-Lou – Steele reflects on the burial of her murdered adult son, Gideon,14 she remarks, in her prayer to her deceased husband and Gideon’s father, ‘The rain, Poppy, it drooled all over our baby’s grave, all over Gideon’s coffin, and pooled black, into that dark, gleamin’ hole where they put ’em … my lovely baby, Poppy, our only, lovely-est chile …’ (G. Boyd 1996b, 37). Like Consecrated Ground, Gideon’s Blues debuts with a parent mourning the loss of an only child, a dead son. However, here the funeral occurs first, with the play unfolding in panoramic flashback. Still, this play is, even more than Consecrated Ground, a harsh study of black male failure and the compensating necessity for matriarchal assertion to preserve – or conserve – ‘the race.’ Commenting on his creation of the character Bigger Thomas in Native Son (1940), African-American novelist Richard Wright saw that his homicidal, naïve revolutionary was ‘an American product, a native son of this land [who] carried within him the potentialities of either Communism or Fascism’ [quoted in Gilroy 1993, 163]. Boyd addresses this dualism, but accents, strikingly, the ‘fascistic’ possibility. Wright’s poor – and poorly educated – Bigger lands a legitimate job that, indirectly, lands him in jail, with two grisly murders of women, white and black, on his conscience. On death row, under the tutelage of his Communist Party lawyer, he rejects nihilism and accepts socialist existentialism. In contrast, Boyd’s colleged, bourgeoisaspiring Gideon Steele finds employ as a Machiavellian drug dealer, who is slain shortly after he slays his shifty brother-in-law, Seve. While Gideon comes to practise vampirish gangsterism in Halifax’s ‘hood’ – that is to say, the economically depressed North End defined by Gottingen Street – it is his mother, Momma-Lou, who accepts, in the end, a doctrine of racialist fascism to ‘cleanse ’ away Gideon’s criminality. Vitally, where Wright’s novel opens, famously, with the ‘Brrrrrrriiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiinng! ’ of an alarm clock (Wright [1940] 1998, 3), our first glimpse of Gideon occurs after his wife, Cherlene, ‘calls … ‘GIDEON!! FOR GODSAKES, GIDEON, WILL YOU WAKE UP!!? GIDEON!!’ (G. Boyd 1996b, 39). Bigger’s ‘awakening’ triggers, eventually, his attainment of a socialist consciousness, but Gideon’s own prefaces his dismal death and his mother’s reactionary radicalization. While Consecrated Ground may be described as a black comedy, with its (temporary) reunification of now-ghoulish parents, Gideon’s Blues is an unstinting, black-on-black tragedy. To begin, Gideon matures as a fatherless child, whose ‘Poppy’ dies when he is a boy. His

64 Directions home

mother, Momma-Lou, the ‘Family matriarch’ (36), becomes his nurturer and provider, but, in reality, the funds to raise Gideon – and later to support him, Cherlene, and their two children, Wendolyn and Pauli – derive from ‘Poppy’s pension’ (49). Although Poppy is a vanished father, his name is a slang variation of Papa – or Father, or God, a paternalist being also unhelpfully absent.15 But, just as Poppy’s death benefits assist the surviving Steeles, so does Poppy-as-pseudoGod,16 as a constant interlocutor for Momma-Lou in her prayers, provide psychological succour to her as matriarch. Despite her intimate conversations with her providential overlord, however, Momma-Lou must manage, all alone, her son, daughter-in-law, and grandchildren, all of whom live under her roof. Still, she seems soldierly or police-like in demeanour.17 Momma-Lou recalls, ‘I had ammunition for Mr. Gideon’s butt when he was young.’ When he lazed in bed, she would beat on the headboard with a billy club so hard ‘poor Gideon used to think it was the second coming of Queen Nzinga’18 (39). (Note that she refers here not to a male military figure, but a female one.) Later, when Gideon argues with his wife and his mother, Momma-Lou warns, ‘Don’t you know you’re outnumbered here?’ (51). Remembering her marriage to Poppy, Momma-Lou says pointedly, while speaking with Cherlene’s wayward sister, Baye, ‘I was bigger than him’: ‘Look, girl – there was a time I was ready to kick his little ole black behind! He gave me my baby and wanted no … watcha call it? “responsibility?” I say, “don’t go down that-there dirt road, Poppy – been there – done that! U-turn!” … And we worked it out’ (58). Momma-Lou is a feisty, ‘take-noprisoners’ dictatrix. In politico-sexual terms, too, she is ‘bigger’ than Poppy – and Gideon, who admits that she used ‘to beat the blue-blazes out of me’ (68). Though she practises the ‘feminine ’ pursuit of ‘needlepoint,’ she is also capable of ‘brandishing a walking cane ’ (67), or ‘menacingly grab[bing] an old cane ’ (99), or ‘retrieving a rifle’ (111) and threatening to shoot her only child (112). Too, her needles, cane, and rifle are all phallic markers of her masculine attributes of daring, ‘guts,’ and macho survivalism (an ideology Sarah references in Consecrated Ground [31]). Remarking on Gideon’s search for work, Momma-Lou states, ‘People don’t ’preciate how much stamina and persistence a black person need to even apply for a job in this here white town’ (43). Recalling Hatlen’s assertion that ‘fascism finds its logical fulfillment in a militarism directed against the enemy without [the nation]’ (1985, 151), Momma-Lou’s folksy combativeness versus ‘white ’ Halifax is neither benign – nor improper. Momma-Lou is confident and mighty: not Gideon. In 1.2, Cherlene dubs him ‘Mister Tiredbutt’ (G. Boyd 1996b, 39) and ‘Mister sleepy head’ (40), names suggesting a dopey and somnambulent masculinity. He sleeps through his children’s departures for their maternal grandmother’s house, but, finding a note left by his son, Pauli, ‘the little big man,’ registers that he has been commanded to ‘Take care-a Mommy for me Daddy!’ (41). The boy is more alert to ‘male ’ capacity than is his father. Considering his daughter, Wendolyn, and her interest in art, Gideon says, ‘I hope she won’t depend on her old man to put her through school.’ Defeatism scores his personality (just as it does that of Willem in Consecrated Ground). Thus, preparing for an interview in a bank, Gideon predicts the act’s futility: ‘Now how many niggers are loans officers in a bank in Nova Scotia?’ (42). When he succeeds in failing, Gideon still asserts masculinist agency, telling his mother, ‘you don’t have to pay for this family – I’m the man of this house.’ His mother contests this claim: ‘You may be the man of the house, but I got Poppy’s pension. That make HIM the man of the house!’ (49). (Later, Momma-Lou complains to Poppy, ‘It seemed to me like society did nothin’ but use that boy … lied to ’em, used ’em til they used him up! Nobody will ever make me believe that they didn’t just goad our Gideon into playing some deadly game he couldn’t win’ [61].19)

afro-gynocentric darwinism

65

Gideon enjoys a macho independence only while dealing drugs for Grebanier, a satanic, Québécois criminal. Soon, his desire for Cherlene is rejuvenated, and he transforms from ‘Mister Tired-butt’ to ‘a butt man,’ sexually excited, virile, and wanting his wife: ‘The mother of my two beautiful kids, her man strongly indicating that he is just one stroke from ecstasy’ (71). At the height of his violent profit-making, Gideon aspires to imitate Grebanier, ‘The godfather’ (36) – that is, his worldly Pappy/Poppy – even telling an associate, Amos, ‘I’ll BUY ya Newfoundland’ (93). By playing his own Mafia-style ‘godfather,’ Gideon constitutes his own (absent) father, but one as corrupt as Shakespeare’s Macbeth. When Cherlene discovers the source of his flashy wealth, she yells, ‘I HATE YOU!’ at her ‘whore of a husband’ (95). Then, echoing Clarice ’s attack on Willem in Consecrated Ground (28), Cherlene ‘slaps Gideon’ (95). This act upsets him: ‘She slapped me man. We never laid a hand on one another before this’ (96). Castrated figuratively, then arrested briefly (106), Gideon requires ‘correction.’ So, Momma-Lou levels ‘Poppy’s rifle ’ (111) at her son while dubbing him ‘boy’: ‘That’s how you been acting. Just like a child Pauli’s age. You think I raised you to be a boy? I raised you to be a man! A bright, proud black …’ (111; ellipsis in original). Despite his mother’s threatening entreaties, Gideon executes Grebanier’s order to murder Seve, Gideon’s own brother-in-law, by cutting his throat (115). This murder caps the multiple infractions and immoralities plaguing the Haligonian black community. Cherlene opines, ‘We got women prostituting themselves, our men becoming junkies. Dope! COCAINE … Crack is eatin’ this community.’ Momma-Lou avers that ‘crack don’t like mortar’ (78). Tracing the responsibility for this dégringolade back to Gideon, Momma-Lou, disguised as a gargoyle during the Halifax Mardi Gras (staged on Halloween), designs to commit ‘carnage ’ by shooting Gideon to death (121). She stalks him, lures him into an alleyway, and executes her son for his unmanly refusal to ‘do the right things.’ Before this drastic event, Momma-Lou, as ‘Gargoyle,’ preaches to Gideon on black history: ‘The things you be fightin’ against be as old as the plains of Kenya – don’tcha understand? I hadda fight ’em. Poppy hadda fight ’em and Pauli and Wendolyn – they gonna have to fight em too’ (122). Gideon rejects this moral ‘lecture,’ damning it as irrelevant for ‘the street.’ But Gargoyle–Momma-Lou exclaims, ‘WE’RE STANDIN’ IN THE JUNGLES – A KENYA!! WE’RE RIGHT IN THE MIDDLE OF THE PLAINS!’ (122). For her, Halifax’s streets and alleys are a wilderness-battlefield, where her son, by harming other blacks and refusing to combat white racism, becomes a race traitor (akin to Willem in Consecrated Ground). Momma-Lou’s rebuke of her son exhibits a stark, Darwinist fascism: ‘It’s the plains, boy. And on the plains it’s survival. Survival of the fittest. The wee animals? The poison animals? Gotta be culled from the herd’ (122). Here Boyd recapitulates the argument of African-American playwright Charles Fuller’s Pulitzer Prize–winning drama, A Soldier’s Play (1981), whose ‘tragic hero, Sergeant Vernon C. Waters, takes upon himself the role of savior of all African Americans in a racist society’ (Macon 1997, 301). Problematically though, Waters is a crypto-fascist who drives another black, a Mississippi blues man, C.J., to commit suicide because his lack of sophistication marks him as expendable, as an animal to be ‘culled from the herd.’ Waters’s speech justifying his fascistic oppression of C.J. seems premonitory of Momma-Lou’s ‘execution speech’: Them Nazis ain’t all crazy – a whole lot of people just can’t fit into where things seem to be goin’ – like you, C.J. The black race can’t afford you no more … The day of the geechy [poor Southern black] is gone, boy – the only thing that can move the race is power. It’s all the white respects – and people like you just make us seem like fools. And we can’t let nobody go on believin’ we all like you! You bring us down – make people think the whole race is unfit! (Fuller [1981] 1995, 38)

66 Directions home

In Gideon’s Blues, Gideon’s own mother deems him expendable because his ‘lack of manhood,’ his refusal to resist white power positively, has led him to prey on his brethren and sistren. Thus, Boyd revises Fuller by transferring the locus of tragedy from the murderous, ‘improve-the-race ’ fascist (who is, in Fuller’s play, ‘executed’ by a vengeful black) to the victim – namely, Gideon20 – of a homicidal, ‘family values’–styled campaign for moral (and racial) ‘hygiene.’ Too, Gideon’s executioner is exonerated. Before she shoots her ‘baby,’ her ‘only-est child’ (G. Boyd 1996b, 37), Momma-Lou–Gargoyle reminds him that, as a black person – and as a man – he has failed to do what a black person must, that is, persevere: ‘you walk … you WALK! … It’s [white racism is] a crime against black humanity, but a crime does not cancel a crime … you stooped too low…’ (122). After slaying Gideon, Momma-Lou sheds her Gargoyle costume, dons mourning clothes, and cries to Poppy about how death has taken ‘our baby’s heart … our baby’s soul’ (124). Gideon’s decadent, failing, black masculinity necessitates his destruction. While rats, bulldozers, and white liberals such as Clancy represent evil and the demonic in Consecrated Ground, in Gideon’s Blues, it is crack cocaine, prostitution, and Grebanier who do so. Indeed, Gideon’s doom may be eternal, for Grebanier is an image of Satan. When Momma-Lou is sitting alone doing needlepoint in 1.9, she senses the presence of ‘some all-seein’ invisible evil’ and, we read, ‘the spectre of Grebanier is raised in the background’ (77). When Grebanier next interrupts Momma-Lou’s needlepoint, in 2.10, she calls him ‘a agitatin’, [sic] devil – a Shango.’ Grebanier responds simply, ‘I have been called worse. I am but the broker for the supplier of demands’ (116), a self-justification Beelzebub himself could have coined. When Gideon is buried, ‘light’ – hellish – ‘seems to be emitting from the grave itself ’ (37). Blight is not just supernatural in origin however. In Consecrated Ground, bulldozers and social workers annihilate Africville, but, in post-Africville Halifax, in Gideon’s Blues, ‘every brick, every stone, rock and pebble that my parents put together to build this community is dissolvin’ … meltin’ away …,’ notes Momma-Lou, blaming crack addiction (78). In both Boyd plays, then, future black generations are in jeopardy. In Consecrated Ground, Clarice tells Clancy angrily, ‘Ya ain’t happy, until ya feed the little black babies to [the rats]’ (27). The next generation of Africvillers either die or leave. In Gideon’s Blues, Seve ’s prostitute-and-crack-junkie girlfriend, Baye, symbolizes the destruction of children: ‘This baby, formin’ in my belly… my little baby’s a junkie ’ (56). The fetus perishes: Seve ‘beat her so bad […] she miscarry his chile … she dropped that baby-to-be ’ (99). The children of Cherlene and Gideon survive the murderous violence that claims Gideon, Seve, and Baye ’s fetus. However, by the end of Gideon’s Blues, Cherlene becomes, like Momma-Lou, a widow-matriarch in the household. Once again, as in Consecrated Ground, the female survives the misguided male ’s self-destructiveness.

Epitaph In Consecrated Ground, in an opening shot, the camera highlights a ‘CONTAMINATED WATER’ sign that warns residents of Africville of the need to boil the water before drinking (G. Boyd [1992] 1996, 13). The implicit allegory is clear: Africville is already ‘contaminated’ – or weakened – by ‘corrupt elements,’ even before the assassin-bulldozers arrive. In Gideon’s Blues, too, pollution and its attendant connotations of moral impurity are extended to human beings. The drug addict–prostitute and expectant mother, Baye, spreads contamination (51) and ‘contagion’ (57), while illegal drugs, distributed by Gideon, corrode the bonds of community

afro-gynocentric darwinism

67

and family. Moreover, the invasive, disease-laden rats that kill Tully in Consecrated Ground are equivalent to the drugs that poison Halifax’s ‘hood’ – and Baye ’s fetus – in Gideon’s Blues. This proto-fascistic ‘naturalism,’ expressed first in the circulation of vermin and ‘toxins’ and later in fratricidal and filial violence, underlines Boyd’s problematizing of a discourse of moral hygiene (kill the hoods, the cowards, and the traitors among us) that promotes racial eugenics (only the fit should live). Importantly, the Afro-gynocentric Darwinism that makes black males expendable and black females ‘heroes’ is a crucial ‘matrix’ for the issuance of any valid, contemporary, Afro–North American, social realist drama. Boyd’s unsettling plays possess this virtue; thus they champion urgent concerns. For instance, how is (Canadian) black community nurtured and developed when its putative, individual constituents are permitted to jettison it in favour of furthering only, liberally, selfishly, themselves? That question spotlights the absurdity of the desperate speculation articulated by Gilroy and others that we are, in any area of the Black Atlantic, free of the guilty pleasures of nationalism – or worse … Triumphantly and tyrannically, though, nationalism – even a fascist form of Afrocentrism – will remain a strident influence among African-Canadian communities for so long as white Canadian society persists as the polite fleshing out of apartheid. Let multiculturalists spout blandishments as they wish: Inspected warily by the white policeman, the black male knows that such surveillance forbids him the affable, complacent facelessness of the private voter in the liberal democracy. No, he cannot be the representative of the good citizen – Johnny Canuck: he must be the spectre of foreign terror and disorder, or so the next essay witnesses.

5 Seeing Through Race: Surveillance of Black Males in Jessome, Satirizing Black Stereotypes in James For Mona States (1958–99)1

The Prelude In his preface to Thelma Golden’s edited collection of essays, Black Male: Representations of Masculinity in Contemporary American Art, African-American literary critic Henry Louis Gates, Jr. recognizes that ‘it would have been possible for the average white American in 1900 to encounter – from the time his or her alarm clock erupted … nothing but images of black people devoid of reason, simian or satanic in appearance, and slothful, lustful, or lascivious in nature.’ Moreover, ‘the bulk of these threatening images [would have been] of black men’ (Gates 1994, 12). In the new – Anno Domini – millennium, bluntly malignant portrayals of blacks are less common and more benign than before, but they persist in popular fantasies. This cornucopia of Negrophobia, this fiesta, too, of black male abjection, still needs draw our stringent insight, for such depictions descend from manias and phobias imposed on ‘Negroes’ during the age of blunt European imperialism and frank African slavery.2 Sound bell hooks: ‘If black men were seen as beasts, as rapists, as bodies out of control, reformist movements for racial uplift countered these stereotypes by revering the refined, restrained, desexualized black male body … Radical militant resistance to white supremacy, typified by the sixties and seventies black power movements, called out of the shadow of repression the black male body, claiming it as a site of hypermasculine power, agency, and sexual potency’ (hooks 1994, 127–8). According to Frantz Fanon, student of the psychology of white racism and black self-hatred, ‘the civilized white man retains an irrational longing for unusual eras of sexual license, of orgiastic scenes, of unpunished rapes, of unrepressed incest’ (1967, 165). Thus, ‘the Negro is taken as a terrifying penis’ (177). Ann DuCille affirms that the destabilizing source of this terror is coital: ‘Only a white man could look at a black man’s penis and assume that his white woman would want to have it’ (DuCille 1997, 306). Fear of the black phallus erects itself in conceits of Negroid masculinity as the locale of unflagging arousal, of seething violence and smooth lust, of cinematic and lithe danger, of slick and evil cool, of delirious criminality, and of, not sinuous intelligence, but insidious and seditious cunning.3 Unsettling intoxication with black maleness is, says Golden, ‘almost always concentrated in three areas: sex, crime, and sports’ (1994a, 27). In the second category, then, African-American males become icons for, Golden advises, ‘the nation’s ills,’ including ‘rampant criminality (Willie Horton), perverse promiscuity (Wilt Chamberlain), sexual harassment (Clarence Thomas), date rape (Mike Tyson), and spousal abuse (O.J.

Seeing through race

69

Simpson)’ (22).4 These promiscuous identifications of melanin-positive males with negative deviances are allegorized, Gates relates, in state-forged manacles and shackles and in pernicious environments: In 1990 alone, for instance, 2,280,000 black boys and men were jailed or imprisoned, while 23,000 earned a college degree, a ratio of 99 to 1 (compared with a ratio of 6 to 1 for whites). To this alarming fact, add the fact that every forty-six seconds of the school day, a black child drops out of school, every ninety-five seconds a black baby is born into poverty, and every four hours of every day in the year a black young adult, age twenty to twenty-four, is murdered, and one quickly realizes that the much discussed crisis of the black male is no idle fiction. (Gates 1994, 13)

Gates’s compelling statistical anatomy suggests that the perpetual, protean demonization of black males contributes to their socio-economic damnations and hellish policing. Fanon states the Kafkaesque reality, with insistent irony: ‘All those white men in a group, guns in their hands, cannot be wrong. I am guilty. I do not know of what, but I know that I am no good’ (1967, 139). Images have consequences: malicious representation hardens into the stony immutability of a prison of repetitions.5 Introducing a 1997 set of essays on the O.J. Simpson affair, Toni Morrison recognizes that Simpson – an African-American sports celebrity accused of slaying two whites in 1994, and acquitted of those charges in 1995 – served to signal, for white Americans, the deceptive beauty – the culpable duplicity – of black males. Portrayed as a degenerate and blackened being, Simpson signified ‘the whole race needing correction, incarceration, censoring, silence; the race that needs its civil rights disassembled’ (Morrison 1997, xxviii); the race requiring, plainly, resolute repression. In haste to sic the American – and Canadian – justice apparatuses on supposedly black souls, ‘the outrage that should be the consequence of lawless police is muted,’ writes Morrison, because ‘blacks and criminality are understood to go hand in hand’ (xxii). In this atmosphere – theatre – of dread, the black male body is viewed as sin, wrong, devilish, as is ‘black’ art: It is bestial, raw, silly, primitive, abnormal, childish, fiendish, invested in the jungle and infested with the biological, and, when ‘good,’ merely plagiarized or derivative. Regard, as Tricia Rose posits, the hysterical castigation of rap music and hip hop culture by American cultural elites, black and white: ‘The more public opinion, political leaders, and policymakers criminalize hiphop as the cultural example of a criminal way of thinking, the more imaginary black monsters will surface. In this fearful fantasy, hip-hop style (or whatever style young black men create and adopt) becomes a code for criminal behavior, and censuring the music begins to look more and more like fighting crime ’ (1994, 157).6 Constructions of African-American masculinity, depictions of that dramatic physique and its suave creativity, hover between lustful hagiography and hateful, or lethal, critique, between, as it were, trophies for Martin Luther King and truncheons for Rodney King.7 Let us now observe the operations of such racialized reportage in Canadian and AfricanCanadian literature.8 In Somebody’s Daughter: Inside the Toronto/Halifax Pimping Ring (1996), by European–Nova Scotian journalist Phonse Jessome, one finds the usual nasty complexes of black-white, male-female, race-sex stereotypes. In Negrophobia: An Urban Parable (1992), by Afro-Montreal writer Darius James, however, one finds their exposure, complication, and negation. Jessome displays a bedazzled surveillance of glittering black pimps, but James undertakes an excoriating, satirical survey of the supporting stereotypes. Ultimately, James understands an

70 Directions home

idea that Jessome undervalues: No archaic archetype dies away completely, nor does any despised or rejected imagery; historical consciousness is a poetry we speak and write against our wills, thus resurrecting that once dead and reanimating that once fossilized.

The Lewd, Ludic Interlude The spectre of the black pimp conjoins paranoia and passion, for his image promises vistas of unbridled miscegenation – sultrily, of white men with black ‘whores,’ but also, disturbingly, of pimps (always black in the popular imagination) with white ‘daughters.’ This imagery is simultaneously dated and timeless. Gates notes that, in a 1907 illustration titled The Frisco, its subjects, a white woman with ‘the classic “Barbie” figure (40–18–32)’ and a black man, his eyes ‘bulging’ with lust, epitomize ‘white racism’s worst nightmare: the economic and sexual liberation of blacks (here, figured as male), and women (here, figured as white)’ (1994, 12). Such depictions are so basic to the North American psyche that African-American artist Adrian Piper relishes their deconstruction. In her ‘found’ art Vanilla Nightmares #8 (1986), Piper utilizes a perfume ad from the New York Times to ‘blacken’ a supposedly whites-only discourse. Here a white model, youthful, richly cosmeticized, leans her head dreamily, eyes closed, against her upraised left arm, whose hand and fingers point to the middle letters – ‘IS’ – within the brand name ‘POISON.’ Piper disrupts this languid, seductive whiteness by placing four large, Negro heads, with eyeless faces and gaping, fanged mouths, just behind the model, while, most startlingly, a fifth head has sunk its fangs into the flesh just above her appetizingly (partially) exposed left breast. Now the model seems to swoon, not because of the insidious sensuality of her perfume, but because of the violent delights brought by her black ravishers. Golden insists that Piper, in her art, confronts ‘fear, specifically white fear of blackness’ (1994, 26). Nicely, Piper’s rendition of a black zombievampire face mimics the coon-show Sambo face that looms phantasmally behind the standing white teen girl featured on the cover art of James’s bizarre, screenplay-styled satire, Negrophobia: An Urban Parable.9 Furthermore, Piper’s drawing prefigures James’s description of ‘a pair of large lips air-brushed on [a] wall. The lips are pouty and Negroid with a touch of tongue, tooth, and saliva’; soon, too, ‘a pair of slender vampire canines [is] protruding from the painted mouth’ (D. James 1992, 4). Later, in a context much like Piper’s altered perfume ad, James’s white pubescent protagonist, Bubbles Brazil, imagines herself appearing ‘inside a circle of revolving NEGRO FACES’ that rotate around her ‘nymphetic NINE-YEAR-OLD [self], nude, with dusty peach-colored skin, demonic lynxlike eyes, and a froth of dazzling blond curls’ (148). While no dark-complected ghost or goblin materializes to haunt the photographic cover of Jessome ’s work of investigative journalism, Somebody’s Daughter: Inside the Toronto/Halifax Pimping Ring, the word pimping in his book’s subtitle conjures the unspoken menace of a black male outside the camera’s range,10 whose salacious focus is a short – white – skirt; long, white legs; and short, laced-up, white boots.11 To open this book is, the cover hints, to snoop, to sniff, to splay those legs. Assuredly, Jessome reproduces, unconsciously, what Piper and James mock: the precept that, ‘in the collective unconscious, black = ugliness, sin, darkness, immorality. In other words, he is Negro who is immoral’ (Fanon 1967, 192). In Negrophobia, James invokes a Doctor Snakeskin who claims, ‘Europe represents the foreground of the conscious. Africa is the repository of all that is vile, unspeakable, and taboo in the dark subconscious’ (D. James 1992, 2; italics in original). The white gaze, falling upon the black male body, deposits its own yearnings and disgust on this

Seeing through race

71

form. Screen, then, the first minute of Albert and Allan Hughes’s documentary American Pimp (2000), where white U.S. respondents to an invisible interviewer parrot a string of epithets to condemn this species of black manhood: ‘abusive,’ ‘manipulative,’ ‘no moral sense,’ ‘despicable,’ ‘someone who doesn’t care for women,’ ‘dirty scumball,’ and ‘essentially well-endowed.’ These a priori apprehensions of the black pimp could apply far too easily to any black male paraded to symbolize symptomatic misogyny or vile regression. In his true-crime treatment of a notorious band of procurers active in Halifax, Montreal, and Toronto in the early 1990s, Jessome, then a television journalist with Halifax-based broadcaster ATV (Atlantic Television System), strives to avoid racializing the thugs that he quotes and stories. He appreciates that his news about a ‘family of pimps’ 12 could be ‘fodder for the racists,’ and he is duly anxious about this possibility: ‘Merely to state a single fact – that the vast majority of Nova Scotia’s pimps are black men from a small community just outside Dartmouth [a suburb directly east, across the mile-wide harbour, from Halifax] – is to hold a lighted match under the powder-keg of racial politics past and present’ (1996, 60, 61, 65).13 That the sex merchants’ ‘“employees” are invariably white women and girls’ may provoke white ‘extremists,’ acknowledges Jessome. Even so, ‘it is ridiculously ignorant to apply a racist view to the facts presented by prostitution in Nova Scotia’ (14). Conscientiously, scrupulously, Jessome charges, ‘people who understand even a scrap of the history behind the image of the jive-talking, gold-laden, Cadillac-driving black pimp would no more consider this caricature an accurate reflection of a racial group than they would picture white women – as a group – in stiletto heels and leather miniskirts, cigarettes dangling from their scarlet-painted lips’ (14–15).14 Despite his vaunted liberal instincts, Jessome retails, still, the stereotypes that James stymies. In Negrophobia, then, James flaunts, with wicked wit, the image of ‘the ragged CORPSE OF A PIMP flap[ping] in the polluted currents [of the Harlem River] like a scarecrow in an evening breeze, its feet encased in cement, a gold tooth gleaming in its ravaged skull’ (1992, 161).15 Too, Bubbles – a ‘DRUG-ADDLED TEENAGE GIRL’ (4) and ‘TEEN SEX-BOMB BLONDE’ (5) – smokes a ‘joint’ that resembles ‘a shriveled, mummified cock stained by a ring of red lipstick’ (3)16 and wears ‘charred, sequined Come-Fuck-Me Shoes’ (4). James spoofs the racial portraiture that Jessome both aptly denounces and ineptly renovates. Whereas Jessome auctions fashion-show-like commentaries on the adolescent white females he ‘covers’ and the black male seducers/abusers he ‘uncovers,’ James ignores such superficial ‘non-fiction.’ Rather, his interest is in excavating the underlying Othello-meets-Lolita narrative that makes such black/race-onwhite/sex scandal mongering (not reportage) possible. For Jessome, the off-camera relationship between penile blackness and vaginal whiteness – that is to say, the source of an off-colour, bipolar discourse of rapture and repulsion – is the on-camera reality of pimping and prostitution. This pathological perspective is given credence in Pimp (1969), the memoir-novel by African-American ex-pimp Iceberg Slim (Robert Beck), who ‘raps,’ approvingly, this philosophy: ‘a pimp is really a whore who’s reversed the game on whores … A whore ain’t nothing but a trick to a pimp’ (Slim [1969] 1987, 215). In tandem, Jessome ’s journalism becomes an uncanny confession of his obsession for scopophilia and consumerist voyeurism. His first paragraph asserts his refusal to write ‘an academic assessment of the problem of juvenile prostitution in Canada’ or even to ‘suggest solutions’ (1996, vii). No, he intends ‘to provide a window on that violent underworld,’ to propose ‘a clearer understanding of who the girls in the tight skirts really are’ (vii; my italics). In practice, Jessome ’s apparent fetish for sexualized visuals spurs him to catalogue such eye-opening ‘player’ – or pimp – accessories

72 Directions home

as ‘fancy cars, fine clothes, expensive jewellery’ (7) as well as the ‘eye-candy’ accoutrements of their juvenile sex-trade peons. Thus, Jessome highlights the lust of ‘players’ for ‘the cars, the clothes, and the money’ (19). Chief is K-bar, who adores ‘his black Pontiac Trans Am sports car with its smoked glass T-bar removable roof panels’ (23). Another pimp boasts, reports Jessome, ‘I got clothes, I got jewelry, I got a car, and I got money’ (50). The Big Man, a role-model pimp, is so stylish, he owns a ‘gleaming yellow’ Corvette sports car. His portrait is sumptuous: ‘[The car] sparkled as he moved along the street. The car came alive as it passed beneath the amber street lights … Seven sparkling, jewel-studded rings adorned his fingers … Around his neck, he wore a massive gold chain, below which hung, fittingly enough, a solid-gold dollar sign’ (61–2). Big Man also owns a ‘dull-gray .9-mm Beretta handgun tucked between the bucket seat and the shifting console,’ and he is famed for his ‘glowing gold jewelry; the expensive yet casual clothing; the smooth, dark face framed in thick black curls weighed down with styling gel’ (65, 67). The ‘players’ lay waste to their capital, in getting and spending on ‘hotels, parties, full-price plane tickets, fine clothes’ (183): they live the lives of playboys, tycoons, ‘high-rollers.’ As for the pandered ‘jail-bait,’17 Jessome allows the reader to peer over the shoulders of Stacey and Annie Mae as they ‘expertly [pick] through flashy fishnet stockings, body-hugging bustiers, and thigh-high vinyl boots’ and other ‘tawdry finery’ (117). We also ‘watch’ Taunya practice ‘the art of faking oral sex’ in New York City – ‘an assembly line for blow jobs’ (86). The girls’ diets showcase North American teen standards – ‘burgers, fries, and milkshakes’ (24) and Coca-Cola – and exotic ‘sides’ of cocaine and marijuana. Their favourite outings are to ‘clothing boutiques, stereo shops, jewelers, gourmet food emporiums’ (35). The class reversals are stark: filet mignon for the black jet set; burgers for the white streetwalkers. Jessome describes a cabal given over solely, wholly, to consumption and commodification. In Somebody’s Daughter, white men ‘buy’ white girls marketed by black men, who, in turn, ‘turn on’ – excite or attack – the white girls they ‘turn out’ – exploit as prostitutes – who, in turn, see them, too, as fascinating, and frightening, articles to be possessed, if only as romantic dreams. Jessome composes a vicious civics lesson whose mandatory terms are not ‘liberal,’ ‘conservative,’ and ‘fascist,’ but a verb, a noun, and an adjective respectively: ‘plan,’ ‘respect,’ and ‘brutal.’ Significantly, the ogling of adolescent ‘white slaves’18 here is dependent upon the eyeing of black men, who, in turn, practise surveillance to both ‘cop’ – seduce – new recruits for their ‘stables’ and to dodge the traps of white detectives. But police spy and eavesdrop upon the pimps, whom they regard as dangers to tranquility – that is, racial hierarchy.19 To account for the horrifying irruption into ‘virgin,’ white, Canadian space that the black Nova Scotian sex entrepreneur represents, Jessome drafts a sociological sketch, analysing specifically the community of North Preston, situated approximately sixteen kilometres northeast of Halifax. ‘Racism, and the frustration and anger it evokes …, along with poverty, high unemployment, inadequate education, and the breakdown of family … were at play in the proliferation of pimping among young men from North Preston in the 1980s,’ Jessome announces (15-16). He also portrays the importance, for at least one of the one hundred or so black men involved, ‘of earning hundreds, maybe thousands of dollars by selling white women to white men … an irresistible irony to a man who saw his race as an insurmountable barrier to making it big in a predominantly white world’ (17). Yes, such ‘surplus,’ squandered youths ‘saw a certain irony in running white girls on Hollis Street [in downtown Halifax] to attract white buyers …’ (19). ‘Angry, frustrated by their inability to get anything better than a minimum-wage job in a burger

Seeing through race

73

joint – or bagging groceries …, and increasingly obsessed with revenge against “the system,” a few [North Preston] teenagers began to follow their slightly older friends into the world of prostitution’ (18). Jessome’s chronicle of the rise of this ‘cooperative of pimps’ (175) aligns with an ‘oral’ folk history of pimping descended from, recounts Slim, ‘proud slick Niggers freed from slavery’: ‘They saw the white man [acting] just like [that] on the plantations still ramming it into the finest black broads… Those first Nigger pimps started hipping the dumb bitches to the gold mines between their legs. They hipped them to stick their mitts out for the white man’s scratch’ (Slim 1987, 194–5). The Hughes’s film American Pimp iterates this narrative. In the documentary, Danny Brown, an LA sex racketeer, lectures, ‘After slaves had been set free, they had no skills, had no money. Black men got money from this vice – prostitution.’ In Jessome ’s narrative, Big Man claims that ‘we ’re the lords of this game [prostitution] man, the streets are ours, the rules are ours. We make ’em and we break ’em’ (1996, 62). Likewise, in American Pimp, Atlanta sex vendor Sir Captain comments, ‘The street game is the black man’s game; it’s the only game [the white man] can’t control.’ No matter the ‘dominance’ that black men ‘enjoy’ in exploiting casual, street-level, heterosexual couplings, they face a ferocious adversary in some white law-enforcement officers. For Jessome, the white cops are his official heroes. There is Dave Perry of the Metro Toronto Juvenile Task Force, who, states Jessome, ‘loved arresting pimps’ (52); there are also the members of Operation Hectic – a metropolitan Halifax, anti–juvenile sex-trade operation. Although black ‘fiends’ and white ‘harems’ are the main surveillance subjects in Somebody’s Daughter, the only persons who may be permitted full-frontal photographic display here are police, justice system bureaucrats, and Jessome himself. Arguably, the author plays a reincarnation of early-twentiethcentury New Orleans brothel photographer, Ernest J. Bellocq, offering snapshots of prostitutes whose faces are actually scratched out. Jessome offers glimpses of the alluringly lurid – ‘what it [is] like to be a teenage prostitute’ (143) – while warning of the reality’s gravid depravity. Notably, the single photo of a black male in Somebody’s Daughter is the by-product of tender – and spiteful – white inspection; the subject is cowed, his head down, his arms and hands manacled. This almost amorous surveillance of black men – that is, the usual suspects – is represented by Detective Perry, who was, in the spring of 1992, says Jessome, ‘honing in on the Scotians [the Haligonian pimping ring] with increasing intensity.’ Perry was ‘deeply committed to tracking down and bringing to justice the pimps who were luring, and, in some cases, forcing juveniles into prostitution’ (99).20 Given his ardent pursuit of the ‘powerful and seemingly unassailable pimping machine ’ (9), Perry became the toast of Nova Scotian reporters: ‘He knew prostitution better than most people and he knew how to speak in the sound bytes that were the lifeblood of modern journalism.’ Perry is Jessome’s forerunner, the ‘observer’ who opens the door of the enticingly spooky to allow the intrigued ‘innocent’ a peek inside. It is he who establishes the rhetoric of in-bred ‘monstrosity’: Perry condemned the ‘monsters’ he said were behind the ‘highly organized and far reaching’ Nova Scotian pimping family (160). Perry’s critique foresees and licenses the obligatory phrases ‘brutal pimps’ (19), ‘abusive pimps’ (49), and ‘violent pimp’ (128, 197) with which Jessome peppers his book. Of course, such racial clichés are the stuff of television: American author George Lipsitz comments, ‘On television, Black people who do not belong on The Cosby Show belong on Cops’ (1997, 20). Morrison holds that white credence of black imbecility and outrageous impulsiveness demands answering caricatures: ‘Blacks are seen to live outside “reason” in a world of phenomena in which motive or its absence is sheltered from

74 Directions home

debate. Or, as a William Faulkner character put it, “a nigger is not a person so much as a form of behavior”’ (1997, xi). In Negrophobia, James ridicules notions of the dark and demonic. His ‘FIRST ILL-TEMPERED YOUNG NEGRO’ pictures the production of such imagery as the making of allegorical ‘sweets’: ‘Manufactured in one of whytie’s nigga factories. The original prototype for nigga-baby candy. Popped hot from a monster mold’ (James 1992, 21; my italics). For her, Bubbles meditates on odious, revolting blackness in this monologue: ‘My high school was overridden with niggas… [N]igger niggas – the nightmarish kind!… These were the kind of niggas my daddy warned me about. The kind of niggas my daddy said would whisk me off to the Isle of Unrestrained Negroes far, far away, and turn me into a coal-black pickaninny with nappy ribbon top and white button eyes if I wasn’t a good girl and didn’t do as daddy said’ (24–5). James’s satirizing of the standard racism spied in terms like nightmare and monster and, to cite one of Jessome ’s chapter titles, ‘Horror and Hope,’ continues in this dialogue between ‘two ball-capped Black Muppets, or BUPPETS’21: first buppet Boyee! I got a stupid fresh concept! Let’s beam up on the rock, go to Central Park, an’ rape us some white women! second buppet Yeah! Get our picture on th’ front page of th’ New York Post, shakin’ hands wit’ d’fat Reverend Do Rag – ‘YOUNG NEGROES SCAM MUCH BOOTY IN CENTRAL PARK!’ Scare mo’fuckas on d’six o’clock news. Shit be dope! (113)22

Further toying with such formulations, James ‘runs’ the ‘film clip of a BLACK FRANKENSTEIN MONSTER in a suit with oversized shoulders slanting at odd angles’ (151; my italics). ‘Wearing gold chains and unlaced Air Jordan chimney-sweep boots’ (151), this character may not resemble the archetypally repugnant pimp, but he does tease out the plastic deformations of the black male that social commentators such as Jessome buttress. James’s assault on these ‘monstrosities’ is defensible, for Jessome casts the North Prestonian Panders as animals.23 They are ‘blowfish [that] can double in size when threatened’ (66). They are also ‘parasites’ and ‘monsters who [call] themselves men’ (115). Thus, James jeers at what Jessome judges monstrous and nightmarish: the deployment of white pubescent girls by callous black men who use them to siphon off the ‘excess(ive)’ capital of depraved white men.24 Strangely, despite all the surveillance conducted so aggressively by Jessome, he seems to have eyes only for three groups: black men, as ‘violent pimps’ (123, 152, 158) and ‘serious player[s]’ (51, 56, 71, 214); white men, as cops; and white girls, as sex objects. His narrative marginalizes two groups: black women (save as crime-oblivious ‘mamas’) and white male ‘dates.’ So, white molesters and rapists who ‘interfere’ with their own or their neighbours’ daughters – and the mature white men who importune them later for paid intercourse in their teens and twenties – go virtually unseen and utterly unpunished.25 Ignoring corrupt, pale phalluses, Jessome seems, rather, spellbound by the spectacle of the mean, diamond-fingered, cash-flashing, (white)-galcontrolling, coat-hanger-whipping, snazzy-sports-car-driving, ‘Scotian’ sex-capitalist. While Jessome refrains, generally, from purveying details of sex acts, he does report that a pimp, Lou,

Seeing through race

75

plans to have ‘anal intercourse with [Taunya], [so] after that she would be his forever’ (86). His observation merits this reflection: ‘Law enforcement represents a possible … site for the exorcising of latent desires for the other: the black male body under arrest, frisked, patted down, probed, cuffed, spread, and ordered to “assume the position,” which, after all, is the stance of anal intercourse ’ (DuCille 1997, 308). Jessome’s text is, then, seized with dazed longings for raced and gendered others. Both Jessome and ‘his’ detectives yearn to spy what the black ‘player’ has, to discover his influential sex(uality).26 Lucid, here, is DuCille, who opines, ‘white men project their own latent desire for the black male penis onto white women and punish black men for a desire that is finely their own: to fuck a black man, to fuck like a black man, to fuck white women with a black penis’ (306). The obsession of Jessome ’s sensationalistic exposé is maleswith-melanin – Shakespearean Othellos, Aarons, and Calibans all – then, latently, their assault on Caesarian white male capital via the flesh of white pubescent, female offspring. For this reason, while Jessome bemoans the lot of white teen sex-traders, he also rues their apparent, irreversible entrenchment in ‘The Game,’ or, at least, their conviction that all relationships involve economic exchange. Hence, even after the liberated teen sex-suppliers have agreed to testify against the ‘Scotians’ and have been accorded shelter at a government-funded house, they persist in ‘the habit of bartering with investigators for the treats [they want] – lunch at KFC [Kentucky Fried Chicken outlets] in exchange for information about life on the street; cigarettes and conversation for the background on a certain pimp; coffee and pop for a week to tell the officers about how girls were taken from Nova Scotia to other provinces’ (Jessome 1996, 177). Even the lead prosecutor is said to have ‘sold the girls on what he knew would be the most attractive thing the task force had to offer’ (149; my italics). Admitting that the freed women continued to ‘act like prostitutes’ and the police like ‘dates’ and pimps, Jessome editorializes: ‘Crass, perhaps, but the system was what the girls had grown accustomed to in their dealings with pimps; and the officers … could only hope it sank in that task force investigators were a whole lot different than pimps in their demands and behaviors’ (177; my italics). The anxiety around that difference – or lack thereof – is, perhaps, one of white male sexual competition with black men. Jessome learns, then, that love-starved, self-doubting, white teen women are enamoured with pimp ‘style.’27 This point is reinforced when the ex-prostitute Taunya, while undergoing rehabilitation, declares she does not ‘like or trust white men’ because her experience as a sex-trade worker has taught her that ‘white men paid for sex while black men did not, and she found she had more respect for black men’ (196).28 This disclosure, capping a narrative so otherwise infatuated with black men’s ‘vampirish’ sex, marks Jessome’s stealthy contest with the ‘pro’ procurers. Does he aim, unconsciously – with the police – to replace the black, ‘unruly’ penis with a white, genteel one?29 Does he wish to displace the black marketeers’s Gothic ‘bondage’ of white women with the Victorian fantasy of the white ‘gentleman caller’?30 Expensive surveillance and extensive interrogations lead, happily, to the cessation (one suspects, temporarily) of this ‘most violent and dangerous pimping machine ’ (Jessome 1996, 101). Jessome exults in the ‘success’ of this policing: ‘The girls left in The Game remained steadfastly loyal to, or frightened of, their pimps. That did not deter the officers from going after the pimps with a classic procedure: the slow, tedious, and highly effective process of surveillance. For more than a week, they set up hidden video equipment and cameras, and just sat there, night after night, watching the stroll [the prostitutes’ “beat”]’ (186). This scrutiny is the catalyst for the arrest, conviction, and sentencing of one pimp to ‘more than two years in prison’ (186). In other words, all of the eyeing of white prostitutes and their white clients for dozens of hours nets one

76 Directions home

black pimp who, upon conviction, receives less than two years of real prison-time.31 In the end, Jessome ’s trash-TV-like ‘coverage’ of the issue of ‘white slavery’ corroborates a set of pulp fictions. Somebody’s Daughter is, as Armond White says of l’affaire Simpson, ‘mythmaking’ that ‘emphasizes dread instead of clarifying the social inequities, [thereby] conditioning Black folks for more abuse, more disenfranchisment’ (A. White 1997, 351). After all, it is only ‘a short jump from the pattern of disparagement in … films and television to its seeming hard proof in news reporting and essayistic journalism’ (350). Jessome’s narrative tumbles, squarely, into this ‘black hole ’ of a tradition. In instructive contrast with Jessome, James accesses the social wisdom always resident in satire. For him, the ‘negrophobia’ of Bubbles results from her actual attraction to, or seduction by, blackness, a quality that she (and others) related to sexual awakening. So, she confesses that she blamed her precocious sexual experimentation on ‘black children from the welfare projects’: ‘They smoked the reefer! They stole the booze! It was niggers! Not us! Niggers! It was niggers poking their greasy, fried-chicken-pickin’ fingers into our wet, underaged pussies! Not us! Niggers!’ (D. James 1992, 157). Bubbles must consign blame for her lusts to Negro immorality so as to preserve her status as her parents’ ‘golden flower, their blossom of blond innocence ’ (148–9), the embodiment of ‘the very essence of uncorrupted purity’ (149). Her confession plays into the typical media construction hyped in Jessome, that which pits ‘overdetermined angelic white innocence ’ against ‘demonic black guilt’ (DuCille 1997, 317). It ups the cliché of ‘the black male ’s uncontrollable lust for and rape of white women,’ while veiling ‘the white female ’s sexual desire for the black man’ (ibid., 305). Bubbles admits: ‘I sat in thrall to the black power pussy plays of Foxy Brown and Cleopatra Jones’ (D. James 1992, 152); ‘I took the Coon Game and turned it into a masturbating minstrel show’ (155). She is, truly, a reconstituted version of the teenage psychiatric patient Fanon calls ‘Mlle. B.,’ whose case attests that, ‘at its extreme, the myth of the Negro, the idea of the Negro, can become the decisive factor of an authentic alienation’ (Fanon 1967, 204). Her fear of ‘imaginary Negroes’ (208), inculcated by ‘the rhythm of a Negro tomtom’ drum (205), mirrors the dread that a later ‘Mademoiselle B.’ – Bubbles Brazil – feels when facing a ‘noisome brood of PALSIED RETARDS, DROOLING MONGOLOIDS, GRINNING PINHEADS, SLITHERING QUADRIPLEGICS, and HUMPBACKED DWARVES …’ ‘Hyperventilating with terror, Bubbles shuts her eyes in cold horror’ as Negroes ‘paw her breasts and hair’ (D. James 1992, 20).32 Assessing the case of the original Mademoiselle B., Fanon finds that her condition of nervous tics and hallucinations arises from ‘a fear of the Negro,’ and he doubts ‘whether she would soon be able to resume a normal life in society’ (1967, 209). Similarly, Bubbles recalls, ‘there was no way to calculate my disease, the degree of my negrophobia’ (D. James 1992, 165). For Mademoiselle B., Bubbles, and perhaps Jessome, his police, and his prostitutes, there is only one salve for their Negrophobia: the insatiable, salivating desire of either the lynch mob or the pornographer.

The Postlude Seeing through race, when race is not seen through, means that even properly conscientious commentators, such as Jessome, will, willy-nilly, reiterate stereotypes, for such speak to silent needs in the general culture. Without a fluently critical vision for guidance, acts of police-like surveillance will capture only preconceived, grainy, and imprecise images – only phantasmal violations

Seeing through race

77

and no substantial wounds or stigmata. Rather, our gaze must fall upon what we do not want to see: the leaden, blinding oppressiveness of official race and gender constructs and the complicity of our criticism with the same. We must render these categorizations transparent, disclose what they hide and forbid, and bare them to the bright light of unflinching revelation. A transformative literary criticism must forego journalism – the blank verse of sociology – and foster, like James, the most imprudent and impudent Juvenalian satire. In myth-become-faith, as Jessome fears and as James trumpets, white female chastity quivers and melts away once face-to-face with upright black virility. Hence, the constant efforts of white male authority, in its confrontation with its own imagination of the Negro phallus, to neutralize it through incarceration, surgery, medication, and even execution. Not only is the black man, à la Fanon, a haunting penis, he is also the shadowy, lurking criminal. The next essay inquires into the status of the Negro outlaw in Canadian literature.

6 Raising Raced and Erased Executions in AfricanCanadian Literature: Or, Unearthing Ange2lique For George Albert Hamilton (1925–49) and Rufus James Hamilton (1926–49), two Africadian brothers, my cousins, executed for murder in Fredericton, New Brunswick, on 27 July 1949

Preamble America is not always an enlightening mirror for Canada, and African America is not always lightning that illuminates the mysterious, shadowy cultures of African Canada. Crucially, one of the distinguishing differences between America and Canada, as well as between African Americans and African Canadians, is that the former peoples possess and proclaim a more copious literature of crime and punishment than do the latter. American and African-American writers are, dramatically, often criminals or ex-criminals; just as frequently, they heroicize imprisoned – or executed – charming rogues and impetuous radicals. In contrast, Canadians and African Canadians are subjects of Her Majesty’s allegedly ‘Peaceable Kingdom,’ whose ur-constitution, the British North America Act (1867), ordains the drafting of federal laws to promote ‘Peace, Order, and good Government’ (Ingle 1989, 131). As a result, Canadian and African-Canadian writers are more apt to be professors than felons (or ex-felons), and prison memoirs and antiexecution protests are underrepresented in Canadian literature. Yet African Canadians have a history of conflict with white Canadian law enforcement and the judiciary that should mandate the creation of a race-conscious creative literature of crime and punishment. However, AfricanCanadian writers tend to document injustices in past homelands, not so much Canadian ones. While many incarcerated – or extinguished – African Americans, from Nat Turner to Angela Davis, have emerged as martyr-heroes in African-American literature, only one – and proto – African Canadian, Marie-Josèphe Angélique, a slave in New France, has obtained that status in African-Canadian literature, and only recently. This essay comments on the paucity of ‘martyrs’ in African-Canadian literature (despite the history of legalized racial injustice) and explores the use that three African-Canadian writers make of the execution of Angélique, for arson, in Montreal in 1734.

I Incontestably, black conflict with a white-dominated justice system has sparked many an African-American slave narrative, memoir, poem, blues or chain-gang chant, soul or rap song, novel, screenplay, and drama. Slavery, imprisonment, and punishment – these données politiques

Raising Raced and Erased Executions

79

– are the perfect negations of a statist ideology of ‘freedom’ in general and of freedom from ‘cruel and unnecessary’ pain in particular. Thus, the African-American literary canon flaunts texts by vaunted prisoners and ex-prisoners. See Nat Turner’s The Confessions of Nat Turner (1831), Martin Luther King Jr.’s ‘Letter from Birmingham Jail’ (1963), Eldridge Cleaver’s Soul on Ice (1968), George Jackson’s Blood in My Eye (1972), Angela Davis’s Angela Davis: An Autobiography (1974), or Sanyika Shakur’s Monster: The Autobiography of an L.A. Gang Member (1993). ‘Criminal’-authored, non-fiction titles are one part of a canon that includes a voluminous catalogue of fictional works ‘rehabilitating’ ex-convicts or wrongly accused innocents, les damnés et les condamnés. From Richard Wright’s Native Son (1940) to Sam Greenlee ’s The Spook Who Sat by the Door (1969), and from Gayl Jones’s Eva’s Man (1976) to the singular oeuvres of Iceberg Slim (a.k.a. Robert Beck) and Walter Mosley, the ‘bad’ man or woman, the insurrectionary, or the bro’ or sistah who ‘don’t take no shit from nobody’ has been a popular and perennial African-American subject.1 This type also attracts nonfiction attention, as in James Baldwin’s The Evidence of Things Not Seen (1985). Another recurrent imago is the African-American violent martyr, a figure exemplified by slave rebel Nat Turner and Black Power radical George Jackson, both opponents – and victims – of state-sanctioned violence. These figures are practical, black extensions of the original American Revolution, avid projectors of its ideals, best encapsulated and popularized in Patrick Henry’s famed, incendiary slogan ‘Give me liberty or give me death.’2 Because so many African-American texts feature plots involving men – and not a few women – brandishing revolvers or razors, and who use them in defence of either licence or liberty, this canon constitutes an out-and-out ‘outlaw’ literature. This phenomenon is explained by the need of African-American culture to confront the extralegal horrors of slavery, lynching, police assassinations, and (wrongful) capital punishment, in art, in song, in journalism, in film, and in too many poems, essays, dramas, and short stories and novels.3 A hard history has necessitated the illustration of how pernicious laws foster impenitent outlaws and of how ‘for-whites-only’ civilization mandates ‘black criminality.’ Because African Americans continue to brave a sanguinary republic (notwithstanding the election to the U.S. presidency in 2008 of Barack Obama), their literature is flush with blood-wet prison cells, incarnadine country roads, and gunned-down, gassed, electrocuted, raped … ‘heroes.’ Canada presents, as usual, an alternative story, one seemingly more benign. The number of heralded ‘heroic’ authors jailed for violent or nonviolent dissent is embarrassingly succinct, headed by the Métis Louis Riel, the leader of two rebellions, who was executed for his ‘treason.’ Yet, true-crime works on notorious Canadian murderers and scandalous killings are popular, particularly in Quebec, where the fascination with this genre most closely mirrors U.S. cultural practices. (Until 2004, Quebec francophones supported a mass-market tabloid, Allo police, which printed lurid stories and macabre photographs of naked or near-naked bodies, dead or alive.) Even so, Canadian ‘criminal’ justice fiction and nonfiction are relatively scarce,4 save, noticeably, texts generated primarily by French-Canadian writers but also by First Nation, JapaneseCanadian, and some other minority-community authors.5 In African-Canadian literature, however, only a minority of writers has dealt with black ‘criminality’ and its punishment by white authority – and only a minority of texts has sought to resuscitate executed black Canadian ‘heroes.’ This curious absence of black ‘crime ’ texts in Canada is due to several factors. First, the emphasis on peace and order and the legislation of ‘gun control’ in Canada mean that black ‘outlaws’ have restricted opportunities to achieve sustained, ‘front-page ’ notoriety.6 Second, the abolition of capital punishment in Canada in 1976 and the reconfirmation

80 Directions home

of abolition in 1985 also restrict, happily, the social territory for martyr narratives. Third, black violence in Canada is enacted in metropolises mainly against other blacks: these are crimes that media and police forces deplore and black communities endure.7 Thus, Jamaican-Canadian essayist Lennox Farrell holds that black criminals in Toronto ‘remain unapprehended because of negative relations existing between forces representing [white] “law and order” and black communities’ (Farrell 2001, A18). Fourth, whatever their antipathies for white Canadian structural racism and Eurocentric imperialism, some African-Canadian writers of Caribbean heritage echo a nostalgic bias for law and order. Thus, Barbadian-Canadian writer Austin Clarke asserts that ‘I will admit that the same policemen we sometimes accuse of violent discrimination … make my life safe and secure in a city bordering on the American syndrome of ghettoized crime ’ (1992b, 18). Farrell assaults white police racism, but he also desires strict enough policing to restrict urban ‘criminals’ who ‘function as would a black arm of the Ku Klux Klan.’ Such ‘hoods’ deserve ‘neither solace nor sanction’ (Farrell 2001, A18). According to Barbadian-Canadian journalist Philip Mascoll, ‘Jamaicans are basically hard-core, right wingers when it comes to law and order.’ In a November 2000 op-ed piece, he bemoans the difficulties that Jamaica was facing in hanging ‘six men condemned for first-degree murder’ (A34). Although officially independent, its highest court remains the anti–death penalty Judicial Committee of the British Privy Council.8 (Due to the reluctance of the British Privy Council to impose the death penalty, Trinidad and Tobago and other Commonwealth Caribbean nations officially inaugurated the capital–punishment friendly Caribbean Court of Justice in 2005.) Fifth, there is a fear of contributing to stereotypes about black criminality, for there is no offsetting ‘badman’ or ‘bad woman’ tradition in Canada, partly because such history is suppressed.9 And sixth, African-Canadian writers are more likely to champion an African-American or African or Caribbean ‘renegade ’ than an indigenous one. Our poems and plays idolize Rosa Parks, the African-American anti-segregation ‘lawbreaker’ of 1955, not, generally, the unfairly obscure Viola Desmond, imprisoned in Nova Scotia in 1946 for violating segregated seating in a provincial cinema. Or we celebrate Toussaint L’Ouverture, the revolutionary emancipator of Haiti, or Nelson Mandela, the planter of democracy in South Africa, or Harriet Tubman, the liberator of American slaves, but neither black Canadians who have fought injustice and suffered nor those who have committed crimes of nihilistic or political import. (Or we have failed to laud them enough.) For example, Trinidadian-Canadian poet Dionne Brand cites the use of executions as assassinations in the demise of Grenada’s Marxist government in 1983. In No Language Is Neutral, she eulogizes Jacqueline Creft, the minister of education in the People ’s Revolutionary Government of Grenada, who was slain on 19 October 1983, as a coup erupted with gunfire ([1990] 1998, 11). Another Trinidadian-Canadian poet, Stephen Douglas, in Historic Hangings in the Chadee Gang, preaches Christian sermons on the hangings of nine drug-trade gangsters in Trinidad in 1999 for four vicious murders in 1994. Nine hangmen in one month left The nation in panic … You can feel the tension in the air you can pierce it with a spear. You can almost smell the stench of blood as panic stricken the atmosphere. (20–1)

In this apocalyptic political calypso, Douglas examines the case from every perspective, writing

Raising Raced and Erased Executions

81

elegies for the murdered, the hanged, and their survivors. He accepts capital punishment as a ‘fact of life,’ neither moral nor immoral: Life in prison for crimes committed for some people is like a cold glass of water. I’m a humanitarian, so I hate inhumanity, but what is to be must be. K sarah-sarah [sic]. (83)

Another African-Canadian writer, Nigerian-born Ken Wiwa, in his 2000 memoir, protests the trauma of the iniquitous hanging in 1995 of his father, Ken Saro-Wiwa, the enviro-activist, poet, and novelist, by the Nigerian government. Given all these factors, the promotion of ‘hero’ or ‘martyr’ narratives of black Canadian ‘lawbreakers’ is left to spoken-word poets, dub poets, and rappers and to a few left-identified writers, journalists, and intellectuals – that is, to singers and political activists.10 The erasure of le captif noir canadien in African-Canadian literature is problematic, for the Canadian state has hanged – and the Canadian people have lynched – recoverable ‘heroes.’ Their narratives, if unearthed, could bare the ‘clandestine’ racism of Canadian authority and popularize the resistive strategies of African-Canadian communities.11 Scholars must eye those occasions when black Canadian ‘crime’ met with white Canadian punishment, for the penalties were usually bloody. From Confederation in 1867 until 1962, when the last hangings occurred, of ‘about 3,000 people … convicted of crimes punishable by death,’ Canada executed 701, reports historian Alan Hustak.12 The condemned were ‘subject to a lottery rigged by politics and economics and manipulated by unconscious racism and social prejudice,’ says Hustak, so ‘Native people, French Canadians, Canadians of Slavic origin, homosexuals and blacks had a better chance of being executed than did white Anglo-Saxon Protestants’ (1987, xv). Criminologist Neil Boyd finds that ‘ethnic and racial origin remained a statistically significant variable in [federal] Cabinet judgements [regarding death sentence commutations]. Native Canadians and French Canadians were more likely to be hanged than English Canadians’ (1992, 60). Examining the morbid compilation Persons Sentenced to Death in Canada, 1867–1976 (1992), edited by Lorraine Gadoury and Antonio LeChasseur, I count forty-seven men listed as ‘Negro,’ or ‘Colored,’ or ‘Mulatto,’ or ‘American negro,’ or ‘American mulatto’ (two occurrences), or ‘“Colored” from Bahamas’ (one occurrence), who were, presumably, in present parlance, black.13 Of these forty-seven men (all originally convicted of shooting, stabbing, strangling, axing, slashing, or bludgeoning their victims14), slightly more than half of them, or twenty-four, were hanged. Others received commutations of their sentences, or were, following appeals, convicted on the lesser charge of manslaughter, or were, in a few cases, acquitted at their second trials.15 Only 23 percent of all persons convicted in capital cases were hanged in Canada, but 50 percent of all blacks so convicted were hanged. Racism may have influenced the federal cabinet to decline mercy in over half the cases where black men faced the noose.16 Dean Jobb remarks that ‘convicted murderers were hanged in more than three quarters of the cases’ in which juries had not recommended mercy (1988, 112); thus, black convicts denied mercy by white juries initially were not likely to receive it from white politicians later.

82 Directions home

But African Canadians were dying in executions – fair or foul – even before the Canadian state was born. Worse, some perished for the same reason as did African Americans, in sacrifice to what Toni Morrison labels a typical form of ‘white mischief – the kind that surfaces when the opportunity to gaze voluptuously at a black body presents itself ’ (1997, xiii). African-Canadian law professor Carol A. Aylward wagers that, ‘in Canada, as well as in the United States, it can be said that law has failed in its purpose of establishing justice for Black members of society’ (1999, 14). Assuredly, classic white Canadian racism could be as caustic as its U.S. ‘night rider’ counterpart. ‘In 1911 Maclean’s magazine published an article,’ writes Jobb, ‘that purported to describe the typical black section of a Nova Scotia town. “White people pass it in fear… It is the abode of little more than innocent shiftlessness, but such places are adapted to the breeding of vice and crime”’ (1988, 99). Maclean’s cast black Nova Scotians in 1911 in a social role that Morrison saw African-American sports celebrity O.J. Simpson compelled to perform in 1994–5: to symbolize ‘the whole race needing correction, incarceration, censoring, silencing… This is the consequence and function of official stories: to impose the will of a dominant culture ’ (Morrison 1997, xxviii). Aylward lists many ‘illegal’ legalities that African Canadians experience. Citing a 1995 inquiry into systemic racism in the Ontario justice system, she affirms its conclusion that ‘Black men, women and male youths were overrepresented in the prison system.’ Additionally, African Canadians were less likely than whites to receive forgiving treatment from either the police or courts (1999, 15). Canadian state narratives about ‘dangerous black lawlessness’ are rooted in African slavery (the Profitable Institution), which thrived in five of the six eastern-most provinces (excusing Newfoundland) of what is now Canada. Aylward registers that ‘the legacy of slavery still plagues both Canada and the United States’ (1999, 15). And, as in the antebellum United States, the black slave in Canada was ‘more answerable for some of his crimes than free whites’ (quoted in Hornby 1991, xiv). Advises Canadian historian Jim Hornby, ‘It is ironic that the slaves’ humanity was only recognized by the state on occasions when it was necessary to attribute human free will to them in order to justify their trial and punishment’ (xiv). Not surprisingly, then, hangings in ‘primal’ Canada put on display dangled black bodies. The first person hanged in what is now Ontario was ‘a Negro named Josiah Cutten’ (Duff 1949, 5). Caught stealing rum and furs in October 1789, Cutten was damned, in court, as resembling animals that ‘go prowling about at Night for their prey.’ Duff also records that ‘a negro was first in the London District’ to be hanged (7). And the first execution in Welland County, Ontario, in 1859, ‘was that of Henry Byers, another Negro.’ For that execution, ‘stands were erected for the spectators and seating was also placed on the roof of a nearby hotel’ (8). In Nova Scotia, ‘Brittain Murray, a black, was hanged for robbery in 1786’ (Jobb 1988, 98). Popular historian Dorothy Dearborn records that, in 1798, during the Loyalist settlement of New Brunswick, ‘a slave of Judge Upham … was tried for the murder of “the girl West.”’ Luke Hamilton, who did not enter a plea, ‘would have had little say in the matter of his guilt or innocence in those days,’ advises Dearborn, but ‘was convicted from the marks of the horse shoes on the ground near where the body of the girl was found’ (1999, 22). He hanged. In 1815, in Prince Edward Island, writes Hornby, ‘Sancho Byers was hanged upon conviction of stealing goods described in court as “one loaf of Bread and one Pound weight and upwards of Butter of the value of one Shilling”’ (1998, 49). His brother, Peter, was hanged after a coin stolen during a burglary was found in his possession (50).17 In L’Esclavage au Canada Français, Quebec historian Marcel Trudel documents hangings of blacks in New France (and its post-conquest form, Lower Canada). Jean-Baptiste Thomas, who belonged to Louise Lecompote-Dupré, was hanged in the Montreal Market, for theft, in the summer of 1735 (1960, 85). In

Raising Raced and Erased Executions

83

1827, Robert Ellis, convicted of breaking into and stealing from a church, was hanged in front of the prison in Quebec City (87).18 The most famous black condamné – or, rather, condamnée – in proto-Quebec history is Marie-Josèphe Angélique.19 These blacks, if remembered and written about now, would serve to rend the veil that shrouds Canadian slavery.20 During the post-slavery era (which began, unofficially, in the early nineteenth century and, officially, in 1834), African Canadians continued to be hanged or lynched. For instance, in the chapter entitled ‘The Charivari’ in Roughing It in the Bush: Or, Life in Canada (1852), Susanna Moodie records the tale, as told by Mrs. O., of what is in effect the lynching of Tom Smith, somewhere in Upper Canada, sometime before the Moodies’ arrival there in 1832. This ex-African American had had the temerity to marry ‘not a bad-looking Irish woman.’ To chastise him for his ill-considered union, a gang had gone ‘so far as to enter the [newlyweds’] house, drag the poor nigger from his bed, and in spite of his shrieks for mercy, [hurry] him out into the cold air – for it was winter – and almost naked as he was, [ride] him upon a rail, and so ill-[treat] him that he died under their hands.’ Mrs. O. then tells Moodie that ‘the ringleaders escaped across the lake to the other side ’ – presumably the United States – ‘and those who remained could not be sufficiently identified to bring them to trial.’ In good Canadian style, Mrs. O. goes on to relate, ‘the affair was hushed up,’ though ‘it gave great uneasiness to several respectable families whose sons were in the scrape ’ (Moodie [1852] 1989, 211). In Moodie’s citation of this frontier ‘Histoire d’O,’ one sees, in embryonic form, the usual Canadian response to racial violence against so-called visible minorities, whether in Canada or in Somalia: pretend that we are not implicated.21 In the twentieth century, ‘lynchings’ may have posed as legal hangings. One possibly ‘masked’ lynching terminated Daniel P. Sampson, aged forty-nine, a Haligonian labourer, in 1935. Convicted of homicide in connection with the supposed stabbing deaths of Edward and Bramwell Heffernan, two white children aged ten and twelve, in Halifax in 1933, Sampson, if guilty, was a minor version of Nat Turner. Sampson’s stated motive for slaying the children was that they had maligned him with a racist epithet. A Royal Canadian Mounted Police commentary on ‘The Hefferman [sic] Case ’ says that Sampson was arrested after ‘prolonged investigation’ and tried twice: in April 1934 and in October 1934. The second trial occurred because ‘the written confession had been tendered as an exhibit at the Preliminary Hearing but apparently became mislaid in the Prothonotary’s office’ (Royal Canadian Mounted Police, 1935, 10). This circumstance urges doubt about Sampson’s guilt. (See David Steeves’s true study.) Morrison alleges that the ‘blood’ smelled by the media in the 1994–5 O.J. Simpson affair ‘belonged not to the victims but to the prey – a potent sensation aroused by the site and sight of a fallen, treacherous, violent black body, and sustained by the historical association of such a body with violence as dread entertainment’ (1997, xiv). To what extent was Sampson, guilty or innocent, positioned as the nightmarish black body disrupting facades of white innocence and ‘civilization’?22 Despite the records of persecutions as prosecutions, suspicious convictions, and suspect hangings, African-Canadian writers have been slow to open ruddy documents and eye past black existence in Canada and the ways of white folk in administering racially unequal ‘justice.’ Many ‘cases’ remain ‘open,’ and we must sift through their remains. The bodies of our executed must be reclaimed.

II Marie-Josèphe Angélique is the only African-Canadian executionee to kindle contemplations by several African-Canadian writers and artists. The most famous – though still obscure – black

84 Directions home

victim of execution in Canada has sparked African Canadians to ink, as of 2009, one novel (in French), two published plays (in English), a third play (staged in 2008), a made-for-television film, a major history (in English), and a tribute song (also in English).23 (A novel by the Québécoise writer Micheline Bail is a recent ‘white’ contribution to the Angélique legend; but there have been several other works too.24) Angélique appeals to different black creators for different reasons. By allegedly starting a fire – in the home of her mistress, Thérèse Decouagne – that incinerated, eventually, forty-six houses and the l’Hôtel-Dieu convent and hospital in ancien régime Montreal, Angélique appears in African-Canadian history as a violent resister of slavery. Also, as a black woman who exercised agency in choosing her lovers and in denouncing her accusers, Angélique symbolizes feminist self-actualization. She was also, attractively, youthful: Trudel pegs her at being twenty-one at the time of her baptism in June 1730 (1960, 92), so she may have been as young as twenty-four when she died.25 Captured in her flight from Quebec, condemned as an arsonist, hanged, and, once dead, burned at the stake on 21 June 1734 in Montreal, Angélique emerges as a classic martyr. Yet she is also, richly for writers and artists, an ambiguous heroine. Before she entered the annals of history and the pages of fiction, Angélique was mainly an acquiescent slave and no firebrand. Loyal to her owners, she chose to flee only because she feared being sold. Even her ‘heroic arson’ was, perhaps, accidental. If she did set a fire to consume her mistress’s mansion, then it was to cover her flight – into the arms of her white lover, Claude Thibault, a fact that complicates her status as a rebel. But the image of her figure (hanging, then burning), martyred in the cause of liberty, is irresistible. (Her ‘Christian’ name even encapsulates beings germane to that religion.) She is an African-Canadian version of Joan of Arc; Thomas Hardy’s tragic heroine, Tess; and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s Acadian saint, Evangeline – at least for some of her acolytes. In his vast history of black Canadians, Robin W. Winks skips every capital case involving ‘us’ save one, that of Angélique. His treatment is catatonically laconic: ‘a Negress belonging to Mme. François Poulin de Francheville set fire to her mistress’s house in April 1734, thereby destroying a portion of Montreal ...’ ([1971] 1997, 11).26 Winks neither identifies this ‘Negress’ nor ascribes any heroism to her. To attack the white space – the opaque silence – that shrouds Angélique in Eurocentric histories, Barbadian-Canadian writer Lorris Elliott, ‘Afro-Acadien’27 writer Paul Fehmiu Brown, and Afro-Québécoise writer Lorena Gale have published, in turn, a one-act play (an excerpt from a longer play), a juvenile novel, and a full-length play on Angélique. Fittingly, all three authors have Quebec connections. Elliott taught English at McGill University and was active in black arts circles in Montreal; Brown, a native of Acadie (i.e., Nova Scotia), now lives in Montreal; and Gale was a native Montréalaise. The three writers image Angélique in their own terms.28 Elliott’s play, The Trial of Marie-Joseph Angelique – Negress and Slave, repeats the facts of Trudel’s history. In his introduction, Elliott writes that Angélique was condemned ‘for what has been recorded as “the most spectacular crime committed by a slave in Canadian history”’ (1985, 55), thus Englishing Trudel’s assertion that ‘le crime le plus spectaculaire qu’un esclave ait accompli dans notre histoire, c’est celui de la négresse Angélique …’ (1960, 92). Elliott plucks his facts from Trudel, but his usage of Angélique is original. He begins by recounting the history: Tortured four times and forced to admit to her ‘crime ’, she was allowed to make a confession in prison in the presence of a priest, Navetier. She was then handed over to the Executioner (probably a negro, Mathieu Léveillé), taken to the church to make amends, displayed to the townsfolk and

Raising Raced and Erased Executions

85

hanged. Her ashes were then spread about. Thus satisfied, the Montrealers began to reconstruct their homes. (1985b, 55)

But Elliott jettisons realism in his play, preferring to position Angélique as a time-travelling spirit able to warn future black immigrants about the innate hostility of Canada. When Angélique first appears on stage, it is 1734, she is in a prison courtyard in Montreal, and she is about to die. Voices shout ‘Assassin … Arsonist,’ ‘Hanging’s too good … burn her alive ’ (57; ellipses in original), and ‘burn the firebrand’ (58). The voices assaulting Angélique are sing-songy, childish (‘O goody goody … we ’re going to have a hanging’ [57]; ‘We want a burning … how about a hanging … we want a hanging … etc’ [58; ellipses in the original]), exposing the congenital savagery of superficially civilized beings. The voices bruit the brouhaha of a lynch mob. Before her execution, however, Angélique abandons the eighteenth century for the nineteenth, projecting her spirit through more than a century of time and more than six hundred kilometres of space to ‘haunt’ Mary Ann Shadd, ‘a Black woman, a teacher, founder and editor of The Province [sic] Freeman in Toronto, Windsor, and Chatham, Canada West’ (56). Angelique ’s spirit odyssey fascinates, but her message to Shadd fulminates. The ‘arsonist’ tells Shadd, the abolitionist newspaper editor and promoter of African-American emigration to Canada West (in the aftermath of the passage of the U.S. Fugitive Slave Bill in 1851), about her life as a Canadian slave. ‘A negress and a slave … a merchant’s property,’ she has been ‘rooted up, and against my will, brought here to be transplanted … here within this snow-cold land …’ (L. Elliott 1985, 59; ellipses in original). Shadd considers Canada a land of liberty: ‘In fact, the good woman, Harriet Tubman, has brought many a former slave into this country … here to live as all others … in freedom.’ Angélique soon undermines Shadd’s romanticism (or optimism), alleging that ‘this land that uses brother against brother … and sister too, is no place to settle in.’ When Shadd asks, ‘… must I leave Canada to find another country?’ Angélique answers, while ‘pointing to the audience,’ ‘Do you believe they want us to entrench here, when laws are made against those who would offer us support?’ (60; ellipses in original). Her question voices not just her personal, historical despair but also the present disgruntlement of black immigrants residing in an unwelcoming Canada. Her last words to the audience – and to Shadd – are bitter: ‘God bless you Canada … once I did think that, with Claude, … I would find a good life here … and freedom …’ (64; ellipses in original). She is hanged in view of a Shadd now herself magically transported to 1734 Montreal. Shadd’s last speech reveals her re-education: ‘O Journey … is this true? … is this Canada? … O Angelique’ (65; ellipses in original). Angélique, as archetypal black immigrant (impotent but rebellious), underlines the persistent agony that white Canadian racism poses for the new black immigrant, whether it be Shadd in the nineteenth century or Elliott and his confrères in the twentieth. Elliott animates Angelique as a wraith generated by Canadian territory and Canadian ‘terror’ – or iniquity. A speaker for indigeneity and racial history, one who will return ‘[à] l’état de nature ... the very Nature from which she came’ (61; ellipsis in original), Angélique projects the true history of African-Canadian experience out of the landscape itself. In Elliott’s extraordinary play, Angélique becomes a Cassandra, one who cries out, ‘New black immigrants, beware the ingrained Negrophobia of the “Great White North.”’ Opening his eponymously titled novel, Marie-Josèphe Angélique: Montréal, Québec 21 juin 1734, Paul Fehmiu Brown declares that ‘tracer le parcours de Marie-Josèphe Angélique et raconter sa vie, c’est écrire son histoire à l’enverse’ (1998, 7). He is right. To memorialize this character is

86 Directions home

to write history inside out or wrong side up. But only an inversion can invest Angelique with the rigour of representative martyrdom. She is, directly, a victim of New France, a slave state. She is the toy of her owners, the family of François Poulin de Francheville, then the credible vache of a slave-taureau (86), Jacques César,29 and then the plaything of her white lover, Claude Thibault. Occasionally, Brown’s Angélique displays anger and mourns her slavery, but these gestures are sporadic and ephemeral. She is willful but frustratingly ‘loyal.’ She ‘belongs to’ – and remains with – a household that schemes successfully, through coercion and fraudulent pledges of liberty, to see her impregnated by César, another owner’s slave, so that she can bear new slaves to be sold off to pay her owners’ debts. This sad destiny is scuttled only because her children, a boy, Eustache, and then twins, Louis and Marie-Françoise, perish in infancy. Angélique contests her slavehood so inconsistently that it is only her stoicism when facing execution that grants her a final, tragic majesty. Angélique possesses a ‘fausse quiétude ’: she accepts the degradation and self-denial demanded of slaves because she imagines that she will be freed when she turns twenty-five. At times, she is ‘assez lucide’ – realistic enough – to consider the present as a universe of shadows (7). Still, she expects to eventually find ‘la liberté et la dignité’ (7). Angélique demonstrates the patience not of Job, but of Longfellow’s Evangeline.30 She is also, like Evangeline, beautiful and virtuous (though, for a slave, ‘virtue’ is a vagary). While Evangeline is eyed by ‘[m]any a youth’ as ‘the saint of his deepest devotion’ (Longfellow 1962, 15), Angélique ’s beauty leaves no man ‘indifferent,’ we are told – ‘not even the curé’ (Paul Brown 1998, 10). Angélique also staves off coerced intercourse with César until relenting for her own reasons. Brown’s Angélique is ‘la plus belle’ slave woman in Montreal (10), but she is also – albeit only slightly – politically conscious. First, and strikingly, she respects the Afro-Aboriginal alliance that formed when some Black fugitive slaves, having found refuge among the Aboriginal people, shared with them their communal life, to the great dismay of their former white owners (31). Second, she appeals – in African custom – to ancestral spirits (41), thus demonstrating her partial reclamation of her own native culture. Third, Angélique recognizes that New England is freer for blacks than is New France. Hence, when she flees Montreal, she heads for Vermont: ‘Why? Because this state never practised in any official or systematic manner the enslavement of Blacks’ (99). Her action reverses the Canadian stereotype about a unidirectional, northbound ‘Underground Railroad.’ Fourth, she wins over the black hangman who will take her life. Mathieu Léveillé, a Martiniquan character taken from history, is able to speak ‘an impeccable French, with a Creole accent’ (54). Although he is young, on arriving in New France he is pressed into service as a hangman. However, he has hanged only one person before Angélique. When he passes the noose around her neck, she maintains ‘an astonishing calm, causing the young executioner to tremble again’ (116). Quivering and looking into her eyes, Léveillé is told by her, ‘Don’t be afraid, my friend, my blood-brother … It is either my head or yours’ (117). Her espousal of a form of pan-Africanist solidarity secures Léveillé’s commitment to reunite Angélique with her slave ‘sister,’ Marie-Charlotte – on the gallows platform – one last time. And fifth, Angélique is blameless of any crime. She confesses her innocence (the fire was an accident triggered by Thibault) to Marie-Charlotte, who says, ‘I hope that, from generation to generation, there will always be someone to remember Marie-Josèphe Angélique. History will remember you.’ Saintly, Christ-like, Angélique commands Marie-Charlotte, ‘Dry your tears, my friend, I am going to rejoin my ancestors’ (118). Angélique immediately ascends to the status of hero-martyr. Despite all her insight, Angélique has a major flaw. She surrenders easily to the lethal machinery of fate (a characteristic reminiscent of Thomas Hardy’s Tess): ‘Slave masters control

Raising Raced and Erased Executions

87

and rule our lives, but it is Destiny that has the last word’ (Paul Brown 1998, 51). She repeats this point later: ‘What I mean is, that Destiny, ours, for you and me, is tragic. It isn’t accepting our condition as slaves that is tragic, it is being deprived of dreams’ (86).31 Angélique has opportunities to thwart her ‘overlords’ and escape her circumstances, but she does too little too late. For example, she calls Decouagne an ‘old hypocrite’ (92) and batters her mistress, knocking her forehead thrice against a table (93). The struggle between them starts a fire, which catches on Angélique ’s skirt. But Angélique does not flee; instead, she puts out the fire and continues to live with Decouagne (94) and ‘answers to the whims of her mistress.’ Angélique is too forbearing – and too fatalistic – for her own good. She knows that it is ‘illusory to think’ that Decouagne will not try to sell her, but she merely awaits ‘the fatal day nervously’ (95). In sum, Angélique proceeds from le taureau (stud – i.e., César) to le borreau (the executioner), pretty much as ‘fate ’ ordains. Brown’s intrusion into the unmarked space of the Canadian slave narrative constructs Angélique as a secular ‘African’ martyr, one who bears witness to black suffering, extends pan-African sympathies to other blacks, sentimentally unites with Aboriginal peoples, and perishes – a wronged innocent – stoically, but one who hesitates to assert any agency. As courageous as Angélique is, her constant expectation that white society will one day allow her liberty effects a self-deception that negates effective action. Brown suggests that African-Canadian communities in Quebec must remain vigilant in jealously fighting for equality rather than accepting pacifying, rhetorical blandishments about future ‘bliss,’ justice, and prosperity. The cover art of Marie-Josèphe Angélique fetishizes the protagonist’s martyrdom. The illustration by Marie-Judith Langlois portrays a svelte and ‘comely’ black woman, chained to a stake, in profile and staring straight ahead – like a figurehead – while flames leap about her form (which Brown rightly says is ‘naked under her shift’ [Paul Brown 1998, 115]). Yet before Angélique was bound to the stake, she had been tortured – in reality, in actual history, her legs have been smashed to pulp – and hanged until dead; she was neither living nor ‘pretty’ when burned. The cover art disavows the brutality of her end. The chains that bind her resemble Gucci fashion accessories, not coffle-strength metal. The cover art for Lorena Gale’s play Angélique is an apposite opposite. Here we see a confident, stern-looking, young black woman, with strong features, gazing directly at us while fire consumes the buildings just behind her. The imagery is not of sexualized martyrdom but of in-yo’-face ‘terrorism.’ (Gale’s text notes that Angélique is, at her execution, ‘barefoot and naked under a rough raw cotton period shirt’ [2000, 74; italics in original].) Elliott and Brown, both men, present Angélique the martyr, but Gale prefers Angélique the rebel. Thus, the cover art by Richard Horne complements the insistently insurrectionary nature of Gale ’s text (which won the duMaurier National Playwriting Competition in 1995). The two-act play was first produced in Alberta in 1998, then in Detroit and New York City in 1999, and in Toronto in 2004. As in Elliott’s play, Gale’s drama registers, ‘Then is now. Now is then.’ The stage directions inform the reader that, ‘Unless otherwise stated, the slaves are working in every scene in which they appear, either in a modern or historical context.’ Gale describes Angélique pointedly as ‘a slave, in a Canadian history book’ (3). Her Angélique summons up a heroine who attests that issues of economic servitude respecting women of colour – and poor whites – plague us yet. This Marxist theme infuses the play. Thus, in Gale ’s version, Claude Thibault – a servant – comments, ‘I’m just a peon. Like you. Something to pee on’ (14). Claude can only work ‘quietly in the background’ and not ‘watch openly’

88 Directions home

as François Poulin de Francheville, his boss and Angélique ’s owner, undresses her, ‘revealing period undergarments beneath her modern clothing’ (34). After Claude spies his boss ‘pumping’ Angélique ‘like he’s fucking her from behind’ (35), he begins to talk to her about escaping ‘South’ to New England, and ‘He takes her hand and kisses it’ (36, 37; italics in original). His socio-economic ‘impotence ’ compels him to court Angélique by promising her freedom in another land. Their respective class and caste positions would render any union in New France impossible.32 At one point, François accuses Claude, in front of Angélique, of ‘fucking’ her, and when Claude, the employee, denies it, his boss says, ‘But you want to … I don’t blame you. Everyone should get a taste of brown sugar’ (38). (Signifying her lack of power, Angélique can only privately curse and spit surreptitiously – perhaps poisonously – in the water that she serves François following this incident.) By the play’s end, after Claude and Angélique have fled Montreal together, he decides to abandon her while she sleeps. His reasons are tied not so much to race as to class: I remember watching my mother’s back – always bent, her shirt sleeves rolled above the wrinkles on her elbows. The skin on her arms and hands – rough and red and flaky. She scrubbed laundry for the rich … Some days I would beg more than she earned ... I’ve done everything for you [Angélique] … But with you, I’ll always be running. And I can’t run anymore … He runs off. (71)

Despite his testimony, Claude fulfils a prophecy of Gale’s César (here, too, a black stud), who warns Angélique, ‘There ’s only one thing worse than a rich white master and that’s a poor white who wants to be one. You think he’s on your side right now. But watch out. ’Cause in the end they are all white together’ (50). Regrettably, she never follows the logic of her own wise assertion to Claude: ‘I’m not willing to bet my body parts on your view of the world’ (36). Earlier, the white mistress, here called Thérèse De Couagne, beats a hanging carpet (or tapestry) but imagines that she is beating Angélique (thus denying her ‘sisterhood’) for miscellaneous reasons – ‘Because the bread didn’t rise,’ ‘Because he went to you again last night,’ or Because he stared at you through dinner. (smack) Because I have to pretend this isn’t happening. (smack) Because I wish you’d disappear. (smack) Because there is nothing else I can do. (smack) (30)

Thérèse ’s excuses for wanting to ‘smack’ Angélique arise from her frustration over her position as a white wife in a slave society in which African and Aboriginal women may be kept as concubines. Later, after Thérèse is widowed, she berates Angélique for having been her late husband’s mistress and curses her as a ‘Black bitch. Lying whore ’ who ‘liked it when he took you.’ Angélique ’s defence is, ‘The master only took from me what you refused to give ’ (42), an argument that backs a phallocentric view of marriage. Nevertheless, after the altercation, Angélique promises them both a bright future: ‘I know that things haven’t been good between us. But that’s all going to change now. I’ll serve you well. If you will let me ’ (43). Just as in Brown’s novel, Angélique dedicates herself to serving Thérèse. This ‘solidarity’ ends when Thérèse designs to sell Angélique – and the latter deigns to flee with Claude. Still, on the day of Angélique ’s execution, Thérèse recognizes that she herself is – metaphorically – responsible for the fire: ‘Hang me. It’s me ’ (74). Angelique is her scapegoat.

Raising Raced and Erased Executions

89

Importantly, Gale ’s Angelique builds an alliance with Manon, ‘a panisse, a young native slave/ servant,’ and the two women dance together to mingled African and Aboriginal-Canadian drumming and singing (28). Their friendship is scuttled by Manon’s love for César, who is in love with Angélique. Destructively, Angélique and Manon trade stereotypes about each other’s culture, then deny each other support: manon: I don’t follow you. Do not follow me. angélique: I won’t. You have forgotten the way. (59)

Manon later testifies against Angélique (66). But, like Thérèse, by the play’s end, Manon claims that it was she alone who set the destructive fire (74), thus ‘owning’ her anger regarding her sociopolitical disenfranchisement. Gale orchestrates the play’s contrasting sex-race-class conflicts so deliberately that, by the night of 10 April 1734, when the fire breaks out, five potential arsonists are on hand. Manon appears ‘shoveling hot coals into a bucket’; César ‘takes the bucket from MANON and prepares a cigar for smoking’; Ignace Gamelin, a capitalist who wishes to buy Thérèse ’s shares in her late husband’s factory, ‘takes a light from César’ and puffs on another cigar; ‘THÉRESE enters with a candle’; and Claude ‘enters with an oil lamp’ (59–61). The sixth suspect is Angélique, who also holds the bucket of hot coals first carried on stage by Manon (62). Even so, the play leaves open two possibilities: (1) that Angélique is innocent of staging the fire (though she has cause to do so); (2) that five characters – including Thérèse herself – have undertaken, independently or in alliances, to set her home ablaze.33 When Angélique decamps from Montreal with Claude, the mysterious fire – an allegorical representation of their love (62) – consumes forty-six houses, a statistic presented as if in a TV news report (63).34 Another overlap with the recent present occurs when a reporter casts the ‘M.J. Angélique case ’ as the ‘O.J.’ case (69), thus linking Angélique ’s persecution for alleged arson with Simpson’s 1994–7 prosecutions for – alleged – murder. Gale positions Angélique, as do Brown and Elliott, as a model for contemporary ‘marginals.’ By the end of Angélique, the protagonist, speaking from the gallows but at a microphone, knows herself to be a forerunner of the day when Montreal will be ‘swarming with ebony. / There ’s me and me and me and me … / My brothers and my sisters,’ and she can see them being ‘Arrested for their difference’ (75; ellipsis in the original). She insists on her innocence but also on her interest in pur et dur vengeance: I will from twisted history, be guilty in your eyes. If thought is sin then I am guilty. For I wish that I had fanned the flames that lead [sic] to your destruction. (75–6)

She dies amid ‘The overpowering sound of drums’ (76), a military-cum-multicultural sign of her perpetual ability to light ‘fires of rebellion.’ To conclude, Elliott, Brown, and Gale use the execution – or martyrdom – of Angélique to underline their respective political visions. The immigrant writer, Elliott, uses the spectre of

90 Directions home

Angélique to warn of the persistence of white Canadian racism. Brown, a native francophone African-Canadian writer, stages his Late Romantic Angélique as a countering black soeur of the Acadian nationalist symbol, Évangéline. Gale, a native, bilingual Québécoise, the daughter of an immigrant, identifies Angélique as the radical prophet of a multiracial Montreal. The three writers’ texts strike dramatic contrasts. Where Elliott’s Angélique strives to give future blacks the truth about Canada and set them against settlement, Gale’s Angélique prays that Canada will become ever ‘blacker’ and ‘browner’ and thus more accommodating. Elliott’s Angélique lectures anglophone blacks primarily, but Brown’s Angélique wants to rewrite French-Canadian ‘racial’ history. Intriguingly, both Brown and Gale reprint a legal document declaring Angélique ’s sentence of torture and death: Brown in French (1998, 107), Gale in English (2000, 73). The writers stress, then, Angélique’s implicit threat to authority and that authority’s explicitly violent response. Yet Brown’s Angélique is sentimental,35 while Gale ’s Angélique is seditious. All three authorial visions are progressive and useful, for they speak to current dilemmas of blackness and racial definition – and indefinition – in Canada. To establish other versions of socially transformative martyrdoms, scholars must exhume the bodies of the officially destroyed, the authoritative ‘Others,’ of our collective past. We cannot know our history until we know theirs. Yes, African-Canadian writers are summoned to banish the disquieting silence around racially biased incarceration and state-sanctioned murder in Canada. We must examine all texts – novels, poems, and plays; religious, journalistic, and legal materials – to begin to deter mine the lives of our ‘martyrs’ in colonial, modern, and postmodern Canada and to begin to hear their voices speaking back to us. To close with an appropriate African-American aphorism, from Sharon Patricia Holland, ‘The dead truly acknowledge no boundary, and their unruly universe is worthy of critical examination ... The dead survive and clamor for our recognition’ (2000, 171). Poignantly, we believe we can resist the dead. Our breaths defy their organic stasis, decay, and evaporation. Our muscular presence convinces us we may remake social truths and material facts. Yet, the dead define us, even as we turn our backs on their graves, for they are also our conclusion, that instant when Time will press us back into their bosoms, and we cease to be their children and become their collaborators. In musing on their failure to achieve Justice, we discover, too, how much we refuse to establish it for ourselves. It is a darkly luculent lesson true for Europeans as well as for Africans – and everyone…

7 Let Us Compare Anthologies: Harmonizing the Founding African-Canadian and Italian-Canadian Literary Collections For Ricardo Scipio (1965–)1 If this essay is a tapestry, it is one threaded with the flamboyant gilt of mea culpa and caveat lector. Ignorant of the subtle, delicate, and intricate lineaments of Italian-Canadian literature and culture, I am foolhardy in hazarding any opinions about the ways in which the first anthology of Italian-Canadian literature, Roman Candles: An Anthology of Poems by Seventeen Italo-Canadian Poets (1978), edited by Pier Giorgio Di Cicco, might be alleged to share affinities with the first widely circulated African-Canadian literary anthology in English, Canada in Us Now: The First Anthology of Black Poetry and Prose in Canada (1976),2 edited by Harold Head. However, while I cannot define the history, politics, and institutions of Italian-Canadian literature, I may acknowledge its apparent similarities with its African-Canadian counterpart, for their foundational anthologies address equivalent issues. The comparison is neither illicit nor illogical, for, despite their contrasting temporal, cultural, and linguistic origins, both of these minority group– fostered Canadian literatures first achieved ‘critical mass’ in the 1970s. Moreover, their mutual ‘coming-to-voice,’ so to speak, coincided with increased immigration from their homelands and the announcement, by the Canadian state, on 8 October 1971, of an official policy to promote the development of a multicultural society within a superstructure of official bilingualism. Indeed, in its response to the report of the Royal Commission on Bilingualism and Biculturalism in 1971, the twenty-eighth Parliament of Canada, led by Liberal prime minister Pierre Elliott Trudeau, forecasted the basic social environment in which the Head and Di Cicco anthologies would appear: Canadian identity will not be undermined by multiculturalism. Indeed we believe that cultural pluralism is the very essence of Canadian identity. Every ethnic group has the right to preserve and develop its own culture and values within the Canadian context. To say that we have two official languages is not to say we have two official cultures, and no particular culture is more ‘official’ than another. A policy of multiculturalism must be a policy for all Canadians.3 (Canada 1971)

Too, both Di Cicco and Head – and their various contributors – had similar social agendas: 1) to articulate a group identity; 2) to reject both segregation and assimilation; 3) to create a dialogue with other ‘ethnic’ Canadians. Consequently, Di Cicco’s Roman Candles and its predecessor, Head’s Canada in Us Now, advance their socio-political interests in complementary ways. This accidental, near-coalition offers an implicit defence of bureaucratized Multiculturalism4 while also underscoring the unity-within-diversity of distinct, but parallel, literary cultures.5

92 Directions home

Crucially, both Roman Candles and Canada in Us Now appeared in the wake of the promulgation of a federal Multiculturalism policy. Prompted by concerns for national unity, the program sought to improve Canadian national identity by promoting, said Prime Minister Trudeau, ‘confidence in one ’s own identity; out of this can grow respect for others and a willingness to share ideas, attitudes and assumptions.’ Trudeau believed that ‘a vigorous policy of multiculturalism will help create this initial confidence. It can form the basis of a society which is based on fair play for all’ (quoted in Tepper 1997, 197). Though Trudeau’s rhetoric is lacklustre and vague, the policy itself was revolutionary.6 York University history professor Irving Abella confirms that ‘Multiculturalism is innovative; it has enhanced our self-image; it has proven a life-saver to many communities; it has created pride where there had once only been pain; comfort where there was once only contempt.’ (1997, 72). For Abella, Multiculturalism ‘came into being in order to open minds that for too long had been closed’ and ‘to right a terrible historical wrong and to write [minorities] back into Canadian history’ (78). For Hedy Fry, once secretary of state for multiculturalism (1996–2000), the program is ‘the polar opposite of apartheid’ (1997, 36). According to Emilio S. Binavince, a constitutional lawyer, Multiculturalism makes it possible for Canadian minorities to pursue ‘equal access to government power and the institutions of government’ (Binavince 1997, 91). Its supporters understand that Multiculturalism extends, to non-Anglo-Saxon and non-Gallic Canadian citizens, official recognition of their existence as minority groups within the state. This notice was radical, for it detracted from the prevailing view of Canada as a white Franco-British state, where only Canadians of these heritages, espousing Protestant and Catholic versions of Christianity, could qualify as complete citizens. Through official Bilingualism (established in 1969), the federal state argued that it was responsive to francophone (as well as anglophone) Canadians; through Multiculturalism, it portrayed itself as representing all Canadians, without distinguishing among different – ethno-linguistic – heritages.7 Whatever the progressive implications of this repositioning of the Canadian state, federal Liberal politicians were quick to attempt to reap the usual electoral benefits. By 1976 and 1978 then, when the Head and Di Cicco anthologies appear, ‘song-and-dance ’ multicultural festivals and celebrations were commonplace.8 True: Di Cicco’s anthology was funded by the Canada Council arts-funding agency, and Head’s was published by the Marxism-infused New Canada Press. Neither book received funding from the Multiculturalism Secretariat. Nevertheless, both entered an environment where state Multiculturalism was being instrumentalized as an opportunistic means of cementing ‘ethnic’ allegiances to the governing Liberals, while also serving as a propaganda bulwark against the independence-minded government in Quebec.9 In other words, while eschewing any imbrication with state Multiculturalism in the 1970s, both Head and Di Cicco produced works engaging inevitably with its principal discourses: pro-immigration, pro-‘Canadian’ identity, pro-diversity, and pro-national unity (or anti-separatism). Such an engagement was inevitable because Multiculturalism proposed, in the 1970s, to forge Canada into a ‘truly global and metropolitan community’ (Kinsella 1997, 54) or ‘a multi-ethnic mosaic within which multiple allegiances are fostered’ (Stanford 1997, 177).10 Head and Di Cicco participate in a discussion then that was heralding what Fo Niemi calls the ‘age of “mosaic democracies”’ (1997, 172). However, neither editor could articulate, in 1976 or 1978, a truly catholic multiculturalism, for both were pursuing, in occasionally clashing terms, culturally (ethnic) nationalist aesthetics and agendas. In ‘We Have Come,’ his introduction to Canada in Us Now, Head, in fealty to the black liberation ethos then popular among black intellectuals in urban Canada, voices an ars poetica of black

let us compare anthologies

93

power: ‘This anthology is representative of the collective consciousness of people in the act of liberating themselves (and us) from a legacy which denied their humanity and heaped scorn on the culture of colonial peoples.’11 For Head, a South African native, the writers canvassed in his anthology ‘reaffirm the spirit of all mankind striving to be free ’ (1976, 7). Thus, he disparages ‘petty’ work mandating ‘simply the pretty arrangement of words for the edification of a “cultured” minority’ (9). Head’s dismissal of supposedly dismally bourgeois art dovetails with his publisher’s sworn interest in publishing ‘books and pamphlets that will be of assistance to the Canadian People ’s struggle for national liberation’ (4). Head’s guiding principles are both Marxist and pan-Africanist, representing an alliance between Anglo-Canadian nationalists anxious about U.S. influence in Canada and black community activists anxious for greater influence within Canadian society. In his preface, Di Cicco is briefer than Head and less directly ‘political.’ His impetus for assembling Roman Candles is purely cultural, not socialist. Feeling ‘isolated’ from other ItalianCanadian writers, as well as self-conscious about his dual culture and heritage, he wants to found a conversation. Di Cicco offers no palaver of ‘liberation,’ no gestures towards a ‘collective consciousness.’ Instead, he organizes a conference of poets who express a ‘bicultural sensibility’ (1978, 9) – Italian and Anglo-Canadian.12 Another difference also separates the two anthologists. Introducing his anthology, Head centralizes the black immigrant experience. The politics of dislocation and relocation are his writers’ focus: ‘The majority of the contributors to this anthology are new Canadians. Some have been here only four years, two have lived here for the past twenty years and three are fourth generation Canadians’ (1976, 10). Di Cicco applies an opposing emphasis: ‘All the poets included have one sure thing in common – they are not emigrants. They were brought here by their families at an early age, and three were born in North America’ (1978, 9). Head feels that his mainly immigrant authors seek to realize black liberation, albeit in concert with Canadian aspirations to achieve a socialist society. Di Cicco classes his authors, in contrast, as practically native North Americans or Canadians; their usage of English cancels, Di Cicco believes, their putatively alien origins. Opposing Head, Di Cicco claims a Canadian identity for his contributors. By denying émigré status to children, Di Cicco suggests they are Canadian by birth. Yet, the authors’ bios discredit this assumption. For instance, John Melfi, born in Italy in 1947, arrived in Canada in 1956; Joseph Ranallo, born in Italy in 1940, landed in Canada in 1952; Filippo Salvatore, born in Italy in 1948, was sixteen when his family removed to Canada (Di Cicco 1978, 84–5).13 The idea of a common ‘North America’ (9) shared by Italian immigrants enables Di Cicco to count the U.S.-born Mike Zizis as Canadian (85). Thus, the editor defines, strategically, his ‘Italo-Canadian’ writers as Canadian.14 The contrasting emphases of Head and Di Cicco are underscored by Di Cicco’s seeming riposte to Head’s title, Canada in Us Now: The First Anthology of Black Poetry and Prose in Canada: ‘I decided to limit the work to that written in English, largely to avoid an anthology the title of which would be The Italian Poets Writing in Canada.’15 Di Cicco wishes to explore ‘what, if anything, these poets could bring to Anglo-Canadian poetry,’ to accent their ‘fortunate and tragic position of having to live with two cultures, one more exterior than the other’ (1978, 9–10). Di Cicco’s ‘Italo-Canadian’ poets interest him for the ways in which they manifest Italian-ness within the dominant discourse of English, or, specifically, Anglo-Canadian literature. For his part, Head ignores Canadian literature. The potential existence and availability of a dual ‘Black’ and ‘Canadian’ sensibility is irrelevant. His desire is to unify ‘blacks,’ those who

94 Directions home

happen to be ‘in Canada,’ not to promote integration with Canadians – who are thought of as white. Yes, Head recognizes that his contributors share with Anglo-Canadians a British heritage. They ‘were schooled in Shakespeare, Wordsworth, Blake, Byron, Shelley, Keats, and Browning,’ and are from ‘Guyana, Trinidad, Barbados, St. Vincent, South Africa, Nigeria and Canada – all former British colonies’ (1976, 7). Still, Head’s poets and prose writers hail from, fundamentally, ‘the Black World’ (9), and their compositions ‘return, in spirit, to origins, to Africa where the work of the artist is even today at one with his community’ (8). While Di Cicco seeks to identify the Italo-Canadian ‘displaced sensibility’ or ‘bicultural sensibility’ (1978, 9) and its contribution – realized or potential – to English-Canadian poetry, Head is obsessed, strikingly, with how his authors replicate ‘Africa’ in their subjects and rhetoric, for they belong to ‘the Third World’ (1976, 10) – a purportedly primary allegiance. Head’s writers are, he urges, building a pan-Africanist, not a Canadian, literature. He sees, then, only the possibility of a ‘Black’ and ‘Canadian’ – that is, white workers’ – liberation movement uniting to oppose American and European imperialist capitalism (11–12). There are ‘Blacks’ and there are ‘Canadians’ – no hyphenation necessary. The only ‘hyphenated’ Canadians16 Head discusses, the so-called Afro-Canadian – or multi-generational African-Canadian – people are flawed: they bear the stigma of ‘historical and psychological castration’ (10).17 Their ‘bicultural sensibility’ – as Di Cicco would term it – is, here, a terrible liability. In sum, in his anthology preface, Head craves a unified black collectivity, within Canada, whose writings participate in a global, pan-African, black-empowerment movement, but whose politics leave room for opportune, leftist alliances with white Canadians: ‘You share our colonial heritage; your (our) liberation is not yet done. Your future lies with us every bit as much as our present lies with you’ (1976, 12). Turning to Di Cicco, one notes that he disparages ‘Canadianism,’ or Anglo-Canadian nationalism, to foreground ‘Italo-Canadian experience ’ – that is, writers who ‘belong and do not belong’ (1978, 9, 10). Although Di Cicco rejects the Canuck nationalism Head supports, tacitly (to offset British and American nationalism), Di Cicco’s emphasis on the dual cultural status of his writers is as contradictory as Head’s description of black immigrants as ‘new Canadians’ (1976, 10) who are, nevertheless, scribes of a black ‘Socialist International.’ Even though Head and Di Cicco strike contrasting attitudes towards Canada and immigrant populations, both oppose any model of monocultural white/‘Anglo’ Canadianness. Head expresses his dissent by collapsing Canadian identity into pan-Africanism. Therefore he writes that, following a ‘yesterday’ when ‘we were separated from Africa into Jamaica, Barbados, Trinidad, Guyana; Mandingo from Ashanti; Ashanti from Benin …’ – and when ‘Canadians could count on one hand the black faces around Bathurst and Bloor Streets in Toronto’ – we will ‘tomorrow … be marching down the streets of Pretoria on our way to celebrate life in Soweto’ (1976, 11). African Canadians are imagined as displaced and divided Africans who will re-unite in the triumphant celebration of a liberated Africa. This vision is pseudo-Garveyite. Likewise, Di Cicco resents ‘the sheer force of Canadianism’ (1978, 9), that is to say, Anglo-Canadian cultural nationalism, which stifles ‘Italo-Canadian’ expression. He prefers writers who will re-make English- (and French-) Canadian literature and culture in a new, Italian-Canadian image. Despite their like tactical challenges to a Canadian ‘culture ’ dominated by whites (according to Head) and Anglos (says Di Cicco), the editors differ on strategy. Head considers blacks who happen to live in Canada; Di Cicco is concerned with Italian Canadians who feel stranded between an Italy where they are not remembered and a Canada that (super)imposes an Anglo (or Franco) culture upon them. Head views Canada implicitly as a ‘white ’ country that is a nearly

let us compare anthologies

95

irrelevant host for a black/African population in provisional exile. For Di Cicco, the Italian immigrant quarrel with English (and French) Canada is a battle among Europeans-in-exile, with ‘Italians’ protesting the tendency of Anglo-Saxons and Gauls to hog Canada for themselves. In other words, Head constructs, from ‘Black’ Canada, a pan-African Union established within the blank, waste space of semi-colonial Canada; Di Cicco seeks, in contrast, a concordat with English-Canadian culture and literature. Despite their clashing philosophical ‘anthems,’ Head and Di Cicco compose anthologies that harmonize remarkably. Both editors include seventeen poets. (Head also enlists three fiction writers.) Head’s ‘crew’ hail from all corners of the African diaspora, but also number a ‘Coloured’ South African and two Caribbean-born South Asians, all assembled under the rubric ‘Black,’ a sign protean and cosmopolitan here. Di Cicco selects writers from Italy, Canada, and the United States. However, his approach also approximates multiculturalism, for the writers from these three locales matured in vastly different societies. Head ‘imports’ the ‘black world’ to Canada; Di Cicco introduces Canadians to a multifarious, ‘Italian’ identity and experience.18 Di Cicco closes his preface with a poem, ‘My Genealogy,’ by John Robert Colombo, that speaks to a family lineage of incessant cultural fusion and transfusion. Its last four stanzas merit recitation here: 9. Blood flows through my veins at different speeds: Italian, German, Greek, French-Canadian. Sometimes it mixes. 10. At times I feel close to the Aegean, the Cote d’Azure, the Lombard Plain, and the Black Forest. 11. I seldom feel close to the Rocky Mountains, the Prairies, the Great Lakes, or the cold St. Lawrence. What am I doing in Toronto? 12. If this means being Canadian, I am a Canadian. (Colombo 1978, 11–12)

Di Cicco sounds Colombo so as to flesh out his own precept, ‘that the true [Canadian] citizen

96 Directions home

remains a foreigner if only to remain a citizen of the world’ (1978, 10). Head backs a similar internationalism; his Caribbean-born contributors are, he feels, ‘a new adjunct to the Black and Canadian communities,’ and that all blacks ‘offer other Canadians a unique opportunity – a window – and a tangible link – with the Third World’ (1976, 11). Head urges, to recast Di Cicco, that the true Black Canadian remains a foreigner if only to remain a citizen of the larger black world. The poem that best articulates Head’s aims in Canada in Us Now is Liz Cromwell’s ‘We have come,’ whose title also heads Head’s introduction. Here is its opening stanza: To Toronto we have come as men Seeking shapes in a long lost dream Across the green seas. We who dried our blackness in the sun Have come as bondsmen without shame or home To seek a loaf of fame, redeem our pride Imbibe the juice of pain To do what we as creatures of past dreams Of smoke have made us. (Cromwell 1976, 60)

These ‘bondsmen’ of Cromwell – and Head – face a major peril: forgetting their original, Caribbean heritages and thus becoming ‘white-washed Negroes / of the much-touted sad mosaic’ – of multiculturalism (Head 1976, 60). To avoid this danger, Head’s anthology seeks to reconstitute a coherent black community within the forbidding, ‘white ’ vastness of Canada. Similarly, Di Cicco wishes to save ‘Italo-Canadians’ from the ‘isolationism’ created by Anglo-Canadian nationalism as well as from ‘the convenience of a melting-pot’ – or assimilation (1978, 9, 10). Thus, he engineers an anthology. Italian-Canadian scholar Joseph Pivato applauds such cultural work: ‘The publication of ethnic anthologies … creates an identity for the group or generation, … stimulates reader interest in the writers as a group, … encourages the writers to publish their own work, … begins to create critical and academic interest in the writers. Pier Giorgio Di Cicco’s 1978 anthology of Italian-Canadian poets, Roman Candles, did all of these things and more ’ (Pivato 1994, 67). To revise Head, then, Di Cicco denies a future of utterly Gallicized or Saxonized Italians. Explicitly, both Head and Di Cicco defend the maintenance of distinctive cultural heritages in an officially Multicultural society. By pursuing a definite policy of ‘hyphenated Canadianism,’ a concept supported by his use of the term ‘Italo-Canadian,’ Di Cicco rejects the rightist liberal view that ‘the “hyphenated” concept can undermine Canadian identity’ (Cardozo and Musto 1997, 9). By showcasing poets who voice a ‘bicultural sensibility’ (Di Cicco 1978, 9), Di Cicco flouts critics, such as U.S. liberal Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., who deems multiculturalism ‘dangerously divisive. It encourages government to segregate citizens along racial, ethnic, and linguistic fault-lines’ (quoted in Jan Brown 1997, 68).19 Di Cicco’s practice also counters the vision of Japanese-Canadian cultural activist R.L. Gabrielle Nishiguchi, who alleges the hyphen is ‘that tiny splash of ink uniting words but distancing worlds’ (1997, 112). By compiling Roman Candles, Di Cicco offers an eloquent retort to those who, in the name of advancing Canadian (or Québécois) unity, request the erasure of minority cultural specificity.20 Although Head rues the only ‘hyphenated’ Canadian group he discusses (i.e., the ‘AfroCanadian’) (Head 1976, 10), he does not rue multiculturalism. His chief passion is the unifica-

let us compare anthologies

97

tion here of intellectual black and ‘Third World’ émigrés and exiles. His totalizing ‘Black’ vision nixes any hyphen. The rhetoric of black consciousness and anti-imperialism is the rallying point for black – and brown (Asian) – intellectuals displaced in(to) Canada. From this perspective, Canada in Us Now is an inversion of the more ‘natural’ title: ‘Us in Canada Now.’ Head’s interest is not Canadian citizenship, but the raising of a phalanx of African-heritage intellectuals to continue to agitate, from a ‘Canadian’ vantage point, for anti-racism in Canada and anti-apartheid and anti-colonialism abroad. Di Cicco accents the ‘bicultural’ Italo-Canadian identity of his writers, but his anthology affirms multiculturalism by appearing in English. Moreover, the apparent influence of JewishCanadian writers on at least three of the Roman Candle poets presents another glimpse of multiculturalism at work (or play). Di Cicco dedicates a poem to Tom Wayman (‘The Poem Becomes Canadian,’ 1978, 38). Filippo Salvatore’s poem ‘Three Poems for Giovanni Caboto’ replicates the spirit of an Irving Layton poem addressing the statues of Hebrew prophets in a Québécois Catholic cathedral, ‘On Seeing the Statuettes of Ezekiel and Jeremiah in the Church of Notre Dame.’ Like Layton, Salvatore features a speaker who comments ironically on the appropriation of a great ancestral compatriot by an alien culture. His persona engages in a monologue addressing a statue of ‘John Cabot’ – the Giovanni Caboto of the poem’s title – an Italian explorer who claimed the ‘New World’ for Britain: Giovanni, they erected you a monument, but they changed your name; here they call you John. And you look at them from your stony pedestal with a hardly perceivable grin on your bronze lips. (1978, 14)

Layton’s persona sounds much like Salvatore’s speaker. He complains that Ezekiel and Jeremiah now bear French names, and, far from being fierce, dynamic prophets, are now immobilized in alabaster and stationed in an unaesthetic edifice (Layton 1977, 19). Likewise, Len Gasparini’s poem ‘The Photograph of My Grandfather Reading Dante ’ echoes A.M. Klein’s lyric ‘Heirloom’. In the case of both poets, the speaker bonds with a patriarch by recalling, wistfully, the latter’s dedication to text – poetic or scriptural. Klein’s poem forges the connection between paternal ancestry and cultural literacy with nostalgic, Romantic rhetoric: My father bequeathed me no wide estates; No keys and ledgers were my heritage; Only some holy books with yahrzeit dates Writ mournfully upon a blank front page – Books of the Baal Shem Tov, and of his wonders; Pamplets upon the devil and his crew; Prayers against road demons, witches, thunders; And sundry other tomes for a good Jew. …

98 Directions home These are my coat of arms, and these unfold My noble lineage, my proud ancestry! (Klein 1974, 157-8)

Gasparini’s lyric memorializes a paternal reader two generations back: Every evening he would sit for hours in his favorite old rocking chair, holding a glass of homemade wine, with the Divina Commedia in his lap and a snuff box on the table beside him. Under a plain parchment lampshade that haloed his venerable head, my mother’s father, Luigi, would immerse himself in profundities. And while the rest of our family played cards or listened to Italian music, I would study his wrinkled, serene face and love him … (1978, 28)21

Like Klein, Gasparini delineates his literary paternity by appealing to the example of a studious male forebear. For Klein, it is the father who reads Hebrew scripture and its glosses; for Gasparini, it is the grandfather who reads Dante. The parallels between both poets’ poems do not end here. Klein’s father, in his reading, left ‘snuff … on this page, now brown and old’ (158). Gasparini’s grandfather sits reading with ‘a snuff box on the table beside him’ (28). One more intertextual linkage is Gasparini’s use of the rocking chair; this reference points the reader to Klein’s most successful collection, The Rocking Chair and Other Poems (1948). These allusive connections suggest an Italian-Canadian interest in the Jewish-Canadian success in building a new culture in an alien land, while eschewing both isolation and assimilation. Canada in Us Now shows no interest in any Canada-located minority group save African-heritage people. Instead, Head’s writers display a multicultural vision by limning a pan-African and Third World-oriented blackness. The anthology scribes, describes, and prescribes a polyphonous, international, and kaleidoscopic blackness, the very form of ‘African-Canadianité.’22 Thus, poet Vibert Cambridge anatomizes contemporary West Indian immigration as a further globalization of the African diaspora: You may have seen him in Panama’s Canal … England’s Brixton, Balham, Birmingham and Bradford, Guyana’s Tiger Bay, Trinidad’s La Basse, Jamaica’s Dungle And America’s Bedford Stuyvesant.

let us compare anthologies

99

You can now see him in Canada’s Bathurst and occasionally Brampton and Bramalea. (Cambridge 1976b, 24)

Head’s poem ‘Resumé’ rewrites a job-application form to present an archetypal black leftist whose ‘Past Employment’ saw him participate in the liberation of Algeria, the Congo, Kenya, Cuba, and Vietnam, while his ‘Position Desired’ is ‘Restoration of dignity / & respect to the Indian nations / bantustand [sic] in Babylon’ (1976, 84). The itinerant South African exile, Arthur Nortje, in the course of his immigration to Canada, complains, in ‘Immigrant,’ that ‘Bitter costs exorbitantly at London / airport’; critiques ‘the bulldozer civilization / of Fraser and Mackenzie ’ in British Columbia; recalls ‘the blond aura of the past / at Durban or Johannesburg’ in South Africa; and applies the ubi sunt rhetorical formula to native South Africans: ‘Where are the mineworkers, the compound Africans, / your Zulu ancestors, where are / the root-eating, bead-charmed Bushmen, the Hottentot sufferers?’ (1976, 112–13). His own exile and emigration becomes emblematic of the original displacement of South Africa’s native population. In Canada in Us Now, then, multiculturalism is championed, not by stressing congruencies between the writings and experiences of blacks and other Canadian minorities, but by marking the pluralism of ‘Black Canada’ and its de facto linkages – cultural and political – to other peoples of colour. Therefore Head includes two Indo-Caribbean writers (Darryl Dean and Harold Sonny Ladoo) as well as one Caribbean Aboriginal (Arawak) writer (David Campbell). Reflecting the anthology’s thematic ‘bicultural sensibility,’ Roman Candles’s contributors discuss Canada-located crises that debut in the loss of language or culture and which climax with the death of an elder. In ‘The Man Called Beppino,’ then, Di Cicco tells of a man who, as a barber in Baltimore, Maryland, ‘works for nothing, because his english / is less than fine; the customers like him, / and the man is easily duped, he believes in the / honest dollar, and is offered peanuts in return’ (1978, 31). Antonino Mazza, in his poem ‘Canadese,’ commands other Italian Canadians to remember their heritage: ‘Don’t try to reject your mother tongue, / in our cage, it is wrong; / do canaries smother their private song?’ (1978a, 39). His poem ‘Death in Italy’ recounts the macabre surrealism of mourning, in Canada, the death of a father overseas: Ah, not to have seen one’s father die! … Mute days followed. Heartsunk we stayed at home in one grave lit room my mother’s dress turned black, the men wore death for ties, black arm bands and other sorrow signs and bands of friends appeared to pay their last respects in absentia. They are ghostly people with ghastly voices when they relate their own Death in Italy stories. (1978b, 40)

The pain of separation from parents and relatives ‘abandoned’ to the ‘Old Country’ is a common thematic. Tony Pignataro sighs, ‘Life was a long distance telephone call / across the Atlantic’ (1978, 49). Mary di Michele tells of a Canadian-raised daughter visiting the Italian village of her

100 Directions home

childhood, then dialling ‘home,’ ironically, to Canada: ‘Pronto, I hear my mother cough, / across the Atlantic’ (1978a, 60). ‘Enigmatico’ limns di Michele’s heritage of ocean-wide estrangement: she cries out caught with one bare foot in a village in the Abruzzi, the other busy with cramped English speaking toes in Toronto, she strides the Atlantic legs spread like a colossus. (1978b, 62)

Di Cicco’s poets straddle Italy and Canada – or at least they attempt to bridge both countries. But Head’s poets still seek a homeland that is fully their own – a Canada that is welcoming, or a Caribbean that is truly free from neo-colonial control. Vibert Cambridge states, ‘We have until tomorrow to make our countries / our countries,’ and asks, ‘When will we stop making our countries / their countries? / And still have no country to call our own?’ (1976a, 29). In her piece ‘The raping of the womb,’ Felizze Mortune imagines a black birth as the instantiation of an assumption of war: i stuck out my black skull through mother’s vagina my first reaction to the real world was a cry of revolt. (1976, 102)

No black person, whether born in Canada or not, can evade the historical mission of revolt. Head insists: In Babylon When a woman gives birth Do not ask if it is a boy or girl We are soldiers The moment we are born. (“In Babylon,” in Head 1976, 85)

One does not need to know the Rastafarian concept of ‘Babylon’ to understand that the negative connotations of the biblical signifier apply to the capitalist, secularist, and ‘white ’ Occident – including Canada. In his introduction, Head may call for an alliance between Canadians and ‘Blacks,’ but he is clear that Canada is so problematically ensconced within the Euro-American, capital-imperial nexus that, here, too, black children born within its borders are fated to be fighters – or liberators, guerillas. If Di Cicco’s Italian-Canadian poets approach multiculturalism via their biculturality, Head’s ‘African’ assembly must foreground a heritage of (racial) struggle that links all black people, that is to say, they must vaunt a black multiculturalism. Indeed, the anthology is ‘dedicated to the spirit and ideals of the Second World Black and African Festival of Arts and Culture to be held in Nigeria in 1977’ (Head 1976, 2). Introducing The Anthology of Italian-Canadian Writing, editor Joseph Pivato recognizes that, prior to the arrival of Di Cicco’s anthology, ‘there were many Italian writers and many books by Italians living in Canada, but they did not constitute a conscious literature.’ Instead, their writing represented ‘individual works produced by isolated writers who did not see themselves as crea-

let us compare anthologies

101

tors of a new literature but as Italian writers in exile, or travellers or as writers in Canada who adopted the new language’ (1998, 11). Head’s 1976 anthology features a like psychology: the ‘Us in Canada now’ are not yet African-Canadian, nor is their writing consciously that of Black Canadians, but rather, it is representative of ‘Black Poetry and Prose in Canada’ as the subtitle says. Or, as the dedication puts it, the anthology presents ‘the collective consciousness of the African diaspora in Canada today.’ Nevertheless, Head, too, like Di Cicco for Italian-Canadian writing, helps to usher in a self-aware African-Canadian literature by consciously grouping together writers of disparate cultural and national origins. While neither Head nor Di Cicco engages with official Multiculturalism, their respective groupings of ‘Blacks in Canada’ and ‘Italo-Canadians’ could make sense only in the context of a society dominated racially by whites and culturally by Anglos and Francos.23 In sum, their respective writer-collages – pan-African/Canadian and transatlantic/Mediterranean/Canadian – conjured up an intra-communal multiculturalism that made official Multiculturalism less stable – that is to say, more dynamic – whatever its status quo proclivities. Oui, African-Canadian intellectuals worry the Tar Baby of Canadian white supremacy, while Italian-Canadian writers attempt the Sisyphus-like task of dislodging mutually exclusive Anglo-Saxon and Gallic assumptions of privilege. Yet, the struggle of African Canadians is more acute, for their bête-noire – or ‘Great White Hope’ – is Europe itself, not just two of its ethnicities that were transplanted in Canada. Naturally, the African-Canadian posture is Janus-faced: ogling a marmoreal construct of liberté, but also cutting eyes at a papier-mâché notion of Justice. Too, whether celebrated or excoriated, Europe has emerged, for African-Canadian writers, as a substitute Canada. The next essay ponders the import of this discovery.

8 The Idea of Europe in AfricanCanadian Literature For William Lloyd Clarke (1935–2005)1

Europa = Canada Political scientists, sociologists, historians, and cultural studies philosophes agree: Canada is, culturally, an extension of the United States; however, it is, ideologically and politically, an extension of Europe.2 American sociologist Seymour Martin Lipset cites the argument of compatriot analyst Louis Hartz, who finds ‘Canada, the United States, and other overseas European societies were largely settled by middle-class emigrants and were thus all “fragment cultures,” lacking both the privileged aristocratic class and the deferential peasantry of the European “whole”’ (Lipset 1990, 9). According to Lipset, Hartz appreciates that ‘English Canada is “etched with a Tory streak coming out of the American Revolution”’ but that ‘the differences between the two countries are of less significance than the traits common to both that set them off from European societies’ (10). Lipset disagrees with Hartz’s thesis, however, preferring to emphasize ‘a somewhat greater degree of continuity between the communitarian and elitist aspects of monarchical Britain and the character of Canadian value orientations’ (10). In 1966, Canadian political scientist Gad Horowitz, elaborating upon Hartz’s ‘fragment’ theory, proposed that Canada was founded by ‘pre-Enlightenment Catholic’ French, and by English composing ‘a bourgeois (liberal) fragment touched with toryism’ ([1966] 1995, 28, 25).3 These anti-revolutionary fragments of European societies, washed up on Canada’s shores, were able to host, eventually, a distinctive ‘Red Tory’ ideology, one favouring pragmatic state intervention in the economy to allow for public ownership of natural resources and communications as well as redistribution of moneys to provide social welfare and health care. This Red Tory element meant that Canada, unlike the United States, could permit the flourishing of a democratic socialist (or social democratic) party.4 In addition, the nation’s right-of-centre party had to label itself, for most of the twentieth century, with a splendid oxymoron, ‘Progressive Conservative.’ But Canada’s most successful national party, the Liberal Party, established its centrality by being, usually, fiscally conservative, while often enacting progressive social legislation (albeit stingily and gingerly), and spouting, always, the rhetoric of reform.5 Canadian philosopher George Grant asserts passionately that ‘to be a[n English] Canadian was to build, along with the French, a more ordered and stable society than the liberal experiment in the United States’ (1970, 4) and that ‘English-speaking Canadians had never broken with their origins in Western Europe’ (71) – at least until circa 1918 or 1957 or 1963.6 In contrast, feels Grant, ‘the United States is the only society on earth that has no

the idea of europe

103

[political] traditions from before the age of progress’ (65).7 From this Grantian perspective, the American Revolution separated the United States from monarchical Europe, while the French Revolution cemented the idea of the separation of church and state. The impact of the first ruction was to drive loyalist British North America – later Canada – closer to Britain (for trade and defence purposes);8 the effect of the second was to inspire French-speaking Catholic subjects of this Briton- and Protestant-dominated state to adopt practical pseudo-theocracies – until well after the Anti-Fascist War.9 Unfortunately, however, in the post–Second World War era, both English-speaking and French-speaking Canada have acceded to, Grant laments, ‘the homogenized culture of the American Empire’ (5).10 Canadian literary critic Northrop Frye concurs with the view that Canada is essentially American, though evincing a Loyalist twist: ‘a Canadian is an American who rejects the [American] Revolution’ (1953, 273).11 A French commentator on early-twentieth-century Canadian politics, André Siegfried, in his Le Canada, les deux races: problèmes politiques contemporains (1906), or The Race Question in Canada, proposes that the (then) Dominion of Canada consists of two European civilizations, French and English, both rivals, yet constituting, jointly, ‘a colonial civilization.’12 This confederate culture is jeopardized, warns Siegfried, by ‘the civilization of America whose exuberance, force and vitality threaten to submerge everything’ ([1907] 1978, 17). Sounding precociously like Grant, Siegfried tells us, ‘It is not the American nation that threatens the Canadian nation; rather, is it the American form of civilization that threatens to supplant the British’ (246).13 Siegfried separates a deviant American society from a Canadian, or ‘British’ – and thus European – one. Introducing the 1965 English edition of Siegfried’s study, Canadian historian Frank Underhill explains that, later in his career, Siegfried explored the theme of ‘the development of the Anglo-Saxon world, led by the United States, toward a civilization different from that of France and Western Europe ’ (Underhill 1978, 5–6). Like Grant, Siegfried too anticipates the eventual unification of Canada with the United States under an Anglo-Saxon banner.14 Canada’s basic culture seems to be American in orientation. Politically, however, it maintains vestiges of European notions of ‘public order and tradition, in contrast to freedom and experiment’ (G. Grant 1970, 71), the sine qua non of the ‘Great Republic.’ African-heritage peoples in Canada, too, feel the allure of (African-) American popular culture, while also falling into largely English-speaking or French-speaking societies that are still symbolized by a semi-indigenized monarchy (the Canadian ‘British’ Crown) as well as by resistive institutions in Canada, especially those of the nationalist Québécois. This paper must explore, then, the vestigial idea of Europe present in several African-Canadian writers. If classical Canadian ‘civilization’ is an extension of Europe,15 the same claim may be ascribed to its literature(s). In his 1974 comparison of Québécois and African-American novelists, Caliban without Prospero, Haitian-Canadian scholar Max Dorsinville writes that all post-colonial literatures ‘evolved from a common, “post-European’ genesis”’ – that is to say, ‘post-European literature comes, paradoxically, as a logical continuation in a process of miniaturization of the concept of culture that started with the late Renaissance in Europe’ (1974, 15). Dorsinville ’s refined analysis establishes that minority literatures arose from ‘the disintegration of the unity of European culture ’ (p. 10). This disintegration began with ‘the Renaissance breakaway from the unitary tie between Church and the State’ but was furthered by ‘the replacement of Latin by the vernacular …, the substitution of a national point of view for a continental, the ascent of the middle-class as patron and consumer of the arts, and the stress placed on milieu … and the avowedly secular in literature ’ (10, 11). Dorsinville also records the contributions of empiricism, rationalism, Marxism, and capitalism in eroding the once-Christian unity of Europe (10–11). He then offers this recog-

104 Directions home

nition: ‘It is no coincidence if the literatures of Quebec and Black America are born in the period when, historically, colonies make way for nations, when the pan-European dream is shattered by the rise of nationality which culminates … in the celebration of multiple ethnicity’ (11–12).16 Although Dorsinville ’s broad outline of the rise of literary postcoloniality is correct,17 one must remember that Canadian literature(s) broke late with Europe. Frye comments that, unlike the English poet, whose ‘language proceeds in a direct chronological line down to himself,’ the Canadian poet is ‘broken off from this linear sequence.’ Consequently, for the Canadian poet, ‘the traditions of Europe appear as a kaleidoscopic whirl with no definite shape or meaning, but with a profound irony lurking in its varied and conflicting patterns’ ([1943] 1970, 92). In other words, from the Canadian perspective, the obelisks of Stonehenge are just as contemporary as the skyscrapers of Manhattan, and Chaucer has as much relevance as V.S. Naipaul. Yet this recognition came relatively late. Norman Newton holds that, in English Canada, ‘the aristocratic tradition kept an appearance of vitality’ well into the twentieth-century (1974, 19). Its literary effect was to license bogus visions of identity: ‘Right through the Second World War, we were still presenting an image of ourselves in our propaganda films as a nation of wheat-farmers, fishermen, sailors, trappers, and dwellers in small country towns. French Canada, producing spokesmen like the Abbé Groulx, a clerical pamphleteer and historian who could have fitted very comfortably into the France of Charles X … was even more archaic’ (15). Politically, too, Canada retained British imperial allegiances until the rupture precipitated by the Suez Crisis of 1956 (when Canada backed Egypt and the United States against British and French efforts to regain control of the strategic waterway nationalized by a newly independent Egypt). Then, with the 1982 ‘repatriation’ of the country’s 1867 constitution, the British North America Act (now titled the Canada Act), Canadians no longer needed to seek the agreement of British parliamentarians to amend their own fundamental law. Canada’s delayed differentiation from Europe means that African Canadians remain in conversation with European ideas and practices – even if they should not wish to be. Moreover, extensive European settlement in Canada during the nineteenth and twentieth century mandates that African Canadians must engage with this majority heritage. (There is no population ‘Black Belt’ in Canada.) Indeed, any African Canadian who glances at an ethnically defined map of the nation will find communities of European ethnicity dominating discrete portions of the land, beginning most notably with the French in Quebec, but also embracing New Brunswick Acadians and Danes; Manitoban Francos and Icelanders; British Columbian Russians; Newfoundland Portuguese and Basques; Ontarian Germans, Italians, Finns, Swedes, and Norwegians; Québécois Jews, Italians, Greeks, and Latinos; Nova Scotian Acadians and Germans; as well as Saskatchewanian and Albertan Ukrainians and Poles.18 Of course, this European-coloured cartography also reflects Canadians of British descent and their dominance of most of the country, particularly Atlantic Canada, Ontario, and British Columbia.19 Given this numerical majority – and its concomitant political and cultural force, no African-Canadian intellectual can remain immune to the influence – even if diluted – of Europe.20

[Autobiographical Proof] Speaking only for myself, then, as a boy, I thrilled to the exploits of the German flying ace Baron Manfred von Richthofen – the Red Baron, and to the genius, eccentricity, and heroism of the

the idea of europe

105

Jewish German physicist Albert Einstein. When I began, as a teen, to read African-American literature, I was entranced by James Baldwin’s novel, Giovanni’s Room (1956), which showed me a macabre Paris, as well as by Conrad Kent Rivers’s fantastic poem ‘Four Sheets to the Wind and a One-Way Ticket to France, 1933’: As a Black Child I was a dreamer I bought a red scarf and women told me how Beautiful it looked. Wandering through the heart of France As France wandered through me … And I shall die an old Parisian, with much honor. (1964, 176–7)

As a boy, in Halifax, Nova Scotia, I biked – or ran – up and down Cunard Street, knowing, like all Haligonians, that the street was named for Samuel Cunard (1787–1865), the Nova Scotian–born Atlantic steamship and cruise-line operator. However, I was oblivious then to the leftist works and feminist passions of his disinherited British granddaughter, Nancy Cunard (1896–1965), and her complicated relationship to ‘blackness.’21 Ironically, in a city split into white and ‘coloured’ enclaves, I lived on and travelled daily a street linked tangentially to a European intellectual who championed black peoples and Africa (though in condescending terms). So, there I was, a child and then a youth, drawn towards Europe by the empowered Anglo-Saxon (and naval/military) culture that defines Halifax, but also directed overseas, in imagination, by the African-American literature that celebrated England, France, Spain, and the Soviet Union (Russia) as havens from discrimination.

African Canada / Europa Despite such (auto)biographical gestures of enthusiasm for Europe (and they occur in the works of more black authors – particularly jazz musicians – than any Afrocentrist would like to admit), the continent is problematic for African Canadians, for reasons I will now delineate. As attracted as we may be by the mythology of a liberal, progressive Europe, African Canadians are well aware of how far Europe falls short of its trumpeted ideals. Proof of European ethnocentrism and inhumanity is omnipresent in Canada. To begin, European-Canadian civilization constitutes a palimpsest upon the original First Nations civilizations and their greater harmony with a challenging environment. Worse, it may be termed parasitical, gorging on the mineral, vegetable, and animal wealth of the territory it has seized from the original inhabitants, and then having the audacity to erect thereon flags and forts. Although this settler Caucasian civilization tried to transplant Europe (Britain and France) to North America, it had to adjust and revise any wholesale rebuilding model to recognize the impediments of geography and climate, the recalcitrance and resistance of the First Nations, and, next, the imperious, pervasive cultural presence of the United States. True, Canada boasts European features: a British native who is, constitutionally, the Queen or King of Canada; the metric system of weights and measures; two official European languages; an English common law – and French code civil–influenced legal system. Nevertheless, this civilization is an encamp-

106 Directions home

ment, seemingly perpetually colonial, and so its art is often about anywhere else, or the experience of alienation, or about suffocated communications. Too, citizens do not inhabit the land; instead, we survive in garrisons and outposts, in ‘multitudinous solitudes’ (G. Clarke 2001, 50), amid an archipelago of city-states. Our architecture is often Gothic – a pretence of gloomy decay hinting at the absence of a ‘glorious’ past – because a country lacking European history must exude evergreen despair.22 Our visual art is often garish, violent, landscape portraiture (see the Group of Seven, Emily Carr, and Tom Thomson). Our cinema treats horror-provoking angst. Our poetry fluctuates between tidy intellectual abstraction and gaudy exotic pain. These common elements of a Canadian aesthetic reflect, I believe, the impression of the settler-class that Canada is a lost, would-be Europe, set adrift in a hostile, seductive America. In the end, therefore, most Canadians are multicultural citoyens du monde who never feel quite at home.23 Given the preceding analysis, the African-Canadian writer must feel doubly displaced: first, as a black person in a nation that celebrates whiteness; secondly, as a pseudo-African in a pseudoEurope. The African-Canadian ‘polyphonous consciousness’ (G. Clarke 2000b, 473) encounters a polity, the Canadian society itself, that is – to mix metaphors – a cacophony of splinter groups. If African-American discourse voices the struggle for black equality, African-Canadian discourse is impossibly diverse. Hence, the Black Canadian scribe denouncing white racism will soon confront the francophone protesting anglophone arrogance, the Aboriginal condemning the iniquitous ‘Confederacy’ (Canadian Confederation), as well as the immigrant seeking economic success, and consequently uninterested in ‘badmouthing’ a ‘land of opportunity.’ Thus, the Black Canadian protest writer is drowned out by the clarion din of many other cogent dissents. Also, urban multicultural entanglements render projects of Afrocentrism both harder to voice and harder to be heard, while the Canadian myth of ‘Tolerance ’ serves also to muffle the dissatisfied and mute the angry. Too, the African-Canadian writer who celebrates a Canadian identity will be patronized, but not championed: white Canada needs no ‘black’ Anne of Green Gables or Maria Chapdelaine.

African America + Europa African-American writers are estranged from America by ‘race ’; yet, ‘race ’ remains the common grammar for socio-political conversation. Moreover, their estrangement does not estrange them from Europe, for the very idea of African-American identity is grounded in European philosophy and practice.24 Hence, the first major work of African-American poetry, Phillis Wheatley’s Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral (1773), appeared thanks to the philanthropy of the (British Methodist) Countess of Huntingdon Connection. The first anthology of African-American poetry, Les Cenelles (1845), was published in France and consisted of the French verse of New Orleans, Louisiana, gens de couleur (Fabre 1991, 11–12). In his anthology of early African-American writers, Benjamin Brawley notes the influence of British authors on nineteenth-century African-American poets: ‘After the first quarter of the century, the dominant influence in [African-American] poetry was that of Byron, along with whose sweeping, rhythmic verse may be taken that of Scott.’ Indeed, ‘Byron made himself felt for decades in America …, and in the literature of the Negro he especially affected a group of writers that flourished about the middle of the century’ (1935, 11). Moreover, as French scholar Michel Fabre reports, ‘After slavery was abolished, black [American] leaders came to France to visit the land of the

the idea of europe

107

egalitarian principles born of the Revolution as well as to partake of the splendor of a grandiose culture ’ (1991, 2). Throughout his classic text The Souls of Black Folk, African-American intellectual W.E.B. Du Bois, once a student in Berlin, cites many connections between African America and Europe. For him, southern sharecroppers – ‘black peasantry’ – are equivalent to Europe ’s proletarians: ‘They are black, sturdy, uncouth country folk, good-natured and simple, talkative to a degree, and yet far more silent and brooding than the crowds of the Rhine-pfalz, or Naples, or Cracow’ ([1903] 1995, 144). Du Bois also identifies a black woman keening a spiritual with the ‘same voice … that sings in the German folk-song’ (273). The poverty of black Dougherty County, Georgia, is not unlike that, Du Bois suggests, ‘of Italy a century ago’ (182). Fabre lists Richard Wright, James Baldwin, Chester Himes, Ted Joans, and Barbara ChaseRiboud as some of the African-American writers who made France their base. Philosopher, intellectual, and activist Angela Davis earned her doctorate at the University of Berlin. Jazz musician and composer Duke Ellington did not feel he was taken seriously as an artist until he received acclaim during a tour of England in 1933 (Collier 1987, 158–9). Another jazz musician and composer, Miles Davis, found his first trip to Europe, in 1948, similarly ennobling: ‘I had never felt that way in my life. It was the freedom of being in France and being treated like a human being, like someone important’ (Davis and Troupe 1990, 126). Discussing his Paris experiences, novelist Himes states, ‘I had become completely free. I had a German girl, a German car. I was making my living from French publishers, and I had no reason whatsoever to put foot in America’ (quoted in Fabre 1991, 226). The African-American engagement with Europe has been so pervasive, for two centuries, that the government of France invited opera diva Jessye Norman to sing the national anthem at the official 1989 ceremonies marking the bicentennial of the French Revolution. That same year, Berliners sang the U.S. civil rights movement anthem ‘We Shall Overcome ’ as the Berlin Wall, separating the Soviet Union–controlled zone of the city from the other Allied-controlled zones, began to be demolished. In The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness, Black British scholar Paul Gilroy bids us consider ‘Frederick Douglass’s relationship to English and Scottish radicalisms …, W.E.B. Du Bois’s childhood interest in Bismarck, … and the use his tragic heroes make of European culture ’ (1993, 17). He also asks that we ponder novelist Nella Larsen’s ‘relationship to Denmark,’ and how, perhaps, ‘the course of the black vernacular art of jazz changed by what happened to Quincy Jones in Sweden and Donald Byrd in Paris’ (18). Despite the profound engagement between the twain, African-American commerce with Europe has not been trouble-free. German philosopher G.W.F. Hegel states, ‘The only essential connection between the Negroes and the Europeans is slavery’ (quoted in Gilroy 1993, 41). His insult summons this rejoinder from African-American novelist Toni Morrison: ‘modern life begins with slavery’ (quoted in ibid., 221). Morrison rebukes Hegel and his ilk by establishing the African and African-American presence – in European-driven commerce and life – as precursors to the Enlightenment and to modernity.25 Petrine Archer-Straw finds that, ‘for Europeans, Africa and the black man were framed in notions of high adventure, savagery, fear, peril and death’ (2000, 13). Worse, ‘Darwin’s suggestion that the white race was superior in the human species had the impact of providing a pseudo-scientific justification for European expansion and imperialism’ (24).26 Martiniquan psychiatrist and liberation theorist Frantz Fanon agrees that, ‘when European civilization came into contact with the black world, with those savage peoples, everyone agreed: Those Negroes were the principle of evil’ (1967, 190).27 Fundamentally, the

108 Directions home

Negro is, Fanon finds, ‘a victim of white civilization’ (192).28 Archer-Straw, Fanon, et al., may be right that Europe, ‘by presenting [blacks] as different and exotic, by showing them as slaves, servants, entertainers and humorous characters related to animals, [communicated] their racial inferiority’ (Archer-Straw 2000, 38), thus unleashing a cavalcade of stereotypes. However, African America’s revenge was to annex the figure – or trope – of the Negro for its own hegemonic purposes. Thus, Du Bois declares, in 1903, ‘After the Egyptian and Indian, the Greek and Roman, the Teuton and Mongolian, the Negro is a sort of seventh son, born with a veil, and gifted with second-sight in this American world’ ([1903] 1995, 45). Here Du Bois claims all of blackness – all of vital, historic, antique, and prophetic blackness – as American. Gilroy points out that Du Bois presents Black Americans ‘as a seventh world-historic people, extending Hegel’s list in a rhetorical mode which also betrays his own inspiration’ (1993, 134). Baldwin adds to this supposition: ‘Someone, someday, should do a study in depth of the role of the American Negro in the mind and life of Europe, and the extraordinary perils, different from those of America but not less grave, which the American Negro encounters in the Old World’ (quoted in ibid., 146).29 Dorsinville asserts that the Afrocentric philosophy of négritude itself is ‘the child of Existentialism …, the child of Marxism’ (1974, 154).30 The defining of black-white competition as an African-American–European tête-à-tête is precisely the construct that Gilroy adopts: ‘The image of the Negro and the idea of “race” which it helps to found are living components of a western sensibility that extends beyond national boundaries, linking America to Europe and its empires’ (1993, 159). In her work, Archer-Straw underscores the reciprocal relationship between the ‘New Negro’ typified by the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s and the search by the European avant-garde for a model modernism: Participation in black culture meant rejuvenation and liberation from the trappings of bourgeois values. But it was the ‘idea’ of black culture and not black culture itself that informed this modernity. Ironically, blacks were also caught up in these stereotypes. Their blackness qualified them for modernity, but to participate in it they had to negotiate, straddle, distort and deny their identities to accommodate European ideas about the primitive. (2000, 183)

Archer-Straw agrees with Morrison that ‘what made black people modern was the fact of the diaspora, their transcultural state, their restless (dis)continuity, and the possibility of their cultural mutation’ (Archer-Straw 2000, 184). If these facts made blacks – mainly African Americans – popular with European intellectuals in the 1920s, Europe was just as attractive for them. Fabre testifies, ‘There is enough truth in the myth of liberal France, just as in the myth of democratic America, to keep these myths alive, propagate them, and help them provide living inspiration for the new generations’ (1991, 344) – and to attract new generations of African-American artists to France and Europe. Fabre asserts that French anti-black racism seemed less toxic than the Anglo-Saxon variety: The Anglo-Saxons were convinced they were the superior race; they implicitly assumed that the natives were so radically inferior that they could never become like their masters. As a result, under a system of indirect rule they left native cultures somewhat to themselves. The French were just as convinced that they were a superior people… Their implicit assumption, however, was that, given the basic features common to all peoples, all mankind could become like the French. Therefore, they granted full or partial citizenship to a few colonial subjects and forced assimilation on the native

the idea of europe

109

cultures. Roughly speaking, the first type of racism is exclusive and keeps the Other at a distance; the second type is assimilationist and wants to make the Other like oneself. To black Americans, excluded for so long from the benefits of citizenship in their home country, such assimilationist policy understandably seemed attractive, at least until the time of black power and the resurgence of black cultural nationalism. (1991, 340)

From the standpoint of a colonized African, French assimilationism was just one more instance of European arrogance, plus haute couture racism. But in African-American eyes, French acceptance of their blackness, even though predicated on Eurocentric terms, put the lie to white American claims of fidelity to principles of universal liberty. Indeed, for Black Americans, at least up until the 1960s, even an American metropolis as liberal as New York City could be viewed as complicit in the degradation of ‘soul brothers and soul sisters’ in Mississippi.31 Going to Europe – to London, Paris, Rome, Berlin, Madrid (for those who preferred living cheap, if under fascism), and even Moscow (for those who were Marxist-Leninist or sympathizers) – seemed, simultaneously, an ideal individual escape and a newsworthy social protest.32 Nor can it be denied that there were marketing opportunities in being an American exotic in Europe, just as there were pleasures in exploring, as an artist or intellectual from the richest and most powerful nation in the world, the commensurate exoticism of Europe.

African Canada ÷ Europa Neither French assimilationism nor English racialism could (or can) attract African Canadians to Europe, mainly because they could (and can) experience a version of the shrug ‘at home ’ in Quebec, and a version of the cold shoulder in the rest of Canada.33 The promise of a ‘better’ racism may compel African Americans to Europe, but African Canadians, already acquainted with the ‘smiling’ racism of European Canadians, evince little desire to go to Europe to experience the same in its undiluted form. Thus, there is no tradition of African-Canadian expatriation to Europe. Among contemporary authors, novelist Tessa McWatt lives in England, playwright Djanet Sears has summered in Germany, and novelist Austin Clarke has spent a season or two in Italy (and saw a novel published there in Italian translation34). However, the main site of expatriation for African-Canadian authors is the United States, where writers such as Clarke, playwright Walter Borden, and novelist Dany Laferrière have enjoyed lengthy stays, and where other writers – novelists Jan Carew, Darius James, and David Odhiambo, poet Shane Book, academic Zetta Elliott, and the celebrity intellectual Malcolm Gladwell – currently live. Too, many early African-Canadian authors, including novelist Amelia Etta Hall Johnson and poet and musicologist Nathaniel Dett, were published only in the United States.35 I speculate that African-Canadian writers prefer expatriation to the United States for the same reason that African Americans elect to go to Europe: they feel freer in the different space. African Americans appreciate the ‘quieter’ racism of Europe just as African Canadians prefer the ‘louder’ racism of the United States. The African Americans who elect to write from Europe do so from a space relatively free from direct racial confrontation (save for that directed against Arab and African immigrants and Turkish ‘guest workers’). But African Canadians go to the United States to have an opportunity to organize against racism while experiencing the benefits of immersion in a larger, more confident, black culture.36 Furthermore, if African-American artists seek, in

110 Directions home

Europe, affirmation of their talent, this quest, for African Canadians, is best conducted stateside.37 In addition, if, as Du Bois and Baldwin believe, the Negro is American culturally, AfricanCanadian writers tend to critique this figure in terms of African-Canadian culture, or Caribbean or African culture, not that of Europe.38 Even so, like their African-American peers, African-Canadian writers must contest Europe on the grounds of language. Dorsinville knows this truth: Given the fact that one is indebted to an Other’s language which … implies a certain conditioning in outlook …, the post-European writer’s dominant temper reflects the archetypal Shakespearean predicament. If Prospero is as much a part of Caliban as Caliban is of Prospero – and Prospero, at least, does not realize this until he has battled with Caliban – the same is true of the post-European writer vis-à-vis the European icon. But he has to shatter it first in coming to terms with his dilemma. (1974, 15)

Fanon also verifies this crisis of expression for blacks: ‘Every colonized people – in other words, every people in whose soul an inferiority complex has been created by the death and burial of its local cultural originality – finds itself face to face with the language of the civilizing nation; that is, with the culture of the mother country’ (1967, 18). Tobagan-Canadian poet M. NourbeSe Philip provides a similar analysis in a 1989 essay: ‘I have come upon an understanding of language – good-english-bad-english english, Queenglish and Kinglish – the anguish that is English in colonial societies’ (1989, 11).39 Because ‘the English language merely served to articulate the non-being of the African’ (16), Philip wagers, black writers must utilize ‘language of the people. Language for the people, honed and fashioned through a particular history of empire and savagery’ (18). In her Guggenheim Award–winning text, She Tries Her Tongue, Her Silence Softly Breaks (1989), and most startlingly in her poetic sequence ‘And Over Every Land and Sea’ (27–36), Philip speaks back to standard English and Latin verse by playing demotic Caribbean English against an English prose translation of Ovid’s Metamorphoses. She carries out a mission that Martiniquan poet Aimé Césaire also specifies for himself: ‘French was a tool that I wanted to use in developing a new means of expression. I wanted to write an Antillean French, a black French that, while still being French, had a black character’ (Césaire [1955] 1972, 67).40 Clearly, African-Canadian writers, like all postcolonial writers, challenge the linguistic hegemony of Europe by rewriting and dislocating imperial-canonical authors and texts, and by inventing words, re-engineering syntax, and foregrounding vernacular orality. However, they resist and remember Europe, not only in these immediate, but also in metaphysical, ways. Rather, Europe enters into some African-Canadian texts as subject, both as a positive and as a negative. See, for instance, Suzette Mayr’s second novel, The Widows (1988), translated, significantly, into German as Drei Witwen und ein Wasserfall: Roman (1999). Born in Calgary, Alberta, in 1967, to a German father and a Caribbean mother, Mayr probes gender, ‘race,’ sexual orientation, and other social issues in her poetry and fiction. Her style is disarmingly candid, fiercely ironic, and suavely satirical. Of mixed-race heritage, but also identified as African Canadian, Mayr does not feel called to speak primarily about blackness (though a discourse of biraciality informs her first novel, Moon Honey [1995] and her poetry chapbook, Zebra Talk [1991]). The Widows demonstrates this point, for, here, gender and geriatrics are Mayr’s first concern, followed by nationality.

the idea of europe

111

The plot is exceedingly direct: ‘Hannelore, Clotilde, and Frau Schnadelhuber are three old women tired of living in a world which does not allow old women to be seen or heard’ (Mayr 1998, back cover copy). They decide to spice up their lives and demonstrate their feistiness by flying from Germany to Canada; stealing a bright orange, souped-up, space-age barrel from an Edmonton, Alberta, theatre employee; driving both it and themselves from Edmonton to southern Ontario; then entering the barrel and hurtling over Niagara Falls, thus performing a truly death-defying feat. Cleopatra Maria, the twenty-six-year-old granddaughter of Hannelore and grandniece of Clotilde, assists the scheme. A highlight of this feminist adventure is the link drawn between the mature German women living in 1996 (when the story mainly occurs) and an ideological foremother, Annie Edson Taylor, an American who, at age sixty-three (while claiming to be forty-three), in 1901, became the first daredevil to shoot the falls in a barrel, and survive. (Unfortunately, her fame proved too ephemeral to allow her to parlay her feat into cash; she died destitute.41) But Mayr references not only the first woman – Taylor – to go over the falls, but also the first black – that is, the first African American – to perform the same feat. Quoting from European-Canadian historian Pierre Berton’s text Niagara: A History of the Falls (1992), Mayr provides this epigraph: ‘To this day nobody really knows what possessed William Fitzgerald to invest his life savings in a “Plunge-O-Sphere” so he could conquer the Falls… His words when he was taken from his odd craft in July 1961 give some hint as to his intentions. “I have integrated the Falls,” he said. That was the only reference to his colour’ (1998, 129). By bidding her white German heroines utilize a craft like that of Fitzgerald (alias Nathan Boya, who, like Taylor, earned a transient fame), Mayr suggests resemblances in the struggles for equality waged by seniors, women, and people of colour. Another interest of The Widows is to enact a dialogue between Germany and Canada. One reason, then, for the elder women’s decision to come to Canada is that Hannelore ’s son, Dietrich, lives in the snowy monarchy, and his mother craves ‘her boy and his Kanadian maple trees’ (Mayr 1998, 40). Too, Dieter has married, ‘in Kanada … Rosario, half Mexican, half African, half Chinese, half Kanadian’ (17). (Thus Mayr gestures to the complications that mixed-race identities pose to supposedly ‘pure’ ones.) Yet another reason for the Canadian odyssey is history, specifically that of modern Germany. In their home country, the widows witness ‘too many deaths, too many sick women, too many dead husbands, too many funerals …’ (39). Hannelore’s garden even ‘shot up gravestones instead of irises’ (40). Frau Schnadelhuber has survived ‘the World Wars one and two, too many air-raids to count, chauffeuring a master spy, detention in a work camp, buried bomb defusal …’ (151). Hannelore has also ‘suffered through the air-raids …, waiting in line-ups for food, trying to make nourishing meals for her family out of air… Never mind standing beneath a sky full of planes, crammed full of planes, and standing on houses smashed by giant bombs’ (172). Later, Frau Schnadelhuber opines, ‘Of course there are ghosts… But at some point ghosts are going to have to face the fact that they’re dead and that’s that… End of the history lesson’ (220). By plunging over the falls, the women rid themselves of ghosts – namely, the horrors of Nazism and the calamitous war it triggered. The cataclysmic geography of Canada, symbolized by Niagara Falls, provides a baptism unto a new life, one cleansed of a devilish European history. Thus, Mayr writes, when the daring seniors plunge to their metaphorical ‘deaths’ and ‘rebirths,’ ‘such a beautiful country, such outrageously sparkling water’ (229). Clotilde describes her experience this way: ‘one minute I was dead, the next minute I was alive ’ (236). Following their ‘baptisms,’ the widows choose to stay in Canada. In fact, they open a delica-

112 Directions home

tessen at the West Edmonton Mall, and Clotilde begins to paint landscapes featuring ‘German fields full of yellow flowers and the Rocky Mountains in the distance. A few paintings have tiny Sasquatches in them hidden in the trees’ (247). With this vision of wholeness, where Frau Schnadelhuber ‘wears a purple push-up bra and jeans. And a butcher’s apron,’ and the women dub their restaurant, ‘“Köningen der Nebel,” Queen of the Mist’ (247), thus honouring Taylor’s inaugural falls voyage, and Hannelore realizes ‘she will need to find some sex, crashing, overwhelming Niagara Falls kind of sex, but soon’ (248), Mayr depicts Canada as a site of potential progressive uplift. It is also a place where sullied foreign histories can be ‘washed clean’ in the bracing, perilous landscape – if one is imaginative and courageous enough to make the attempt. The Widows may be read, then, as a paean to immigration to Canada, emigration from Europe. The heroines are – like Taylor and Fitzgerald/Boya – social pioneers (another definition for daredevils). Claire Harris is, like Mayr (once Harris’s student), based in Calgary. Intriguingly, it was during her expatriation in Nigeria, in 1975, that Harris, born in Trinidad in 1937, began to write. In her fourth book of poetry, The Conception of Winter (1989), Harris chronicles a visit to Barcelona, Spain, that she and two women friends undertake in July 1984. This trio thus reverses the direction of travel of Mayr’s women: from escaping European history to facing European culture, from encountering Canada to slipping its stultifying and stodgy embrace.42 Harris’s persona also confesses, in ‘This Is a Post Card,’ that the ‘three women’ seek to explore ‘the uncharted self ’ (1989, 10). Still, in ‘Jane in Summer,’ co-voyageuse Jane, wanting to experience regeneration in Spain, is, the speaker warns, accepting ‘an illusion of action’ (21). The other sojourner, Kay, leaves ‘her past her future’ in Calgary as ‘a dead thing lying on the ground in Spain,’ according to the speaker, who watches her friend – ‘her bottle blonde hair artfully / streaked with grey’ – flirt with ‘two young men’ in a café (19). In ‘Post Cards: Under the Feet of Heaven,’ Harris’s persona races her ‘sister’ – but white – Canucks, Kay and Jane. To her, they stand ‘in admiration / in white wonder’ before, presumably, albescent statuary, talking of ‘feats / of arms and passage ’ (40). But, on 16 July 1984, the speaker is able to spy … only the dead in black mountains hear only the high pitched keen of raped women

flaming

crosses I stand under the feet of murderers of sodomites (1989, 40)

The persona’s immersion in the fact of Europe reminds her of a history of imperialism, conquest, crusades, slavery, and Holocaust that, at least temporarily, divides her, intellectually and emotionally, from her apparently untroubled European-Canadian friends. What inspires awe for them is, for her, awful. Europe presents, for Harris’s speaker, a confrontation with an immedicable history.43 Born in Montreal, Kim Barry Brunhuber, a mixed-race African Canadian of German–South African heritage, presents a Europe that is a site of both psychological disintegration and semi-

the idea of europe

113

Afrocentric redemption. In his debut novel, Kameleon Man, his protagonist, Stacey Schmidt, a German-Afro-Canadian male model, seeks to score a European contract: ‘Europe ’s the big ticket.’ A fellow model questions this belief: ‘Europe’s a sham, man… Europe ’s just pretty pictures. And kick-ass herb.’ Stacey’s response is to think ‘I can’t believe what I’m hearing’ (2003, 20). Eventually, Stacey lands his dream job: becoming the face of the German blue-jean manufacturer, Kameleon Jeans (‘one of Germany’s top cultural exports, right behind strudel and porn’ [201]). Stacey relocates from Toronto to Munich, ‘a big, drab city indistinguishable from any other save by an occasional eagle crest or sandblasted swastika’ (190). Here, on the verge of stardom, boogying ‘to the senseless rhythm of invented music’ (196) on a nightclub dance floor ‘littered with women’ (195), Stacey opines, ‘Europe is still the centre of decadence, the real heart of darkness’ (196). However, his hopes for an international modelling career vanish as the result of a pickup basketball game with American sailors on leave: the play turns violent and Stacey is gashed across the face by ‘a broken pop bottle’ (212–16). To repair his fortunes (if not his face), Stacey must now ‘use my ass to make money’ (225): he agrees to ingest tubes of drugs and ferry them to Barcelona, where they are to be released in his stool. But after one tube bursts poisonously within him, Stacey is forced to hide and recover in Alicante, Spain, relying upon the charity of his white German uncle Karl. Once lauded for his cross-racial appeal and his mixed-race appearance, but now stripped of this neutral façade, this ‘camouflage,’ Stacey ponders the hidden black history of Europe: ‘If it weren’t for the architecture, it would be hard to believe that my distant cousins, the Moors, ruled this country for 700 years.’ He then comments: ‘If I could pick a time and a place to live in, I would choose [Spain] in the days of Tarik, when a black guy became the master of Spain and Africa began at the Pyrenees’ (273). Although his original profession marks him, wrongly, as effeminate, Stacey’s cheeky initials, ‘S.S.,’ position him as a macho would-be conqueror, one who fantasizes about a Spain inferior to him: ‘Spain squats below me, looking up’ (272). Soon, Stacey finds companionship with an expat African-American woman artist, B., nominally a Dantean Beatrice. As the novel ends, he sees B. ‘at the window, staring out over the mountains. The greenhouse is backlit and reflects onto her. There ’s a garden in her face. I expand the picture, broaden it 360 degrees to include me’ (281–2). Together, it seems, this black ‘New World’ couple will build their personal Eden within the precincts of old Europe – like new conquering Moors. While Harris’s speaker finds images of conquistador brutality in Europe, Kameleon Man suggests that it is also possible to Africanize – or intellectually colonize – the continent. However, success in this enterprise demands Afrocentric heterosexuality and militarism disguised as historicism.44 A bilingual Montrealer – or montréalaise – born most likely in the 1930s, and once a Canadian diplomat to Japan and the United States, cosmopolitan and liberal Mairuth Sarsfield utilizes Europe as a posh bank of cultural capital, especially for the African-Canadian women characters in her first novel, No Crystal Stair. Their acquaintance with European culture, along with their enjoyment of black music, expressive religion, and soul food, signals their classiness as befits members of the Coloured Ladies Club (CLC). However, the novel’s avatar of the high-class ‘lady’ is Torrie Delacourt, who, due to her checkered past as a mistress, is not permitted to join the CLC until near the novel’s end (after she has, safely, married). Ironically though, it was Torrie ’s decade-long travels in Europe as a Danish businessman’s companion that permitted the ex-dancing girl and native Kansan to develop a taste for fine living and an appreciation of fine art. Torrie ’s reveries about her European experiences contrast nicely with the alienation voiced by Harris’s speaker:

114 Directions home Torrie had to admit that no matter how often she indulged in cold showers [in Montreal’s summer heat], her skin did not feel tinglingly clean and cool, with that sense of sensual well-being that she had nurtured to a fine art during those halcyon pre-war years with Lars in Norway. Oh, how she missed making love in the afternoons, cross-country skiing through the midnight forests north of Oslo to hidden cabins, meandering endless mornings on the arm of her lover down the long, dim corridors of Danish country museums, followed by a smörgasbord lunch with Aalberg aquavit and Tuborg lager at a quiet krol in Liseleje. (Sarsfield 1997, 73)

With Lars as her sponsor, Torrie experienced ‘wonderful little hotels in ancient towns … the walled city of Bruges …; Avignon …; Honfleur …; Heidelberg …,’ plus solo travels to ‘Paris, Rome, or Amsterdam,’ where she was able to hobnob with expat African-American artistic royalty, namely Paul Robeson and Josephine Baker (76). Torrie was even able to accompany Robeson to Leningrad, where they explored the masterpieces in the Hermitage Museum. But although Lars ‘had taught her to appreciate the influence of the Moors in Spain; to read [the Russian – and black – poet] Pushkin; to admire Picasso’s “Guernica,”’45 their idyll ended when Germany invaded Denmark in 1940, and Lars, suspected of being ‘a Nazi sympathizer,’ a ‘part of Norway’s fifth column,’ disappeared (78). Fleeing now-perilous Europe, Torrie landed in New York City, where, she found, ‘her Sorbonne French and intimate knowledge of Old World cuisine were not marketable’ (79). Her next stop was Montreal. Soon we see her ‘descending the circular outside stairs [to her flat] as if entering a ballroom’ (82). Sarsfield depicts Europe as a kind of finishing school for African-Canadian women: To be conversant with its culture is to be conversant with that of internationally respected black art and artists – such as Robeson and Baker – but even Picasso, so heavily influenced by African art. Although Sarsfield’s Torrie is aware of the looming war that will bloody the white snows of Norway and Denmark, she ignores this threat until it is almost too late. For Torrie, as a racially oppressed, once-poor, African-American woman, Europe, even one threatened by Nazi tyranny, still represents personal liberty, private leisure, and precious learning. For Sarsfield, therefore, Europe is not antithetical to blackness; in her multicultural vision, it is as valid as Africa, and a truly Canadian African Canadian can embrace European culture as an adjunct to his or her own. Born in Trinidad in 1957, André Alexis came to Canada in 1960 and was raised in Petrolia and Ottawa, both in Ontario. Of all African-Canadian writers in English, he is likely the most persistent miner of European texts, peculiarly works of philosophy. In his debut collection of short stories, Despair, and Other Stories of Ottawa, Alexis treats us to tale after tale of weird and macabre events, situated mainly in the nation’s capital and environs. But the final story, ‘The Road to Santiago de Compostela,’ is set in Europe. Here one overhears the conversation of a quartet of Canadians, all Ottawans, travelling by train to Santiago de Compostela, Spain, from Poitiers, France. As if characters in Giovanni Boccaccio’s Decameron or Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, the travellers each relate a story about love, Ottawa, or Ottawa as a site of lovers, and soon one eavesdrops on several Gothic narratives. However, these Canuck-told tales of Ottawa, all related during a European night, inspire one character to blur Canada and Europe together: ‘Back home it was night… The clock on the Peace Tower rang softly … and she could suddenly hear it, because she had reached the place where Santiago de Compostela is a suburb of Ottawa, and Ottawa a suburb of Santiago, a suburb of Pamplona… All one in God, they say…’ (Alexis 1994, 229). Unproblematically, and almost alone among African-Canadian writers (with Sarsfield as a sister exception), Alexis asserts an ideational and cultural unity between Canada and

the idea of europe

115

Europa. In this regard, he could ‘pass’ for African American46 – or European Canadian.47 He imagines, in this terminal story, a world where, despite the ravages of colonialism and racism, nations – white-ruled – are united, across oceans, by a healing Christianity.48

{Homing In} With the quotation from Alexis, I arrive where I began. The reason why most African-Canadian writers deal so seldom with Europe directly, the reason why most expatriate themselves mainly to the United States and the Caribbean (but avoid Europe), is that, with its official multiculturalism, official English-French bilingualism, and church-state interaction in some provincial public school systems, Canada already replicates Europe. Those Black Canadian writers who feel they have had enough of Europe, or those who feel they must consider it more deeply, may do so either by staying at ‘home’ and writing about European – or African – Canada or by venturing abroad – primarily to the United States of America. No matter what route the writer chooses, though, he or she is bound to tussle with Europe – even if from afar. After all, as Dorsinville declares, ‘the post-European writer, so long as he tries to function ever so self-consciously in the “mainstream” of Prospero’s culture, is bound to fail’ (1974, 202). Indeed, Dorsinville prescribes that it is when ‘Anger erupts as the active mode opposite to the passive one of Sadness’ (206) that the post-European writer is finally able to know himself or herself and express unhindered authenticity. Now the post-European – or AfricanCanadian – writer and intellectual recognizes that ‘the expression of an indigenous culture is thwarted when it has to resort to imported models and to depend on metropolitan approval for success or failure ’ (206). Dorsinville goes on to say, ‘It is at this stage … that the Calibanic writer [learns] … that to engage oneself in the articulation of native expression is the logical extension of the nineteenth-century European recognition of cultural pluralism rooted in diversity of selfexpression’ (206).49 One happy reason for African-Canadian writers to go ‘Underground,’ or to play, enthusiastically, ‘provincials’ rooted in native experience – whether it is that of Canada, the Caribbean, Africa, or even that of ‘America’ – is that their first duty (or expectation) is to map blackness where it seems either most invisible or most opaque. In this endeavour (or struggle), their Europe will grant them luminous clarity – or darkly cloud their thinking.50 Afro-Caribbean-Canadian writers, particularly those who are first-generation Canadians, seek, at times vociferously, to recollect or reconstitute, in their texts, the ‘living technicolour’ blackness of their once-homelands, thus turfing out the pretensions of ‘Europe ’ (that racial police-state) in favour of a region kaleidoscopically African/American/Asian and European. Despite this epic rooting, re-routing, and mapping, one deserving of audience and accolades (at ‘home ’), African-Canadian literature of Caribbean orientation exists in a dreamy, ironic exile. Its relationship to region is rootless and remote, or so the next essay insists.

9 Does (Afro-) CaribbeanCanadian Literature Exist? In the Caribbean? For Peter E. McKerrow (1841–1906)1

Overview The idea of an ‘African-Canadian literature’ is fragile, even brittle, for this elastic – but bounded – concept must hold within itself a multicultural array of authors: those of longstanding Canadian genealogies as well as those who possess ready memories of childhoods in the United States, the Caribbean, South America, Europe, and Africa. A palimpsest label, ‘African-Canadian literature ’ shelters several other literatures, all of them different: the writings of Afro-Caribbean authors in, usually, economic ‘asylum’ in Canada; the texts of dissident African Americans; and the voices of Africans seeking prosperity and safety from persecution. Its generic multiculturalism mandates, for African-Canadian literature, its innate incoherence. The literature thus assembles a disparate coalition of African Americans, Haitiens, Sénégalais, Jamaicans, Trinidadians, South Africans, Nigerians, Ethiopians, Grenadians, and so forth, along with a smattering of long-time Albertans, British Columbians, ‘Scotians,’ Ontarians, and Québécois. As a result, AfricanCanadian writers tend to shout the pains and glories of their homelands, or, occasionally, croon the benefits of pan-Africanism, but, really, the literature is a ‘cosmo’ chorus of ‘ethnic’ soloists. Considering those of Caribbean origin, few respond explicitly to Canada; most celebrate ties with an external homeland, or lament their loss of those bonds. That is not to say that Canada is ignored or that the attitude towards former homelands is uncritical or only nostalgic. Writers such as Austin Clarke and Dionne Brand, natives of, respectively, Barbados and Trinidad, target Euro-Canadian Negrophobia and identify the flaws and foibles of their original compatriots. Yet – and aptly – Canada is an alien space where they merely happen to be, putting up with the blizzards and the racist epithets. So, a first-generation Anglo-African-Caribbean immigrant writer to Canada faces a quadrilateral quandary: How English/British, or African, or Caribbean, or Canadian is one? This identity dilemma underscores the complexity of African-Canadian literature as a whole, but also instigates a productive challenge for its writers: to imagine the grounds of a ‘Can-Carib’ or ‘Caribbeanadian’ consciousness. Herein, I seek to tease out the fundamental irony of the Anglo-Afro-Caribbean contribution to African-Canadian literature, namely, its appeal to homelands where it has a ghostly existence. These primordial locales figure prominently (and appropriately) in Afro-Caribbean-Canadian literature, but this writing is highly invisible in the very societies to which it is directed. To put this point another way, all Afro-Caribbean-Canadian writers are landed in Canada, but not all

Does (Afro-) Caribbean Canadian Literature exist?

117

are grounded here. Only a few dwell upon the country in which they dwell. Their Caribbeanoriented writing thus embodies a spectral discourse. It is ventriloquized there, but it is heard here.2 It is truly the literature of a ‘floating world,’ one-part romantic and one-part analytic, and seemingly foreign to its geographic origins – both in the Caribbean and in Canada.3 This phantasmal presence has several causes: 1) its perceived loss of cultural or ‘rooted’ authenticity/legitimacy; 2) its inability to find wide circulation in a conservative pedagogical and limited commercial environment; and 3) its possession of an allegedly ‘hybrid’ accent that strikes some auditors as false. Despite these issues, the Caribbean and Canada share a great deal, and this essay closes with a consideration of these commonalities.

I. Textual Traces / Critical Evacuations Let us begin by noting the near-invisibility of Afro-Caribbean-Canadian writers in the Caribbean itself. The evidence here is vast and irrefutable. Kenneth Ramchand’s groundbreaking book, The West Indian Novel and Its Background (1970), studies only one ‘Canadian’ writer, Indo-Canadian author Samuel Selvon. But, in 1970, Selvon was absolutely impervious to any suspicion of Canadian-ness, for he was still in England.4 The relative earliness of Edward Baugh’s pioneering text, West Indian Poetry, 1900–1970 (1970), excuses it for citing only one AfricanCaribbean-Canadian-positioned writer – Montreal native H.D. Carberry. Gareth Griffiths’s 1978 work, A Double Exile: African and West Indian Writing between Two Cultures, mentions only two Afro-Caribbean-Canadian writers, in passing, namely Austin Clarke and John Hearne, and Hearne lived in Jamaica, not Canada. Baugh’s trailblazing anthology of critical essays, Critics on Caribbean Literature, also appearing in 1978, references the work of Clarke, Hearne, the by-then Canadian Selvon and the future Canadian Louise Bennett in the ‘Select Bibliography.’ However, of the eighteen articles in the volume, only two deal with ‘Canadians,’ namely, Selvon and Bennett, who are, really, at that point, Indo- and Afro-Caribbean, respectively. The back cover copy of the 1982 reissue of C. Everard Palmer’s 1951 novel, The Broken Vessel, confirms the irrelevance of Canada to Caribbean readers: ‘C. Everard Palmer was born in Jamaica and spent his childhood on a farm.’ This first sentence is bucolic; but the next is dismissive: ‘Although he has been living in Canada for several years Mr. Palmer still manages to capture the authentic flavour of Jamaican life in his many novels’ (Palmer 1982, back cover; my italics).5 (This crucial notion of authenticity is discussed in Part III of this essay.) In his 1983 checklist, ‘A Bibliography of Theses and Dissertations Written in English on Caribbean Novels,’ Samuel B. Bandara bears unintentional witness to the repression of Canada as a ‘homeland’ of Caribbean authors. Of 129 entries, only eight discuss or mention African-Canadian writers (Hearne, Jan Carew, Clarke, Palmer, and Bennett), and only one is a single-author study (of the ‘Jamaican’ novelist, Hearne, who was born in Canada). Furthermore, only one of these writers – Clarke – has based his career almost wholly in Canada (although his fiction utilizes Caribbean – plus Toronto, Ontario – settings). The year 1989 witnessed the appearance of Viney Kirpal’s The Third World Novel of Expatriation: A Study of Emigré Fiction by Indian, West African, and Caribbean Writers, a significant volume that includes commentaries on Montreal-born Hearne and Calgary-settled Selvon. Strangely though, both Clarke and Carew are missing in action (so to speak), although Clarke had already been an ‘expat Bajan’ in Canada for more than thirty years, and Guyanese-born Carew, though resident in the United States, held a Canadian passport. Richard F. Patteson’s

118 Directions home

Caribbean Passages: A Critical Perspective on New Fiction from the West Indies provides in-depth studies of five writers, but only Olive Senior may be claimed as Canadian. Still, Patteson views her as torn, like other ‘English-speaking Caribbean’ writers, between ‘the lingering pull of the old, colonial power, Great Britain’ and ‘the looming presence of the United States’” (1998, 16). An exception that supports this unfolding picture of the invisibility of Afro-Caribbean-Canadian writing is Mervyn Morris’s anthology The Faber Book of Contemporary Caribbean Short Stories (1990), where, of twenty-four writers chosen, seven were based in Canada: Neil Bissoondath, Carew, Clarke, Abdur-Rahman Slade Hopkinson, Clyde Hosein, Roger McTair, and Selvon. (Another writer, Senior, would later move to Canada.) In his introduction, Morris recognizes his ‘authors come from Trinidad, Jamaica, Barbados, Guyana, St. Lucia, Antigua and Montserrat; but half of them now live and work abroad, in the United Kingdom, the United States or Canada.’ Next, he nixes this noteworthy expatriate or émigré aspect of authorship by telling us, ‘Nearly all the stories here are set in the Caribbean’ (Morris 1990, x). In The Caribbean Novel in English: An Introduction, edited by M. Keith Booker and Dubravka Juraga, of eighteen novels surveyed, only one ‘Canadian’ work – Selvon’s Moses Ascending (1975) – is discussed, but in regards to the author’s Indo-Trinidadian heritage, not his Canadian ‘visible minority’ transfiguration. Likewise, Nana Wilson-Tagoe ’s cultural study Historical Thought and Literary Representation in West Indian Literature enlists no Canada-situated scribe: not Carew, not Clarke, not even Hearne. Indicative of her oversight is her listing of ‘African Americans’ and ‘Afro-Caribbeans. See “Negro, the,”’ in her index (Wilson-Tagoe 2001, 311). I need not mention her excision of African- and Caribbean-Canadians. Introducing their section ‘Women Poets of the Caribbean,’ in a ‘special issue ’ of the Literary Review, editors Pamela Mordecai and Betty Wilson defend a decision to omit expatriate writers: ‘We thought hard about whether to include our Caribbean sisters now residing in Canada, the USA, and the United Kingdom. We decided that … owing to space constraints we would use this issue for the work of those who live here, who have limited access to publication, and whose work would be unlikely to reach a US audience save for an opportunity like this’ (1992, 445). Ironically, two of the writers included in the ‘special issue ’ – Mordecai herself and Senior – would shortly move to Canada. (Both were living in Toronto by 1995.) Even so, the host of Caribbean-born women writers already resident in Canada is deliberately voided. U.S. critic Harold Bloom follows this example in his edited 1997 text, Caribbean Women Writers. Of a dozen writers discussed, only the just-landed Senior can be classified as Canadian. That same year, acclaimed writer Anita Desai, in her Eye to Eye: Women, mentions not a single ex-Caribbean or ex-African woman writer living in Canada. In yet another 1997 text, Shirley Chew and Anna Rutherford, editing Unbecoming Daughters of the Empire, group discussions of Euro-Canadian writers Margaret Atwood, Isabel Huggan, and Daphne Marlatt under the rubric ‘Canada.’ However, they position Jamaican-Canadian author Senior under the heading ‘Jamaica.’ Likewise, two essays in Caribbean Women Writers: Fiction in English (1999), edited by Mary Condé and Thorunn Lonsdale, deal with Senior and Dionne Brand, both Afro-Caribbean-Canadian writers. However, the editors’ ‘A to Z of Authors and Works by Country of Origin’ places Senior, Brand, Hazelle Palmer, M. NourbeSe Philip, and Claire Harris squarely within the Caribbean.6 Simone A. James Alexander’s study Mother Imagery in the Novels of Afro-Caribbean Women is interested only in ‘the three Caribbean women writers who are at the forefront and arguably occupy center stage of Caribbean writings in the Western Hemisphere … Paule Marshall, Maryse Condé, and Jamaica Kincaid’ (2001, 1). If, politically speaking, ‘Western Hemisphere ’ means white America

Does (Afro-) Caribbean Canadian Literature exist?

119

and Europe, Alexander signals that only writers prized in these regions merit scholarly attention.7 Wilson-Tagoe ’s aforementioned 2001 work includes a chapter on writing by ‘West Indian women,’ but you will seek in vain the names of Brand, Harris, Philip, and others: By voyaging to Canada, they disappeared. Canada-based Afro-Caribbean authors are also absent from two crucial 1994 texts. New Writing from the Caribbean: Selections from the Caribbean Writers, edited by Erika J. Waters, offers eleven short story writers, but only one ‘Canadian’: the Jamaica-born Senior. Significantly, the Caribbean school examination book, A World of Poetry for CXC (Caribbean Examinations Council), edited by Mark McWatt and Hazel Simmons-McDonald, includes works by only two poets who live in Canada: Senior and sister Jamaican expatriate Lorna Goodison. In other words, of all the Anglo-Caribbean poets that ‘junior secondary’ students around the Caribbean basin would be asked to know by studying this examination-oriented anthology, only two have a – tenuous – connection to Canada.8 Later in the decade, 1996 saw the issue of The Routledge Reader in Caribbean Literature, edited by Alison Donnell and Sarah Lawson Welsh. Although this work is a plush compendium of Anglo-Caribbean creative writing and criticism, the only Canadians represented are ‘secret’ ones such as ‘Jamaican’ poet Carberry (a childhood Montrealer), Indo-Trinidadian author Selvon (who finished out his life in Calgary), and Jamaican poet Goodison (who is married to a Canadian and thus now possesses an address in Toronto). Omissions of Canadian immigrant authors from the purviews of postcolonial critics are equally telling.9 In the 1990 compilation Crisis and Creativity in the New Literatures in English, editors Geoffrey Davis and Hena Maes-Jelinek select thirty-six essays for inclusion. Not one canvasses Canada. Although Dorothy F. Lane studied at Canada’s Queen’s University and taught at Luther College in Regina, Saskatchewan, her book The Island as Site of Resistance: An Examination of Caribbean and New Zealand Texts (1995), despite a chapter-long treatment of Hearne, is oblivious to his Canadian roots. Chris Bongie, in Islands and Exiles: The Creole Identities of Post/Colonial Literature (1998), surveys the works of Euro-Canadian writers Margaret Atwood and Hubert Aquin as well as commentaries by scholars Linda Hutcheon and Stephen Slemon and even the African-Canadian scholar Frederick Ivor Case. However, his only Caribbean-Canadian author is an accidental one, namely, Hearne, whose 1976 anthology, Carifesta Forum: An Anthology of Twenty Caribbean Voices, scores a citation. Audaciously – or recklessly – J. Michael Dash does not mention Canada in his text The Other America: Caribbean Literature in a New World Context, and the only Afro-Caribbean-Canadian writer cited, briefly, is Dany Laferrière. Even so, Dash’s discussion of Laferrière ’s Comment faire l’amour avec un nègre sans se fatiguer (1985) is slapdash: He never notices the novel is set in Montreal. Dash recognizes that ‘Laferrière’s characters experience an exile that’s external, not internal,’ but that external exile seems to be in a non-descript Limbo, not in a vibrant, francophone-dominated, North American city. No, for Dash, ‘Laferrière ’s characters are … cut off from the world’: they are ‘writers shut away in a tiny, filthy room’ (1998, 117). Here Canada, as a backdrop, is merely the unstated sign of a prison, bland save for its degrading dirtiness. Yet Laferrière ’s protagonist, Vieux, exemplifies an entrepreneurial immigrant: one who uses the white (and black) prurient interest in the de facto pimping of white, upper-class anglophone women by black francophone intellectual artistes and arrivistes to achieve – in requisite American style – an individual class ascension.10

120 Directions home

Although Afro-Caribbean-Canadian writers remain at best peripheral to the vision of West Indian critics and anthologists, the arrival of Jamaica’s Ian Randle to Caribbean publishing in the last decade has improved the intra-Caribbean publication and distribution of titles by Austin Clarke and other Canada-based authors. Also estimable is the annual Calabash Literary Festival, begun in 2000 and staged in Jamaica, which puts authors, both domestic and emigé, and their books, before hundreds-large and enthusiastic crowds. (This vital festival is no more, sadly. Its founders and organizers decided to end the experiment in 2010.)

I I . Into Archives , Out of Sight The recent changes wrought by Ian Randle and the Calabash Literary Festival have been significant, for, as recently as 2000 and 2001, it was easy to note, through in-person scrutiny of library holdings in two English-speaking Caribbean nations, an indicative dearth of Afro-CaribbeanCanadian-authored titles. Indeed, in addition to the textual survey with which this essay begins, personal bibliographical research undertaken in 2000 and 2001 disclosed again the marginalization of Caribbean-Canadian writers in Caribbean-centric discourse and canons. For instance, my search of the library system at the University of the West Indies at St. Augustine, Trinidad, in December 2000 turned up no subject heading for either ‘African Canadian’ or ‘West Indian Canadian.’ The subject heading ‘Black Canadians’ produced two texts, while the listing ‘Caribbean Canadians’ turned up only one: Indo-Caribbean-Canadian Who’s Who: Profiles of Achievement (1995), edited by Stephen E. Nancoo et al. Similarly, in my review of the library system at the University of the West Indies at Cave Hill, Barbados, in April 2001, I found no subject heading for ‘African Canadian’ or ‘Black Canadian’ or ‘West Indian Canadian.’ The subject heading ‘Caribbean Canadian’ again yielded only one title – once again, Nancoo’s Who’s Who. While both university libraries in Trinidad and Barbados (and presumably at the third library on the UWI campus at Mona, Jamaica, as well) possess works authored by Afro-Caribbean writers in Canada, at neither location are they catalogued as such. They are simply Caribbean or West Indian authors – or authors from specific Caribbean nations. If these university libraries are any indication, Canada fails frequently to register as a ‘Caribbean’ immigrant space within the Caribbean academy.11 My personal review of the West Indian Collection (Fiction) in the National Library in Bridgetown, Barbados in April 2001 revealed the presence of only eight Afro-Caribbean-Canadian writers, including two novels by Clarke, one by Cecil Foster, and one by Hazelle Palmer, all Barbados natives. The library also held memoirs by two Caribbean-born African-Canadians (Rachel Manley and Foster), two academic texts of the same provenance (by Odida T. Quamina and Keith A. Sandiford), and two works of Afro-Caribbean-Canadian-authored poetry (by H.D. Carberry and Pamela Mordecai). (Although famed native son Austin Clarke is merely a slight presence in the National Library of Barbados, his work had, as of 2001, inspired two of the dissertations held at the library of the University of West Indies at Cave Hill, Barbados: Sharmila Harry’s ‘West Indian Immigrant Experience in Canada’ [n.d.] and Michael G. Scantlebury’s ‘The Geography in the Novels of Austin “Tom” Clarke’ [1982].12) Cataloguing of African-Caribbean-Canadian writers and titles has likely improved in Trinidad and Barbados since 2000 and 2001. In addition, Jamaica has a greater awareness of Canadian literature than may be the case elsewhere in the West Indies. Still, it was striking to consult the

Does (Afro-) Caribbean Canadian Literature exist?

121

Postgraduate Information Pamphlet, 2000–2001, of the Department of Language, Linguistics and Literature, at the University of the West Indies, Cave Hill Campus, and find, in the course ‘Readings in Post-Colonial Literatures III: Canada’ no writers of African or Caribbean heritage. Note, too, that a course titled ‘Special Topics in West Indian Literature ’ included no Canadabased authors.

I I I . Groundings with Brothers and Sistren To attempt to better understand the reasons for the relative lack of consciousness of AfricanCanadian writers of Caribbean origin in the region itself, I interviewed several Afro-Trinidadian intellectuals in Trinidad in December 2000. In my interview with Ceronne Prevatte, an official of the Ministry of Education, Trinidad and Tobago, she stated that Trinidadian knowledge of Trinidadian Canadians depends on whether or not they come back often, do tours, write about Trinidad and Tobago, and, in short, cultivate an audience. An opportunity to test her views presented itself when Ms. Prevatte invited me to attend a meeting of the Trinidad and Tobago Reading Association (TTRA), whose members include herself, in suburban Port-of-Spain. During this meeting of one dozen middle-aged and middle-class members of the TTRA, I conducted an informal poll of these volunteer literacy workers to test their knowledge of Caribbean and Caribbean-Canadian writers. The results were instructive. Everyone knew of V.S. Naipaul, the native Trinidadian who would receive the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2002. However, the group’s knowledge of the ex-Caribbean writers in Canada was sketchy and patchy. Indeed, only one TTRA member had heard of the Trinidad-born Canadian writers Dionne Brand and Claire Harris (and none had read Brand, and only one had read Harris). Two TTRA members recognized the names of Austin Clarke, Richardo Keens-Douglas, and Cyril Dabydeen. (Only one of them had read Clarke, and neither had read Dabydeen; however, both had read Keens-Douglas, a Grenada-born children’s book author.) Four TTRA members were familiar with the work of the Indo-Trinidadian-Canadian author Neil Bissoondath. The relatively positive name recognition was due to his appearances, as one member explained, in local newspapers and magazines. (Even so, only one respondent had read a book by Bissoondath.) Five members of the group were aware of another Trinidadian-Canadian author, M. NourbeSe Philip, and three had read her work. Philip’s notable score in this survey occurred because, like Bissoondath through his journalism, she had (and has) cultivated a home audience. Indeed, her juvenile novel, Harriet’s Daughter (1988), is one of the few Afro-Caribbean-Canadian texts to circulate widely in the English-speaking Caribbean, thanks to its appearance on school syllabi.13 English professor Gordon Rohlehr of the University of the West Indies, St. Augustine, in his interview with me in December 2000, explained the causes for the inaudibility of Canadian-based writers in the Caribbean. His analysis canvassed two main points. First, the AngloCaribbean is bound to the English system of publication and what becomes known through its production, distribution, and promotional machinery. Who is read in the West Indies depends on what is available in bookstores, and it is hard for Canadian-based writers to show up on local store shelves. Second, the first wave of expatriate writers went – like Naipaul – to England, whence their books and ideas could be easily circulated back to the West Indies.14 Rohlehr went on to suggest it is unfortunate that the West Indian public does not know Canada – a country with a large West Indian immigrant population – better. However, he also

122 Directions home

suggested that the domestic publishers and reading public lacked a ‘vibrant interest’ in cultural matters. This refusal to attend to narratives of migration meant that West Indians were failing to address the cultural – not economic – reasons that drove so many of their compatriots into ‘exile.’ Rohlehr also maintained that West Indian writers in Canada were really ‘double exiles’ – authors who felt ‘a sense of not belonging in either space.’ For them, the Caribbean may be a ‘mothering space,’ but one that still calls up feelings of ‘bitterness and ambivalence.’ In Rohlehr’s view, for these writers, ‘home becomes problematic: a place you’re running from and a place you haven’t found as yet. What you do then is make yourself, your experience, your home, and your space.’ In my interview with the poet Eintou Pearl Springer, then the national librarian of Trinidad and Tobago, this Rohlehrian sense of the Caribbean expatriate writer’s domestic alienation on two fronts – at home and in the home away from home (in this case, Canada) – recurs as a rationale for Afro-Caribbean-Canadian literary invisibility in the Caribbean. For instance, referring to Austin Clarke, Springer argued that his work is still relevant in the Caribbean, but that a divide exists between ‘those writers who stayed [in the region] and those who left.’ She sourced its cause in what Rawle Gibbons, the director of the Creative Arts Centre at the University of the West Indies, St. Augustine, terms ‘authenticity.’ According to Springer, the question that the domestic Caribbean audience asks itself is, ‘Who represents the Caribbean reality most authentically: those at home or those away?’15 Rawle Gibbons elaborated upon the discriminatory concept of authenticity in another interview. He underscored its consequences for the reception of expatriate Caribbean writers: ‘Once you’re living outside [the Caribbean], you may say you’re writing for the Caribbean, but really you’re writing for an international audience. You lose your authenticity. Very little [of such writing] touches our reality.’16 Gibbons also posited that an estranging ‘difference [exists] between the educated and those who develop out of the creative roots of the society as “Trinidadian Creole.”’ Like Rohlehr and Springer then, Gibbons affirmed, ‘the exiled writers fortunate enough to be on the syllabi at [the] secondary level and in university are the ones who are read and studied.’

I V. ‘Syllabis ’ and Alibis, or Publishing and Perishing This unfolding thesis – that Afro-Caribbean-Canadian literature lacks cultural force in the English-speaking Caribbean because it has little physical presence in terms of book circulation and little intellectual heft in terms of bibliographies, indexes, and syllabi – is underscored by reports on the state of bookselling in the region. In a study analysing the availability of textbooks and other educational materials for the Organization of Eastern Caribbean States Bill Clare and Evie Sheppard found ‘an impending crisis in textbook distribution, and an inefficient and very costly decentralized system that demands reform in order to ensure affordable and available textbooks.’ Clare and Sheppard note, ‘Usually texts are purchased by parents … at the request of schools through booksellers who have inadequate means to forecast requirements or to supply them on time. The costs of the textbooks that do reach the students are inflated by inefficient ordering and shipping procedures’ (1991, i). This arrangement paralyses book circulation: ‘The combination of teacher choice in text selection, bookseller involvement and parental ownership (where texts cannot be re-used by new students) constitutes one of the most expensive textbook systems conceivable, and a system that is untenable given increasing inflation and/or dramatic

Does (Afro-) Caribbean Canadian Literature exist?

123

currency fluctuations’ (i). Pernicious effects result: ‘Because of high textbook prices, schools often reduce the number of texts on the school booklists in consideration of parents’ inability to buy. This subtracts texts from the system’ (10). Rawle Gibbons reported, ‘The book trade is about schoolbooks… [But] the whole schoolbook thing is a scam; it’s a business. Many are [put together] by schoolteachers and are riddled with errors. But parents are forced to buy a certain number of books per course’ (Gibbons 2000).17 This stultifying, closed cycle of syllabi construction, bookseller ordering and stocking, and parental book buying limits, sadly, the availability of Caribbean-Canadian texts for a Caribbean readership.18 As I mentioned earlier, the presence of Ian Randle Publishers in the Caribbean marketplace has bettered book circulation in the region. Even so, the profile of Canada-located authors remains low. In her MA thesis, ‘The Status of Literature in the Secondary School System of Trinidad and Tobago,’ written at the University of the West Indies at St. Augustine, Désirée Sharon Augustin establishes the existence of ‘a pull between the desire, on the part of the authorities, to continue offering a diet based on the classics, and the perceived need to introduce commercial subjects.’ Another problem has been ‘the perception of the citizenry that any curriculum … not based on the metropolitan model was suspect’ (1997, 18).19 This conservative pedagogy was biased against adventurous and ‘outré’ émigré writings. In 1991, Clare and Sheppard reported that the entire publishing industry in the Caribbean was problematic, requiring local government action to progress:20 ‘In Jamaica primary texts in all basic subject areas are distributed without charge to every student… In Trinidad and Tobago, almost all [approved] primary texts have been printed under license … and are then made available to schools through local publishers, publishers’ agents and booksellers… In Barbados, pupils are expected to purchase their own language texts at the primary level’ (1991, 7). The authors’ recommendation: ‘Standardization [of marketing] and change of [book] ownership from parents to Ministries are essential to affordability’ iii). Augustin pleads, ‘Libraries in schools should be upgraded and well-equipped to support the teaching of Literature and to facilitate the elimination of illiteracy or sub-literacy among students’ (1997, 264). Yet one wonders whether such measures, however worthy, would even begin to address the lack of availability of works by Afro-Caribbean-Canadian writers in the Caribbean. Given the terrific difficulty of circulating Afro-Caribbean-Canadian-authored texts in the region itself, along with the eminent invisibility and inaudibility of Canada in scholarship and anthologies focused on African-Caribbean or, simply, Caribbean writers, one is justified in wondering whether the title ‘Caribbean-Canadian literature ’ has any meaning, in reality, outside the Canadian readership of such works.21

V. Orature, Or Else While Rohlehr and Springer felt that an Afro-Caribbean-Canadian writer’s expatriation may reduce his or her chances of being read in the Caribbean – that is to say, to be considered authentic –Gibbons offered another explanation, namely, the West Indian preference for orature: ‘For us, the people who live in the Caribbean, emphasis on our créolité and our roots is more important than an emphasis on the Western intellectual heritage. We don’t really see ourselves in the Eurocentric literature. But, even in the Creole tradition, once a book is published, people don’t read it. It’s the performance that counts. The writer has to perform the work… We ’re a people who don’t read.’22 Gibbons’s perspective is challengeable. Michael Bucknor of the University of the

124 Directions home

West Indies, Mona, objects doubly: first, ‘there are other kinds of literature texts that could be accused of the same crime [i.e., of being literary in style, not oral-perfomative], yet they are read’ in the Caribbean; and, second, ‘many … Caribbean/Canadian texts are much like their at-home Caribbean counterparts in their use of the oral tradition to develop their poetics.’ It is simplistic, then, to credit that Afro-Caribbean-Canadian writers are marginalized in the Caribbean because they are ‘heard’ as being too invested in print or ‘read’ as sounding ‘too English.’ Yet, Gibbons’s prejudice cannot be vacated wholly. Angst bedevils many Afro-CaribbeanCanadian intellectuals because they love orality, but their education – or indoctrination – has been in imperial English, and the strain between these modes of expression may increase their sense of alienation from the once-homeland, even as they yearn to reproduce it, orally and aurally, in print. This duality has been noted as early as 1976.23 See South African–born Harold Head’s introduction to his compilation Canada in Us Now: The First Anthology of Black Poetry and Prose in Canada,24 where he feels that his mainly West Indian contributors reject ‘the teachings of their colonial youth, where poetry was placed in some higher metaphysical sphere[;] Black creative expression is designed to inspire and serve the people ’ (1976, 8). Head flouts both the Pre-Raphaelite notion of ‘Art for Art’s sake’ and the modernist notion of ‘impersonality.’ Rather, he favours participatory, performance-oriented poetry. But what Head demands, really, is authenticity. In her reading of C.L.R. James, Antiguan-Canadian writer Althea Prince opines that he ‘discusses the search for Caribbean writers and calypsonians whose work can be considered “authentic.”’ She posits, James locates verisimilitude and wholeness of being – or ‘of a Caribbean world-view’ – in ‘the authentic voice’ (2001, 91). In this regard, Head, like James and Gibbons, couples ‘authenticity’ with ‘orality.’ Just as Afro-Caribbean-Canadian writers may be perceived as ‘inauthentic’ because they are based in Halifax, Montreal, Ottawa, Toronto, or Vancouver, they may they also be deemed so – wrongly – if their Caribbean auditors find their ‘orality’ too prosaic, their lyricism too stodgy. Indisputably though, a vernacular Caribbean emphasis on the superiority of performance – that is, of dramatic, and musical, recitation – colours the reception of literature in the region. Take, for instance, Jamaican poet Victor D. Questel’s review of Guyanese-Trinidadian (and, later, Afro-Caribbean-Canadian) Slade (Abdur-Rahman) Hopkinson’s verse collections, The Mad Woman of Papine (1976) and The Friend (1976). First, Questel declares Hopkinson uncomfortable with standard English composition: ‘Hopkinson … sees himself as fettered, as trapped by “these linked English rhymes.” Thus, the poetry in the first collection is where the poet is not in control of his art; he is, in fact, the victim of his art’ (1977, 3). Secondly, Questel promotes Hopkinson’s gifts as a performer over his ingenuity as a poet: ‘Hopkinson’s abundant talent lies in his skill as an actor rather than as a poet. It is his actor’s skill to interpret his society’s characters and Character that gets in the way of expression… It is not that Hopkinson is unaware of the excessive gestures, the words riddled by rhetoric and feigned reticence[;] he is all too aware of it’ (3). For Questel, performance precedes poetry, and it takes a savvy bard to recognize its different disciplinary needs. Such biases are indelible. Introducing his landmark anthology, Best Poems of Trinidad (1943), editor A.M. Clarke deplores what he deems the ‘rough edges’ of his ‘flowers’: ‘Genuine Trinidadian poetry may be characterised by the now universal sense of frustration, and the harsh uncouthness which precedes virtuosity,’ or, in other words, by the intrusion of ‘native ’ voice into ‘British’ verse composition ([1943] 1999, xviii). Excusing ‘Trini’ poetry’s ‘lavish use of tropical colour and sound,’ Clarke observes, ‘we may sometimes feel the rhythm of the Shango drum, the

Does (Afro-) Caribbean Canadian Literature exist?

125

Carnival street band, and catch snatches of the Calypso’ (xviii). Ambivalent about the value of such indigenous sounds, Clarke discounts Calypso as ‘only a glorified type of street song.’ Valuably, Clarke ’s critique registers the tension between the formal ‘Victorian English’ poetry of the classroom and the rude, ‘uncouth’ sounds of the streets (xviii). Re-reading Clarke in 1999, Tony Martin, in his foreword to the second edition of Best Poems of Trinidad, identifies an ‘outstanding’ Carnival poem as best ‘capturing the exquisite melange of mental concentration, physical power, improvisational facility and inherited polyrhythmic genius that constitute a Trinidad “rhythm section” or “engine room”’ (ibid., xii). Martin favours the poem for its mimicry of performance – that is to say, for its ‘authenticity.’25 Indigenous Caribbean literary critics (as opposed to scholars of syntax) read oral folk-forms as the primary vehicles of ‘literature.’ Thus, in Sayings of Trinidad and Tobago: Old and New, compiler C.R. Ottley presents folk-sponsored orature in literary terms: ‘Our linguistic past is full of colour, drama, and phenomenal flights of imagination.’ Importantly, too, Ottley argues for the political superiority of orature in maintaining cultural distinctiveness (or authenticity): ‘These sayings, almost all of them over three centuries old, are … a vivid illustration of the way our ancestor provided his own means of communication in a language incomprehensible to his slave master’ (1966, 3, my italics). An oral-based poetic also governs Cynthia Allen’s pedagogy in her handbook The Creation and Appreciation of Poetry and Lyrics. Thus, her discussion of the concept of ‘mood’ in verse relies upon examples that are bizarre and offensive, unless understood as deriving from the spoken word: When, for example, in the past, a Trinidadian called a Trinidadian of African descent ‘nigger,’ he did not only imply that he was black, but that he was low-bred, son of a slave, ill-mannered, … etc. When on the other hand a Trinidadian called another Trinidadian ‘coolie’ he not only implied that he was a carrier of loads, or one who did menial tasks, but also that he was low-bred, subservient, lacking good taste, self-respect, etc. So that both words used in a derogatory sense have almost the same meaning. (1976, 33)

Where European critics might have illustrated the same principle by quoting canonical poems, Allen chooses to employ two words that carry greatest force when spoken.26 Mervyn Morris offers an outright defence of Caribbean creole forms as constituting Caribbean-ness – I mean, an ‘up-front,’ ‘down-home’ poetics – in his Faber Book of Contemporary Caribbean Short Stories: ‘There is variety within the Caribbean; each place has its characteristic accent, and each has its own creole. For many readers one of the joys of West Indian literature is the expressive range of the language, shifting along a continuum between Creole and standard’ (1990, xi).27 Morris includes Canada-based writers in his compilation, suggesting that he is able to ‘hear’ their accents as Caribbean. But such critical catholicity is not universal. In their document ‘West Indian Poetry,’ literary critic Kenneth Ramchand and poet Cecil Gray remark, ‘Too often, … teachers have the attitude that West Indian poetry has not maintained the “high standards” of traditional English poetry, without looking at West Indian poetry for its own worth.’ They go on to state, ‘If teachers hold the view that dialect is not good enough for a work of art, … this attitude will be communicated to students.’ Ideally, ‘students should be led to recognise [the art of dialect] through their experience with dialect poetry’ (1980, 3). Again, Ramchand and Gray appeal for a politic level of respect for ‘authenticity of expression’ as

126 Directions home

the base poetic in the teaching of West Indian poetry. In this regard, Afro-Caribbean-Canadian poets, especially those tainted by too long a sojourn in the Great White North (or other centres of what Prince calls ‘white cultural hegemony’ [2001, 39]), may find their works falling on deaf ears in the Caribbean. Too, while some Caribbean expatriate authors in Canada utilize demotic forms of English, their texts still iterate a standard English orthography and grammar, at least in part to meet the needs of major Canadian publishers and ‘mainstream’ Canadian readers. The Caribbean ‘accent’ is merely ‘optional’ in Canadian-authored texts.28 In turn, these texts are merely ‘optional’ in the Caribbean: there their ‘authenticity’ is in doubt.

Vi. Caribbean = Canadian Discourses Curiously though, a persistent intercourse of ideas and a shared history, both economic and political (beginning, of course, with the African slave trade), binds the West Indies and Canada so tightly, it is astonishing that Canadian, Caribbean, and (Afro-) Caribbean-Canadian writers have not tried harder to explore their similarities as well as their differences. This point becomes even more astounding when one recognizes that, nigh four decades ago, a South African, Harold Head, suggested just such an undertaking. In his introduction, titled ‘We Have Come,’ in Canada in Us Now, Head sets forth a Caribbean-anchored pan-Africanism29 that also aligns, explicitly, with contemporary Canadian concerns. The introduction borrows from the title of an included poem by the Guyanese native, Liz Cromwell, and much of Head’s discourse follows a Caribbean sensibility and colonial experience. He opens by noting that ‘the writers in this anthology were schooled in Shakespeare, Wordsworth, Blake, Byron, Shelley, Keats and Browning because they hail from Guyana, Trinidad, Barbados, St. Vincent, South Africa, Nigeria, and Canada – all former British Colonies’ (1976, 7). (J. Edward Chamberlin reads this history as one of ‘broken words and dislocated peoples’ [1993, 5].) The international bios of the Caribbean-born contributors underline the ‘deterritorialization’ of Caribbean literature, ‘Afro-’ or otherwise, in this anthology.30 Head says that his compilation is ‘representative of the collective consciousness of people in the act of liberating themselves (and us) from a legacy which denied their humanity and heaped scorn on the culture of colonial peoples’ (7). His insight underlines the vital idea that, in Caribbean-oriented discourse in Canada, ‘colonial’ is a synonym for ‘Black.’31 The political psychology behind this positioning was, in the 1970s especially, potent and progressive: as ex-colonials, Caribbean – and African – immigrants to Canada were political equals of the Euro-Canadian majority population. The African and Caribbean fight against the ‘black colonialism’ of slavery and neo-colonialism was, for black intellectuals in Canada, not dissimilar to the struggles of a decolonizing, if still repellently racialist, Canada.32 This understanding animates Head’s politically astute introduction. Indeed, he closes his introduction to Canada in Us Now with a rhetorical passage presuming equality between the ex-colonial newcomers and the wouldbe postcolonial Canadian ‘host’: ‘You share our colonial heritage; your (our) liberation is not yet done. Your future lies with us every bit as much as our present lies with you. Canada in us now’ (12). The same assumption of black ex-colonial equality with a then-increasingly independentminded Canada inspires Head’s observation that ‘those Black bards, Ogun, Iqbal, Antar, Aesop, Terence (Terentius Africanus), and much later Pushkin and Dumas have since been folded into the bosom of European culture in the same way Austin Clarke and Harold Sonny Ladoo are

Does (Afro-) Caribbean Canadian Literature exist?

127

just now being invited by the Establishment into the official realm of Canadian literature ’ (9). Head proposes that Clarke and the Indo-Trinidadian author Ladoo are being absorbed in the central Canadian ‘canon’ on the same majestic terms that earlier black authors were accepted at the very – white – heart of European culture. His imagery insists that (white) Canadians are, in 1976, adopting Clarke and Ladoo because of their merit, which proves their social and artistic equality. Head already appreciates that, having established their independence – that is, ‘the will … to be different [from] and equal to English people’ (Diawara 1990, 840) – African and AfroCaribbean people now occupy a position from which they are able to instruct other colonial peoples, including Anglophile and Yankee-mastered Canadians, on the process of decolonization.33 Head even dreams that, one day, Africa and the Caribbean will constitute a constellation of black and brown republics truly equal in power and prestige to Europe and the Europeansettler societies of North America. Notably, Head rejects the alleged white Canadian vision of blacks as ‘West Indians … happy to come from “the Islands” to be domestics in wealthy homes or pick fruit’ (10). This rejection accents Head’s class-based, immigrant attack on white racism in Canada. Moreover, the shared English context of (most of ) Canada and the ex-British colonies should have helped to strengthen African and West Indian immigrants’ sense that they were equals who could demand white Canadian respect. In the 1960s, they landed not merely as new ‘subjects’ (literally, of the monarch), but – on paper – as equal citizens and partners of the British Commonwealth, whose home nations, even if they were now republics, retained, in varying ways, religious and cultural affiliations with Britain.34 In Being Black: Essays, Antiguan native Althea Prince recalls deciding to immigrate to Canada rather than the United States because ‘Canada had been one of those [British] colonies; and with all of the smug superiority of a British colonial subject,’ she considered the United States, in the school terms in which she had been taught, as having been ‘created out of “a dangerous rebellion”’ (2001, 30).35 This British connection allowed Prince, Head, and others to treat with other anti-imperialist Commonwealth blacks, and with progressive African Americans. David Austin limns the import of these linkages: In 1968 a mass protest erupted in Jamaica following the government’s banning of Guyanese historian Walter Rodney… In England, the Black Power movement … served to raise the political consciousness of Black Britons who were fighting police brutality, anti-immigration propaganda and systemic racism. And Canada, with its burgeoning Black population, was also adjusting to a new political climate. Following the historic Congress of Black Writers in October 1968 and the February, 1969[,] Sir George Williams University protest and occupation – an occupation that was violently suppressed by Montreal security forces – Canada and the world were awakened to the fact that Black people were very much a part of the fabric of Canadian society and that racial discrimination was a fact of life north of the US border. (2003, 33)

In a footnote on the Sir George Williams (now Concordia) University affair, Austin states that this protest by ‘predominantly Caribbean students’ against ‘racially biased’ grading by a science professor, which ended with the police ‘storming’ the (student-occupied) computer room, the burning of the facility, mass arrests, and the (controversial) death of a student, inspired ‘mass protests’ in Trinidad, culminating in an abortive coup in 1970 (33–4).36 This history of shared black struggle against white racism and Western imperialism informs Head’s sense of a persistent dialogue in Afro-Caribbean and African literature between allega-

128 Directions home

tions of superiority and inferiority, in African versus European (or white American or Canadian) contests, and in the perpetual battle to establish a realized equality or a nurturing equilibrium. In sum, Head craves a unified black collectivity within Canada whose writings participate in a global, pan-African, black empowerment movement. Still, he and his white Canadian readers, via a mutual historical experience of colonialism, may find a rapprochement: ‘You share our colonial heritage; your (our) liberation is not yet done’ (12). Assuredly, white anti-American nationalists and black radicals could both subscribe to the ideas of the Martiniquan-born Algerian patriot and theorist of decolonization, Frantz Fanon.37 Certainly, Head establishes the equality of struggles – African, Caribbean, Canadian – against imperialism. But the path to Liberation must pass through the gates of History. In Passport to the Heart: Reflections on Canada Caribbean Relations, Barbadian lawyer Trevor A. Carmichael notes that Great Britain mused, during the Great War, that Canada should ‘secure [British] colonies in the tropics’ (2001, 7). Canadian prime minister Robert Borden commissioned Sir Joseph Pope to ‘study and report on “the subject of the annexation of the West India islands to the Dominion of Canada.”’ Pope’s report, ‘Confidential Memorandum upon the Subject of the Annexation of the West India Islands to the Dominion of Canada,’ concluded, ‘annexation would be advantageous’ (Carmichael, 2001, 8). This imperialist idea was broached again just before the Second World War and later as well (9). Though it never became government policy, this possibility emerged, writes Carmichael, from ‘a level of complementarity … enhanced by virtue of the relative position of both regions as colonies of Britain as well as by their geographical nexus and resource and climactic compatibility’ (14). From a Canadian imperialist perspective, annexation of – or union with – the British West Indies made geopolitical sense, for it would serve Canada’s ‘role within the British Empire as well as fulfilling its perceived North American responsibilities’ (Carmichael 2001, 9). Indeed, as far back as the 1870s, the Canada First movement called for ‘closer trade relations with the West Indies, with a view to ultimate political connexion’ (quoted in McNaught 1978, 157). In the late nineteenth century, Prime Minister Sir Charles Tupper said, reportedly, ‘The day is coming when Canada, which has become the right arm of the British Empire, will dominate the American continent’ (Steyn 2003, A18). As a self-governing state in the empire, one whose anglophone leaders saw it as an extension of British power in North America, it seemed sensible for Canada not only to colonize its so-called North-West Territories but also to annex and expand into ‘South East’ ones – that is, the English-speaking Caribbean. In The History of Canadian Business, 1867–1914, R.T. Naylor writes that, due to a ‘profound depression in the sugar islands,’ in 1884–5, ‘inside Canada some pressure for outright annexation existed, especially after Britain announced it had no objection to Canada annexing Jamaica.’ These imperialist aspirations foundered on the rocks of white racism: ‘As the Monetary Times quaintly put it, “annexation would bring us [a large black] population which it is not desirable to have”’ (1975, 231). Yet, as a result of the SpanishAmerican War, ‘prospects of political union between Canada and Jamaica … improved.’ In 1911, ‘Canadian financiers … began a campaign for the annexation of the Bahamas” (234).38 Although Canada never established a political empire within the Caribbean, its capitalists have been perennially present there.39 Naylor records that, at the beginning of the last century, ‘Trinidad had Canadian capital in its telephone system, … and in its electric light and tramway company.’ Yet another Canuck syndicate ‘was responsible for utilities in Demerara and Kingston.’ In 1912, ‘a Winnipeg securities firm began a big advertising campaign to sell banana lands

Does (Afro-) Caribbean Canadian Literature exist?

129

in central America for $20 an acre’ (1975, 261). In Jamaica, in 1912, ‘the Canadian firm, West Indian Tramway Company … raised fares and refused to increase the wages of the conductors and motormen who were forced to do more work, including policing those who refused to pay the increased fares.’ The Canadian company’s ‘intransigence’ led to ‘a confrontation that pitted Jamaicans against a foreign [monopoly] and implicitly against colonial rule itself ’ (Lindberg 2001, 45). Currently, several of Canada’s transnational corporations – Alcan, the Bank of Nova Scotia (Scotia Bank), and the Royal Bank of Canada, to name but a few40 – are major regional players (even if the Canadian public ignores this home-grown capitalist imperialism).41 Of course, the Canadian people – as tourists – carry out their own annual occupations of Caribbean beaches and resorts, often with complete gringo disregard for local cultures.42 These facts of history require attention if we are to articulate an Afro-Caribbean-Canadian consciousness. An example of such a consciousness is manifest in Carmichael’s reading of Austin Clarke, who ‘not only searches deeply into the Caribbean condition but … also merges it with his equally inquisitorial rendering of the Canadian kaleidoscope’ (2001, 166). For Carmichael, Clarke ’s ‘skilful juxtaposition of the vernacular language with its impeccably English counterpart is therefore used to sharpen the issues by contrast and implied comparison. Clarke in this sense, while explaining the difference, stresses the diversity’ (161). Carmichael sights a similar fusion in the work of visual artist Roger Moore. In Moore’s painting St. Lucy’s Church, set in Barbados, ‘one experiences a Barbados landmark laced in the northern hues and perspective of Canada.’ In contrast, in Moore ’s canvas Ontario Barn, ‘the artist consciously or unconsciously reverses the mode and our snow surrounded barn is swept in the tropical dimensions of Caribbean sun’ (163). However, it is in literary terms above all that the Caribbean aspiration for an indigenous, ‘authentic,’ national(ist), anti-colonial voice yields a template for engagements with Canadian intellectuals and artists. Tony Martin comments that Trinidad and Tobago poets of the 1940s ‘may have been a stodgy group, in their poetry.’ He then cites critic Albert Gomes’s view that ‘he would rather watch a football game … than witness the “pathetic spectacle of a group of pretentious and artificially-spirited young men and women dissecting Keats”’ (Martin [1943] 1999, xii). However, this critique echoes, in the Canadian context, poet F.R. Scott’s scathing satire ‘The Canadian Authors Meet’ (1927), with its images of ‘Virgins of sixty who still write of passion’ and ‘Expansive puppets [who] percolate self-unction’ ([1927] 1982, 91). Scott would also have been able to apply to English-Canadian poetry these bons mots from A.M. Clarke: ‘A limited outlook could not have produced a Shakespeare, and too slavish a regard for local colour often savours of pandering to the tourist trade’ ([1943] 1999, xviii). Consider too this passage from Lloyd King’s Towards a Caribbean Literary Tradition: What is it that helped to make Latin America eccentric, to assign it a provincial status relative to Europe? One can name its colonial and neo-colonial situations, its New World idiosyncracies of geography, the impress of the language and the traditions of Spain, and the results of the encounter between Spanish imperialism and colonization on native Indian and transported African peoples and their cultures, and to an unstable post-Independence politics and economics. One result has been a search for definition which was simultaneously a quest for recognition. From the point of view of artistic life, it produced cultural nationalism along with an obsession with the New, a fascination with the archaic or traditional aspects of one ’s native ground and a desire to link these to forms of contem-

130 Directions home porary expression. Educated to Enlightenment values, the Latin American intellectual has shared a form of life pervaded by pre-Enlightenment myths and mentalities. (n.d., 1)

King’s insights into Latin American (and Caribbean) realities apply just as forcefully to Canada, if Britain and British (or France and French) replace Spain and Spanish. The literary arguments that drive Caribbean literature are not unknown in Canada. Thus, the cleavages among officers of the literati in the Caribbean Basin repeat themselves here. One recognizes this discourse: ‘The ideological conflicts in West Indian criticism are not merely between a West Indian formalist and a West Indian socio-historical approach… In addition, West Indian theoretical and critical issues simultaneously engage metropolitan theory, and the nature of this engagement provides additional criteria to assess the politics of West Indian criticism’ (Griffith 1993, 112; italics in original). Thus, the Trinidad-born playwright Lennox Brown, discomfited by his racial minority status in the vast, white landscape of Canada, charges, ‘there is no substantial Black culture in Canada’ (1972, 8). He even claims, ‘Black culture [in Canada] was born in the cradle of Whiteness’ (6). In contrast to Brown’s apparently ‘West Indian socio-historical’ – i.e., politically nationalist – position, J. Michael Dash, in the acknowledgements for The Other America: Caribbean Literature in a New World Context, notices that ‘literary movements in the Caribbean, even when singlemindedly nationalistic or ethnocentric, have been invariably sensitive to the issue of multiple identities and a regional ethos’ (1998, xii). Brown’s apparent ethnocentrism – or chauvinism re: blackness – is answered by Dash’s insistence on the presence – for Caribbean writers – of an implicit multiculturalism. Both attitudes are consistent with ‘Caribbeanité’ and both tendencies show up in Canada. Although Canada houses a chilly climate and holds a Caucasian majority population, it resembles the West Indies politically.43 Both polities adhere to conservative ideals of ‘law and order,’ though the Caribbean allows less (public) sexual licence and permits more authoritarian usage of police.44 Canadian critic John Matthews defines English-Canadian philosophical conservatism: ‘Canadians … inherited the Burkean concept of civilization as a slow accumulation, an accretion, laboriously built up by generations of trial and error – that one enjoyed privileges within a society not by any universal stroke of natural rights, but through the efforts of those who had gone before, and that those rights had to be balanced by responsibilities which one owed to the society that gave one those rights’ (1965, 22). This sentiment, or one close to it in feeling, has also governed Caribbean society, where, as in Canada, revolutions have been few.45 Assuredly, Canada’s constitutional ideal of ‘Peace, Order, and Good Government’ mandated the suspension of civil liberties in Quebec, in 1970, to resolve a terrorist hostage-taking crisis. That same year, in Trinidad, when Black Power protests erupted in the streets, ‘the Government cracked down on the … movement.’ It even jailed a poet, Abdul Malik (b. Delano De Couteau), who found himself ‘a political detainee ’ (Poet of the Streets 1977, 24). However, West Indian conservatism also intrudes upon culture. Treating curriculum design, Carlton R. Deonanan and Venus E. Deonanan, of Trinidad, observe that a ‘teacher will have views on the type of citizen he hopes to produce in the end…’ (1975, 4).46 Too, Dorcas White reports that ‘it is an offence in all of the islands to publish a blasphemous libel’ and that ‘publication of obscene matter is contrary to the law in all the islands’ (1977, 17, 19; my italics). Press liberty is less important than ‘The Sovereign’s Peace ’ (14). In both Canada and the Caribbean, although with greater force in the latter region (where capital punishment remains a popular ‘justice’ measure), intellectuals, too, are commissioned not to provoke disturbance.47

Does (Afro-) Caribbean Canadian Literature exist?

131

Conclusion All niceties aside, perhaps the main reason why Afro-Caribbean-Canadian writers have found it difficult to gain a hearing in the Caribbean is because they immigrated to a relatively obscure country. Toronto has its flash – and cash – but is not as visible a cultural beacon as, say, New York or London. After all, are not Paule Marshall of New York and V.S. Naipaul of London more exciting to consider than Austin Clarke of Toronto? One might even argue that the achievements of Clarke, Brand, Philip, et al., fail to measure up, quality-wise, when set against the works of their more famous Caribbean peers who chose to write and publish out of more empowered – and empowering – locales. Yet even if the preceding paragraph were true, a responsibility remains for Afro-CaribbeanCanadian writers and their critics to grapple with what Prince terms ‘the objective realities of Toronto, Canada, the world’ (2001, 86). For one thing, we must understand ‘that the reason the issue of [the] African self [is] a burning concern’ for African Canadians is that blacks live ‘in Canada, in a white cultural hegemony’ (45). Afro-Caribbean-Canadian writers and their critics must delineate the Canadian-ness of Afro-Caribbean-Canadian consciousness by treating the concrete particulars of history and socio-political données.48 When we begin to define the lineaments of this consciousness, we will begin to understand Canada as an extension of the West Indies (but with a white majority), while also recognizing historical and political congruencies. Is it not possible, for instance, to juxtapose Canada’s October Crisis of 1970 with Trinidad’s Black Power Revolt of the same year? How might we juxtapose the ‘leftist’ Liberal Canadian prime minister Pierre Trudeau with the ‘socialist’ Jamaican prime minister Norman Manley? May we not understand Canada as comprising a Caribbean-style archipelago,49 not of islands, but of city-states, with as much difference between Vancouver and Toronto as exists between Trinidad and Jamaica? When intellectuals begin to raise and answer such questions, I believe we will discover that the point of congruency between the Caribbean and the Canadian is the desire of citizens in both locations to occupy a homeland that has, definitively, satisfyingly, the respect of the world and the admiration of the United States. Accepting this view, ex-Caribbean writers will achieve a clearer understanding of Canadians, the very people they currently do not know – that is to say, those very people who they do not know they are. Two trailblazers in such self-discovery are St. Vincent native H. Nigel Thomas and Antiguaborn Prince. Now based, respectively, in Montreal and Toronto, both author fiction that traces Caribbean social dysfunction to the moral disorders inculcated by ‘classical’ imperialism and by contemporary neo-imperialism. In the short stories of Thomas and Prince, ‘virtue ’ is a less positive commodity than vice. Let us see…

10 Voluptuous Rapine: The Viscous Economy of ‘Vice’ in the Short Fiction of H. Nigel Thomas and Althea Prince For Alfie Roberts (1937–96)1

Imperial Piracy, Native Booty The project of European imperialism necessitated centuries of plunder and rape and labour exploitation, from 1492 until – at least – the Anti-Fascist War of 1939–45. This wanton destructiveness inspired, in turn, ‘indigenous’ resistance – spiritual, intellectual, and material. The imperial/colonial dialectic, so sumptuously violent, also compelled the conception and application of theories of liberty and tyranny, freedom and slavery, prosperity and penury, art and craft (i.e., ‘folk’ art), elitism and populism, reason and madness, and morality and immorality: a smorgasbord of binary oppositions. The European conquered and colonized First Nations of the world – in the Americas, Asia, Africa, and Oceania – became the laboratories for the elaboration of repressive ‘convention’ and resistive ‘invention.’ The chronicle of these experiments is what we now label ‘(post)colonial literature,’2 and one acute site of this creativity is that oft-reducedto-tourist-brochure-pretty chain of (resort) islands titled ‘the Caribbean.’ Here – as elsewhere – the network of exchange between colonizer and colonized is a Sadean system, or so Martiniquan poet and essayist Aimé Césaire finds: ‘wherever there are colonizers and colonized face to face, I see force, brutality, cruelty, sadism, conflict, and, in a parody of education, the hasty manufacture of a few thousand subordinate functionaries, “boys,” artisans, office clerks, and interpreters necessary for the smooth operation of business.’ This economy mandates ‘forced labor, intimidation, pressure, the police, taxation, theft, rape, compulsory crops, contempt, mistrust, arrogance, self-complacency, swinishness, brainless élites, degraded masses.’ It turns on ‘relations of domination and submission which turn the colonizing man into a classroom monitor, an army sergeant, a prison guard, a slave driver, and the indigenous man into an instrument of production’ ([1955] 1972, 21). Indeed, the Imperial command economy reduces the Native, the conquered, to the status of a ‘thing,’ and, to boot, judges local cultural production as worthless, crude, or kitsch.3 In the Imperialist imagination, corrupted and besotted by the need to extract profit at any cost, the subject – exploited – population is poor because it is unimaginative and unimaginative because it is poor. Useful (and used) only as labour, the subjugated seem bereft of culture: because they are nil, their art is moot too. In this one-way economy, the Natives – or the oppressed –gain value only as they relinquish – or are stripped of – their traditional modes of life, language, and worship, and adopt the ‘modern’ and ‘superior’ culture of those who now squat on their land, dictate rules, and manipulate cash flow.

voluptuous rapine

133

The imposition of the alien, Imperial way of life devalues – or nullifies – indigenous custom automatically.4 In the Caribbean arena, the Nobel laureate V.S. Naipaul – a conscious apostle for neo-colonialism – is able to assert, acerbically, in 1962, ‘History is built around achievement and creation; and nothing was created in the West Indies”’ ([1962] 1969, 29). His insult seeks to nix the possibility that the Aboriginal, African, and Asian citizens of the archipelago had, through surviving slavery and servitude, fomented philosophies and folkways that enriched their lives and spurred popular agitation. Impossibly, but like a serf ’s landlord, Naipaul had tallied the slaves’ and coolies’ blood, sweat, and tears, squeezed from them to produce sugar and rum, and said it equalled ‘nothing.’ But Naipaul’s impoverishing pronouncement was ironically valuable: it has stimulated an offsetting, self-conscious artistic productivity, which negates his negation. Hence, in their introduction to a special issue of Savacou, guest editors John La Rose and Andrew Salkey bid readers to ‘recall the elegant slander that we’ll forever consume and never create, and then read the contributions in this special number of Savacou, and the hollowness of that critic’s rebuke is resounding’ (La Rose and Salkey 1974, 10). Their implicit repudiation of Naipaul assumes an Afrocentric cast when La Rose and Salkey maintain that the creativity of the Caribbean people stems from the priceless blackness of its citizens: ‘If it’s true that there ’s always something new and hard-edged coming out of the despair of Blackness, then, on the evidence of the work in this Anthology, we think that there’s always something beautiful and lasting coming out of the torment of our exile.’ Here the editors conflate négritude with economic displacement, yet the race philosophy and the political experience induce ‘Native’ artistic production, even if this cultural work must be undertaken by intellectual dépaysés. Next, La Rose and Salkey reiterate their rejoinder to Naipaul, italicizing the slur ‘We’ll forever consume and never create,’ and answering it with an indigenous apostrophe, ‘Says wha’!’ (11). Their recourse to Afro-Caribbean slang hints that, along with the material goods created in the anglophone Caribbean and shipped to Mother England, there was adamant popular – or vernacular – creativity too, from the oil cans cut open to create steel pan music to the different accent and specialized local vocabulary representing a dynamic English. La Rose, Salkey, and, for that matter, Césaire and Naipaul, like all Caribbean intellectuals, descend from Bartolomé de Las Casas, the Spanish priest who witnessed the genocide carried out by the Spanish conquistadors in the forty years following the initial Columbus voyages to the Americas.5 In his j’accuse titled, in English, The Devastation of the Indies: A Brief Account, Las Casas blames the greed and lust of Spain for the horrors its men and enterprises are inflicting on the indigenous peoples of the Americas. With pithy and withering irony, Las Casas denounces ‘the terrible transactions of the Christians’ ([1552] 1974, 33), who, as ‘Tyrant governors’ (32), destroy and depopulate, rape and torture. On Hispaniola (now Haiti and the Dominican Republic), the Christians ‘attacked the towns and spared neither the children nor the aged nor pregnant women nor women in childbed, not only stabbing them and dismembering them but cutting them to pieces as if dealing with sheep in the slaughter house ’ (33). Las Casas’s bleak report sets the tone for most subsequent Caribbean discussions of imperialism and colonialism – the brutal command economy of the imperialists – as well as the hellish realities of their immorality. Césaire exemplifies this inheritance: ‘I am talking about societies drained of their essence, cultures trampled underfoot, institutions undermined, lands confiscated, religions smashed, magnificent artistic creations destroyed, extraordinary possibilities wiped out’ ([1955] 1972, 21). The supposed nothingness of Caribbean society is here blamed squarely upon European imperialism.

134 Directions home

Considering French misrule in Indochina and its bloody consequences in the 1950s, Césaire asks rhetorically, ‘What has become of the Banque d’Indochine in all that [responsibility for French imperialism]? … And the martyrs? And the innocent people murdered? And the blood-stained money piling up in your coffers, gentlemen?’ Césaire answers himself, charging that the victims of imperialism ‘have evaporated! Disappeared, intermingled, become unrecognizable in the realm of pale ratiocinations’ (43). For Césaire, it is Europe’s erasure of accounts – its pallid selfabsolution – that leaves the Caribbean looking as if it has been voided. His argument connects blood-lust and money-greed, charting the profits the overseers, slave traders, and plantation owners exacted from the powerless and the poor. The Imperial command economy offered its subject peoples detractions, so as to leverage its subtractions of their actual wealth: if the victims could be taught how ‘little’ they were, how much they did not count on their ‘small’ islands, then they could not complain about the little they earned.6 Afro-Caribbean literature has followed Las Casas in demanding an account of what was taken – and what is owed. In his study Afro-Creole: Power, Opposition, and Play in the Caribbean, Richard D.E. Burton registers ‘the state of disempowerment to which, historically, most West Indians have been condemned,’ but also the ways in which, through sports, festivals, music, religion, art, and politics, they challenge the status quo and provide ‘surrogate satisfactions for deeper dissatisfactions.’ Yet, this creative amelioration of lack, due to its ‘very richness,’ serves to ‘reconcile the disempowered to the political, social, and economic inequalities, inherited from the past and entrenched in their basic structure in the present, that caused the dissatisfactions in the first place ’ (1997, 263). Burton urges recognition that Caribbean rebelliousness is, really, ‘adjustment’ – that is, reformism and revisionism. Hence, ‘English-speaking West Indians have preferred, through a combination of choice and necessity, to work within the political, economic, cultural, and ideological systems imposed or imparted from above rather than to reject them outright or even substantially to transform them.’7 Thus, even folk-heroes are commodified, turned into spectacle, and transformed into symbols of national – as opposed to racial or religious – pride and authority.8 Burton also observes ‘a modified form of Westminster, parliamentary democracy in all of Britain’s former West Indian colonies,’ due to their fundamentally conservative political cultures (264, my italics). To cite Carl Lumumba then, under the Imperial command economy in the Caribbean, ‘the imposition of European culture (in this instance, predominantly British) upon the still viable remnants of an African culture, has predisposed the emergence of a culture form fraught with inconsistencies and incongruities – essentially a paradox,’ and one that exists ‘in a state of imbalance ’ (1971, 148). This point is illustrated by Gordon Lewis’s finding that Trinidad and Tobago nationalist Dr. Eric Williams is ‘an ardent Oxonian,’9 Naipaul rejects his Native inheritance ‘in favour of an East Indian Englishness,’ and ‘the professional West Indian Trotskyite insurrectionist … CLR James’ constitutes himself ‘a fulsome Victorian-like eulogist of the English gentleman class’ (G. Lewis 1968, 69–70). Under the Imperial command economy, in its (post)colonial manifestation, one sees the local replication of external, coercive power10 alongside a series of resistive reproductions, so that the masque of power reappears as masquerades conducted by the powerless, now clothed – costumed, playfully – in the guise of their masters (both real and imagined, present and absent). The result? Ambivalence.11 Burton underlines this fact, pointing out ‘the extreme ambivalence of West Indian oppositional culture, whose radicalism and utopianism stand in such marked contrast to the pragmatism and caution that West Indians commonly display in their lives, as they have done from the period of slavery onward’ (1997, 264).12 The

voluptuous rapine

135

Imperial command economy encourages, in the bosoms of those who would (should) overthrow it, an ambivalence that shades all, including art and morality, and issues in paralysis.13

Balancing the Books Two Afro-Caribbean-Canadian authors who bother to analyse the slippery, oily intermingling of ‘vice ’ and virtue, money and power, within the once colonial Caribbean are the Antiguanborn essayist, children’s book author, and fiction writer Althea Prince and the St. Vincent–born novelist, poet, and essayist H. Nigel Thomas, now a professor emeritus at Université Laval in Quebec City. The moral ambiguity that is the viscous residue of imperial exploitation is explored in their short fiction collections: Prince’s Ladies of the Night and Other Stories (1993) and Thomas’s How Loud Can the Village Cock Crow? (1995). Elsewhere, Thomas outlines his ‘black comic’ – jaundiced, jaded – view of the Imperial legacy in ‘The Empire Writes Back (To Whom? For What?).’ I quote the poem in full: These new colonial posts shore up the old and termite-proofed on which the house of empire sits (some will say change-proof, but there are changes in some rooms for computers and stuff ). Britannia alias the World Bank / IMF still rules the waves of credit, tidally willing them to swallow whole countries up. None of this writing is fighting, Not even of an Anansi sort. So while new posts are added and old ones overhauled, I wish to see The house turned bottom up. At the very least a wire or two short-circuited. (1999, 35)

Thomas’s allegory accents his sense that the supposedly resistive canon of postcolonial writing perpetuates the imperial canon of British literature and culture, while obscuring Britain’s continued neo-colonial economic, (and political) sway over its former colonies. Bleakly, he suspects that postcolonial literature is not even capable of Anansi-style trickster subversion, let alone of eradicating the local buttresses of empire. His argument supports Burton’s dictum that ‘it is as though West Indians have preferred to keep their radicalism in the cultural domain where it can neither really threaten the power structure nor bring injury on them while permitting them to

136 Directions home

pursue pragmatic oppositional ends day to day’ (1997, 265). In another poem, ‘Emancipation,’ Thomas provides an aphorism on neo-colonialism: ‘Emancipation / often frees / into slavery / the emancipated will not see.’ The result is ‘confusion and cruelty / too clumsy for paradox and metaphor’s clothing’ (1999, 65). Confusion, cruelty, paradox, and moral ambivalence – the spawn of the ‘invisible ’ slavery that is unfinished imperialism – are the subjects that entrance Prince and Thomas. In their respective fiction collections, they invent characters both viscous and vicious – black anti-heroes whose wealth is based on sleaze and the repetition of oppressive, imperial paradigms. These beings are not innately loathsome; rather, they are keen negotiators of local economies where it pays to be illegitimate and reprehensible, for their (social) exchange networks descend from a plantation society that put a premium on deceit and deviance, even when it pretended to saintly propriety.

Prince Born in Antigua in 1945, Prince has lived in Toronto since 1965. Educated at Johns Hopkins University and York University, she holds a doctorate in sociology. An unabashed public intellectual who participated in the Black empowerment and feminist movements – as lived among Caribbean immigrant communities in Canada and in Britain, through the 1960s and 1980s – Prince has authored the aforecited fiction collection, two children’s books, an essay collection, a novel, and a book on black hair aesthetics and politics. As a first-generation Afro-Caribbean woman immigrant writer in Canada, Prince is conscious of her role as a cultural worker intent on clearing ground for the next generation of intellectuals and writers. A sharp interest for her is defining the relationship among Anglo-Canadian, Caribbean, and Afro-Diasporic cultures and literatures. In her signature short story set, Ladies of the Night, Prince combines taut sociological observation of Afro-Caribbean peoples – in urban Canada and ‘at home ’ – with tart recognition that European Christianity and its morality are marginalized owing to the realities of poverty and trickle-down patriarchal authoritarianism. Facing both undeserved penury and unmerited punishment, Prince ’s Afro-Caribbean characters often adjust moral codes to suit their objective conditions.14 Prince begins her collection with an eponymously titled poem, wherein one reads that flowers – ‘Ladies of the night’ – ‘sweeten the horrors of the night.’ It is a paean to ambivalence and duality. Returning ‘home,’ the poem’s speaker sees, in the faces of the citizens, ‘a fine, fine madness … / thinly disguised as gladness’ (1993, 7). She wonders, ‘Do men and women love so … here? / Then why do they hate so? hit so? leave so? / Is there a malaise of commitment’ (8). These questions are answered in Prince’s pursuant stories of heterosexual pairings that lapse into serial adulteries, perpetrated mainly – but not only – by men. Although a feminist analysis is available to Prince, she allows no dogmatic interpretations or simplistic excoriations of her protagonists’ immoralities.15 She views her characters with a balance – a yin-yang dualism – that seems to owe something to both her ‘mother’s gift of language ’ and ‘the gentle, yet strong essence of my father’ (3). The opening story, also titled ‘Ladies of the Night,’ is instantly disorienting and destabilizing of conventional moral codes. One enters a perverse economy and a deviant social structure as soon as one reads the first two sentences: ‘Miss Peggy had been whoring since she could remember and she felt no shame about it. “It takes one to know one,” she said whenever anybody called

voluptuous rapine

137

her a whore ’ (10). Indeed, ‘Miss Peggy … enjoyed whoring and felt a certain pride at how easily she began to have power over men’ (11). But the revelation that she had ‘lost her cherry’ as a girl ‘less than twelve years old’ (10) problematizes her ostensibly mature self-confidence. The detail of the event is horrible, though, and its horror is increased by its workaday ordinariness: Miss Peggy’s own mother, Miss Olive, had called out to the girl, ‘as she played with some stones in the yard, “Peggy, come child, come go wid dis man. He have money to give you.”’ She ‘had thrown away her stones and had gone inside their little house with the man.’ While the older Miss Peggy is proud of her labour and her relative sexual power, the truth is, like a slave of yore, she has been made a prostitute – with no other career considered. Furthermore, her initiation into the sex trade is through rape, a violation conducted in the ‘little’ family house upon ‘a sagging bed,’ and presided over by Miss Olive. Worse, whatever the payment for the act, it cannot be enough to lift the family from its relative impoverishment. Miss Peggy recollects that, after her initiation into her mother’s trade, she felt ‘ragged inside herself ’ – rent like the very cloth of poverty. Her reward for her pains had been ‘a five-dollar bill clutched in her hand’ (11), and her mother-pimp had commented, smiling, ‘Five dollars! And is your first time. Well, well!’ (12) In fact, the five-dollar payment had been in addition to the twenty dollars the well-to-do customer had directly paid Miss Olive. Yes, this situation of rapine merits the most withering condemnation. But Prince permits only ambivalence. Miss Peggy becomes a skilled whore and even feels ‘stronger than Miss Olive ’ because ‘she knew that she was even better at getting money from men than her mother had ever been. She only dealt with men of High Society, men who were from the upper classes and who were mostly light-skinned.’ She prospers socially as well: ‘Her customers and the goods Miss Peggy bought with her body made her the envy of the neighbourhood. Her neighbours were not prepared, however, to pay what she paid’ (12). Then, when Miss Olive retires, Miss Peggy uses her proceeds to provide her mother ‘with a tray’ from which she sells ‘sweets, cigarettes, and chocolates.’ Despite their earnings, however, both women continue to live in their ‘little house,’ but this co-existence is not peaceful. Miss Olive is ‘proud of Miss Peggy’ but lambastes her daughter ‘about the same topics: Miss Peggy’s love of men and her love of money’ (13). The two entrepreneurs come to blows when Miss Peggy, while entertaining ‘a regular, twice-a-week customer …, the same man who had paid her five dollars to have sex when she was a little girl,’ is refused a cigarette by Miss Olive (14). The resultant fight sees the daughter beat the mother and humiliate her publicly by stripping her naked: ‘It was the worst beating the neighbourhood had ever seen’ (16). Later, though they stop speaking to each other, mother and daughter forge a new domestic and economic arrangement: Miss Peggy whores and cooks; Miss Olive washes and irons. Both women, disregarding community censure, soon take pleasure in accompanying each other to church. This regimen continues for ‘many years,’ until Miss Olive dies and Miss Peggy, in mourning, ceases her sex work. Still, ‘the five-dollar man at the centre of the fight between Miss Peggy and Miss Olive’ (19) visits daily with the former, enjoying ‘an easy, comfortable relationship’ (20). After his death and the reading of his will, the story’s dark-hearted secret outs: Peggy Sheila Barnabus is the natural daughter of ‘the five-dollar man,’ whose will describes her as his ‘beloved daughter … sired with Olive Barnabus.’ Although we now know that Miss Peggy was, as a girl, a victim of incestuous rape, we also learn that her deceased father has left her with ‘money to look after her for the rest of her life’ (21). At her father’s funeral, other attendees assume Miss Peggy is ‘one of the family’s servants’ (22). But, after they depart, she leaves flowers at both her parents’ graves, then returns to her ‘little house,’ now fully its mistress, and laughs ‘a

138 Directions home

sweet joyous laugh’ while remembering ‘her mother and her father’ (23). At story’s end, when, selling wares from the tray before her house, she is teased by neighbourhood children as ‘Whoring Miss Peggy,’ she strides into the street and bellows proudly, ‘Whore like your mothers! It takes one to know one ’ (24). This complex story refuses moral certitude. Sex work earns mother and daughter an independent livelihood. But, in gaining their income, they remain dependent on – and exploited by – men. Abysmally, paternal lust and maternal greed conspire to violate and debauch an innocent girl, to coerce her into perilous labour. Their work benefits the Barnabus household materially but also engenders a destructive jealousy and denies Miss Peggy knowledge of her father qua father. Even so, the rapist-father becomes, eventually, a friend and, from the grave, a substantial benefactor – a sugar daddy – whose death, in fact, the daughter laments. By story’s end, Miss Peggy feels empowered by the knowledge that both her parents loved her. Yet, the de facto family was never a de jure one. Nor did the father utilize his wealth to provide his daughter with education and instruction that could have led her and her mother to less scandalous – and more lucrative – employment. Then again, in the (post)colonial economy, morals – like prices – shift in value and must be haggled over: nothing is ‘fixed.’ In her essay ‘Talking to a Six/Eight Drum,’ Prince warns, ‘Crass modernity, eyes focused on money, is the real enemy’ of black community and unity (2001, 144). This moral is present in ‘Ladies of the Night,’ but only barely. Nor do the practitioners of rapine – father, mother, daughter – meet only tragedy and heartbreak. In her stories, Prince narrates awful situations, but she does not depict unambiguous ‘monsters.’ Hence, in ‘Croops, Croops, Croops,’ Tracey, a pubescent thirteen-year-old, confronts the painful fact of her father’s desertion of the family for another woman. The father’s behaviour is reprehensible, but he, Samuel, is humanized as a ‘hen-pecked’ husband who has left his wife because she has berated him mercilessly for his infidelity. Intriguingly too, the story begins from the point of view of ‘the other woman’ and her own socialization as a young girl to understand that she could be a successful wife only if she could cook and clean to please a man: ‘The words stayed with her as she grew up: “If you can’t wash, if you can’t turn fungie and you can’t make grainy rice, no man will want to marry you, cause you not a real woman”’ (1993, 31). The mature woman rejects this propaganda: ‘She no longer cared to acquire the virtues of a real woman. On the contrary, she took pleasure that she was not a real woman and had no desire to take up the drudgery of croops, croops, croops [laundry], smooth fungie, grainy rice and the obligations of motherhood.’ Spurning this domestic-sphere economy, she chooses to be, instead, a more-orless serial mistress, telling her lovers, ‘I can’t wash to suit you and I cook rice like pap, but I want to love you and be loved by you.’ So, her lovers ‘found her refreshing, then went home to wives who washed their pants and shirts, their merinos and their undershorts, making the dried-up evidence of their time with her melt into the soapy water’ (32). These returned husbands enjoy ‘eating, eating, eating with a hunger born out of their time spent with [the adulteress]’ (33), who may take their money, but who is free of any social obligations. These adult rationales and trade-offs are unavailable to Tracey, who, seeing the misery of her mother and feeling lonely for her father, sets out to confront Samuel at his girlfriend’s house, to convince him to return home. Before this father-daughter meeting occurs, Prince makes us privy to the anger and depression of Samuel’s wife, Cintie, over her husband’s history of infidelity. Her pain had intensified because she had noticed evidence of his adulterous emissions in the underwear she washed for him (35). She had rebelled, forcing Samuel to launder his own briefs,

voluptuous rapine

139

while constantly chastising him for his philandering. He had answered, ‘Every man in dis island have a[n extra] woman,’ but Cintie was still his ‘queen’ (38–9). Samuel’s morals, such as they are, are selfishly elastic. But Cintie has expected Samuel to live up to his vow ‘to forsake all others and cleave unto her. That is what marriage meant’; ‘deep down that is what she had thought it would be like to be married.’ Her churchly hopes have been dashed, however, by a social – or patriarchal – economy that permits mistresses and concubines practically as the incarnation of a subtle polygamy.16 Indeed, Samuel’s lover shares the same class status as Cintie. Like Cintie, she is a domestic worker – a maid by trade – even though she dresses ‘like one of the bank girls’ (39). Tracey cannot possess these insights. Innocent of any question of moral ambiguity – or of social dysfunctions initiated by slavery – she seeks to heal both her mother’s hurt and the rift in the family. Boldly, desperately, she goes to her father’s lover’s house. As she knocks on the door, she hears a reggae song blaring, from a stereo, lyrics about two lovers ‘stealing love on the side ’ (44). Tracey is galvanized to snatch back her father. Tearfully, she entreats her father to return home. Samuel agrees to do so, but his reason is that his lover ‘is not a woman to live wid’: she insists on her independence and ‘doesn’t like to wash and can’t cook’ (45). He desires the blissful service economy that is ‘Cintie ’s hands going croops, croops, croops, washing, washing, washing’ as well as her ‘cooking, cooking, cooking’ that he loves ‘eating, eating, eating’ (46). Adultery has its virtues – especially for the independent woman – but, ultimately, it cannot displace the validated domestic economy and nuclear family. But Prince resists any pat formulation. Cintie feels cheated (and hurt and humiliated) by Thomas’s extramarital transactions. The ‘other woman’ has no intention of ‘keeping’ Thomas, but merely wants to ‘rent,’ temporarily, his company. Tracey is right to claim her father’s paternal affections and to direct him to respect and honour his lawful wedded spouse. While all four characters exhibit defensible cause for their behaviour, it remains true that, to keep her husband, Cintie must play a dutiful domestic. Moreover, Tracey has also learned, from her parents’ example, that a ‘good’ wife maintains the household uncomplainingly, even if her husband should stray. In this economy, she must preside over a household in which the husband need not maintain residence.

Thomas Born and raised on the Caribbean island of St. Vincent, Hubert Nigel Thomas now lives again in Montreal, where he lived between 1968 and 1988, while studying at Concordia University, McGill University, and the Université de Montréal (where he earned a doctorate in English literature) and teaching with the Protestant School Board of Greater Montreal. He taught at Université Laval in Quebec City from 1989 until retiring as a full professor in 2005. Since 1988 when his first book – an academic monograph – appeared, Thomas has published two novels, a set of essays in French, a collection of poetry, a book of interviews with African-Canadian writers, and his 1995 short fiction, How Loud Can the Village Cock Crow? While Thomas’s debut novel deals with a young Afro-Caribbean intellectual’s acceptance of his homosexuality, the short story collection is a series of portraits, individual by individual, of a community steeped in treachery (political), corruption (economic), and sleaze (sexual). Surely, the narratives benefit from Thomas’s dissertation-based knowledge of both African-American and Caribbean folklore. Really, his language exhibits an almost hallucinatory transparency: we are bid to enter the conscious-

140 Directions home

nesses of imperialism-damaged beings whose ‘home’ soil is richly folkloric yet also righteously raw and dirty.17 The opening story, ‘Anishalo McBain,’ allows a pungent picture of a dissolute and community-dissolving individual. Like Prince’s Barnabus women, McBain has known poverty, but his was worse: his childhood house was ‘a one-room hut really’; his parents’ bed was ‘crude sticks’; another bed ‘was just big enough to hold his grandfather’s body’; while ‘Anishalo, his three brothers and two sisters slept on the dirt floor on jute sacks and rags’ (Thomas 1995, 1). Living in scrap and filth, Anishalo learns to resent his lot – and his parents, who are ‘East Indian’ (2).18 At age fifteen, Anishalo learns from his father that their family is cursed: their poverty is rooted in a supernatural malignancy. Now, Anishalo begins to plot his socio-economic ascent. McBain fils first begins to accumulate wealth by operating a store through which he cheats his poor black clientele through such devious means as mixing lard with the butter he sells, wetting saltfish to make it weigh more than what it really does, and utilizing a weight scale that declares fourteen ounces to equal one pound.19 Anishalo then defrauds a white elderly landowner of her estates by persuading her to sign a paper that he represents as a receipt, but that is really a document that transfers her lands to him. Like Shakespeare ’s Macbeth (another doomed gangster),20 Anishalo secures his economic fiefdom by murdering Albert, a black worker who had complained about Anishalo’s withholding his wages, and then his own wife, Saraj, who had witnessed the homicide. Anishalo’s criminal tyranny is stymied when one of his sons, Calis, is accused of raping an English girl, and Anishalo must pay a ruinous bail. To recoup his losses and stave off the familial curse of poverty, Anishalo turns to magic, consulting an ‘obeah’ man, Darcy, who informs him that he will have to sacrifice a child. Anishalo then kidnaps his intended victim, Baboo, a boy ‘barefooted and chubby, covered over in baby fat,’ injects him with a sedative, and ties him up in a cave (13). When Darcy fails to keep an appointment for the scheduled sacrifice, Anishalo unties Baboo, then confronts Darcy about his non-appearance, only to be told, ‘Man, all I told you was a joke ’ (17). The two men rescue sleeping Baboo, and, as Darcy is dousing the child with cold water to awaken him, he tells Anishalo, ‘I don’t know what you drug him with, but if anything happen to this child, I will make you lose your Coolie ass in jail! You should stuff all your fucking property down your throat! This is a little boy, Anishalo McBain… What kind o’ fucking monster you is, man?’ (19) It is this last crime, his intended murder of Baboo, that haunts Anishalo as he, now old and sick, lies dying of a disgusting disease in his own dirt and stench: he is festering; his buttocks are plastered with sores and his ‘necrotic tissue’ is oozing (4). Now he recognizes that he has been ‘rotting inside a long time’ and ‘I ain’t worth shit’ (21). Moreover, all his schemes have come to naught. He had received back the hundred thousand pounds (minus a thousand) that he had paid to release his son, Calis, from jail, but only because ‘six months after Calis had been presumed to skip bail, his body washed up on Brighton Beach. He had taken cyanide and presumably jumped into the water’ (20). Worse is the unstated possibility that Anishalo murdered his own son so as to regain the bail money. On his deathbed, he condemns himself, speaking aloud to the apparition of the now-mature Baboo in his hospital room: ‘You don’t have to tell me that a man who [is willing to] sacrifice human flesh to the devil already dead inside ’ (21). To paraphrase William Wordsworth, Anishalo has gotten and spent, all by Machiavellian hook and by crook, and he has laid waste to his powers in the process. Now, as he is prostrate and dying, the jumbie – or Caribbean spirit – of his once-intended sacrifice, Baboo, seems to be

voluptuous rapine

141

present and judging him silently. It is to this imagined presence that Anishalo shouts his confessions of mortal sin. When Gertie, his black nurse, hears Anishalo ranting and comes to check on him, he is alone; but he dies in the midst of trying to tell Gertie that Baboo has visited him and is still in the room. Given the checklist of Anishalo’s capital sins – greed, lust, murder – it seems that Thomas presents McBain as a vividly viscous character. True: Anishalo functions within a criminal economy. Still, he transgresses against too many moral strictures, murdering a brother-in-law (Albert), his own wife, and perhaps his own son, and coming within a hair of murdering a sevenyear-old child. His punishment for passing from rags to ill-gotten riches is to end his days in a hospital bed where bandages dress his putrefying body. Vitally, his judgement is served up, not by a court of law, but by community representatives, including Darcy and Baboo (whom Anishalo dreams has told him to ‘buy a rope to string your fucking self up’ [21]). As in a fairy tale, McBain gains the world but loses his soul – and the world – in the process. He accumulates wealth, but is, in the end, disowned by the people he has exploited, including his own children. Like Prince ’s ‘Croops, Croops, Croops,’ Thomas’s story ‘Bushy’s Return’ deals with adultery. Here the ‘other woman,’ Milly, attracts communal condemnation because she agrees to become the mistress of her sporting-man employer, Martin, because her own husband, Bushy, apparently in England, has not communicated with her for more than three and a half years (Thomas 1995, 99). The story opens by acknowledging that ‘keeping up morality was a civic responsibility’ (95), and, so, many villagers have gathered before Milly’s shack to witness what they expect will be her just-returned husband’s violent wrath in learning of his wife ’s infidelity: Indeed, Milly has just received a letter from Bushy condemning her for ‘butting’ him and threatening ‘to kill yo ass and cut yo up in small pieces and trow you in the sea where fish go eat yo and nobody cant find you.’ (101). Expecting to see blood, ‘the crowd began moving into the yard, sadistic smiles wrinkling their faces, mischief gleaming in their eyes’ (102). Nevertheless, Thomas’s narrator is scrupulous in explaining – if not justifying – Milly’s liaison with Martin. First, she is not wrong to think that her husband has abandoned her (initially, he sends her only one letter from England, mailed some six months after he had left); secondly, she works for Martin; and, thirdly, Martin is desirable and he seems both nice and unhappily married. Milly accepts Martin, though she feels guilty about her position as an adulteress: ‘Martin wife ain’t do me nothing. I can’t take up with Martin and cause she to suffer. But every day I could feel another piece of my strength break off. It just get harder and harder not to lie down in the potato furrow’ (100). Soon, Milly discovers that Martin is on intimate terms with his wife, and then he begins to cheat her of her rightful earnings and beat her when she complains. Simultaneously, everywhere she goes the villagers ‘curse me, throw words at me ’ (101). Now a crowd has gathered to usher Bushy up to his front door – and then eavesdrop on what it expects will be Milly’s sobbing confession and contrition and Bushy’s vengeful spousal battery. Instead, Bushy rebukes the throng and orders its constituents, ‘Get to fuck off my property… I don’t hear from my wife in years, you all don’t start washing yo’ mouth on she.’ Bushy enters his home with the mob still lingering without, its members still hoping to hear ‘echoing blows.’ Instead, they hear ‘sobs – only sobs – of two people crying’ (103). Disappointed, the throng drifts away. Although the mob expects to witness the meting out of patriarchal violence, it is telling that its members are not expecting Bushy to confront his wife’s seducer and abuser. He is the economically powerful employer, a boss, and so no social opprobrium falls upon him for his brazen adul-

142 Directions home

tery and his coercive seduction of Milly. While she may deserve censure, Milly is likely neither Martin’s first victim nor his last. Thomas’s story illustrates the limits of social judgement as well as of pseudo-polygamous or pseudo-polyandrous arrangements. As in Prince, the stubborn sanctity of monogamy prevails, though the reality of economically driven abandonment and adultery persists. Whatever the moral imperatives of Thomas’s tale, it settles into ambivalence, for the conversation between moral convention and individual invention is polyphonous.

Settling Accounts The (post)colonial economy is the source of this many-sided debate, one arising from the social structures inherited from slavery. Burton buttresses this point: ‘in the last years of slavery’ in Jamaica, creolized Africans evolved ‘a combination of nuclear and extended families that, being neither African nor European, may be regarded as an authentically Creole form of family structure ’ (1997, 39). The stories of Prince and Thomas underline this tension between the conventional expectation of monogamy and the persistent cultural tolerance of less restrictive union (though, admittedly, these more open relationships favour men). In their tales, adulterers may meet with understanding, if not sympathy, and, if critiqued, are still treated with relative gentleness. Yet another sociological fact – the ‘important distinction of gender’ (Burton 1997, 35) is germane here. Burton attests, ‘If the growing cultural and educational strength of women can be translated into concrete social, economic, and political power …, it would strike at the very core of the structures and values inherited from slavery and colonialism’ that still hobble socioeconomic progress (267). In her discussion of the literary criticism of Trinidadian Trotskyist and pan-Africanist C.L.R. James, Prince teaches that James’s search for authenticity in Caribbean literature is limited by his omission of women who are, she points out, ‘the overwhelming majority in all Caribbean populations’ (2001, 93).21 By excluding women, James’s ‘discussion of authenticity and wholeness begins with part of the equation missing’ (103). The struggles of Caribbean women for intra-region equality must be assessed to elaborate a populist history that better accounts for the survival of African-Caribbean peoples within the deleterious socioeconomy and politics erected by slavery and then by the Imperial command economy (and now by the proxy forces – compradors – of neo-colonialism).22 Usefully, the short fiction of Prince and Thomas delineates the plastic, ‘amoral’ decisions Afro-Caribbean peoples have had to foment to maintain body and soul, family, and self-respect. If these stories are didactic, their educative function is accidental. Their fundamental moral is likely, as Prince would have it, ‘to triumph over the possibility of annihilation [by managing] the objective realities of the environment in a way that ensures survival’ (2001, 96).23 Arguably, even the most indecorous and inglorious protagonists in these stories merit appreciation for being able to function within egregiously faulty economies, where voluptuous amorality serves as a suitable business strategy.24 I end with an argument-clinching couplet from Thomas: ‘It’s comforting that even stripped of almost all / it needed, we kept our humanity from crumbling’ (1999, 50).25 Prince and Thomas limn Imperial or neo-colonial violations that too often define Caribbean experience. Empire and ‘race’ are subjects also taken up by Arthur Nortje, a South African or, rather, Canadian poet – or so I posit next.

11 Repatriating Arthur Nortje

À ARTHUR NORTJE (1942–1970)1 Nay, if there be no remedy for it, but that you will need buy and sell men and women like beasts, we shall have all the world breed brown and white bastard. Shakespeare, Measure for Measure

Such golden, muddy lees: your poetics – That sulphurous lava, Standard for mixed-race mix-ups, snafus, Who distill piss-yellow acid from brown sugar: Your vernacular sops and oozes black ink, The colour of drool out a smashed mouth, Stammering, dyeing all those white grammars, Blotting the air. Your genealogy parses apartheid holocaust – The melting flesh around the smoking brand, The icy-feel of chains like intimate jewellery… From gulags of oblivion and limbo, you flit, Tan vampire, to suck white and black teats, To bleed South Africa and give Canada ebola. George Elliott Clarke

Departure Incontestable is the national and canonical provenance of Arthur Nortje. Born in 1942 in Oudtshoorn, South Africa, raised during the apartheid period, educated at Paterson High School in Port Elizabeth – where he was taught by fellow South African poet Dennis Brutus (1924–2009) –

144 Directions home

and a graduate of the then-segregated University College of the Western Cape, Nortje is as validly South African as the veldt itself. Moreover, with Brutus, Nortje was a co-winner in Ibadan University’s 1962 Mbari poetry competition. When, after teaching at South End High School in Port Elizabeth, Nortje leaves for Oxford University in October 1965, it is to utilize a scholarship arranged by the National Union of South African Students.2 His poetry collections, Dead Roots (1973), Lonely Against the Light (1973), and Anatomy of Dark: Collected Poems of Arthur Nortje (2000),3 emit a corrosive nostalgia for his ‘beloved country’ (to use a phrase popularized by Alan Paton4), all blood and bullets and so, so beautiful. Nortje’s poems also appeared in the South African journal Sechaba and in Seven South African Poets, edited by Cosmo Pieterse (1971).5 His abrupt death in Oxford in December 1970, at age twenty-eight, from a suicidal dosage of barbiturates as he faced imminent deportation to South Africa,6 seals off, hermetically and unambiguously, his oeuvre and his history. In canonical criticism, Nortje is a poet ‘preoccupied with experiences of alienation and fragmentation,’ ‘introspection,’ and ‘exile … the guiding metaphor of [his] themes of homelessness and marginality’ (Killam and Rowe 2000, 180). Charles Dameron insists ‘the bulk of [Nortje ’s] later work reflects his deep concerns as an exile and wanderer: with the turmoil in his distant homeland, with his experiences in new environments, and with the introspective demands of his poetic craft’ (155): Nortje’s verse ‘records the disintegration process of a gifted, despairing young African exile ’ (162). In the preface to his edition of Nortje ’s collected poems, South African scholar and editor Dirk Klopper surveys these readings: Critical studies have revealed two tendencies in Nortje ’s poems. On the one hand, there is a consistent opposition to social oppression, including not only apartheid rule of South Africa of the 1960s, but also forms of racist and economic oppression Nortje encountered while exiled in England and Canada. In terms of this tendency, the poetry is associated with a literature of political resistance. On the other hand, there is an ongoing inner turmoil, an insistent psychic conflict. This tendency reveals a poet whose struggle is ontological, a struggle with the meaning of being and who writes a literature of confession. (2000, xxv)

Klopper accepts the helpfulness of these impressions, but he also senses that Nortje ’s poetry ‘raises the spectre of loss and fragmentation as constituting the very basis of consciousness’ (xxvi). Yes, as a title like Dead Roots indicates, Nortje’s very nativity launches his innate disconnection and discontentment. As one anonymous reader confirms, ‘Classification as “coloured” (mixed race) in apartheid South Africa eroded Nortje’s selfhood’ (quoted in Killam and Rowe 2000, 180). States Jacques Alvarez-Pereyre, Nortje’s ambivalence for South Africa ‘was to follow [him] throughout his exile’: he desired ‘this beautiful land’ and rejected ‘this implacable country’ (Alvarez-Pereyre 1984, 160). The duality is the allegiance. Thus, the elegiac back cover matter of Dead Roots posits, ‘[Nortje’s] tragically early death removed a poet who had every promise of becoming one of the leading South African poets’ (my italics). Yet, though the poet had to ‘abandon’ South Africa, though ‘his ties of love with his homeland … frayed, … they still exist’ (Dameron 1976, 157, 156). So, the perished poet is cradled, reverently, in the South African literary pantheon – and libraries. Klopper hopes that his collection ‘will serve as a return of sorts, a homecoming [to South Africa], for Nortje’ (2000, xxiv). By reclaiming the disjecta membra of Nortje ’s lyrics, some ‘submitted to Heinemann by the author, and … under consideration

Repatriating Arthur Nortje

145

at the time of his death,’ others ‘obtained from various individuals after his death,’ and plural copies of still others whose ‘texts vary [so that] it is hard to tell which is the definitive version’ (Publisher’s note 1973, [xiii]), the collected ‘scattered remains of a corpus’ (Klopper 2000, xxiv) ensure Nortje ’s inexpungeable South African status.

Virage Nortje ’s entombment as ‘South African poet’ is not as final as his compatriots think. There exists the disconcerting (because disinterring) reality that he is also an African-Canadian poet. This claim is not fanciful: 1) Nortje was ‘coloured’ – and a mixed-race identity always posits multiple allegiances, including, potentially, various national allegiances; 2) he chose exile; 3) he immigrated to Canada and lived in Hope, British Columbia, and Toronto between 1967 and 1970,7 and authored a quarter of the poems in Dead Roots in Canada; 4) his Canadian residency coaxed a shift in his poetic style, one that may have influenced later African-Canadian poets; and 5) he was identified as a Black Canadian poet in a pioneering anthology and bibliography in his adoptive literature. All ‘national’ canons are more cosmopolitan and diverse than their framers allow. Too, we must acknowledge that, in the case of African writers, their often short-term residencies in a host of nations allows them the elastic luxury of multiple ‘belongings’ and ‘claimings.’8

Port I The primary point that allows African-Canadian literature to repatriate Arthur Nortje is his status as ‘Coloured’ – brown – in a South Africa that insisted on partitions among the black indigenous African peoples, the colonizing Dutch- and British-descended white minority, and the imported Indian labourer and professional class. In Canadian terms, Nortje was biracial, a ‘Métis.’ In Midfielder’s Moment: Coloured Literature and Culture in Contemporary South Africa (2000), Grant Farred notes that Nortje ’s poetry ‘compels us to attend seriously to the designation “coloured”’: ‘The product of a brief liaison between a coloured working class woman, Cecilia Potgeiter, and a Jewish man, Nortje felt his colouredness with a keenness unrivaled… A racial hybrid with access to only his mother’s (coloured) culture, Nortje’s family origins – or the lack of them – deeply affected his poetry’ (2000, 56). Nortje’s psychological division regarding his mixed-race heritage resembles that of Canada, itself a mongrel state, the ‘bastard’ creation of Great Britain and France. To cite André Siegfried’s monumental if antiquated study, The Race Question in Canada, ‘Canadian politics is a tilting-ground for impassioned rivalries. An immemorial struggle exists between French and English… In the first place …, it is a racial problem’ ([1907] 1978, 14). Nortje ’s racial dilemmas are not unknown in Canada – even among ‘white ’ Canadians. Obsessed with ‘the condition of colouredness’ (Farred 2000, 56), and the unchurched coupling that brought it about, Nortje jets an almost monomanic theme of bastardy. In ‘Hangover,’ his persona smiles, ‘No lice, luckily I’m a bastard’ (1973a, 9); in ‘Pornography: Campus,’ a sexual-political allegory disrupts the urbane surface of the poem: Continually life is a hunt below the tousled surface

146  Directions home of pubic’s hair blond shock, or jet: we are bastards of debauchery. (1973a, 17)

For Nortje, the biological instruments of genitals and ‘race ’ implement the immoral, the illegitimate, and the criminal. Problematically, as Farred notes, Nortje’s ‘bastardization’ taints his vision of women – especially ‘coloured’ women.9 His work resolves into ‘an intensely misogynistic disdain’ (2000, 56) at times, a blunt aspect of his semi-autobiographical lyric ‘Casualty,’ where, the speaker snarls, ‘My devil is the bastard of desires’ (1973a, 34), and spits: I shall be true eternally towards my father Jew, who forked the war-time virgins: I shall die at war with women. (35)

This theme, so prominent in the South African poems of 1963–5, returns archly in ‘Dogsbody half-breed.’ Because biraciality equals, for Nortje, bastardy and alienation or exile, it is apt that ‘Dogsbody half-breed’ was inked on Balsam Street in Toronto, the bastard offspring – like Pretoria – of London. Here a recollected South Africa is imagined as the matrix of race-mixing – that is, political pollution: ‘Maternal muscle of my mixed-blood life / with child were you heavy, with discontent rife ’ (1973a, 104). The abandoned land of ‘abandoned’ morality spawns ‘bastardies, abortions, sins of silence ’ (105), all because, centuries ago, ‘blond settlers … / … oxdrawn, ammunitioned,’ enacted ‘a covenant against the Zulu’ (104). Of course, this ‘covenant’ was more honoured, as history and bloodlines prove, in the breach – and breeches – than in the observance. Farred reads the poem’s third and last section as a mildly disparaging comment on the supposed ‘lasciviousness’ of ‘Coloured’ women (2000, 57), whose ‘delicate nooks and moments noble-gentle / bud-open both to blond and black’ (Nortje 1973a, 105). Yet, the ‘you’ in the poem is likely South Africa, and the speaker, though set, remembering, in Toronto, promulgates an Ezra Pound–like ‘Pact’10 with his ex-natal state: and I hybrid, after Mendel, growing between the wire and the wall, being dogsbody, being me, buffer you still. (105)

As a ‘Heinz 57’ mongrel – or ‘dogsbody’11 (an identity the speaker here accepts), but also being, himself, ‘bud-open … to blond and black,’ his buff-coloured, off-colour ‘race ’ allows him to blossom as an intercessor between black and white peoples. Farred deems mulattoes’ bodies ‘a reminder of the historic sexual links between European colonialists and the indigenous population’ (2000, 57) and reasons that Nortje speaks, thus, from ‘a precarious social position and … a racially ambiguous position’ (56).12 To be coloured is to be a bastard is to be alone is to be an exile, is, then, to be an exilic immigrant (in Nortje ’s case, to a cold, unwelcoming Canada), and is, lastly, to claim the solitary home of the grave.13 Crucially, for a native South African under apartheid, to be coloured is to be divided at the root, torn in at least two directions, and driven, branded like Cain and crazed like Lear, across the face of the earth in search of a fresh, unbesmirched – and unbesmirching – nativity.14 Yet, Nortje is a ‘blood’ infant of Africa, the Netherlands, and Israel, as well as, linguistically,

Repatriating Arthur Nortje

147

of Britain, and, politically, of South Africa and Canada. Thus, his poetry always announces his provisional status as ‘Coloured / South African’ and his incipient identities as ‘Black’/African, Dutch/Boer, Jewish, British, and landed immigrant / Anglo-Canadian.15 Then again, every mixed-race person is ordained to experience dislocation: only naked political repression need make an organic exile a physical one. Consequently, Nortje ’s life and work acts out a destiny that another tireless wanderer, African-American writer James Baldwin, witnesses – the recognition that ‘I was a kind of bastard of the West’ ([1955] 1984, 6). Baldwin’s separation from white-faced civilization, a status signed by his fairly unadulterated black physiognomy, is intellectual and, simultaneously, moral. To be a raced bastard – even a purebred one – is as much a matter of culture as it is of breeding, of genius as it is of genealogy. The fate is estrangement, as the Europe-stranded Baldwin establishes: “I was an interloper; this was not my heritage.” The reaction to this fate is expropriation via exile: ‘I would have to appropriate these white centuries, I would have to make them mine … otherwise I would have no place in any scheme’ (7). A like reckoning occurs in Nortje’s reactions to South Africa, Britain, and Canada. In ‘Athol Fugard’s invitation,’ one of Nortje’s last South African-authored poems (penned in 1965), his persona cites ‘cobbled multi-racial pavements’ that ‘White rain beats in stinging torrents’ (1973a, 27). Following this superb intuition, Nortje casts off the land that has type-caste his like and, now, as an out-caste, as a mother-/father-/land-less being, seeks to establish a new, accommodating South Africa. Yet, he also seeks to appropriate a new domicile – either in the ‘maternal’ kingdom of Britain or the ‘sister’ Commonwealth state – dominion – of Canada.

Port I I Like many African diasporic writers, Nortje accepted expatriation, or exile, or emigration, because postcolonial (and mixed-race) identity demands a constant shuttling among potential objectives, possible ‘homes.’ Therefore, as the diary-like,16 travelogue, ‘fugitive ’ lyrics of Dead Roots underline, Nortje left South Africa in 1965 to attend Jesus College in Oxford. Though his official purpose for departure was study,17 his tours became exile, but one replicating a form of quasi-post-Imperial federation, so that Canada and England figure as largely equal partners, with South Africa, in his poetry.18 Still, the direct spur for Nortje ’s exodus is his perception, pronounced in his work of 1960–5, that South Africa, with its racial repression and ‘soured’ heterosexual amours (also poisoned by ‘race’ laws), is one more desert of the soul. If lonely, coloured bastardy is the plangent theme of Dead Roots, its sound is a bluesy fusion of pathological, suicidal Sylvia Plath and hateful, specious T.S. Eliot. The imagery speaks for itself – a fugue of Ariel and ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’: Liberal girl among magnolias born was set to clipping dahlias in the prison yard, her blonde locks shorn. Winter is in the shining grass. (Nortje 1973a, 7)

The lyrics mine a rich rhetoric of ruin: ‘the heart is not a void / but barren ground / where roots have struggled and died’ (20);19 ‘I stand self-empty, ascetic’ (31). As in early Eliot or the late, late Plath,20 one finds, ‘The soul has left / its slim volume / of acrid poems only’ and ‘Stench leaks

148 Directions home

from the gloomy tomb of treasure’ (24).21 South Africa itself, in 1965’s ‘Windscape,’ is some ‘wild slut [that] howls for rain / to soothe her caked and aching hollows’ (21). The unsettling pass laws (‘identity is / 268430: KLEURLING [COLOURED] / Pretoria register, male 1960’ [10]), the decay of love into lust (‘Bleak times I breathe like this / face smothered in your shoulder’ [16]), and the decline of protest to furtive graffiti (‘Who fouled the wall O people? / FREE THE DETAINEES someone wrote there’ [12] 22), inspire the sere style of Eliot and the searing style of Plath. Here is the poetry of self-expulsion, ‘carrying with it melancholy, but also irony – two chords … found everywhere in Nortje’s work’ (Alvarez-Pereyre 1984, 154). Nortje became a Commonwealth cosmopolitan, writing in three countries. Even so, his South African critics downgrade Canada as an abode of his creativity. Dameron tells us the years 1965– 70 represent, in Nortje, ‘self-imposed exile.’ Fleeing ‘the shackles on free speech that bind the outraged black dissident,’ Nortje ‘chooses the rest of the world over South Africa’ (1976, 155, 156). For Alvarez-Pereyre, this choice means that Nortje decides ‘to take on the world,’ first suffering ‘the wrench of the Great Separation’ in London and Oxford, ‘the heartbreak of exile,’ and then ‘departure for the Great North,’ Canada (1984, 155). Here he seeks the literary reputation he had won ‘without trying in England,’ but seems sunk in ‘work as a teacher, a deep disappointment in love,’ and, for two years, 1968–9, a despairing hiatus in productivity that saw the writing of ‘a mere four poems’ (ibid.).23 Klopper also disparages Nortje ’s Canadian sojourn: ‘His poetry during [1968] and the following year is as bleak as the frozen landscapes that hold him hostage. Uses his powers of keen observation to anatomise and abjure consumerist culture in Canada’ (2000, xxii). Although the last year of work, ‘a period of feverish travels – London, Canada, back to London, Oxford,’ is fecund with new lyrics, Nortje’s prime poetic period, wagers AlvarezPereyre, is 1961–5 (155, 156). It is Nortje’s semi-cryptic, anti-apartheid poetry at home that appeals to Alvarez-Pereyre, not the exilic lyrics, including those drafted in Canada.24 He opines that ‘the turning-point in Nortje’s life occurs in 1966–7,’ when, while in England, ‘the profound disappointment in love he experienced then’ served to undermine his self-confidence, while turning his poetic into its confessional ‘echo, its tormented reflection’ (162). But Nortje ’s experience of lost love in England mirrors principally his loss of moorings. London and Oxford were not as repressive as South Africa, racially, but the imperial capital still constituted, for him, a centre of moral depravity, social ugliness, and emotional sterility. If South Africa elicited, from Nortje, an Eliot-Plath poetic, London, that oasis of miasma, is the original locale of Eliot’s ‘The Waste Land’ (1922) and the remembered demesne where Plath, American expatriate, gassed herself to death in 1963.25 Nortje’s persona remarks, ‘I am saying I am sorry / I spilled across your borders’ (1973a, 37). To emphasize his displeasure with England, Nortje dedicates two poems ‘For Sylvia Plath.’26 In the first, Nortje repeats the Plath persona’s ‘Hate for the father,’27 purely because ‘His blood confuses mine’ (46). While the speaker recalls sterility – ‘my seeds have fallen in absences… // lack of belonging was the root of hurt’ (62)28 – his Oxfordian present is no less a Purgatory, a purgation: ‘Alone I have seen / gutterwater bear away white petals’ (66). In the Plath-like ‘Autopsy,’ Nortje’s persona pictures South Africa as a ‘blond / colossus’ vomiting ‘its indigestible / black stepchildren like autotoxins’ (52).29 But he also sees that The world receives them, Canada, England now that the laager masters recline in a gold inertia behind the arsenal of Sten guns. (52–3)

Repatriating Arthur Nortje

149

In England, then, ‘roots are severed’ and ‘your wrists can stain razors’ (69) and the poet’s ‘wrought sentences / [fall] dead as the thin conversation of evenings’ – an echo of Eliot’s ‘Prufrock.’30 Sex, too, comes to nothing. Though a woman’s ‘aching beauty’ – vaginal – has ‘held me rooted,’ in copulation, she is ‘fearing / the third growth, the fruit of nature ’ (80). England, like South Africa, is a site of blight: ‘severed roots’ equalling exile, dead roots signalling abortion. On the eve of his exit for Canada, Nortje’s painful solitude – his South African heritage – adds new pangs of exile and sterility – his English culture. In exile – that ‘bitter’ and ‘empty’ state – he finds his roots ‘severed,’ his seed ‘scattered’ (but sterile), his identity fusing LSD flashbacks and Vietnam news flashes, ‘Mod’ English and pied noir African. Like Eliot and Plath, two earlier U.S.A. poet-exiles in the marble heart of the old Anglo-Saxon ‘Empire,’ Nortje travels, a poet-exile from another U.S.A. – the Union of South Africa – to remake himself and his poetry, rebuffing modernism for the ‘Mod.’ Like the Americo-Anglo modernists of yore, he, too, felt his identity mutate in England. His ‘Canadian’ verse proves less bleak, but not yet ‘black’ in consciousness.

Port I I I In shuttling to Canada, Nortje undertook not just another migration, but immigration. Between leaving South Africa in summer 1965 and dying in England in fall 1970, Nortje spent two-thirds of that five-year-period, from September 1967 to July 1970, in Canada (excepting a February 1970, month-long sortie to England). In addition, of the 104 poems in Dead Roots, some 26, or one-quarter, were written in Canada.31 Although Nortje wrote fewer poems in Canada than he did in South Africa (30) and in England (48),32 it was the only country besides his native land where he tried, consciously, to make a home.33 England was always just a transit point.34 An early poem from Nortje’s Canadian expedition, ‘Conversation at Mathilda’s,’ written in British Columbia in September 1967, is wondrously domestic after the acerbic satires on pop life in ‘swinging’ London: Veils drift over the mountains: their faces and backs are forested. The rain seethes with eyes over the river: it is a strong and silent grey colour. (1973a, 84)

Mathilda’s own thoughts ‘reach back to Cape Breton Island’s / lobster and cognac’ (84), a moment of plenitude. Even so, the speaker remains aloof, listening to Mathilda’s ‘voluble words’ and ‘weighing moments, waiting to write up results’ (85). Given now, though rarely previously, to sexual pleasure, Nortje ’s persona celebrates, in ‘Joy cry,’ a reinvigorated ‘virility’ while ‘snowmelt waters roar down the mountain’ (87). Although Canada, unlike London, offers a sense of being ‘grounded,’ of being landed, Nortje’s persona declares, ‘The isolation of exile is a gutted / warehouse at the back of pleasure streets’ (90). Moreover, the frontier – or ‘bulldozer’ – civilization of northwestern Canada is a discomfiting mishmash: I have Oxford poetry in the satchel … as I consider Western Arrow’s pumpkin pancake buttered peas and chicken canadian style. (1973a, 92)

150 Directions home

In ‘Immigrant,’ Nortje ’s persona bears ‘a maple leaf … in my pocket’ (1973a, 92), but also feels alienated from South Africa: ‘Where are the mineworkers, the compound Africans, / your Zulu ancestors …?’ (93). After landing near ‘Vancouver bay,’ the persona notes, with sly irony, ‘As we taxi in / I find I can read the road signs’ (94).35 Nortje ’s speaker is a South African immigrant to Canada, but he is also representative of what Paul Gilroy calls ‘the rhizomorphic, fractal structure of the transcultural, international formation’ (1993, 4). Yet, where Gilroy drafts a ‘Black Atlantic’ of Americanized and Afro-Caribbeanized European intellectual ‘currents,’ Nortje maps a ‘coloured’ Anglo-Saxon Atlantic. His is one where South Africa, England, and Canada still constitute, imaginably, the resurrected axis of the Imperial Federation League, founded in London in 1884, and the British Empire League, ‘which succeeded it in 1896’ (Berger 1970, 5). Both groups sought to revivify declining British imperialism by making the white-governed ex-colonies of Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa equal partners in the running of the empire.36 While Nortje ’s transatlantic interests trace those of Canadian Imperial Federationists, he shares with them, to cite Carl Berger, only a proto-nationalist ‘yearning for significance and a desire to obliterate the stigma of colonialism’ (259). Nortje also seeks to salve the hurt of apartheid. As Berger observes in The Sense of Power: Studies in the Ideas of Canadian Imperialism, 1867–1914, Canadian novelist – and ‘progressive ’ conservative – Stephen Leacock could state, ‘I … am an imperialist because I will not be a Colonial’ (1970, 259). Contrastingly, Nortje’s attitude in his work seems to be, ‘I … am a Commonwealth cum Third World internationalist, because I will not be a provincial, “coloured bastard.”’37 Hence, Nortje also echoes the Imperial Federationists’s waffling sentiments towards England, voicing, ‘a curious mixture of affection and anxiety, resentment and solicitude ’ (Berger 1970, 260).38 Like Canuck imperialist George Taylor Denison, then, Nortje goes to England (in 1970) ‘to warn of degeneracy and collapse, not to pay homage ’ (ibid.). Following the classic Anglo-Canadian imperialists, Nortje saw London as ‘the Mecca of the [Anglo-Saxon] race,’ but he was also, like them, ‘repelled by her materialism and parochialism’ (261). Every constitutive part of Nortje ’s putative ‘Anglo-Saxon Union’ proves repulsive.39 In Canada, too, despite ‘lush woods [that] luminesce in green explosions,’ rivers ferry ‘pesticides from upland farms’ and ‘The rain-forest … still breathes though / the chimneys of the pulp mills belch sulphur’ (Nortje 1973a, 97). If British Columbia is a self-polluting ex-paradise, Toronto boasts ‘rotten bonanza’ (100). Visiting London in February 1970, Nortje ’s persona views Canada as ‘abortive America’ and cites the English metropole as the city that ‘suckled my exile ’ (102–340). Canada is the failed dreamland of immigration,41 so London is Nortje ’s new favoured citadel of separation. Nevertheless, in just two spring months in Toronto, April–May 1970, Nortje ’s poetics metamorphose again, becoming looser. The late poems of Nortje ’s career – from his Canadian twilight and his London night – forego the tightly structured, Eliot-Plath stanzas of the previous work, freeing lines to move according to the rhythms of thought. In ‘Poem: South African’ then, where Nortje conjures up the memory of repression – ‘the man with the whip ... beats my / emaciated words back’ – as well as his status as witness of racial union –: ‘take me as evidence ’ (1973a, 114) – his phrases zigzag back and forth and slalom down the page. In ‘A house on Roncesvalles, Toronto 222,’ Nortje’s lines employ shifting margins to relate sociological satire: ‘a secular poem will note / unpalatable truths: / city of judges with Kapuskasing faces’ (1973a, 120). These poems prepare the way for the even freer final poems of London and Oxford.

Repatriating Arthur Nortje

151

Port I V Abroad again, no longer a ‘Canadian,’ Nortje eschews the song of the unsettled and the frontier, and, back in the white citadel of the ex-empire, promulgates a fiercely race-conscious and political verse. Now he sees London as a transmission site of reconstituted African/Asian/Arab voices. Read the extraordinary poem ‘Nasser is dead,’ of September 1970, which attains a potent stridency. His tone recalls the Martiniquan-born decolonization theorist Frantz Fanon; his persona supports the black and brown wretched of the earth;42 his politics is direct and progressive; his language is shorn of ornament: I think of the sons of Africa sometimes and my heart bursts. When I think of Chaka or Christ the rebel My heart bursts. (1973a, 131)43

Like the Chilean Marxist poet Pablo Neruda, Nortje concentrates on the physical image: Rusting tanks are the last monuments. Millions mourn a train longer than the Nile: their flood of tears cannot be beaten back, and the rich silt is the salt on women’s cheeks, sweat on the brows of men. (132)

This vivid taxonomy of crucial things – tears, silt, salt, sweat – may descend from Neruda,44 but it foreshadows the similar poetic of Trinidadian-Canadian poet Dionne Brand. Arguably, Nortje ’s ‘Canadian experience,’ then, served to hone the poet’s sensibilities and to clarify his interests. ‘Nasser is dead’ became possible only after his composition of ‘Poem: South African,’ the lyric inking his ‘blackening’ in Toronto. By passing through the arboreal limbo of the last of his white dominions,45 Nortje was prepared to cast his eyes back, hotly, tearfully, on the whole ‘coloured’ world, so that, now, ‘brown’ accommodated ‘black’ and ‘yellow’ (but no longer ‘white ’). In ‘Natural sinner,’ a London poem of September 1970, Nortje ’s persona foregoes speaking ‘belletristically,’ cancelling wasteful or obscurantist ‘dark romanticism.’ Addressing other blacks, Nortje hopes, For your sake… invisible has become … the stamp of birth, of blackness, criminality. (1973a, 137)

Such an evolution is accomplished liberation: ‘I speak this from experience…’ Then, like Fanon, he commands, ‘speak from me’ 46 (137), a summons to present and future ‘decolonizing’ readers to take up his ‘cross’ of crossed-race and ‘criminality,’ to use his poetry and poetics as their bullhorn. It is perhaps this summons to which contemporary African-Canadian poets react when their first volumes of verse appear. Assuredly, lines from Brand’s early poem ‘Lament’ (1976) – fig-

152 Directions home

uring a homeland that’s dying, children prematurely aged, and skulls that are as empty as hollowed-out calabashes (Head 1976, 20) – recall Nortje’s ‘Nasser is dead’: ‘And all over Africa the gourds are broken, / the calabashes empty at one time or another” (1973a, 132).47 By leaving Canada for London and by abandoning sob-story obscurity for confrontational ‘cool,’ Nortje becomes both ‘blacker’ and a ‘prophet’ of African-Canadian poetry. True, Nortje re-adopts exile in England, but not without having lain the groundwork for his reclamation, long after he would perish and be published – as an African-Canadian poet.

Port V Another South African exile and African-Canadian writer spearheaded Nortje ’s ‘Canadianization.’ A ‘transplanted South African’ (Head 1976, 142) and author of one of the first African African-Canadian poetry collections, Bushman’s Brew (1974), Harold Head edited the pioneering Canada in Us Now: The First Anthology of Black Poetry and Prose in Canada (1976).48 In that volume, Head includes three of Nortje’s poems – ‘Immigrant,’ ‘Hope hotel,’ and ‘A house on Roncesvalles, Toronto 222,’ thus presenting Nortje as a writer invested in a – Black – Canadian discourse.49 Believing that it is his mission to assemble voices to reaffirm ‘the world-wide commitment of the Black artist as liberator,’ and that ‘this poetry is a return, in spirit, to origins, to Africa where the work of the artist is even today at one with his community’ (8), Head expresses a Marxist pan-Africanism. Thus, he ‘disappears’ national boundaries. Decisively and well before others, he acclaims Nortje as a ‘Black’ Canadian poet, and does so explicitly on the basis of only a few of the ‘Canadian’ poems. Thanks to Head’s willy-nilly repatriation of Nortje, Barbadian-Canadian scholar Lorris Elliott, assembling his groundbreaking Bibliography of Literary Writings by Blacks in Canada (1986), includes Nortje in the poetry section, listing both Dead Roots and the three poems published in Canada in Us Now. The inclusion of Nortje in Elliott’s bibliography further incarnates the poet’s once-spectral identity as an African-Canadian author, whether or not he desired (or merited) the designation.50

Exit Although Nortje ’s work has not been included in any national African-Canadian anthology since Head’s appeared,51 its position there – and in Elliott’s checklist of extant ‘Blacks in Canada’ poetry as well as in Afro–British Columbian poet and scholar Wayde Compton’s anthology Bluesprint (2002)52 – means scholars must address Nortje’s position in the ‘African-Canadian’ canon. To begin, his identity as a ‘South African’ poet is unstable: his ‘coloured’ and bastard status, exile experience, immigration to Canada, and the alterations of his poetic there, all set Nortje in a triangular transatlantic orbit, uniting Johannesburg, London, and Toronto. However, his adoption by African-Canadian scholars and poets lodges him within Canadian jurisdiction and oversight. The debate over Nortje’s nationality is political. Admittedly, as Robert Lecker says, ‘the evolution of canonical value projects a displaced expression of nationalist ideology.’ From this perspective, ‘to find the literature [is] to find the country, and to find successive works of literature that embod[y] the nationalist ideal [is], in effect, to discover the nation’s solidity in time ’

Repatriating Arthur Nortje

153

(1991, 9). Since every anthology or bibliographical compilation is an exercise in canon formation, Head and Elliott (and Compton – regarding Afro–British Columbian literature), guided by pan-Africanism in their initial apprehensions of an incipient African-Canadian literature, include Nortje as well as several other only tangential or provisional authors.53 Their selection of Nortje is authoritative, for they read him as an archetypal African-Canadian writer, one whose works replicate the stresses and strains of immigration, racism, exilic angst, nostalgic yearning, and, really, a cold, hard existentialism. Thus, Nortje ’s supposedly ‘un-African’ ‘hyperintrospective ’ style (Dameron 1976, 160) makes him suitable for a canon – that of African Canada – that exhibits a supposedly ‘provincial’ tendency to insularity. According to Leon Surette, canonical Canadian texts ‘internalize … cultural stresses’ between maintaining ‘old-country’ ties and celebrating the liberatory mysticism of the ‘new’ soil (1991, 25). Clearly, Nortje, with his to-and-fro movements between blackness and whiteness, past and present, Canada and England, Eliot/Plath modernist discombobulation and Fanon/Neruda politicized imagism, emerges as a ripe candidate for inclusion in a national canon torn between ‘a strong Tory strain of continuity’ (29) and disruptive, ‘make-it-new’ poetics. Yet, no canon is impervious to change. As Dermot McCarthy claims with respect to the Canadian version, ‘Perhaps there will never be a Canadian canon but only a tradition of canonic anxiety’ (McCarthy 1991, 45).54 More to the point, the English- and French-Canadian canons already enfold texts and writers of questionable ‘fit.’ Louis Hémon, a French writer who immigrated to Canada in 1911 and died there in 1913, was surely more French than he was French-Canadian. Still, his Maria Chapdelaine: récit du Canada français, written in Canada and first published in 1914, achieved canonical status because it was adopted as a celebration of French-Canadian loyalty to the land and to ‘the Faith.’ The example is instructive: Arthur Nortje is the AfricanCanadian Hémon and Dead Roots the Maria Chapdelaine of African-Canadian literature. Finally, if we exclude Nortje from the African-Canadian literary canon on the grounds that his main concern was South Africa and that he wrote the majority of his ‘travelling’ poetry in England, we must, in truth, ban many other African (and Caribbean) authors, especially South African natives, from our assembly. For instance, the now-Canadian Archie Crail and Rozena Maart, once active in native, anti-apartheid struggles, continue to write solely about South Africa. In contrast, African writers such as Paul Tiyambe Zeleza and David Odhiambo, for some years resident in Canada, have moved, at least temporarily, to the United States. Strict citizenship rules for African African-Canadian writers, in particular, would have the effect of erasing their presence. Rather, our inspiration should be a liberal catholicity. By taking Nortje at his word, reading him as a Canada-oriented settler/immigrant, we induct him into the African-Canadian canon. By viewing ‘Canadianité’ as an identity of identities, we are empowered, to paraphrase the conclusion of Paul de Man’s 1969 essay, ‘Lyric and Modernity,’ to make Nortje – and all other fugitive minority and immigrant poets – into clearly Canadian ones.55 Consider Dionne Brand. Her identity, inflected first by African diasporic political debate, is actually simultaneously Canadian, given her conservative distrust of Romanticism (reverie) and her preference for realism (revolt). Or so the next essay maintains…

12 Locating the Early Dionne Brand: Landing a Voice For H. Nigel Thomas (1947–)1

Introduction Indisputably, Dionne Brand’s breakthrough verse collection was her fifth, Chronicles of the Hostile Sun (1984). The text seizes readers, in part, because it is about a verifiable event, a veritable Cold War crisis: the invasion of Grenada by U.S.-led forces after the self-destruction of the Grenadian Revolution and government in 1983 in a spasm of character assassination plus ‘the real thing.’ Importantly too, Brand – present for the domestic coups and the foreign invasion and bombardment – bore witness to these headlines. She is thus one of very few contemporary English-Canadian poets to experience live, wartime ‘fire.’2 Distinctively, Brand was able to chronicle the first major American military intervention since the superpower’s 1975 defeat in Vietnam – and to do so with the specificity of a black woman, Canadian aid worker, Trinidadian immigrant, true-blue ‘Red,’ and doctoral candidate in women’s studies at the University of Toronto – and as a poet. To this date, Chronicles remains the major literary work on the death of the Grenadian Revolution amid the throes of the American-launched paratroop and amphibious incursion. Yet, Chronicles is anticipated by Brand’s early poetry, including that published under the partial pseudonym (semi-anonymity) of ‘Dionne,’ in such Toronto organs as Spear magazine, from the early to mid-1970s, and then in the groundbreaking African-Canadian anthology Canada in Us Now (1976), edited by South African émigré Harold Head, where one espies her revising and trying on public positions. Later, writing directly as Dionne Brand, in her first four books, all poetry – ’Fore Day Morning (1978), Earth Magic (1979, 1983), Primitive Offensive (1982), and Winter Epigrams and Epigrams for Ernesto Cardenal in Defence of Claudia (1983), she prepares the concatenations and detonations of 1983–4. Her debut quartet shares, along with the post-1983 works, politically repercussive interests in dream versus reality, romanticism versus political realism, and wishful thinking versus the real-life contingencies of geography and history.3 To begin to uncover and identify the original inspirations that urge on her, usually superior, later works, scholars need read these earlier poems. Two points surface here: 1) Brand had to pass through the Hell of assassinations and coups, invasion and collapse, in 1983, to find the Dantean Inferno dynamics of her subsequent prose and poetry; 2) her political and poetic interests have been remarkably consistent for two-score years.

locating the early dionne brand

155

Indeed, to savour Brand’s oeuvre, one must consider the ways in which, pace leftist, radical heroes such as Vladimir Lenin, Frantz Fanon, and C.L.R. James, she revises Marx by asserting the primacy of geography – location – over mere history as a means of configuring class and racial consciousness. What Brand thus advances in her work is a romantic anti-romanticism (simultaneous delight in and suspicion of location) and a tragic ‘revolutionary’ ethos (the blinkered and oppressed masses seldom find the guts or the smarts to revolt). As I think one of her later works – A Map to the Door of No Return: Notes to Belonging (2001) – clarifies, Brand has always felt that people are prisoners of geography as much as they are of history, and so, save for the happily enlightened (or unhappily neurotic) few, the masses must suffer a paralysing atrophy of their powers of political analysis and mobilization.4 For her, as I discuss below, the proof is the once socialist, now ‘recapitalized’ Grenada. Here I must outline Brand’s passions and engagements, for they reflect and respond to the interests of her poetry, a point true from the outset of her career. Born in Guayguayare, Trinidad, near the southern city of San Fernando, in 1953, Brand came to Canada after graduating from Naparima Girls’ High School in 1970, at age seventeen. She has lived primarily in Toronto ever since, save for eight months in Grenada, a three-year-stint in Burnt River, Ontario, and teaching posts and writer-in-residencies at other locales. She graduated in 1975 from the University of Toronto with a BA in English and philosophy and commenced an abortive PhD in women’s studies, but did obtain an MA in the philosophy of education from the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education in 1989. More important than her educational résumé is the fact that Brand plunged directly into community organizing, immigrant counselling, black empowerment causes, and women’s equality struggle from the instant of her arrival in Ontario. She seems to have missed the Black Power revolt in Trinidad in 1970, that agitation for greater social-economic power of Black Trinidadians versus, not whites, but Indo-Trinidadians (the two communities are roughly equivalent in population and political strength, but not economic power). However, she was inspired by the revolutionary black cultural and Black Power movements in the United States to enter into similar, but necessarily smaller, mobilizations in Toronto. In line with her progressive analyses, she joined the Communist Party of Canada (CPC), which was backed by the Soviet Union, but also the ‘establishment’ Marxist-Leninist organization in Canada. (I speculate that the CPC was attractive to Brand, in part, because it was connected, if tangentially, to revolutionary Cuba, a Soviet ally and the only Caribbean state to see, prior to Grenada in 1979, a successful, popular revolution.) In addition, especially in the 1970s and 1980s, Brand wrote for and helped to edit various black, women’s, and literary magazines. Of course, she published in these venues, notably Spear and the Harriet Tubman Review, but also, critically, in anthologies.

Enter the Anthologies In his study of the canonization of postmodernist Euro-American novelist Thomas Pynchon and the excommunication, seemingly, of modernist African-American poet Melvin B. Tolson, Michael Bérubé renders the astute observation that the chief genre of African-American literature during the Black arts and Black Power era was not poetry, per se, but, rather, the anthology (1992, 178). This assertion, I hold, applies to African-Canadian literature of the overlapping period, although, as usual, with caveats. First, fewer such anthologies were published in Canada. I have identified five (discussed below), issued, in English, between 1973 and 1985, while, in the

156 Directions home

United States, dozens appeared between 1965 and 1985. Secondly, the market for those anthologies was very different: both large and small, black-owned, and white mainstream U.S. publishers could peddle their books successfully to educational institutions as well as to mass readers. In Canada, no African-Canadian anthology appeared from a major publisher until 1992.5 The first five anthologies to appear were limited in distribution and produced by small presses, only one of which was white-owned (NC Press). Their publishers produced these books, deliberately, for local markets, basically Toronto. While the African-American audience was national, and was, among youth, interested in radical and alternative black writing and prideful about a Negro or Black identity, all of these points could not (and cannot) be stated with certainty regarding African Canadians. In the 1960s and 1970s, this audience was – as it still is – defined regionally, with urban populations being largely immigrant and rural populations being of a century or two’s provenance. Furthermore, those from the West Indies felt closer identifications with the Caribbean or even distinctive home nations, as opposed to an abstract – and Americanized – blackness, while ‘indigenous’ Black Canadians, save for some youths, identified with either an American notion of Negro or a British notion of Coloured. Given their variegated constituency, the pioneer editors and publishers of African-Canadian anthologies could not assume they would experience the same degree of support, acceptance, and popularity as their American counterparts could. Thirdly, the very idea of a Black arts movement in Canada and its periodization is fraught with indefinition. Again, in the United States, one may speak of the period from the beginning of the civil rights movement in 1955 to the end of the Vietnam War in 1975 as one of sustained struggle, intellectual debate, mass mobilizations, and cultural discussion and art making, by whites and blacks, and as a time of black cultural and political efflorescence. It is harder to make such a case in Canada. Here, the markers of black struggle during the equivalent period are all regional, provincial, isolated, and sporadic. Though we may yearn to do so, we cannot speak justifiably about any mass mobilization, nationally: segregation ended in spasms of protest in Ontario and Nova Scotia in the mid- to late 1950s, Africville was bulldozed in Halifax between 1964 and 1970, 1968 saw a Black Writers conference in Montreal, and 1969 saw the burning of the computer centre at Sir George Williams College in that same city. Frankly, the Black advancement movements in Canada were more scattered, smaller, subtler, and piecemeal than they were in the United States, so periodization remains speculative. However, we can mark 1955, the beginning of increased immigration from the Caribbean, as a signal date for the emergence of new race relations in major Canadian cities, including Toronto, and the later 1960s and early 1970s, say 1968–75, as a time of organization, consciousness raising, and artistic experimentation – partly as a result of the founding of the Montreal-based National Black Coalition of Canada in 1969, the Black United Front of Nova Scotia, also in 1969, and the stimulus offered by the launching of official multiculturalism in 1971, in cities like Toronto, Montreal, and Halifax – but involving markedly different populations. Then, in the early 1980s, one sees the developments, in Toronto, Montreal, and Halifax, and then gradually in other urban centres (such as Winnipeg, where the black literary magazine Caribe began to be published in 1978, and lasted until 1992) – the first sustained developments of black arts groups, projects, and publishers, as indicated by the first national Black Canadian Artists conference, attended by Brand, Austin Clarke, David Woods, and others, held at McGill University, in 1980.6 Thus, I will propose the working dates of 1969–85 as the primary Black arts period in Canada, while conceding that it was never as pervasive, influential, and sustained an endeavour as was its counterpart in the United States. No, it was a project of pockets of black intellectu-

locating the early dionne brand

157

als, responding, first, to local needs: immigration issues and community settlement problems in Toronto and urban Ontario; these concerns, plus language, in Montreal; and unemployment and justice issues in Halifax and throughout Nova Scotia. This milieu, then, of scattered agitation and local initiative, is the one in which students of colour at Dawson College in Montreal published, in 1973, the first African-Canadian anthology (though only of local import), Black Chat: An Anthology of Black Poets, edited by Camille Haynes, followed in 1975 by One Out of Many: A Collection of Writings by 21 Black Women in Ontario, edited by Liz Cromwell (a project supported by International Women’s Year). The third anthology appeared in 1976, namely Harold Head’s Canada in Us Now: The First Anthology of Black Poetry and Prose in Canada. (The subtitle is true only if you allow for Head’s attempted national focus.) Almost a decade elapsed before the next anthologies appeared: Charles C. Smith’s Toronto-centred sad dances in a field of white, and the much larger and ‘national’ offering from McGill University professor Lorris Elliott, Other Voices: Writings by Blacks in Canada, which was, really, a revisiting and revising of Head’s 1976 effort. Out of the first five anthologies, Brand has work in the last four, and two of these – One Out of Many and Canada in Us Now – appeared before her first book, ’Fore Day Morning (1978). These titles appeared when the Black arts and Black Power movements in the United States had ended, but they participate in the just unfolding Canadian echo. Strikingly, two of the first three anthologists of the literature had similar aims. Their respective titles, One Out of Many and Canada in Us Now, possess the same intent: to unify the African Canadian peoples. Introducing her collection, which was typeset at Spear magazine and whose title repeats the national motto of Jamaica, Cromwell registers the multicultural catholicity of her black women contributors. She confesses that she wishes ‘to show Canada today through the eyes of Black women whose backgrounds are as diverse as the places from which they have come.’ Cromwell comments, too, ‘From the very beginning I believed that Black women living in Ontario had many important things to say,’ and that these women, however diverse, had ‘in common a bond of Blackness, a common history, a desire to communicate, and a Black tradition of sharing’ (1975, 5). Also, she values ‘communication’ and ‘simplicity’ as the principal poetics for the black (woman) writer. Cromwell’s concerns are iterated in Head’s year-later anthology (to which Cromwell contributed). In his introduction, titled “We Have Come,” Head urges that ‘the voices in this anthology reaffirm the world-wide commitment of the Black artist as liberator.’ Moreover, they ‘arise from diverse national backgrounds,’ but, yet, ‘return, in spirit, to origins, to Africa…’ (Head 1976, 8). Finally, and insistently, ‘Black creative expression is designed to serve and inspire the people,’ thus resisting ‘the “empty patterns of intellectual gentility and individualism”’ (9). The world in which Brand’s poems first see light in Toronto is one in which the rhetoric of black solidarity and revolution is already passé in the United States.7 Yet this political vernacular was both au courant and de rigueur for a multicultural ‘African’ community where no one black ‘nationality’ (not even Jamaican) was able to define all the others. Moreover, in a nation where the very concept of black studies seemed opaque, the poetics of ‘simplicity’ was vital for African Canadians during the 1970s. Too, it was a response to the influence of reggae, by then appropriated for political use by the dub poets – mainly Clifton Joseph and Lillian Allen – and, tangentially, Brand, whose own experiments with the Gayap drummers replicated the AfricanAmerican Last Poets group (but some six to ten years after their early 1970s immediate vogue had passed). To ‘rap’ or speak political truths over a reggae beat, one ’s work had to be able to cut to

158 Directions home

immediacies, without any distracting erudition or any confusing verbiage. To sum up, Brand’s early poetry was issued to an audience that demanded direct address, the heightening of ‘black’ consciousness, and broad, communal appeal.

Awake ! 8 Among the six Brand poems in Cromwell’s 1975 anthology, three reappear, revised, in Head’s 1976 florilegium. The first of these, ‘Poem of a Place Once,’ is fascinatingly prescient in regard to Brand’s later career and sensibility. Here we see, in vitro so to speak, one of her youthful, sustained efforts, at age twenty-two, to separate obscurantist romanticism from painful but necessary – because clarifying – realism. As it appears in Cromwell’s poorly proofread, wonkily typeset anthology, the poem is a rigid, left-margin-controlled column of forty-six lines, followed by an indented stanza of six lines. As suggested by the poem’s revised structure in Head’s book, this placement may have been more a concession to cramming the poem into Cromwell’s cranky page allotment than it was an effort to give this stanza any particular weight. No matter, the poem is both a long, cinematic description – and yet a refusal to accept this aesthetic – of a place that looks a memory of Brand’s childhood home. The poem (Brand 1975b) opens with tensions between tourism-style pastorale and the fact of ready violence. The night, placid and tropical, is disturbed by the inarticulate utterances of the local nocturnal zoology, including those of bipeds. These bestial beings – both human and animal – have eyes brighter than moonlight and emit cries that drown out the sound of the sea: they could be extras from one of George Romero’s ‘living dead’ zombie film franchises. Despite the best efforts of inanimate nature, which, to the speaker, seems peaceful, lulling – just sand, light, and surf – human and animal nature is ill at ease. The speaker herself demarcates this disjuncture from her vantage point of a consciousness more mature than when her toes, as a child, imprinted the sand. Remembering the scent of seashells, she stirs from a lulling slumber to find animals, the sea, and people suffering both a paralysing nostalgia and acceptance of dreams deferred, a point that is made in alliterative abstractions suggestive of romantic reverie. Pacified by their sultry environment, the objectified fauna in the poem cannot take up the escape the speaker, selfconsciously and guiltily, has already effected. From her freer vantage point, the speaker, now masked as either a fish-spy or a fisher-fugitive, is mystified by the failure of her escape plan. She has – or you have – hidden in crevices, meaning to dart away, but instead finds the water withdrawn, and is left to flounder, parch, die, under a fatally dazzling sun. A complex, if awkward, allegory is landed here.9 The speaker imagines herself as escaping the trapped condition of others (who have departed for other activities in the night). However, her romanticism is thwarted when her means of escape dries up under a sun now actively hostile. This moment is followed by an image-proverb suggesting that all trapped creatures and things will be discarded by their oblivious, uncaring successors: Indeed, a well-used calabash that has been useful for baths, and whose utility is also aesthetic, is discarded by ignorant, innocent, uncaring kids. ‘Poem of a Place Once ’ evokes the speaker’s own memory of her temporary escape – placed now as the night before – from this beautiful but also malevolent place, where routine destruction is visited upon rudimentary inventions and home-made toys. Having slipped – for awhile – the nights of disturbance, intrusion, danger, and death, the speaker can only pray for an absolutely pacific night and the sapphire water of sun-bright day:

locating the early dionne brand

159

so, she resuscitates romanticism. But it is soon undercut. For, following a description of a girl – a version of the speaker herself – licking up mango juice that’s run down her arm – and descriptions, childlike, of sea-tossed coconut husks that ‘talk’ to jelly fish and of drifting almond leaves and donkeys’ eyes, the speaker wonders, again, if this subject – the girl – realizes that her very dress (yellow) signals the end of things (perhaps childhood consciousness), a conclusion marked also by a river that catches fire and the perishing of an alligator and orange flowers. Clearly, this is not a ‘country for old men’ (Yeats) or women or children or anyone: it is a vista of the Apocalypse, but only for those gifted with revelation, scrutiny, insight, consciousness, to see and understand and act. At a time when Jamaican reggae star Johnny Nash was singing, romantically, about having post-rain, clear vision, Brand’s persona has a different song and a different sight. First, her persona conjures horrors – a rolling head with still-open eyes, a man who has leapt from a height – but then indicates that she misses these people and events. In other words, there is regret for leaving, for escaping. Yet, the next line underscores a leitmotif in Brand’s politics and poetics: to stay, to not go, is to suffer; to endure any context of oppression is to know pain. Thus, one must ‘leap’ – escape – if one can, or die trying.10 But the poem doubles back to another position – nostalgia: for every day that the speaker does not return ‘home’ but remains in safe exile, she must also tolerate this new location’s isolating and deracinating effects. The poem closes by restating the seemingly romantic wish for a black and lulling night and a sea-blue day. However, as this ideationally sinuous poem attests, Paradise may just be a misprision of paradox. The ‘Eden’ we see here is more a fatal prison, of piss and poverty, than it is an oasis of happy-go-lucky folk and cuddly critters. And yet, escape and exile introduce the evils of nostalgia, regret, and second guessing – and a temptation to return to pitiless dangers. I have spent some time on this poem, but I am not finished with it yet. Indeed, Brand’s stance here and her terminology merit patient consideration. First, her voice occupies a position of superior knowledge to that of other creatures, who, lacking a developed – critical – consciousness, find themselves caught in at-first pleasant, later perilous, and finally lethal positions. Deceived by romanticism, these others lack the intellectual powers of discrimination that will allow them to evade its hazards. This position, this analysis – and the very insistence on analysis itself – runs throughout Brand’s oeuvre, but attains, I feel, a distinctive crescendo in the aptly titled essay-memoir, A Map to the Door of No Return (2001). Here, for instance, Brand, not distanced by a persona, critiques ‘romances’ of nation that, supposedly, animate such constituencies as the blacks of Nova Scotia. Yet such a bird’s-eye view denies the possibility that these people, resident in places she describes as ‘barren and desolate reaches’ (68), maintained a culture, contributed – despite racism – to the construction of this nation, and, most vitally, came to love their churches and their community. However, such deeper truths are repressed by a too pat Marxian ascription of an underdeveloped consciousness to these sufferers of ‘romance’ (67). Too, one may ask, if all longing for belonging is just a manic obsession, then of what utility is pan-Africanism? This division in Brand, a wish to discard ‘nationalism’ as romantic, while simultaneously articulating a romantic pan-Africanism, is irresolute in her work, and it comes down, finally, to her perception that some landscapes or political entities – the Caribbean, Trinidad, Cuba, revolutionary Grenada – are simply better than others: Nova Scotia, Canada, Black America, et cetera. This stance is itself romantic – even nigh fantasy. Observe also Brand’s use of the term still, which seems harmless enough, save that, in its later

160 Directions home

manifestations, in No Language Is Neutral (1990), it points to arrested development, or lurking disaster, or the ‘calm before the storm.’ In the poem ‘return,’ then, the repetition of still in a catalogue of scenic descriptions of a Caribbean space emphasizes that such superficial beauties veil a reality of violence and oppression, and thus seduce people into a false consciousness: The at-high-noon, heat-molten streets, the burnt grass, and even citizens are not only still, but stilled (Brand [1990] 1998, 7). The ellipsis that follows ‘people’ invites one to add the words ‘still suffering.’ The poem lays bare, beneath the pretty, untroubled stillness, the persistence of an ugly, troubling history: indeed, what still lingers most – and sours all – is the odor of slavery. To be still, in Brand, is to be unaware, unconscious, and unenlightened, and to invite, thus, violent oppression. Recognize that Brand’s application of still to the landscape of semi-northern Ontario, in A Map to the Door of No Return, replicates the same psychology of danger and despair that appear in the Caribbean spaces ‘mapped’ in her 1975 (‘Poem of a Place Once ’) and 1990 (‘return’) poems: ‘It is a still place… If there is desperation here it is the kind that is slow burning, the kind that drinks beer and smokes cigarettes and is overwhelmed by the bush or the river, the kind that makes the body grow large and lumbering and listless’(Brand 2001, 149). This suspicion that the denizens of northern Ontario possess limited intelligence (and thus few options to ‘escape ’), which is related to an unchanging and fossilizing geography, echoes the critique inspired by the landscape (and attendant social reality) encountered in ‘Poem of a Place Once ’ and later sung, more effectively, in ‘return.’ Here, once again, the speaker occupies a privileged and superior vantage point from which she can correct – analyse – those rural white or rural black folks of undeveloped (or underdeveloped) consciousness. Yet, the passage also reminds one of ‘Dialectics – X,’ where Brand’s persona feels the sluggish heaviness of the Caribbean Sunday, its lassitude and dangerous, sultry indolence (Brand 1997, 66). For one bereft of knowledge and know-how, of a means to escape, all she (and others like her in the Caribbean) can do – like the dullards and sluggards of Ontario – is ‘slow burn’ in frustration and desperation. Interestingly, the yellow dress featured in ‘Poem of a Place Once ’ recurs in Brand’s later work – perhaps because of its gendering implications as well as its marking of a British AfroCaribbean upbringing and poverty.11 But that yellow dress also shows up in another Brand poem anthologized by Cromwell and Head. In ‘Day Doyze’ (Brand 1975a), included, with a typo in the title,12 in Cromwell, the dress seems to represent a positive girlhood. One may speculate that its early appearances reflect a still willed heterosexuality that has repressed lesbian yearnings (themselves stifled by that dress). Once she accepts her lesbianism, however, the dress becomes, for Brand, a negative signifier of a socially imposed gender and sexual orientation. From the beginning of her career, the verb pay assumes powerful significance for Brand; in short, it signals the economic and allegorical aspect of suffering. One pays for one ’s refusal of analysis, refusal of escape, and one may pay with one’s life – the fate of some Grenadian revolutionaries. In ‘Day Doyze,’ the meaning is more positive: the nostalgic speaker sums up an element of childhood experience in a proverb indicating that a wanderer does not have to pay for things, suggesting the freedom implicit in rambles. But in ‘Poem of a Place Once,’ the sense is entirely oppressive: If you stay where you are, you pay the tribute of pain (1975b, 17). The focus of ‘Poem of a Place Once’ on tropes of ‘days,’ ‘nights,’ and ‘journeys’ is replicated in much of Brand’s later work, both poetry and fiction. Thus, the title of Brand’s first book of poetry, a Trinidadian saying, ’Fore Day Morning (1978), combines all of these elements: the expression refers to a pre-dawn departure, so that ‘night,’ ‘day,’ and travel are all implicated. This image cluster is related to notions of ‘quiet’ and ‘stillness’ and their sudden rending. Thus,

locating the early dionne brand

161

in her 1979 children’s book, Earth Magic, in the poem ‘Market Day,’ Brand recalls just such a pre-dawn Sunday departure and the breaking of stillness into activity and change ([1979] 1993, 8). The stillness and fixity of night – the time of riskily lulling romantic dreaming – can give way, deliciously, to a day of articulate bustle, life-energizing action. The opening poem in Earth Magic, aptly titled ‘Morning,’ allegorizes (I use this verb deliberately and provocatively) morning, this time passage, as an instance of incandescent instigation: Even if night would like to linger and the rooster not to sing, the arrival of the new light, the new day, forces the sky to brighten and the rooster to bray (7). ‘Day’ signifies here a change in consciousness, one that even an element like the sky cannot countermand. Like the Revolution itself, ‘day’ arrives like a thief in the night. The transition from one time to the other is inevitable and immutable, but also suspenseful. This attitude of ‘suspense’ is reiterated in Brand’s later works through her use of terms like ‘surprise ’ and ‘sudden,’ which are often set against ‘still’ and ‘quiet’ and ‘empty.’ In A Map to the Door of No Return, there is the ‘surprise. A quiet peaceful surprise ’ of a seaside childhood home where sea and air seemed somehow one (2001, 8), but also the unpleasant shock – ‘everything, every minute, was a surprise’ – of the day the Grenadian Revolution fell apart (161). Thus, the speaker in ‘Poem for a Place Once’ describes, for much of the poem, the good-and-bad conditions of life before – even the night just before – she left. Too, the lyrical conclusion of the debut poem in No Language Is Neutral fifteen years later, ‘Hard Against the Soul – I,’ affirms this sense: that wakefulness, being conscious and alert, is superior to the inactive, entranced state that is dreaming (1998, 4). Just as the speaker in ‘Poem for a Place Once ’ must celebrate her alertness – consciousness – in the still, perilous night of her ex-location, so does this 1990s speaker espouse an equally necessary eyes-wise-open sensibility. Later on in No Language Is Neutral, the speaker, discovering her opening to woman-woman love, recalls, in ‘Hard Against the Soul – X,’ seeing her desired lover in bed and knowing that desire as a consequence of awakening to this sight. It is no accident, the intra-line coincidence in the poem of the terms conscious and waking up. After two years of no sleep and, therefore, no dreams, just a sensory nightmare, post-Grenada, the poet’s persona is finally able to wake to an extraordinary love (1998, 45), which, because it is unusual, unorthodox, enacts a valid, endorsed romanticism – one that issues from an ‘avantgarde ’ consciousness. Later, in A Map to the Door of No Return, Brand recalls that, in Grenada, ‘I lived like a poet lives, in a dream, in a wonderful dream which is always awakening to the hard things about life and then diving into the dream again for rescue ’ (2001, 164). Importantly though, this revealing passage occurs after the poet confesses her ideological complicity with a fiat of the ruling Grenadian political party to imprison its prime minister (158), a decision with horrific, dream-ending consequences: assassinations dressed up as executions, perils to the lives of thousands of people, the conduct of a long-threatened invasion by the United States and its Caribbean client states, and the snuffing out of the only socialist republic in the anglophone Caribbean, in a nation next door to Brand’s homeland of Trinidad.13 Brand’s admission of her temporary failure to analyse right – that is to say, of her submission to a dream of power but not to the actualities of its real, frighteningly mortal consequences – has haunted her and her work ever since. In A Map to the Door of No Return, she recalls experiencing years of nightmares in which her body lay among the dead of those killed by their own revolutionary cadres, their own militia: ‘When I awoke from those dreams, I was not certain which was the dream and which was the real day’ (2001, 167). I think this dialectic of romanticism dreaming and political-consciousness awakening, plus the idea of journeying (especially in the passage from night to morning), to such

162 Directions home

awakening, this dynamic that drives all of her work, is first evinced in the amateurish, raw ‘Poem of a Place Once.’14 In Head’s anthology, the poem (Brand 1976c) is better printed, bears a new and syntactically direct title, ‘Once a peaceful place,’ and is divided into four stanzas, thus making Brand’s apparent intentions seem clearer. Appearing only one year after its debut in Cromwell’s anthology, the poem boasts a direct line of thought and less convoluted syntax. The creatures that break the night stillness no longer quiet the sea’s sound; they ‘alter’ it (a less vivid idea really). Here, too, the speaker clearly watches one fish die once it is exposed to air and sun. In revising the poem as she has (or by reprinting it with a more careful press), Brand fulfills, more acutely, her editor’s objectives of a spare, rigorous, and engagé ‘political’ poetry. Two other early poems indicate an immediate bifurcation and eventual fusion of Brand’s poetic style. The lyric ‘Sleep’ (Brand 1975c), included in Cromwell’s anthology, is Victorian neoromanticism personified and should be consulted because it is so unlike almost everything Brand writes later. The High Romantic diction and imagery seems composed by some other poet, not the Brand so articulately semi-anti-romantic today. Yet, even within the poem’s cosmos of conventional love/death imagery, the diction of Romeo and Juliet, there are touches of the tougher poet who will later emerge. For example, the practically allegorical tropes of sleep and wakefulness, action and stillness, night and day, life and death, leaving and staying, are all present here. Though the poem is difficult to decipher – due, perhaps, to omitted punctuation and misprints – it seems to articulate, via romantic dreaminess, the same idea that appears in the conclusion of Brand’s novel In Another Place, Not Here (1996) – namely, that suicide, revolutionary suicide, may be an escape from the eternal round of sleeping/waking, action/stillness, abandonment/ remaining.15 Nevertheless, ‘Sleep,’ for Brand, unfurls a dead-end aesthetic. In contrast, the stark, stripped-down lyric ‘This poem needs a name ’ (Brand 1976d), enlisted in Head’s anthology, anticipates Brand’s later clipped epigrams and pungent, piercing, political cries. This lyric, so prescient of Brand’s later rhetorical strengths, also merits consultation. ‘This poem needs a name ’ is more direct than either ‘Poem of a Place Once ’ or ‘Sleep.’ It is also an effective racial/political allegory, one again playing on imagery of time transitions, and claiming the night as a time to prepare black revolutionary action (with echoes of Marxist AfricanAmerican poet Langston Hughes) that will claim, reclaim, proclaim, realized freedom in the morning and every morning after. Its connection to the themes of ’Fore Day Morning requires no explanation here, and so the poem is prefatory to that first book and Brand’s later work. It is also an improvement upon the early, Spear-published poem, ‘Behold! The Revolutionary Dreamer!’ (a title pregnant with the ur-conflict in Brand’s work). The poet – signing herself as ‘Sister Dionne ’ – attacks the ‘hip’ radical whose anti-establishment protests are no more than visions that are themselves highly questionable (Brand 1972, 46). Yet, the poem reads most potently as a selfcritique, one that returns in ‘Poem of a Place Once’ and in later and greater works. Not only is the pronoun ‘you’ better read here as ‘I,’16 it is not masculine, but feminine: It is ‘Sister Dionne,’ who can see, behind her black-power mask, dreams that are fragile constructions. This tyro lyric is, like ‘This poem has no name,’ an epigram, but one not yet clear of obscurantist slang and abstract terms. (One must look it up to verify my claims for oneself.) Brand’s epigrams – such as those in Winter Epigrams and Epigrams to Ernesto Cardenal in Defence of Claudia (1983) – do not (and need not) advance much beyond the style of ‘This poem needs no name,’ save to become more precise, more journalistic. See, for instance, the opening of ‘Canto IX’ from Primitive Offensive (1982), wherein the speaker imagines herself as being as

locating the early dionne brand

163

dead as former U.S. vice-president Nelson Rockefeller, he with caviar in his belly while hers is laced with barbed-wire. Brand’s use of ‘Canto’ as a title suggests an affiliation with The Cantos of U.S. poet Ezra Pound, a champion of imagism and unornamented poetry. However, the canon of Chilean poet Pablo Neruda also yields ‘cantos’; moreover, his Marxist politics (and catalogues of material reality) are agreeable to Brand – as are the politics and aesthetic (cantos and elegies) of Cuba’s Nicolás Guillén.17 Too, the plain-song ‘canonicity’ of ‘Canto IX’ is foreshadowed by the repetitious simplicity of one of the first poems Brand published in Canada – ‘Black Woman’ (Brand 1971a), which appeared in Spear in November 1971, just over a year after Brand’s landing in Canada. In this poem, ‘black’ and ‘woman’ are repeated to help define the phrase ‘Black Woman’. The words are made to mirror the existential experience. A stronger epigram from the eighteen-year-old Brand – now signing herself as ‘Dionne’ – is the conclusion of the adjacent poem, ‘Miss Anne Slave Boy’ (Brand 1971b): It questions the revolutionary credentials of a black man whose lover is a white woman. From the outset, then, Brand conducts a ferocious and passionate interrogation of revolutionaries’ dreams, shows up their failures, and castigates herself for not achieving fundamental social change – despite her well-developed political consciousness. But there are always two hindrances: the ‘beauty’ or ‘harshness’ of place that distracts dreamers and dullards from undertaking rebellious action, and the failure to act when the time is ripe – when night is about to be overthrown by day (or vice versa).

Fusion I will conclude by suggesting that Brand’s best poetry, beginning with Chronicles of the Hostile Sun (1984), combines the spare allegorical didacticism of ‘This poem needs no name ’ and the lush, repetitious, and conventional romanticism of ‘Sleep.’18 It is the fusion of these styles, these approaches, that produces her most enlightening and illuminating work. In other words, her pronounced ‘anti-romanticism’ is rhetorical camouflage for a dialectically imperishable consciousness of the appeal of dreams. Where Brand’s fealty to a brand of Marxism underwrites her subscription to ‘anti-romanticism,’ another African-Canadian woman poet, Maxine Tynes, echoes the neo-romanticism articulated in the Beat movement of the 1950s and early 1960s. Yet, nature is less important to her than her body; indeed, it is the physical transportation of her body through space – and her intellectual reception of mass media, pop culture, and scenery viewed from the automobile – that interests and entrances Tynes’s persona. Her romanticism is, then, more ‘Eastern’ than it is East Coast Canada… See the chasing essay.

13 Maxine Tynes: A Sounding and a Hearing For Dr. Howard D. McCurdy, Ph.D. (1932–)1

Introduction Born in downtown Dartmouth, Nova Scotia, in 1949, Maxine Tynes was a lifelong resident – citizen – of her native city until her premature death in 2011. Author of four books of poetry, each of which includes short stories, Tynes won a regional, national, and international audience thanks to her first two titles alone: Borrowed Beauty (1987), which received the 1988 Milton Acorn People ’s Poet Award (thus making Tynes the first African-Canadian poet to win a national award), and Woman Talking Woman (1990), which confirms and extends the gifts evident in the debut. Tynes’s follow-up collections, Save the World for Me (1991), a work for young readers, and The Door of My Heart (1993), showcase her antipathy for social injustice. Through her literary quartet, she exhorts herself – and her readers – to expunge the negative ‘isms’: sexism, racism, classism, imperialism, and able-ism, as well as ecocide. Her politics motivate Tynes to utilize three modes of discourse: the personal lyric, the social anthem, and the short story. Her overarching style is romantic, but transmuted through the ‘everything-is-holy’ mysticism of the American poets Walt Whitman and Allen Ginsberg: Tynes celebrates nature, music, art, the self, and love (and lovers), but, like Whitman, Ginsberg, and their British High Romantic forebears (Byron, Blake, and Shelley), she also denounces everything impolitic. Thus, apart from her unique cast as an African–Nova Scotian2 woman, Tynes is one more Late Romantic, ‘baby boomer’ Beat. Too, she is part and parcel of the canon of East Coast poets (whether they like it or not). Yet, radically, Tynes also departs from the agrarian sensibility and seaside pictorials in which so many of her contemporaries indulge. Instead, she scrutinizes city streets and (mass) audio-visual media: paintings, television, radio, music, newspapers, magazines, photographs, and posters. Her rhetorical location outside conventional Atlantic Canadian literary motifs demands her readers envision an urban Maritimes and a spectacular show of race, gender, and body type. Additionally, her protean identities and segmented constituencies of reception render her a multimedia poet-observer. This essay seeks to consider, then, the multiple perspectives and projections of Tynes vis-à-vis her audiences.

Scape versus Scope In her essay ‘The Poet as Whole-Body Camera: Maxine Tynes and the Pluralities of Otherness,’

maxine tynes

165

critic Marjorie Stone notes, ‘As a woman and a writer who is black, female, “feminist, womanist,” “able/dis/abled” …, popularly successful, and working-class in origin,’ Tynes embodies multiple alterities (1997, 230). Tynes’s appeal to multiple marginalized constituencies opens her work to divided and divisive readings:3 ‘White female academics’ either ‘focus on Tynes’ gender to the exclusion of race, or they convert her into a spokeswoman for all “victimized” black women or women of colour, overlooking her strong concern with issues such as class. In short, they tend to approach Tynes either as a black WOMAN writ large, or as a woman of COLOUR writ large ’ (ibid., 240). But white women academics are not alone in reading Tynes according to a partisan predilection. Stone charges, rightly, that, in my 1991 review of Tynes’s work (along with that of brother Africadian David Woods), by stressing her status as a black writer, I elide her ‘polemical feminism’ (245).4 Even so, Stone ’s critique of my position reinforces my thesis that Tynes’s work ‘splinters’ like cable TV offerings: subjective and ‘aesthetic’ lyrics for some; ‘polemical’ and rhetorical ‘anthems’ for others.5 Each of her four books repeats this ‘splintering’: Stone recognizes that Borrowed Beauty tends to ‘focus on black identity,’ while Woman Talking Woman emphasizes ‘deconstructing and reconstructing female identity.’ In The Door of My Heart, Tynes studies ‘the ways in which the bodies of the “able/dis/abled” are written and read by those who are “Looking, Always Looking”’ (234). Save the World for Me features whimsical drawings and nurseryrhyme poems, intended for children, but voicing a pacifist and environmentalist agenda. Even Tynes’s book covers stage her contrasting interests. Using a stark black-and-white photograph, Borrowed Beauty presents us with the poet’s profiled face, inspecting a mask whose features resemble those of Tynes herself. The image stresses blackness as subject matter. The cover of Woman Talking Woman is a painted colour portrait of the poet, from bust upwards, with her head flanked by the unfinished drawings of other black women. It proclaims a feminist positioning. The Door of My Heart is announced by a colour full-length photograph of Tynes, standing proudly, her right hand gripping a cane. This cover accents (dis)ability. Save the World for Me is the only book by Tynes where nature – likely a photo of a Nova Scotian seascape – dominates the cover, thus picturing the book’s conservationist and anti-militarist concerns. As this canvas establishes, Tynes’s book covers support Stone’s claim that the poet represents ‘the poetics of inclusion embodied in the plurality of perspectives she writes from and for’ (231). Yet, Tynes’s commitment to hoi polloi pluralism enables another consequence: the disappearance of any precise – realistic or idealistic – landscape or seascape from her poetic. Atlantic Canada is void in her poems, just as she, as a black woman, is largely absent from current academic criticism of Atlantic Canadian literature. African-American cultural critic Michele Wallace states, ‘If you happen to have more than one feature disqualifying you from participation in the dominant discourse – if you are black and a woman, and perhaps lesbian and poor, as well – and you insist on writing about it, you’re in danger of not making any sense because you are attempting speech from the dangerously unstable posture of the “other” of the “other”’ (quoted in Stone 1997, 230). As true as Wallace ’s insight is, Tynes’s omission from such East Coast Canadian canonizing vehicles as the anthology Landmarks: An Anthology of New Atlantic Canadian Poetry of the Land, edited by Hugh MacDonald and Brent MacLaine, likely has nothing to do with her gender, ‘race,’ ‘infirmity,’ or even class. Rather, Tynes may be missing from this anthology because her work flouts the clichés that the region consists only of land and sea; farm, mine, woodlot, and fishery; lumberjacks, miners, steelworkers, and lobster trappers; and a hardy lot of transplanted Europeans. Introducing the anthology, MacLaine claims that ‘landmarks – real ones and poetic ones – provide signals and

166 Directions home

reference points as we move between the constructed world and the natural one ’ (MacDonald and MacLaine 2001, 12). His imagination of the grounded, ‘Atlantic’ ars poetica allows for voices ‘political in the sense that they speak forcefully for a meaningful, principled, and responsible interaction with the natural world’ (13).6 Human relations run second to environmentalism. Thus, MacLaine relates the ‘hinterland’ to ‘time, particularly as it makes itself apparent through the ecological cycles of growth and decay and the changes observable over generations of farming’ (14). He cites, agreeably, Peter Marinelli’s perception that the pastoral itself is ‘the art of the backward glance ’ (13). Four problems arise from this limited situation of Atlantic Canadian poetry: 1) the suppression of urban settings as sites for psycho-social exploration; 2) the avoidance of ‘social protest’; 3) the enactment of an agrarian stereotype; and 4) the foregrounding of nostalgia. For instance, MacLaine references Simon Schama’s notion that ‘all our landscapes … are imprinted with our tenacious, inescapable obsessions’ (MacDonald and MacLaine 2001, 15). He disregards, however, the city as constituting another vista of fantasies, dreams, and fulfilments. MacLaine also quotes Schama to the effect that ‘landscape is the work of the mind. Its scenery is built up as much from strata of memory as from layers of rock’ (17). Yes, but what if – as is the case, I think, for Tynes – one ’s ‘landscape’ is, in fact, a city window or a TV screen? There is a stark divide ’twixt the romanticism of MacLaine and MacDonald and the postmodern, glass-and-concrete, electronic universe that Tynes navigates. Her oeuvre confronts, then, an East Coast cultural nationalism that, in Benedict Anderson’s terms, is read ‘genealogically – as the expression of an historical tradition of serial continuity’ (1991, 195). Such a genealogical reading marginalizes cities, for their populations are too fluid to uphold the rooted practices of the countryside. The rural becomes the site of homogeneity and ‘purity,’ and, thus, Atlantic Canada is read as a British enclave of fiddling, yodelling, highland dance, and bagpipe performance, with a bit of Acadian fiddling, step dancing, and harmonica playing providing the requisite ‘local colour.’ Absent from this conservative nostalgia are black and other minorities who do not satisfy the static image of the ‘authentic.’ Nor can they do so, for they do not belong to the primary producer economy, but rather to the secondary labour pools of the cities and the towns – and to the consumption of ‘pop’ culture – an urban creation.7 (On one side, there is celtic roots plus country ‘n’ western tunes to represent an ‘authentic’ Atlantic Canadian experience; on the other, there is pop music, including soul, funk, and rap.) Problematically, then, East Coast agrarianism marginalizes African Nova Scotians, who are now primarily urban. Indeed, because their land allotments were so poor, African–Nova Scotian rural settlements were never self-sufficient. Thus, few African Nova Scotians have been farmers (and even fewer have been fishermen). Instead, over generations, they have worked as service providers – as maids and domestics and as unskilled and skilled labour – mainly in cities or towns. Seldom have they lived ‘the georgics’ or harvested the sea.8 The Euro-chauvinist, agrarian-plus-briny ‘Atlantica’ propaganda is, for them – us – and, really, most Atlantic Canadians – fantastic and false. Anderson asserts, ‘We see the “national imagination” at work [in fiction] in the movement of a solitary hero through a sociological landscape of a fixity that fuses the [fictional] world … with the world outside ’ (B. Anderson 1991, 30; my italics). In Tynes’s verse, it is precisely this ‘sociological landscape ’ that matters, and her depiction of it may be more pertinent for an inclusive East Coast identity than any number of epics about the cod fishery or coal extraction. As Japanese scholar Takayumi Tatsumi asserts in his article ‘Literary History on the Road: Transatlantic

maxine tynes

167

Crossings and Transpacific Crossovers,’ ‘Hybridization of cultures brings about a melting pot of narratives’ (2004, 97). Tynes’s grappling with racial, gendered, sexual, and body images drafts a complex portrait of the East Coast, denying those ethnocentric imaginings that render it merely a warren of hard-done-by, displaced Europeans. By placing her black, (dis)abled, and female self at the centre of an often invisible but presumably present (urban) Atlantic Canada, Tynes forces her readers to widen the boundaries of received East Coast ethnography. She accomplishes this strategy even as the actual real estate – or geography – of the region vanishes from her texts. Opposing clichéd categories of agriculture, pisciculture, silviculture, and mining, Tynes gives us (black) urban culture.9 Proclaiming her urbane and multifarious identities, Tynes contests the monochrome monologue that some East Coast critics favour. Noisy with contemporary, citified, social struggles and the musings of globalized media, her poetry denies the sanctity of pastoralism. Due to her rejection of harvests and tonnages, Tynes’s urban-oriented, raced, and gendered poetry forces one to wonder just whose Atlantic Canada these ‘four provinces thrown … further into the Atlantic than the rest of the continent’ really are (MacDonald and MacLaine 2001, 15). Such interrogatives dovetail with Asian-Americanist Shu-mei Shih’s prescriptive queries with respect to postcolonial writing: ‘who is allowed to produce theory, … to call it theory, … and what amount of work on a literature is necessary before we can generalize about it?’ (2004, 20). Surely, Tynes demands that we replace the old, resource-extraction maps of Atlantic Canada with new ones that have room for the disparate peoples landed and rooted – or washed ashore – (t)here. ‘The issue becomes,’ then, says Hungarian scholar Tibor Frank, ‘the saving of local cultural identities, the fostering of cultural pluralism, and the balancing of cultural supremacies’ 2004, 87). Though landscape qua landscape is of minimal import for Tynes, the abstract ‘scapes’ of media – television, magazines, paintings, mirrors, photographs, and car windows – are. Thus, Tynes teaches us to see that even the natural world is mediated through representation. Her East Coast – urban, rural, black, Mi’kmaq, Acadian, gynocentric, and incarnated by the dis/abled – is located on TV screens, viewed from car windows, read about in magazines, and heard discussed – or sung – on radio. Thus, her Atlantic Canada exists centrally within a globalized electronic media and publishing industry. Significantly, she is the first Atlantic Canadian poet to posit this conception. All vistas are mediated: Even environmentalism is an ‘applied’ romanticism. Tynes purveys, then, the ocular experience of her several identities: African, Woman, Physically Challenged, Maritimer, Canadian. She sees herself in-and-through these soul-and-psyche roles, but she also sees herself and the world in-and-through media: print, audio, video, and mass transportation. Too, she performs these perceptions, either putting her vocal body directly before an audience, or projecting herself electronically across space, or applying her identities to paperink-and-alphabet. Tynes is – at long last – the McLuhanesque poet par excellence.10

Sounding and Hearing To open Borrowed Beauty is to address these poetics at once. In ‘Mirrors,’ Tynes comments, ‘Women are always looking into mirrors, looking for a mirror to look into, or thinking about, regretting, sighing over or not quite believing what they’ve seen in the mirror.’ In reality, women are ‘looking at ourselves; looking for ourselves’ (1987, 7). But this search is undertaken via the

168 Directions home

flat distortion of a mirror, even as it is articulated through vocal sounds turned into print. Tynes then specifies her own identity: ‘(at least) a fourth generation Black Canadian woman, writer, poet, broadcast journalist, teacher, performance artist.’ But she also dismantles these categories: ‘as soon as I say something in print or otherwise about my Black past I have to qualify it; because we as a people have lost many tangible, documented traces of who we are ’ (7). All women may look for – or affirm – themselves in mirrors, but the black woman must peer ‘behind the looking glass,’ so to speak, to find her essential self. The further irony here is that this self-knowledge must be gleaned from – and circulated through – media. For Tynes, then, only an abstract, generalized, and romanticized Africa can serve as her spiritual ancestor: ‘I cannot possibly say to you that I am a woman descendent from the people of the plains – the Serengeti, of Kenya, of Ghana, the Gambia or of Zaire – the heartland. I can only look to the vast expanse of Africa, that black mother continent, and say, that is who and what and where I am’ (7–8). Because no mirror can pinpoint her origins, because she can only guess at the lineaments of her heritage, Tynes’s persona issues ‘a lament into the mirror of the map of that place. Africa.’ Moreover, the mirror is, for her, a location of racial invisibility, while Africa, as a map, can only mirror a guessing-game identity. Notice that, in her catalogue of personal identifiers, Tynes labels herself ‘Black Canadian,’ but never Black Nova Scotian. Rather than look out at the Atlantic landscape (or seascape) about her – the tourism-endorsed, East Coast heritage – Tynes chooses to ‘look into my poet’s soul to find there the route to self and personhood, both Black and female.’ While Ernest Buckler’s novel The Mountain and the Valley (1952) concludes with David Canaan perishing mutely, whitely, in a mountaintop blizzard, thereby communing with the landscape, Tynes ignores such romanticism. She prefers ‘inscape’11 (to use Victorian British poet Gerard Manley Hopkins’s neologism12), and, for her, that means replacing botany and zoology with the Afrocentric and the gynocentric.13 Tynes insists that ‘[my] poems, my poetry are like mirrors reflecting back in great or subtle beams and shafts of light and words and images that are womanly and Black and brown and tan and full of the joy and pride in femaleness and in Black womanhood that I am’ (8). A program is announced, and its poetics is the revelation of race and gender identity, in art and media, but not in actual geography. In ‘Womanskin,’ then, skin – the literal surface of black women’s bodies – projects ‘the Nile, the Sahara, Kenya, Zaire, Sudan / the Serengeti’ (Tynes 1987, 9). Skin is a screen upon which history is written and ancestral landscapes mapped. In ‘Borrowed Beauty,’ black women’s physiques embody not only Africa – ‘Sahara, Zaire, Zimbabwe, Cairo’ – but also African women – ‘Nefertiti, Cleopatra.’ The poet declares, ‘this is no borrowed beauty, / this is home ’ (ibid., 42). Here ‘home ’ has nothing to do with Nova Scotia and everything to do with skin and blood. In ‘Edith Clayton’s Market Baskets,’ its subject, an East Preston craftswoman, is some dark Africa woman weaving years gone by shoppers carrying bits of you away in finely crafted maple baskets from Preston woods. (ibid., 38)

Tynes allows a glimpse of the Nova Scotian forest from which Clayton gleans her materials, but the stress is on Africa:

maxine tynes

169

will I be ancient and brown haunting the Preston wood for good maple … Africa years in baskets. (39)14

That Africa – imaginary and distant – is Tynes’s most real ‘landscape ’ (and the focus of her mythopoesis). It is reinforced in her anthem ‘The Profile of Africa’: we wear our skin like a fine fabric … we wear our skin like a flag … we cast our skin like a shadow we wear our skin like a map … read the map of my heritage in my face … the dark flash of eye the profile of Africa. (ibid., 37)15

The body – like Preston in the paean to Clayton – is merely a palimpsest of Africa. If, for Tynes, the physical reflects Africa, history, too, is a matter of graphic echoes. In ‘LoveRoute,’ then, a wedding day’s ‘jazz of honeymoon hands across the pillow’ conjures up the ancient Fulani, Mandinka, Hausa Zulu, Zambesie, Shona jazz/love music of hands. (ibid., 53)

In ‘Family Portrait,’ a poem about ‘Tynes years past,’ the poet admits, I see and not see grandma Nellie in period Loyalist dress and great-grandma Mary all starched apron white-white-white great-grandfather Thomas … in stiff black stuff staring straight ahead, defying the lens like a cadaver. (ibid., 46)

The photograph telescopes back into a past that it cannot, literally, contain, but its representation of past and past-present reproduces, literally, the living – defiant – dead. Importantly, the background holds my homestead house white-washed with cast-iron cookpans hung like slave quarters. (47)

Likewise, when Tynes addresses ‘Crazy Luce’ – or Lucy Mitchell – in the eponymous lyric,

170 Directions home

she speaks to an image ‘frozen on a page dated 1880 / frozen in the Nova Scotia archives’ (ibid., 34) and picturing ‘stark remnants of Blackpast.’ History is both settled and unsettled, with the poet’s breath blowing life into a now-dead woman’s appearance and blowing dust from her image. Tynes cites the archived Black Nova Scotian ancestress as a forerunner to the circa 1980s celebrity iconography of ‘Diana Ross, Moms Mabley, Pearl Bailey / sequins, Broadway, Johnny Carson, Ebony Magazine …’ (35). Still, Lucy Mitchell exists now only in print and in photograph. In ‘Black Heritage Photos: Nova Scotia Archives,’ the poet spies a ‘Black Loyalist shack’ and imagines someone ’s ‘shuffle, bone-weary / going down the road / laden, to market’ (ibid., 41): no actual geography is described. Tynes represses Maritime ‘scenery’ relentlessly. In the sequence ‘Black Song Nova Scotia’ (Tynes 1990, 59–63), in Woman Talking Woman, the first line in five poems to near landscape description is this one: ‘We are Graham Jarvis bleeding on the road in Weymouth Falls’ (63). Certainly, not one of the three poems dedicated to the bulldozed-over African–Nova Scotian community of Africville – ‘Africville Spirit,’ ‘Africville Is My Name,’ and ‘Africville ’ – yields a visual image of the village razed by the City of Halifax. Instead, Tynes delivers, in effect, arena raps – strong on politics and vapid in detail. ‘Africville Spirit’ intones, ‘it is important to recognize / Black community and to own community and all Black experience.’ One also hears that ‘Soweto is Chicago is Toronto / is Detroit … is Halifax and Dartmouth is / Africville ’ (1990, 60). Thus, toponyms top topography. Still, Negrophobia becomes a transatlantic experience, connecting American, Canadian, and South African blacks. In ‘Africville Is My Name,’ Tynes’s persona ‘shout[s] the names of Africville like a map’ and concludes, ‘Personhood. Community. Family. Africville.’ This speechifying restricts ‘description’ to a catalogue of familial surnames (ibid., 61). But, Tynes holds, it is the people, not a collection of houses or a field or a garden, who are the community: ‘No house is Africville. / No road, no tree, no well.’ Africville is man/woman/child in the street and heart Black Halifax, the Prestons, Toronto. (61)

Tynes maintains that the black people of Atlantic Canada possess an identity that looks south towards the United States (and its ‘South’) and east towards Africa, and that these locations inform their (our) identity far more than do the specifics of East Coast geography.16 Too, she suggests that this self-knowledge is (re-)produced genetically in ‘Our Africville face and skin and heart’ (62), and artificially – in the forging of a speech-community and a readership/audience consuming all relevant media, including poetry. Tynes instructs us to locate Africa(ns) and African–Nova Scotia(ns) in maps, photos, history books, genealogical charts, and mirrors – that is, in media. Radically, though, these instruments of narrative (dis)location are either embedded, mutely, in the flesh itself (essentialism with a vengeance), or, if real, can be interpreted only through politic, poetic divination or articulation. Tynes appreciates that ‘black’ consciousness is a media construct and is thus independent of the données of physical place. Her East Coast is simultaneously Africa and the United States, but also 1783 and 1983: a collage.17 Tynes’s multi-mediated poetics informs all her work. Thus, in a poem attacking prostitution, she alerts us that Halifax’s ‘Hollis Street at Midnight is not a T.V. Screen’ (Tynes 1987, 15): No, it is ‘women walking their blues / in the night of men walking their blues’ (16). The complaint is

maxine tynes

171

concrete, but Hollis Street remains undifferentiated: it could be any sex-industrialized street. Its ‘could-be-anywhere ’ location may be a point of the poem. In ‘Avec Mes Soeurs / Con Mis Hermanas / With My Sisters,’ a poem protesting the U.S.-backed Contra terrorism against Nicaragua’s revolutionary government in the 1980s, Tynes identifies with the popular struggle: we, too, are Nicaraguan as we turn on our t.v. and in the nightly litany of Grenada Beirut Uitenhage Johannesburg Nicaragua as the bodies fall into our livingrooms. (ibid., 23)

But ‘Live Aid in a Basket: The Reach Out and Touch Fantasy of the Century’ castigates the 1985 international rock-star show staged for global television to raise funds for Ethiopian famine relief. Tynes’s persona realizes that, as once ‘hippies,’ now fat and complacent with one finger on the t.v. trigger we sit in our livingrooms and think we are freeing the world. (ibid., 27)

Once the extravaganza concludes, the poet wonders, And where in the blue and flickering t.v. world is Ethiopia now? in the ratings war, terrorism is 10 Neilson points above world aid for hunger. (29)

In this dismal electronic-entertainment reality, a starving, skeletal African woman is rendered ‘a natural and constant photo opportunity’ (28). Hence, she is like the photos of Crazy Luce or the documentary images of Africville and Soweto: a superficial icon whose profound meaning must be found and exposed by the poet. Tynes positions these clichéd ‘pictures’ to clarify ‘the reality of living in / the global battle field’ (ibid., 20). Nova Scotia – and Atlantic Canada – become, then, no insular Eden, but, rather, integrated into the globe: its TV markets wars, famines, plagues, and disasters for technicolour consumption anywhere a broadcast or cable signal can be retrieved. Hence, Tynes’s work reminds us that Atlantic Canada has always attended to the drums of war, no matter how far offshore. The region is as much as about Sea King helicopters and Trident submarines as it is about turf and surf.18 True: Moments of ‘traditional’ nature imagery appear in Borrowed Beauty, but, mainly in studies of paintings. (See, for instance, ‘Vincent Knew the Colour of Pain’ and ‘The Bay.’) Again, Tynes focuses on the flat surface – the skin or screen – as well as on metaphors related to indigeneity and political struggle. (See ‘Chameleon Silence,’ where skin colour speaks ‘volumes’ or ‘the

172 Directions home

roots and leaves / of my words’ [1987, 66].) Because she scrutinizes media surfaces (art) and the social construction of language (argument), because, I mean, she is concerned with human communication (pictorial, spectacular, verbal, performative), Tynes may disregard nature portraiture. Stone notes Tynes’s ‘transformation from looking into mirrors in the opening of Borrowed Beauty to looking out of camera that is not merely a detached cerebral eye/I of watching, but an entity that perceives through the heart and the “whole-body” of bone, flesh, nerve ’ (1997, 234). This shift is explicit in ‘The Poet As Whole-Body Camera,’ the opening prose-poem of The Door of My Heart. No longer ‘mirrors,’ Tynes’s lyrics compose ‘the lens, the shutter, the eye of this whole-body camera that I am’ (Tynes 1993, 5). Yet, this change is already advanced in Woman Talking Woman, where Tynes’s persona expects readers to ‘sample my thoughts / stack up my isms’ (Tynes 1990, 5), that is to say, to attend to occasional images but perpetual ideas. Tynes rejects the modernist mantra, ‘No ideas but in things’ (see U.S. poet William Carlos Williams): for her, ideas are things; ‘isms’ are images. To write is ‘to seek, to test and to test the thrust, the parry of thought and word and ism and image. Together’ (Tynes 1993, 5). Though Stone is right to accent Tynes’s switch of ideational metaphor, from the poem-asmirror regard of Borrowed Beauty to the poem-as-camera camber of Door of My Heart, both notions are, really, related. According to either poetic (or perspective), Tynes seeks to analyse contingent surfaces, the apparent extension or articulation of her multimedia-mediated consciousness into the wired, networked world. Again, this project necessitates an immersion not in landand-sea pictorials but, rather, in paper, broadcast or cable signals, rooms, and vehicles. One accomplishment of Tynes’s putative thesis is ‘Are We Having Fun Yet? / Highway Vacation, 1985.’ This poem features Tynes’s most sustained treatment of landscape (albeit American). Yet, a car window interposes between the poet and the Vermont countryside unfolding about her: rolling miles black and dapper cows fill my window I am delighted with the green and gold cornfield picture-book non-t.v. screen display you cannot change the channel … (Tynes 1990, 22)

Yes, the poet celebrates the ‘real’ cows sliding past her car window, as opposed to the ‘artificial’ reality projected on a television screen. Still, her joy is ironic, for these cattle are, first, ‘screened’ by her car window, then imagined as ‘picture-book’ additions, and are, simultaneously, ‘screened’ by the poem itself. Agreed: The pastoral scene is not as malleable as a television signal; however, the car window acts as a camera. The same conflict between objectifying voyeurism and ‘real’ engagement complicates a later image. The car engine mimics nature: ‘the big six horses under the hood / sipping and drinking every litre.’ The ‘domesticated’ automobile domesticates the environment. The woman speaker-traveller and her partner/lover, surveying the passing scenery of ‘golden arches and neon burgers’ (22) and ‘Middle America diners’ (23), see (make sure) that everything is a façade: ‘nature’ is a suburban, motel/restaurant/shopping plaza ‘strip.’ All the pretty bovines viewed (or ‘shot’) from the car window will become ‘neon burgers.’ Gluttonous oglers, the travellers snap up ‘shots of everywhere / like two whole-body

maxine tynes

173

Kodaks’ (24). The attendant scenery becomes fodder for the transient gaze, just as the herbivores become fodder for omnivores’ bellies. A similar eating up (or digestion) of the world via the ‘whole-body camera’ occurs in ‘Sea and Sky.’ A tacitly specific ‘South Shore Maritime sometime ’ is assessed, again, through a car window: I loll my head and dream tires whisper whisper sand beach sand nosing the wind, so fresh from the sea, like a hound. (ibid., 32)

In the end, ‘the earth becomes the sky / those Atlantic blues and greys mesh,’ and the speaker wonders, who can tell, ‘Which is sea? Which is sky? / … Do I even care?’ (32). Perspective flattens out. In ‘Enamoured of the Black and White Cow,’ Tynes’s persona eyes, again, a Vermont cow via ‘my car window.’ The speaker admits, ‘I am enamoured of your image’ (ibid., 33; my italics). Eventually, the cow is set in an individualized ‘graphic landscape,’ which morphs into ‘a black and white blanket,’ a quilt – or painting – titled, ‘Holstein on a Vermont Hillside’ (34). Once more, the three-dimensional world is transformed into a representational plane. For Tynes, ‘reality’ is just a set of impressions. Glimpsing the cow, her persona states, ‘You roll your big and soft brown eyes. / I roll mine over you’ (33). This vision is violent: the ‘rolling’ action is like that of a steamroller. Her object attained, the poet dismisses the cow: ‘My car rolls by. / You are gone ’ (34). The cow vanishes – like a snapshot in a slide show.19 Tynes’s ‘camera-body’ does not shoot ‘blanks.’ She pictures all about her as art: framed and contained. In ‘These T.V. Men and Women,’ television stars, guests, and events become the backdrop of the speaker’s life: ‘to bend and stretch and writhe / for twenty minutes ’round the clock / via cable ’; ‘to cook and cook and cook / with Julia or some French or Creole chef ’ (ibid., 39). Concluding, the speaker admits, Oh, television … Your people tattoo themselves on my life in this surreal and glamorous flicker and dim; T.V., you orchestrate my life. (39)

Reduced to ‘tattoos,’ human suffering bleeds into blasé entertainment: ‘I have seen the holocaust from many angles’ (40).20 Likewise, Canadian wheelchair athlete Rick Hanson’s gruelling 1987 cross-country tour provides ‘great T.V. visuals’ (38). In ‘What’s Wrong with This Picture,’ the poet deplores the persistent, broadcast invisibility of blacks ‘After thirty-five plus years of / watching television’ (Tynes 1993, 41). In ‘I Am,’ Tynes herself becomes an impressionist painting: I am a woman who wears elephants in her ears tonight and, a blue-green parrot over her heart;

174 Directions home the rayon jungle flares and flutters in Gauguin splendour across my breasts and back. (Tynes 1990, 28)21

Blasting commercial notions of female beauty, Tynes’s persona eyes ‘women who are flat and / glossy magazine-slim and / dressed to kill budgets and men’s eyes,’ while she herself, ‘Being real and whole and bodyful,’ is ‘an image / which does not slip across a glossy page / full of staples and designer fantasy’ (30). Tynes knows that all we know are impressions and surfaces.

Last Looks and Last Words Despite the poet’s insistent looking or seeing (prominent acts in her poetic diction), the expected, or typical aspect of contemporary Atlantic Canadian poetry – namely, a discourse on the natural world – is nullified. Tynes is an insolent disciple, therefore, of the late Prince Edward Island native Milton Acorn, for, where his poetry shouted out love, ‘jackpine ’ sonnets, and political curses, Tynes prefers to peer at television, the streets, paintings, magazines, photos, and mirrors, and to glance at the countryside or the ocean from a car or a vessel. Notably, her supreme poems treat in camera experiences: watching, from a window, crows flit about; or describing the visit of African–Nova Scotian contralto Portia White to a wealthy Halifax home; or lovemaking in an iron-and-brass bed. In contrast, Tynes’s anthems – plastic, elastic confections – are broadcast outdoors: big and airy, they speak her solidarity with, or her opposition to, one social experience or another. These political ‘documentary’ poems are amphitheatres, but not ‘natural’ ones; indeed, they exile nature vigorously, and yet, paradoxically, for Tynes’s voice, in these lyrics, disappears in a haze – or glaze – of abstractions. But, then, to reach her multiple audiences, the poet’s voice must sometimes become as diffused as a radio signal: clear and bold when ‘up close and personal,’ but squawking and static-inclined when the bullhorn is needed. Crucially, though, Tynes knows this possibility, and so she has designed her oeuvre accordingly: One poem should hiss from a microphone; another must sing from a page. To reckon Tynes right, recognize that her East Coast consists of unconventional, unexpected, and media-mediated pictures and multicultural, multiracial peoples. Vested in her black, female, and differently ‘able ’ body, her poetry cannot tolerate or reiterate the Caucasian, masculine, macho, and cracker-barrel clichés of our clime. I suspect Tynes relegates the East Coast categories of ‘land and sea’ to the margins of her art, while revelling in explicating audio-visual media (including the putative motion-picture experience of driving), because that is where her persona lives. Two poems explain my meaning. In her lyric on Rick Hanson, Tynes’s persona, watching television, observes the ‘blue and yellow VIA Rail [train] eastbound,’ moving beside Hanson and ‘his rolling wheelchair wheels’ (1990, 38). The train wheels and the wheelchair-bound athlete – together – represent an ease of locomotion through and over ‘real estate’ that the cane-wielding poet must appreciate. Important also is ‘The Woman I Am in My Dreams,’ where the speaker dreams of walking over ‘unforgiving gravel’ and dialoguing with ‘ice and snow’ and always winning ‘that argument.’ In reality, the poet cannot see ‘the world as she walks,’ but must keep ‘eyes on every step / … eyes ever and always on the ground’ (1993, 25). Being a poet who cannot easily access the ‘great outdoors’ or take walking for granted, Tynes turns her eyes from the hiking trails and the wharves of the

maxine tynes

175

Atlantic Canadian canon to inspect her immediate reality: classroom, living room, bedroom, museums, hallways, car interiors, paintings, mirrors, photographs, windows, radio shows, television programs, newspapers, magazines – all the (mass) media available to a woman whose everyday world is practically enclosed. Not easily available to her is the direct apprehension of flora, fauna, and the elements.22 So, Tynes shows us Africa in a face, landscapes that live inside car window ‘frames,’ and fashion models who thrust their bodies at us from newsprint. She shows us our real East Coast home – an abode among images – and she teaches us how to distinguish the gloss from the shadow. Too, her ‘disability’ and her marginality as a racial minority in an economically depressed (but First World) region grant Tynes insight. No other East Coast poet has so saliently understood Marshall McLuhan. No other has put herself so heroically front and centre, (meta)physically, in our collective consciousness. No other has so consistently shown us where we truly live. The poet stands, not corrected, but correctly, peering at us forensically when she seems most intently fixed on herself. Indeed, her focus on blackness plus womanhood permits Tynes to transcend North America and speak to the larger anglophone world. In this way, she, like black foremothers of nearly a century ago, enables the emergence of ‘a globalized, multicultural, black consciousness’ (Mori 2003, 659). Do you hear? Tynes’s scope escapes all our provincial ‘scapes.’ Moreover, Tynes’s work foregrounds the vehement relevance of performance aesthetics and communications theories for African diasporic communities. Two other writers important in this regard are the ‘performance’ poets d’bi.young and Oni Joseph, the subjects of the subsequent essay.

14 Bring da Noise: The Poetics of Performance, Chez d’bi. young and Oni Joseph For ‘The Rt. Hon.’ Gilbert Randall Daye (1956–)1

Speaking Up One warm April Saturday in Toronto in 1983, I was typing up poems in my office at Queen’s Park, the home of the Ontario legislature, when I decided to head towards the lobby of the redsandstone, Hindu-temple-style building and regard the anti-nuclear-weapons rally on the front lawn, where tens of thousands of people were assembled. However, a phalanx of Toronto police constables, standing behind the closed front doors, but surveying and sneering at the marchers, blocked my approach to the building’s main entrance. Then, one officer – brawny where I was slight, tall where I was short – ordered me to leave the area. I refused to do so, and he threatened my arrest. I declared that I worked for the legislature and had every right to be where I was. But as he loomed forward, I stepped back. And then, and then, it happened. He said something, and I answered, in a voice I had forgotten I owned, a speech-act that had everything to do with the ‘streets.’ In a ‘hot’ second, I forgot all the Queen’s English I had polished as an undergraduate, and slid right back – deep down – into the nappy roots of my genealogy. I spewed up slippery pronunciations, pure guttural backtalk, and exquisitely anti-grammatical constructions. This sudden blackening of my tongue did not astound the obstreperous constable. I suppose that my swift ‘slip’ into ‘Black English’ was what he had expected – even from a buttoned-down thencivil servant/poet. I did retreat to another section of the edifice to watch the protesters, but as I seethed at my treatment by the officer, I also felt astonished by my own recourse to the ‘bad English’ of the schoolyard. I had thought that my upbringing by my Encyclopedia Britannica–tutored father and my absorption of ‘proper’ grammar had exiled from my consciousness any knowledge of the salty, peppery, vinegary, and sugary tongue of my African–Nova Scotian (Africadian) peers. But I was wrong: it had taken refuge in my subconscious.2

Performance Anxiety This long opening anecdote empowers me to say that the problem of voice determines every black writer’s expressivity. It is also the bane of almost every critic, whether Afrocentric or Eurocentric (or someplace in between), stranded in the Americas between William Shakespeare (1564–1616) and Robbie Shakespeare (1953–), Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772–1834) and Samuel

bring da noise

177

Coleridge-Taylor (1875–1912).3 Note that any responsible anthology of ‘Afrosporic’ poetry must include song lyrics. African-American collections sound the words of the spirituals and the blues, and, nowadays, rap. In the Caribbean, calypso, reggae, and dub command literary attention. Hence, Derek Walcott (1930–), a Caribbean Nobel laureate in literature, honours calypso in his verse styles.4 Honest critics of Afro-Caribbean poetry must stake out not just the bookstores and the libraries, but also the record shops and the dancehalls. Yet, an excruciating chasm yawns in critics’ reception of the Negro literatures, a cleavage opened by race. The black poet who seeks to exploit the music of words, as well as the drama of his or her ministry, may be dismissed as a ‘performer’ – I mean, as a minstrel, a harlequin. In contrast, the black poet who adheres strictly to the grade-school grammars and college-approved aesthetics of imperious educators, may be faulted by this lactic dialectic of dialect: the more ‘standard’ the speech, the ‘whiter’ the speaker.5 Hence, J. Edward Chamberlin, a Euro-Canadian critic, observes, ‘the perennial tension between tradition and individual talent [has] this additional twist in the West Indies, with writers sometimes being expected to surrender their imaginative autonomy to unwelcome communal prerogatives on one hand, and to uncongenial literary conventions on the other’ (1993, 62). I translate: the Afro-Caribbean poet who asserts his or her ‘racial’ independence, to the point of writing ‘raceless’ poetry according to the canons and conventions of ‘Mama’ England (or ‘AmeriKKKa’), may find a reception as stony and hard as the ‘master’ literary rules he or she has adopted. Uh huh: no black – or Afro-Caribbean – writer may presume the ability to write from a space as seemingly clear as the blank page, for History hovers over and shadows his or her inked being. Chamberlin underlines this reality: In the West Indies after emancipation, colonial experience and imperial ambition converged in a determination to turn blacks into whites, or Africans into Europeans. To many European listeners, the absence of articulate language – or more precisely the presence of what was construed as the inarticulate babble of African languages (with the transfer of some of their intonations into West Indian speech) – was inevitably associated with the absence of coherent thought and civilized feeling. (73)

The stress – the pressure – of this more-or-less legislated diglossia, wherein shared tongues divide between ‘high’ and ‘low’ functions (with the ‘high’ language ‘being used on occasions of greater formality’ and ‘monopolizing written texts, and the “low” variety being the language of everyday intercourse and popular culture’ [ibid., 110]) nixes any black writer’s aspiration to apolitical self-expression. Moreover, as the black hand with the black pen spews its black ink, some white – or black but white-masked – critic, equating Africa with unreason, may decide that this writing, this print, has no permanence of thought or narrative, but is merely transcribed (and inferior) patois, fake writing good only for a laugh. The Martiniquan-Algerian philosophe Frantz Fanon imagines the Euro-Caucasian (or white-identified) critic presuming, ‘The Negro loves to jabber, and from this theory it is not a long road that leads to a new proposition: The Negro is just a child. The psychoanalysts have a fine start here, and the term orality is soon heard’ (1967, 27).6 If Fanon is right, as soon as the Negro7 writer is perceived as being a showman manqué, his or her ‘literature ’ may be written off as highfalutin gibberish: after all, his or her type issues from a font of illiteracy.8 As much as some Eurocentric critics may ignore black writers who seem, to their ears, all slang and no imagery, Afrocentric critics may shout back that the only valid (black) poetry is that

178 Directions home

which trumpets orality.9 Say they, print is secondary to the voice – its rhythms and its ‘instrumentation.’ How a word or sentence is spoken conveys more than its ideational content; moreover, ‘truth’ resides in pronunciation, not just in diction. Yes, Lord Byron pens lilting love lyrics, but James Brown’s screams and wails cut nearer to the heart.10 That his ‘language ’ cannot be transcribed, or circumscribed, is its strength: it is a core, not a subtraction. It is as fundamental, ultimately, as oxygen is for breath. To the Afrocentric ear, the expression of a work is its meaning. The minister who says he loves God cannot be trusted as much as the one who falls on his knees, shouting, weeping, stuttering, and sweating, demonstrating either a desperate need of salvation or a secure possession of transfiguring redemption. The word turns plastic and elastic in the lungs. The self-consciously Negro poet shares the same aim as the Negro performer, to be physically apprehensible, escaping the stultifying fate of being ‘smothered in paper and embalmed in regulations’ (T. White 1975, 175).11 Yep, none of the foregoing is new. American writer Norman Mailer asserts, ‘The Negro communicated more by voice than by his word’ (1964, 203). But his analysis is too passive. Fanon verifies, ‘Every colonized people – in other words, every people in whose soul an inferiority complex has been created by the death and burial of its local cultural originality – finds itself face to face with the language of the civilizing nation; that is, with the culture of the mother country.’ Their salvation is to be ‘elevated above … jungle status in proportion to [their] adoption of the mother country’s [linguistic] standards’ (1967, 18). Fanon dictates that grammar is a cultural battlefield – or minefield – one that the ‘colonized’ speaker must negotiate to establish his or her political equality with putative oppressors. Thus, says, French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre, ‘Since the oppressor is present even in the language they speak, they [the colonized] will speak this language to destroy it.’12 He insists that ‘it is only when [European words] have disgorged their whiteness that [the black poet] adopts them, making of this language in ruins a superlanguage, solemn and sacred, in brief, Poetry’ (1976, 26). Look it: Ex-colonial, Negro poetry emerges from an endless war with European tongues.13 G.E. Clancier accents the psychological struggle that Martiniquan poet Aimé Césaire wages against the white – French – langue that he so deeply loves: ‘This language belongs to the whites whose domination the black poet intends to destroy …; it is at the same time the black poet’s most precious possession, since it is one with his song, be it of praise or revolt, since it is the locus and the soul of his poetry’ (quoted in Arnold [1981] 1998, 130). Jamaican-Canadian dub’poet d’bi.young14 accords with this sentiment. For her, dub – and note her idiosyncratic scribing – ‘chants in the tongue of the under/working class. the form speaks to and for the people by breaking with british hierarchical linguistic rule and grammatically, syntactically, and stylistically represents the working-class experience’ (2006, 4). Her sentiment cannot be doubted, but her argument disregards the shouted socialist sonnet penned with strict grammar as well as the blue-blood black who uses dub to shill for Rolls-Royce. young’s definition may skirt clichés. But this problem is not unique to her: the relative blackness – or ‘Caribbean-ness’ – of either a poem or its performance is dastardly difficult to decode or decide.15 Reading Césaire, James A. Arnold determines that ‘among the modifications that [his] view of poetry involves for readers in the European tradition is an ability to consider the poetic text as a verbal score, the poem in the fullest sense being a reading or a performance.’16 Arnold instructs us that ‘such a total poetics is of course not exclusively African, nor is it by any means unknown in European poetry’ ([1981] 1998, 225). Prudently too, Arnold holds, ‘The reader who hopes to find anything substantial that might connect any of Césaire ’s poems to precise African

bring da noise

179

or Afro-American rhythms will encounter promises and suggestions enough but no demonstration or even much sound argument’ (233). Even a poet as skilled as Césaire cannot set down on paper rhythms that echo actual drumming or singing. Nor can a critic as able as Arnold detect them easily. Analysing one Césaire poem, Arnold senses, ‘One can locate [its] Africanization … acoustically in the guise of a highly original departure from the norms of phonemic usage in modern French poetry’ (238). Maybe, then, the blackness of a black-authored poem is best realized in its performance.17 Therefore, even a Caucasian-composed anthem – ‘Oh Canada,’ for instance – despite its classically derived notation, may be rendered black if delivered via black expressive cultural traditions. Conversely, a black-authored poem – say, Jamaican poet Claude McKay’s sonnet ‘If We Must Die’ (1919) – may be voiced according to a European convention, as when Sir Winston Churchill reputedly quoted the poem to heighten British resolve against Nazi aggression during the Second World War. 18 Yet, even this proposition cannot aid us utterly, for, as Arnold maintains, ‘although we may all agree that a poem … is made to be performed, there is no reasonably objective way to decide who the best performers are or – and the question is aesthetically a different one – what constitutes an appropriate performance ’ (231). When Sartre, leafing through an anthology of Negro-composed poetry, declares, ‘the tom-tom tends to become a genre of black poetry, as the sonnet or the ode were of ours [Europeans]’ (1976, 32), he denies the truth that the ‘jazzy,’ rhythmic, polyphonic poem exists in ‘white ’ Western literature (see e.e. cummings, Allen Ginsberg, Garcia Lorca, Geoffrey Chaucer, and André Breton, just for starters) but also the reality that both the sonnet and the ode may be voiced – acted out – according to the syncopation of the tom-tom. Thus, both Sartre and young are guilty of perpetuating racial fantasy, and ‘race-based romanticism,’ warns Alfred Appel, Jr., ‘can be rot’ (Appel 2004, 99). Or, as I have written elsewhere, ‘Form is as form does’ (G. Clarke [1990] 2000, xxiv): no poetic form is primordially black or white in its signification.19 But despite all the essays that conscientiously deny that words carry any colour other than the ink they assume when printed, Negro – and thus, Afro-Caribbean-Canadian – poets announce they wring black poems from their bluesy souls that ‘shake the stage ’ and ‘rock the mike.’ Introducing T-Dot Griots: An Anthology of Toronto’s Black Storytellers, co-editor Steven Green positions the contributors as griots – African ‘bards or praise singers’ (2004, v) – ‘first generation Canadians… Artists who are informed by the western world around them – speaking it’s [sic] language and influenced by its principles – yet harking back in a spiritual, intuitive way to their ancestral African roots; a tapping in to [sic] the soul of blackness’ (vii). Unapologetically, Green relies on essentialism to connect his youthful, urbane, First World–resident, relatively rich – but Black – Canadians with African ‘traditions such as call and response and signifying.’ His writers are, he maintains, ‘improvisers, and spontaneous creators; off the cuff performers whose traditions are largely oral’ (ix). Yep. See the contributors’ bios (Richardson and Green 2004, 167–79): of fifty writers and artists, only a minority has inked books; a larger number have recorded compact discs of their recitations, occasionally with music. Still, Green and co-editor Karen Richardson insist that their anthology grants spoken word performance a measure of historical record and print longevity. Green states, ‘It is necessary to permanently create a time capsule and a foundation that brings disparate artists together ina [sic] collaborative community’ (2004, ix). Richardson opines, ‘Canonized here, our words shall live on to document our experience in this land of migrants called Canada’ (2004a, 166). This desire for printed resonance is as old as writing itself. Canada’s media guru Marshall McLuhan affirms, ‘The content of writing is speech, just as the written word is the content of

180 Directions home

print’ (1966, 23–4). Yet, the tension remains between the spoken and the written, for, as McLuhan also attests, ‘the spoken word involves all of the senses dramatically’ (81). Witnesses Chamberlin, ‘Theatre often employs local speech’ (1993, 91). Too, speech hikes ‘audience participation’ (McLuhan 1966, 81); and, promises U.S. poet Ezra Pound, ‘poetry begins to atrophy when it gets too far from music’ (quoted in Cookson [1985] 2001, xxii). Hence, the Afro-Caribbean-Canadian – or black – poet, if given to dramatic recitation, produces poems that are really songs, or songs that are one-man or one-woman plays, whose intent is to communalize, uplift, and educate the audience. These ends may be achieved more readily from the concert stage than from the relative remoteness of a page.20 But the page is portable: It needs no electricity to ‘live.’ Too, once committed to memory, the written poem is freely available for recitation and performance. (True: Written music may also be widely circulated, but, unless it is vocal, it requires instruments and musicians to be heard.) Classically speaking, an oral command of Judeo-Christian texts (say the King James version of the Holy Bible), not whether one could read or write,21 was, in black, ex-slave communities, the first signifier of an educated mind.22 The folk recitation of biblical lore, in story and song – not one ’s scholastic achievement, grades passed, or degrees obtained – was the pre-eminent standard of education.23 While the black person with formal education could be appreciated and respected, the preacher who could, through oratory and song, move the audience/community to some unity of purpose acted the real ‘perfessor.’24 If this vision of ex-slave ‘antiquity’ is valid, the movement of ‘live ’ poetry to ‘script’ always figures, for black writers, a break with audience and a turn to readership – that is to say, a separation from black auditors and an exposure to white critics. Ironically, though, it is this retreat/graduation into print that accords the black performer-poet greater legitimacy, authority, and permanence than that won by those who temporarily create a receptive audience that is, in every sense, ‘merely’ a speech community. I mean: black-sponsored orality is generally directed towards black audiences, who respond authentically – spontaneously – to the stimulation of the performance.25 But black-authored print is scrutinized most readily by whites. This point demands that the black ‘performance ’ lyric receive a different ‘reading’ or assessment than that given conventional European ‘print’ poetry, for it dashes lettered orthodoxies.26 Agreed: All good poetry asserts defiance of those formal and grammatical features that would silence its expressive originality (in syntax, diction, imagery). Carrie Noland establishes that ‘poetry is in fact implicated in and often formative of subcultural and minority identities, discursive constructions of the nation, everyday practices, folk and rock music, and the images and compositional strategies of advertising and MTV’ (1997, 42). 27 For the black writer conversant with the media world of his or her audience, where stylistic ‘flash’ and verbal ‘flaming’ are de rigueur elements of ‘street cred,’ the lyric poem must negotiate ‘film, popular fiction, journalism, and advertising’ (45). This citational dynamism is a prerequisite for pop ‘relevance,’ for, wagers Noland in a study of French modernist poet Blaise Cendrars, ‘poetic language, even if drawn from advertising, can only increase in density and thus in value when read as interacting with and as having been formed in relation to its various discursive intertexts’ (49). The Negro bard who adopts such a poetic may seek to ‘electrify’ an audience, not hold readers ‘spell-bound.’ Certainly, the hip hop aesthetic of sampling riffs and words – of creating a (usually) danceable, aural collage – represents this tendency to engage with every form of discourse, from graffiti to television newscasts, to clad one’s works with ‘relevance ’ (or commercial appeal).28 Tobagan-Canadian poet M. NourbeSe Philip practises just such a poetic, splicing to-

bring da noise

181

gether, in one book, ‘poetry and polemic’ and ‘writing in a language that is neither “standard” English nor Caribbean demotic but a syncretic language that draws on a spectrum of Englishes’ (Mahlis 2005, 166). By so doing, Philip ‘remakes English in the image of the Anglophone Caribbean’ (167). Philip herself realizes that ‘the bringing together of different genres in one piece points to the idea of poly-vocality that is so much a part of the Caribbean aesthetic, and I see that poly-vocality expressing itself in the poly-formal’ (P. Saunders 2005, 215). Philip’s polyphony exemplifies African diasporic speech in general. Hence, H. Samy Alim asks, ‘If the Black speech community possesses a range of styles that are suitable for all of its communicative needs, then why the coercion and imposition of White styles?’ (2006, 68; my italics). And if the out-and-out black poet – African, American, Canadian, or Caribbean – insists on the performative grace of his or her work, why must he or she be assessed (condemned) by the print conventions of Eurocentric poetry?29

young: Gifted and Black The cover of d’bi.young’s debut collection, art on black (2006), enacts an African-Canadian manifesto: the poet’s shaved head, sombre face, and naked shoulders bear white-paint, geometric designs. Art is literally on her black skin. This aesthetic is reversed as soon as one encounters the black words on the white page: Can the author’s blackness still be voiced in this white arena? First, the dub poet is a poet first. She ransacks rhetoric to cast forth her being. In her vital essay ‘“Always a Poem, Once a Book”: Motivations and Strategies for Print Textualizing of Caribbean-Canadian Dub and Performance Poetry,’ Euro-Canadian scholar Susan Gingell assures us, ‘Canadian dub poets have brought dub to the page in a wide range of ways’ (2005, 220): These include providing introductions and other explanatory apparatuses; using contextualizing illustrations and other graphics; exploiting the semantic possibilities of unusual placement of words and letters on the page; privileging sound over verbal semantics; using varying fonts and letter sizes, and employing capitals to script differing voices and sound dynamics; deploying non-alphabetic symbols as semantic resources; making allusions to substantive and stylistic aspects of music and other parts of oral traditions to link the written texts to the oral and to guide how the texts should be vocalized; and paying careful attention to prosody and using non-standard spelling and code-switching in order to convey the ‘riddims’ and other phonological dimensions of Caribbean English Creoles and dub itself. (222)30

Here is the panoply of grammatical-guerilla tactics that poets like young employ to force their loud presence into the recalcitrant – and muffling – alabaster canons of English.31 Her opening poem, ‘I dub poet d’bi.young,’ presents a triptych of the poet’s interests and self-styles. Each section is a separate stanza. In Part I, the poet portrays her developing, musicmediated, literary-political consciousness: sometimes She-wind shifts her course swirls softly about my head making me remember dub plates dancing on black vinyl

182 Directions home a slow rub-a-dub pounding the pressures of a people transferred (young 2006, 6)

The circular movement of a breeze about the poet’s head reminds her of the spinning records and their individual ‘tracks’ that she encountered in her childhood. Her adult self knows, however, that these recordings were not mere entertainment but addressed the ‘pressures’ endured by migrant parents and elders. This personal history informs her assessment, as the stanza continues, that ‘dub/poetry [birthed] herself through a canal / of concrete jungle/chaos and/community.’ young suggests that she – her mature consciousness – was born simultaneously with dub, as it emerged from ‘mean streets’ and housing projects (Canuck ghettoes), until she became one more ‘griot in americas’ (6). 32 The ‘She-wind’ resembles a goddess: she brings revelation to a chosen recipient. The movement of the wind conjures the cyclical revolutions of stereo recordings, and resuscitates the ‘record’ – memory – of the speaker’s poetic and political maturation. Part II of this ars poetica spurns standard English, favouring instead the sound – obtained via orthography – of Jamaican patois.33 Here young – as ‘roots dawtah’ – pushes ‘’gainst di parametah of a box-like strukchah. envisioning a more circular. form.’ She depicts the standard stanzas as ‘boxy’ – implying a staticity of style and content. Opposed to these ‘cramped’ forms, young extols the virtues of the ‘circular’ – that is, the art of speaking (‘dub’) ‘ovah’ a 33 or 45 rpm recording. This page-free versifying allows ‘popular reggae vibez’ to be reproduced by youths ‘siddung pon street cornah’ who also ‘chant dung babylon.’ This communal, soulful creativity (and political or religious sermonizing) constitutes a ‘cycle ’ or ‘circle… weh mus continue.’ Thus, young’s use of patois shows a commitment to ‘recycle’ her youthful introduction to communal song-poem composing. But this ‘circle’ also recalls the ‘womb’ (6): young asserts the special agency (or responsibility) of the black woman poet to carry on the ‘cycle ’ of ‘singing’ the political troubles and aspirations of her people. Part III of ‘I dub poet d’bi.young’ revisits the standard English of Part I, but repeats the concerns of both Parts I and II. young acknowledges she is a poet whose heart is ‘in balance with the wind’ (7) – presumably the ‘She-wind’ (6) of Part I. Her duty, as ‘one,’ is to compose ‘many / herstories.’ Even so, this documentation is threatened by erasure: ‘I am tomorrow’s forgotten yesterday / a programmed amnesia.’ While she adopts the responsibility to further the ‘cycle ’ or ‘circle ’ of recitation of communal memory and commentary, she also fears that this process represents ‘a dys/functional re/invention of the wheel’ or ‘changing remaining the same.’ Yes, young speaks of black (Caribbean) history, employs patois to do so, and puts public address to music. But she also frets that such activity will go unremembered – or unrecorded: ‘how will the scroll keepers grow / my son / how will you grow?’ (7) Writing – publishing – her verse is one means, if congenitally dissatisfying, of putting communal speech into civilization-wide circulation. Her son, once older, may open – unscroll – art on black and find its wisdom-verse freshly ready for iteration and promulgation.34 ‘A poem for rosie douglas’ also meditates on the poet’s commission to pass on Afro-Caribbean-Canadian history. Roosevelt ‘Rosie’ Douglas (1942–2000), as a graduate student in Canada in the later 1960s, spearheaded a historic protest at Sir George Williams University (now Concordia) in Montreal in February 1969, against allegedly racist grading practices. He was incarcerated for eighteen months for his troubles, and then deported from Canada in 1974. Elected a member of the parliament of Dominica in 1985, he became its prime minister in 2000, but died before the first anniversary of his ascension. These biographical and political details are absent

bring da noise

183

from young’s eulogy: she expects her readers to understand Douglas’s importance because he merits this poem.35 Repeating the theme of her introductory poem – her concern over the cyclical erasure of Negro history, she connects Douglas’s death to the loss of a library: lawd anoddah library burn down anoddah one (young 2006, 32)

In fact, Douglas’s death is akin to the loss of history itself: I watch you go as tomorrow mourns dis history claims (32)

The third stanza praises Douglas’s ‘cross / into / freedom land.’ But these plain lines acquire force only when set in the context of a Negro and African diasporic history of resistance to slavery, colonialism, and neo-imperialism. Significantly, the verb ‘cross’ ferries the memory of the initial, transatlantic crossing that brought Africans to the Americas as slaves, but also the memory of slave escapes effected by crossings of terrain and wet. However, here, the escape – or passage – is not to Canada or any worldly (supposed) refuge but into the ‘freedom land’ of death. (These lines may be read ironically, too, as referring to Douglas’s arrival in Canada as a student, only to discover that it was not the ‘Canaan’ its Underground Railroad history advertised it as being.) The poem closes, ‘come mek we celebrate / rosie gawn’ (32). Yet, celebration can be effected only in the context of a retrieval of Douglas’s biography along with his Marxist anti-racism and anti-imperialism. For the poem to progress effectively from mourning the loss of a ‘library’ to exulting in Douglas’s ‘cross,’ the poet must ‘recycle ’ Douglas’s historical meaning. In other words, this poem cannot know its full potential unless the poet performs – brings to life – Douglas’s biography and radical politics and their connections to wider African diasporic history. I have said before that ‘because African-Canadian history is ignored in Canada, African-Canadian writers are forced to act as historians’ (G. Clarke 1997a, xx). A signal poetic of performance is, then, for young, and other Negro spoken word poets, to dramatize chronicles that would otherwise go unheard or remain unknown. Each African-Canadian/Afro-Caribbean performance poet is compelled to act out and recite hitherto repressed and ‘whited-out’ history… The longest poem in art on black is ‘brown skin lady,’ whose twelve parts narrate the speaker’s shifting responses to her native Jamaica (during a visit ‘home ’) as well as to her sojourn in Canada. Writ mainly in standard English, the poem seems directed to non-Jamaican-patois speakers, and even to Euro-Canadians specifically, to inform them how harsh and unaccommodating their Canada can be for an Afro-Caribbean immigrant: when I walked in jamaica … i embraced my soul allowed her to kiss my face and sweat canada out of my pores (young 2006, 83)

184 Directions home

The speaker feels literally touched by Jamaica(ns): ‘jamaica had not forgotten what I felt like ’ (84). But as the poem continues, and she outgrows the experience of ‘heat and nostalgia’ (83), she encounters dreadful news that strips the island of all Edenic pretensions. She learns of the murder of ‘horrett, my man when I was way too young to have one’ (84): dem tek juney frock from off di clothes line wrap it round him head so nobody wouldah hear and shot him dead two time rain di fall di morning (84)

Justly, this visual information unfolds in patois, reinforcing the truth that this episode of violence is specific to (Black) Jamaica. The passage concludes with the repetition of ‘horrett / my man when i was too young to have one,’ though, now, ‘I’ appears in lower case: the revelation of Horrett’s death humbles the speaker: ‘I want to crawl into you jamaica / protect me from yourself.’ Recalling her days as a schoolgirl at the elite ‘campion college,’ the poet notes how her ‘thickghetto-jamaican-accent’ was forced to ‘almost fit’ (85): I spoke like this at home ‘nuh becuz mi poor mean mi nuh belong ’ere mi belong ’ere jus as much as you do’ the same sentence the campion way the british jamaican way the best of the best way ‘not because i am poor means i do not belong here I belong here just as much as you do’ (84)

The shifting majuscule and minuscule self allows the speaker’s divided tongue to echo her split Jamaican culture (discourse): one part is ‘ghetto’ fact; the other is ‘elite ’ Brit fantasy. However, the speaker’s identity is further altered by her Canadian life: I still had my accent which come to think of it sounded different compared to the others I felt like a fucking tourist in my own country [Jamaica] fifteen years there six years here [in Canada]

bring da noise

185

in retrospect even a year here is too long strip my tongue my identity (90)

Although Canada is pictured as the cause of the poet’s linguistic difference and cultural separation from her native land, the primary intellectual division between the poet and Jamaica was wrought by her education (indoctrination) there ‘for four fucking years’ (86) to repress her maternal, ‘ghetto’ voice in favour of speaking ‘elite’ English. Years in Canada have worsened this division – so that the Jamaican poet no longer sounds readily Jamaican. Shorn of nostalgia, young’s analysis shows that her alienation from ‘roots’ Jamaicans began with her accession to an upper-class education. young’s movements between ‘i’ and ‘I,’ patois and the Queen’s English, Jamaican and Canadian settings and interests, are depicted – in print – orthographically and grammatically. However, her possession of a bifurcated tongue – and consciousness – is best announced in vocal performance. Accordingly, Maria Caridad Casas finds that, with respect to a speech continuum, ‘orality is in the dialect of one end while literacy is in the dialect of the other (a dialect … much closer to the grapholect [written] in syntax and lexis)’ (2002, 21).36 young’s command of written versions of patois and spoken styles of standard (Canadian) English (and vice versa) reveals what she sometimes feels as ‘division,’ but it also allows her the freedom to exploit multiple discourses. These speech-acts may include ‘the romantic, with its roots in Montaigne ’s noble savage; youth culture, with its “sound” [black pop music]; reggae as a political protest tradition; and images of Creole speakers as the underclass, the poor, and the Other’ (ibid.).37 Too, young may embrace – perform – the roles of the historian, the rhetorician, the confessor, and the (bisexual) lover…

Oni: ‘Haitian Sensation’ Oni Joseph writes in English, but her performance moniker, ‘Oni the Haitian Sensation,’ stresses that her first culture is Haitian, whose popular tongue is Creole – the indigenous French form. Bilingual (in Canuck French and English), Oni also commands Haitian Creole and AfricanAmerican Vernacular English (AAVE). Based in (bilingual) Ottawa, but also an ex-resident of the neighbourhood of South Central Los Angeles (a cradle – hotbed – of rap and hip hop), Oni employs AAVE as skilfully as she does French, Haitian Creole, and Her Majesty’s English. Although she has authored Ghettostocracy (2006), Oni is, first, a performance poet. She has recorded her words on compact disc and projected them (orally) in film. While young splices together Jamaican patois and imperial English in stanzas that privilege lower-case spellings and shifting rhythms and employ little punctuation, Oni prefers majuscule-headed lines, rhythmic rhyme (internal and end), and punctuation that ‘scores’ the reading.38 Stylistically speaking, if young replays e.e. cummings, Oni channels Robert Frost.39 Oni’s title poem seems to conjure an African-American ghetto. Characters such as ‘The Queen of Spades,’ ‘who has three baby-daddies’ and who calls herself ‘welfare ’s property’ and keeps ‘food stamps in [her] bra’ (Oni 2006, 15), look indelibly Afro-‘urban,’ perhaps even stereotypically evocative of South Central LA. Wickedly though, in signing her introduction to the book, Oni locates herself in ‘South Central Ottawa, Ontario’ (12). She signals that her ostensibly

186 Directions home

gritty African-American depictions apply with equal force to urban Canada. Too, she says she descends from ‘a long line of naturally Black Haitian poets’ (9): from this francophone perspective, the Afro-anglophone lifestyles of LA and Ottawa are more similar than not. The poet states forthrightly, ‘In 1997, I lived in Crip [Los Angeles gang] territory, with a Canadien accent’ (10). ‘Gangster Alliance ’ makes explicit the American and Canadian likeness: ‘Fourteen days of death in the fall of 2002 / In South Central LA, / Plus the Bloody Weekends in Toronto’ (21). While young highlights the differences between (rich, white) Canada and (poor, black) Jamaica, Oni cites the similarities between (black) Canada and (black) America. Presuming that the social realities of African Americans and African Canadians harmonize, Oni diagnoses their mutual vices. Her critique of ‘Gwen’ analyses, then, a treacherous black woman ‘friend,’ one who could straddle either side of the forty-ninth parallel – that is, show up (or show off ) in either New York or North York: Gwen painted her face with caramel and fudge. Her cherry-stained lips never had a smudge. Belly had a pudge, she hardly ever budged. She held a big grudge if her beauty was misjudged. Gwen and I met guys named Stan and Sam Stan was fly, Sam was mine, Stan was her man. Gwen was fine not refined, she had a plan – To become the concubine of Stan and Sam. Gwen and I had an eye for men – If I checked one, Gwen checked ten. (Oni 2006, 31)

The swinging, Skeltonic end-rhymes and insistent internal rhymes yield easy aural comprehension (and play) when read aloud, so that the ‘love-game-playing’ – or ‘Jezebel’ – Gwen is starkly paraded as such. The Mother Goose simplicity of the quatrains casts the speaker’s discourse as wisdom intrinsic to smart survival in an arena of amoral romance. Yet, appropriately dramatic recitation, stressing ‘voice quality, timbre, pitch, and movement style making its sounds’ (Casas 2002, 25), along with gesticulations and wordlessly communicative facial expressions, can only enhance the reception of this poem. Turning explicitly to heterosexual relations in the ‘Love Hustle ’ section of her five-part book, Oni drafts a Shakespearean ‘come-on’ in which the Bard himself meets an uproarious comeuppance – in the verbal verve, sly slang, puns, euphemisms, and mock Elizabethan style of ‘Bitches in Ditches,’ a poem that requires complete quotation: Thou paper-faced, fod fat rabbit sucker, Shake your hideous, shag-eared, clot-pole. Saucy bitches in ditches, mud-brained, Hideous, evil-eyed, dog-hearted, Lewd, wannabe whoresons, motley-minded Hideous, eye-offending, soul creatures, Piss off! Run mad, and addeth unmuzzled,

bring da noise

187

Saucy, yeasty rump-fed, queasy, jaded lies And thou shalt have rank, empty-hearted bits Of pernicious gruel between thou thighs. Anon knavish kitty, let thyself go. Thou purpled labia, rug-headed sow, Knowest thy meaning of thy noun, ‘hoe cake ’ Let they self match visual imagery That suits the true likes of thou raw-boned foe! Thou wretch’d, roynish, onion-eyed lass, Peevish-witted karma will kick thy fat ass! Thou gnarling, drooling, shaved kitty cat growls And combineth grace with mold on thy towel. Thy pinch-spotted, jackanape stories are foul. (Oni 2006, 54)38

Beyond their generously lewd nature, their witty assault on the licentious activities of lascivious lovers, these joyously anarchic lines tend to evade mere ‘sense.’ Almost as insolently insular as Lewis Carroll’s ‘Jabberwocky’ (1871), Oni’s poem infuses the English literary heritage with hip hop rhetoric, to compose an excoriation of ‘loose’ women and ‘fast’ men. It is Juvenalian satire – a Philippic – a congeries (or pile of words). But it also replays the African-American street-insult game, ‘the dozens,’ wherein competitors attempt to ‘one-up’ each other by spouting explicit and graphic outrages about each other’s families, parents, lovers, or spouses. (One loses when one ceases to be able to instantly invent creatively shaming retorts, or, worse, resorts to force to silence an opponent.) Yes, playful is her language, but Oni’s poem constitutes fightin’ words – a denunciation of sexual immorality. Yet, her decision to juxtapose archaic Elizabethan terms and contemporary slang also reminds her audience that oft-disparaged AAVE descends, powerfully, from the entirety of the English poetic canon – even as it perennially proclaims its dissent from same. Oni indulges dexterous rhymes and muscular rhythms, while flirting slyly with a four-letter vulgarity, in ‘Who Gives a Flux?’ Though formally couplet-conservative, the poem offers a stream-of-consciousness recitation of the poet’s life, poetics, and politics: Too many fluxing phony phonies out there claim that they are fluxing ripe. I’m fluxing lyrically imbalanced, and my fluxing rhymes are fluxing tight! … I’m the best poetic, diva flux that you ever, fluxing had! Even my fluxing kindergarten teacher will tell you that I was so fluxing bad! Fluxing sperm donors should never flux with the fluxing word, ‘dad.’ If I got any fluxing child support payments, I’d be so fluxing glad. I treat fluxing metaphors like fluxing whores, like a fluxing lyrical pimp. My verbal inflorescence will flux you up like a fluxing imp. (Oni 2006, 103)

188 Directions home

These devious and delicious rhymes do not sit well on the page, for they want to ‘get up offa that thang’ and hog the spotlight and be heard. The poem is a triumphant series of shouts – or ‘shout-outs’ – that showcase the speaker as a masterful student of pop culture, slang, hip hop, and literature. It is, in short, a manifesto for sexual and artistic independence: ‘Flux cockblockers, I’m fluxing multi-orgasmic and I’m fluxing cataclysmic. / Ever since I performed in the Vagina Monologues, my fluxing pussy is fluxing // Algorithmic’ (104). The concatenation of rhyme permits the poem an endless supply of surprise – or intellectual energy expressed through snappy social commentary. The poem could be – should be – performed, maybe with a snarl, à la Bob Dylan’s anthemic and radical rock recording ‘Like a Rolling Stone.’ Familiar with Elizabethan pyrotechnic ‘metaphysics’ as well as the ferocious put-downs and truth-trumpeting word games of Negro urbanity, Oni invests her texts with a quality absent from much postmodern poetry: wit. She slings bons mots everywhere: couplets calculated to coax a smile or prod reverie. See ‘Love Letter to My Boo’: If you give me a chance, gurl, I’ll try to make you mine. Your curves are soft like puddin, And you have the juiciest behind… I love your nappy head, gurl. Damn gurl! You have good hair! If you fry it like bacon, it would mess up your flair. (Oni 2006, 53)

See also ‘I Knead Your Nuts’: Yesterday, a Blackman Pulled a trigger – It was his phallus – And he shot me like a ni@@er, The bullet holes in my womb were deep. In nine months, The resurrection had hands and feet.40 (Oni 2006, 59)

Most black men and women hearing Oni’s recitation of such images – ‘hip,’ ‘relevant,’ and bluesy (ballsy) – would emit a roar, a sob, or a loud amen, of recognition. Existentialism is usually a brooding, stoic affair, but here it turns rollicking and subversive: half Albert Camus and half Yma Sumac.

Percussive Conclusion On a cold Saturday night in January 2003, I joined a standing-room-only crowd of 300 at a downtown Toronto nightclub, where, after each having paid the notable ‘cover’ charge of $15, we were treated to the live recitation of their works by fifteen black women poets from Canada and the United States. For two hours, these performers (whose ranks included Oni) charmed a tough urban audience, eliciting spontaneous whoops and hollers, applause and cheers, whenever they coined a formidable rhyme or stirring phrase or expressed some rousing, undeniable, shocking, or mirthful truth.

bring da noise

189

Oft have I reflected on that night, recognizing that few page-bound poets – despite their fame – could draw such a rapt and paying congregation. Yet, the same Oni who received the adulation of the nightclub crowd won only the disrespect of a literary jury.41 The divide, in Canadian letters, between those who speak, sweat, and gesticulate, and those who mumble in a monotone while covering their mouths and faces with their books, gapes still, and the abyss between both remains coloured – stained – by ‘race.’ No matter this pain – their absence from the Eurocentric (white) anthologies and the ranks of grant recipients – Afro-Caribbean-Canadian poets such as d’bi. young and Oni the Haitian Sensation refresh and renew all of English-Canadian poetry. They remind us that poetry is also music, whatever else it is, and that the lyric poem is also a theatre – a one-woman (or one-man) show, demanding, for its success, the employment of all the resources of rhetoric and drama. This insight into the production of verse – that it must emerge from an engaged body – is drawn from black community life (in the Caribbean, in America, in Canada, and – via DNA molecules – in Africa), but it also hearkens back to the origins of English poetry itself – not just to the royal court and the chapels and colleges of the nobility, but also to the pubs and brothels of the peasantry. The rejection of performance poetry – or of black spoken word verse – by the white aristocracy of Academia is nothing but a reactionary attack upon the possibility of a popular poetry that articulates the deepest feelings of its auditors.42 And yet, the orality of Negro poetry always will out, bursting through all stifling blandishments and suffocating erasures, because those who choose to speak their verse seek both to face brethren and sistren blacks and to face down (white) racists. Poetry puts on flesh only when it pulses in speech. Indelibly, orality scores Negro poetry. But not everyone has ‘ears to hear,’ much to the chagrin of many African diasporic authors, including U.S. native Frederick Ward. His excellence has largely been unrecognized due to the critical silence that shrouds too many bards of colour in Canada. It is high time that Ward find, not just rehabilitation, but advancement – to assume a commanding position at the summit of Canadian literature…

15 Frederick Ward: Writing as Jazz For Diana Brebner (1956–2001)1

Diagnosis of a Disappearance One of the drab clichés, one of the dreary stereotypes, to be spouted by anyone deigning to comment on African diasporic writing is that the black author is a would-be or a used-ta-be musician or singer. In the popular perception of popular cultures, every black writer is, at birth, swaddled in sheet music, and begins to sing even before he or she can speak. These conceptions also attach to African-Canadian writers, who, defined as bizarre exotica by their compatriots, are presumed to have taken up print keyboards because they have eschewed, perversely, the natural, musical ones. Yet, there is – insidiously – bountiful reason for the common belief. For instance, an entire school of poets – the dub poets – that is, Lillian Allen, Klyde Broox, Afua Cooper, Rudyard Fearon, Clifton Joseph, Ahdri Zhina Mandiela, and Motion (Wendy Braithwaite), to name only a Toronto-based and principally Jamaican-born few, perform their works within a musical tapestry, often a form of reggae (the Jamaican influence) or rap (the African-American orientation).2 Certainly, Ghana-born, Jamaica-raised, Canada-educated poet Kwame Dawes performs reggae and drafts poetry (plus ‘lit crit’). Vancouver poet Wayde Compton DJs at his own readings; Montreal’s Kaie Kellough mixes French and English in ways as radical as any Jimi Hendrix guitar solo. Kenyan-Canadian novelist David Odhiambo sketches an acid-jazz band leader in skanky East End Vancouver in his novel diss / ed banded nation (1998). Toronto poets Dwayne Morgan and Andrea Thompson release books – and CDs that are recordings of their books. Literary figures such as Trinidadian-Canadian poets Dionne Brand and Claire Harris, Tobagan-Canadian M. NourbeSe Philip, Barbadian-Canadian novelist Austin Clarke, and the Haitian-Canadian novelist Dany Laferrière refer to African-American jazz and blues singers in their creative writings as well as in their essays. If we add the Canadian poets (black) who employ jazz in their performances, or as subject matter, then almost every African-Canadian poet may be said to be vested, one way or another, in music. But the baddest (in the 1960s ‘Af-Am’ slang sense), hippest, and mos’ def ’ word-composerarranger in Canada is the least sounded, the least heard, the least understood. I refer here to Frederick E. Ward – or Fred Ward – whose published oeuvre consists of only three novels, two poetry collections, and scatterings of stories, plays, and poems among anthologies, one of them (edited by Ward himself ) now more than forty-five years old (Anthology of Nine Baha’i Poets [1966]).

frederick ward

191

African American by birth – in Kansas City, Missouri, in 1937 – and resident in Canada since 1970, Ward has received always ecstatic acclaim yet remains as opaquely phantasmal as a ghost writer, save that his obscurity is not chosen. He is excluded from African-American anthologies and omitted from Canadian ones.3 One cannot find Ward in either The Oxford Companion to African-American Literature (1997) or The Oxford Companion to Canadian Literature (1997). All of his books are out of print.4 He is the Invisible Man of African-American literature and the Sasquatch of English-Canadian literature. That he lays legitimate claim to the attention of two national(ist) literatures explains his rejection by both. His one-time publisher, May Cutler of Tundra Books of Montreal said, thirty years ago when his third novel appeared, ‘It’s just not permissable [sic] for a black American writer to live in Nova Scotia’ (Kimber 1981, 37). True: Few African-American writers resident in Canada have won sustained attention. (One exception is Josiah Henson, the putative real-life model for Harriet Beecher Stowe ’s ‘Uncle Tom,’ whose own ghost-written memoirs appeared in 1849.) Cutler’s assumption that white Canadians don’t want to hear about African America from a writer living here is also probably right. For complex reasons of nationalism, European Canadians prefer to hear tales about the supposed degradation of African-American life from writers living there. Cutler is also depressingly correct to assume that African-Americans, for complex reasons of their own nationalism, may shy away from most of their expatriate writers (the later Richard Wright, the post-mortem Frank Yerby).5 Still, white ethnocentrism also plays a role in apportioning obscurity to black writers – especially those working in non-mimetic modes. This phenomenon transgresses borders. U.S. African-Americanist Aldon Lynn Nielsen, in his persuasive book Black Chant: Languages of African-American Postmodernism, registers that ‘critics of white poetry simply seldom look at black writers while compiling their genealogies of aesthetic evolution’ (1997a, 13). Shamelessly, there exists, he feels, a ‘disinclination on the part of most critics to discover African-American literary precedents for white avant-garde writing’ (71). In fact, ‘historians of avant-garde movements in American poetry have tended to write as if black Americans had little direct involvement, and hence our histories have tended to elide the powerful influence of black poets on American verse in general and “experimental” verse in particular’ (259). Thus, T.J. Anderson III, in his article ‘Body and Soul: Bob Kaufman’s Golden Sardine’ (2000), argues that ‘writers like Kenneth Rexroth and Jack Kerouac have received more notoriety for their jazz-inspired verse than have innovators like Bob Kaufman, Amiri Baraka, and Ted Joans… Even a recent compilation by Rhino Records called The Beat Generation fails to include any work by these three African American innovators’ (2000, 345, n.1). European-Canadian editors and critics have been no better at chronicling black participation in the construction of either Canadian literature or music. A flagrant example is the treatment of the spoken word movement. Discussions of the development of ‘spoken word’ poetry in Canada have focused on white innovators such as the sound-poetry quartet the Four Horsemen (bp nichol, Steven McCaffrey, Rafael Barreto-Rivera, and Paul Dutton), active mainly between 1970 and the mid-1980s.6 But little is said of Brand’s work with the Gayap Drummers, or of the championing of dub poetry by Allen, Joseph, and others. Yet these black creators were disseminating rhythm backed with reasoned dissent throughout the 1970s and 1980s in Toronto, the capital of English-Canadian culture, while Ward was melding poetry and drama in Halifax and Montreal. In his review of CARNIVOCAL: A Celebration of Sound Poetry, a compact disc anthology of Anglo-Canadian sound poetry edited by Stephen Scobie and Douglas Barbour, spoken word

192 Directions home

poet John Sobol recognizes that the editors’ de facto canonizations enact some salient omissions: ‘In their liner notes, Barbour and Scobie contend that “while sound poetry borders on and sometimes overlaps other performance-based genres (song, rap, dub, slam), it is distinguished by its relative nonreliance on syntax and discursive statement.” But wait a minute. If sound poetry at times overlaps with dub, rap or slam poetry, why is there no non-discursive dub, rap or slam poetry on Carnivocal?’ (Sobol 1999, 40). Irritated, Sobol then asks, ‘What is gained by creating an almost exclusively white, male, Anglo-Canadian sound poetry canon? And what is lost? Why are the editors manning the aesthetic barricades when the real carnival is underway outside?’ (40).7 While Eurocentrism – and African-American-centrism – bedevil the acceptance of Ward’s work, he is not relegated to obscurity just because he is a minority in two challenging contexts (an African-American expat in Canada and a Canadian relocatee ex African America), but also because he is a writer whose texts are profoundly grounded in music, particularly jazz. His plight is not just one of ostracism from the ‘national’ literatures that should be most accommodating of his work. It is much worse: he is the devotee of ‘deviant’ genres, namely, jazz-inflected poetry and jazzy fiction. Observe that every significant black jazz-poet or jazz-novelist is, ironically, correspondingly obscure – save for Amiri Baraka and Ntozake Shange (who is known, I wager, for one great work: for colored girls who have considered suicide / when the rainbow is enuf [1977]).8 In the preface, then, to their influential work, The Jazz Poetry Anthology, editors Sascha Feinstein and Yusuf Komunyakaa proclaim that they include ‘a large percentage of lesser-known poets, many of whom deserve more recognition than they have received’ (1991, xviii).9 Avant-garde jazz and avant-garde poetry are both minority discourses. Thus, commentator after commentator conjures up shadowy or forgotten black jazz-poets – as if he or she were conducting some séance. T.J. Anderson realizes that African-American jazz-poet Bob Kaufman (1926–86), despite garnering awards and prizes, ‘was to remain fairly anonymous, financially impoverished, and addicted to methedrine for most of his life’ (2000, 333).10 Nielsen complains that ‘once more we see repeated a pattern whereby entire groupings of African-American poets once widely anthologized and seen as contemporary contributors to the innovation of new black poetries are deaccessioned from the steadily constricting canon of black poets available for critical attention and university instruction’ (1997a, 60–1). These ‘lost’ poets include several jazz-performers of the 1950s and early 1960s. Nielsen laments, ‘The texts of this early period of black postmodernity are mostly fugitive, having passed out of print or never having been printed in the first place ’ (82). Easily then, one review of Ward is headlined ‘Halifax’s Hot, but Unknown, Author’ (Kimber 1981). Publicity for a reading series at the National Library in Ottawa, in which Ward participated in 1988, charges, ‘It is an undisputed fact that the work of those writers whose inspiration comes from a strong sense of ethnocultural heritage has not as yet achieved full recognition in the mainstream of Canadian literature,’ particularly Ward, whose ‘musical training never left him’ and whose entire oeuvre is informed by music (Cayley 1988, 11). Ward is one more jazzattuned poet to see his offerings fall into the blank, silent limbo dividing orality and literature.11

Founding a Poetics of Jazz Literature The reception – or non-reception – of Ward underscores the notion that the critical problem for critics is the practical one of ‘reading.’ In this case, they (we) do not know how to read Ward.

frederick ward

193

One journalist-critic notes, rightly, that Ward has a ‘sometimes difficult, complex, avant-garde writing style ’ (Kimber 1981, 37). But difficulty in poetry is akin to dissonance in jazz, and is just as enjoyable, if we can discern the beat. But one dilemma remains: Canadians cannot hear the jazz in our literature. Efforts to appreciate what one reviewer calls ‘literary jazz’12 (ibid.), either by Ward or by others, dissolve into cranky impressionism or bankrupt silence or skanky dismissal. In a 1996 article contesting critiques of Miles Davis’s trumpeting, Robert Walser comments: ‘Prevalent methods of jazz analysis, borrowed from the toolbox of musicology, provide excellent means for legitimating jazz in the academy. But they are clearly inadequate to the task of helping us to understand jazz… They offer only a kind of mystified, ahistorical, text-based legitimacy, within which rhetoric and signifyin’ are invisible ’ (1996, 179).13 Unable to generate an ‘analytical vocabulary that [can] do justice to their perceptions’ (180), critics have been unable to articulate convincingly either their approval or their disapproval of Davis’s playing. Hear Walser again: ‘Davis’s consistent and deliberate use of risky techniques and constant transgression of genre boundaries are antithetical to ‘classicism’ and cannot be explained by formalism; from such perspectives, unusual content looks like flawed form. That is why so many critics have responded to Davis’s music with puzzlement, hostility, or an uneasy silence ’ (172). Elsewhere, the paucity of responsible and responsive modes for critiquing jazz inspires a medieval racialism. Check Ronald M. Radano’s revelation of the treatment of Anthony Braxton by a 1977 Newsweek writer: ‘Newsweek’s characterization of Braxton, the “free spirit,” as the modern version of the antediluvian noisemaker captures the mass of stereotypes of “the most innovative force in the world of jazz”’ (1996, 209–10): ‘Braxton is a virtuoso on the saxophone, and the instrument has never been subject to such assault. He squeezes out bizarre sounds and clashing, hitherto unheard tone colors. He plays like a man possessed, in a paroxysm of animalistic grunts, honks, rasps, and hollers. He rends the fabric of conventional musical language as he reaches into himself – and back into pre-history – for some primordial means of communication’ (Saal 1977, 52–3).14 Deliciously – or seditiously – Radano opines that, for some critics, ‘Braxton represented the supreme anomaly: while possessing the “calculating mind” of an “intellectual,” he reinforced traditional images of jazz through his blackness’ (1996, 208). The promulgations of duplicitous depictions of jazz emphasize, again, the relative lack of a vocabulary that can assess the art forensically. But if jazz music poses explanatory difficulties for its auditors, jazz-infused writing is just as challenging. Hence, in the article ‘Jazz’ in The Norton Anthology of African American Literature (1997), the anonymous author anticipates – hopes – ‘in the years to come, students of African American culture will find more ways to talk about the elements of jazz – its vamps (or introductory statements), breaks (or solos), riffs (repeated structural phrases), choruses (main themes), bridges (secondary, connecting themes), call/response patterns, improvisations, syncopated cadences, and other definitive structures – and the ways in which they operate in the pages of a book’ (Jazz 1997, 56). Thanks to this absence of critical proficiency, a savvy practitioner of the jazzed-up-literature genre – Mr15 F.E.W. – languishes in our deaf illiteracy. But what do we mean by ‘jazz poetry’ or ‘jazz literature’? Definitions fluctuate between emphasizing styles – such as phrasing or line breaks or stream-of-consciousness liberty – or just subject matter: a paean for saxophonist Charlie Parker, even if written in strict sonnet form, is a ‘jazz’ poem according to this criterion. To advance, we need to think about jazz music and the ways in which it can be manifested in print. Significantly, jazz is a vesper of oral African-African culture.16 The Norton Anthology author provides this sound recording of the anthropological origins of jazz in Black U.S. speech:

194 Directions home Jazz was primarily an instrumental music strongly impacted by the sound of the African American voice. What this music can sound like more than anything else is the jam-session-like talk and song from the Harlems of America and from its southern roads. In a real sense, the sound of jazz is that of the African American voice scored as band music, with all of black talk’s flair for story-telling as well as the dirty dozens, understatement as well as braggadocio, whispery romance as well as loud-talk menace, the exalted eloquence of a Martin Luther King and the spare dry poetry of a pool-hall boast or a jump-rope rhyme. (Jazz 1997, 55)

According to this conception, ‘jazz-directed writing’ accords the voice primacy. Ward scores this poetic: His writing aspires to the condition of jazz vocals – or vocalized jazz. The Norton Anthology writer stresses that jazz dialogues with speech: ‘All of that “talking and testifying” and “speaking and speechifying” boldly make their way into this music, giving it great force and flavor. Once singers got into the jazz act, they tended to follow Louis Armstrong in using their voices as if they were jazz instruments – which meant, ironically, that they were voices imitating instruments that were imitating voices!’ (Jazz 1997, 55–6). Ward’s work is nothing if not flush and plush – or chock-a-block – with voices. In his article ‘Poetry and Jazz: A Twentieth-Century Wedding,’ Barry Wallenstein establishes the importance of oral religious performance to the development of jazz-styled vocals: ‘Jazz with poetic elements actually has origins in the church services of plantation blacks, where the preacher was one of the community who had a way with words. Like the poet/priests of ancient times, these preachers were said to have received the “call” from heaven. Their sermons moved emotionally and fluidly from speech to poetry: “to song to dance to moaning and back again,” as one ex-slave has said’ (1991, 598). This cultural inheritance likely infuses Ward’s depiction of Rev. Mores in Riverlisp (1974): Rev. Mores come out of th pulpit walked up th ile and stood afore Micah: ‘Th Lord welcomes every soul in th Kingdom. And th Kingdom here on earth is th church. Let’s hear you say amens.’ (answered) ‘You, young man been a servant of His for our people with your Bible selling and all. Th community loves you as their own and what better than you show your people [Jews] what th Lord done tol and we here believes – that all th Messengers is one spirit and loves us cause we is one.’ (40–1)

Lawrence W. Levine argues that, ‘in their songs …, Afro-American slaves … assigned a central role to the spoken arts, encouraged and rewarded verbal improvisation’ (1977, 6). This dexterity is forbidding to translate into print: ‘William Arms Fisher warned his readers that his attempts to reproduce the music of the spirituals he heard … could not capture “the slurring and sliding of the voices, the interjected turns and ‘curls,’ the groans and sighs, the use even of quarter-tones, the mixture of keys, and the subtle rhythms”’ (ibid., 159). Yet, Ward is attentive to the problem and inventive enough to attempt to overcome it (as we will hear). His ‘solution’ to the problem of ‘typing’ the voice is to adapt, for the page, jazz techniques, as identified by Siva Vaidhyanathan: ‘improvisation, syncopated rhythm, lyrics with such blues-influenced devices as call and response, repetition, and … the practice of signifying: thoughtful revision and repetition of another’s work’ (1997, 395). By utilizing these devices, the jazz-mused poet enacts an archival-prophetic role, recalling and reformulating mass, vernacular fusions of orality and music and text. Nielsen feels that the practice of such ‘recollective ’ innovation illustrates the truth that ‘African-American traditions of orality and textuality were not opposed to one another

frederick ward

195

and did not exist in any simple or simplistic opposition to modernity and postmodernity’ (1997a, 34). For the jazz-bard, then, the emphasis must be on polyphony, that is, the stacking up of a series of different speakers or voices. Arthur Jafa terms this process, in ‘Black popular culture ’ itself, as ‘polyventiality’: ‘“Polventiality” just means multiple tones, multiple rhythms, multiple perspectives, multiple meanings, multiplicity’ (1992, 253). According to Eileen Southern, these effects are achieved through ‘collective improvisation’ by jazz band members (quoted in Hill et al. 1998, 807) – or, by extension, by a series of speakers in a text. Hence, Ward’s work is also as multiculturally influenced as jazz is itself. In ‘The Death of Lady Susuma,’ a prose poem about a black woman, then, Ward inserts a Gaelic lyric: Ar bidh Is sinn Cridhe Mor An daimheach Uidhe agus eadar A Ar cridhe bidh mor daimheach Agus a is an uidhe eadarainn17 (F. Ward 1992a, 22)

A truly jazz-auditing poet must attempt to echo the music’s interest in mixing culturally distinctive sounds.18 The issuing potpourri, derived from the rambunctious, delirious miscegenation that defines jazz, licenses, as in bebop, ‘the use of nonsensical language. Jazz musicians sing words and phrases such as “hey Boppa Rebop” for rhythmic effect and/or expression of ecstasy or joy’ (Bop 1998, 1101). Ward’s penchant for capturing orality, as in the sound of a whisper (‘spish spish, spish spish!’ [1974, 108]), manifests the superficially nonsensical to mandate fresh sense. Echoing the ‘freed speech’ of the bop idiom, as it is transferred into print, is the deployment of ‘tributes, boasts, and slogans … unified by internal rhymes – the virtuoso single-sound freerhyming that [is] a hallmark of black vernacular style’ (Williams 1992, 165). Now hear Ward’s song, ‘Around 12 Bars in 3/4 Time’: I made a Song with your Name. Sort of Whined it and Cried it I made a Song with your Name – and when I Sighed it, I Put a spell be-

196 Directions home Side it what made a Song. (1983, 6)

Nielsen notices that the jazz poetic employs ‘virtual catalogues of jazzy rhythmic effects, virtuoso free rhyming, hyperbolic and metaphysical imagery, understatement, compressed and cryptic imagery, “worrying the line,” and … black music as poetic reference ’ (Nielsen 1997a, 14). Here is Ward’s system of ‘sound-writing’ explained. (Examples will follow.) Pertinent is the notion of ‘worrying the line.’ One explicator senses ‘the tendency in Black music to “worry the note” – to treat notes as indeterminate, inherently unstable sonic frequencies rather than the standard Western treatment of notes as fixed phenomena’ (Jafa 1992, 254). The effect of ‘worrying’ is set out by African-American novelist Ralph Ellison via a character’s interpretation of the effect of his social ‘invisibility’ on his black consciousness: ‘Invisibility … gives one a slightly different sense of time… Instead of the swift and imperceptible flowing of time, you are aware of its nodes, those points where time stands still or from which it leaps ahead. And you slip into the breaks and look around. That’s what you hear vaguely in Louis [Armstrong’s] music’ ([1947] 1995, 8). Chasing these precepts, Ward’s style is, therefore, one of open-ended closure. Works aren’t written or plotted; they’re composed and they’re improvised.19 Combined with slang-tuned imagery or homely surrealism, jazz-banded lingo moves towards the condition of ‘scat,’ the sine qua non of improvised vocalization: ‘In the scat idiom are all of the characteristics of extreme, verbal ritual: special styles and registers, fast delivery, high pitches, broken rhythms, grunts, anomalous, mumbo jumbo words, and prosaically pleasing repetitions’ (Leonard, quoted in Wallenstein 1991, 600).20 The logic of scat informs Ward’s ‘Lady Susuma’s Dream’: – SPLENDID SPECIALNESS! She shouted it through her imaginings and greeted her impressions in ancientnesses: – Woyi bie! Woyi bie! Welcome! Welcome! O Wedo, calling Wedo, O Wedo there… (F. Ward 1983, 56).

If jazz disruptively subverts classical European music concepts, Ward’s writing makes English speak a new tongue. However, scatting – a type of scansion – is only one aspect of a polyphonic jazz poetic. In his 1995 article, ‘Purple Passages or Fiestas in Blue? Notes Toward an Aesthetic of Vocalese,’ Barry Keith Grant insists that jazz also relies on ‘vocalese,’ which ‘involves the setting/singing of lyrics (almost always composed rather than improvised) to jazz instrumentals, both melody and solo parts, arrangement and solos, note for note ’ (1995, 287). Printed ‘vocalese ’ requires odd spacings, irregular keyboard leaps, phrases not sentences, typographic shorthand and dingbats, and pages that look as if they had been vetted by Charles Olson in the most subjective moods of his projectivist project. Such work ‘tends to be tempered by a visual intelligibility …, a sense of coherence that resides in shape rather than message or paraphrasable statement, a sense impressed upon the reader by the placement of the words on the page ’ (N. Mackey 1993, 134). True: Ward is conservative, playing his lines always off the left margin, and rarely venturing into the middle of a page. Nevertheless, he plants unusual spaces between words to separate a particular one or series into a breathing phrase:

frederick ward

197

tears sometimes washes th stickeness of love ‘’way and put a river wall tween separation bein on th one side and justice on th other (1974, 92)

Looking again at African-American commentary, I note that T.J. Anderson III views Bob Kaufman as an adept print practitioner of both vocalese and scat precisely because he is able ‘to blend and blur their demarcations. He also emphasizes the “music” of silence, the rhythms that occur outside our concepts of music’ (2000, 331). For Anderson, Kaufman exploits a ‘jazz meter,’ in which ‘the improvisatory gesture is a crucial element, rendering his use of regular meter unpredictable ’ (335). Hence, says Anderson, Kaufman ‘managed to apply the rhythmic and tonal techniques of be-bop in order to achieve [his] aesthetic purposes’ (331). I believe that Ward is just as proficient in adapting jazz to suit the needs of poetry. But Kaufman is not the only AfricanAmerican poet who may be claimed by the jazz genre. Vaidhyanathan reports that Amiri Baraka ‘employs jazz devices and his own loud, postmodern style to erase the line between poetry and prose. For example, in his short story “The Screamers” (1963), Baraka fuses syncopated sounds, sights, and speech to paint a powerful yet humorous picture of an urban jazz scene ’ (1997, 396).21 Wallenstein praises ‘the strong imagistic sense, the overwhelming rhythms, and the sophistication throughout’ a Baraka jazz poem (1991, 612). Gayl Jones tells us, ‘Baraka shares some of the techniques of the Beats – the juxtapositions, “loose” structure, nonstandard or slang diction’ (1991, 112–13). Clearly, Ward adopts these approaches. Too, one of his models is another African-American poet storied for his ‘music’: Robert Hayden (1913–80). Finds Brian Coniff, ‘[Hayden’s] poetry uses improvisation and linguistic heterogeneity as a means of constantly redescribing, and cultivating, human complexity and dignity’ (1999, 503). Hayden’s interest in a humanistic and musical poetic, mastered by Ward, is revivified in the protegé’s verse. Ward’s utilization of the elements of a jazz poetic – the inking (blacking) of voices, their multiplication in polyphony and their diversification via multiculturalism, the enjoyment of improvisation (surprise, in rhythm and in imagery), the employment of non-standard rhythm (aiding vocalese), the openness to unintelligible speech (scat), and metaphors borrowed from conjure ceremonies (or their like) – renders him a jazz poet. He attempts to mimic, to orchestrate, with words, the discordant but stimulating conjunctions jazz offers. ‘But if jazz strives to attain the syntactic logic of what [pianist Bill] Evans calls “a developmental language” of its own, then poetry, without question, strives that much harder to achieve the emotional complexity and rhythmic drive of music’ (Feinstein and Komunyakaa 1996, xi). Frederick Ward’s work pursues that end – even if, perilously, by writing via jazz, he contributes to his inaudibility, his invisibility in the dull, bland canons of this northern confederacy. Now elderly, he yet awaits, with the gracious patience of a martyr, our discovery of his unabated, deathless illumination.

(Re-)Discovering Frederick Ward The close reader of Frederick Ward will recognize hints of the American modernists e.e. cummings, Wallace Stevens, and William Faulkner; the U.S. Black Mountaineer Robert Creeley; and the British modernists Gerard Manley Hopkins, James Joyce, and Dylan Thomas; but also

198 Directions home

those royally romantic rebels William Blake and John Clare. Skilfully mixing words so as to produce a wilful, Mallarméan obscurity (mainly in his novels), Ward is also indebted to an AfricanAmerican assembly of music-tutored, music-touting poets: Jean Toomer, Robert Hayden, Bob Kaufman, Henry Dumas, and, probably, Ishmael Reed. (That European Canadians are largely ignorant of these poets does not diminish their importance.) Indeed, Ward has come to his excellent, poetic, compositional style, not primordially through Canada, but through his special past, flamboyantly African American and flagrantly ‘artsy.’ Ward was the son of Samuel, a tailor, and Grace (née Douglas), who set him playing piano when he was wee. Not only that, but Ward was exposed to an array of African-American musicians who visited Kansas City, including jazz saxophonist Charlie Parker, whom Ward met, and vocalist Ella Fitzgerald, whom Ward joined on stage as a child singer in one of her shows (Diamond 1992, 19). As a youth, following the sudden death of his mother, Ward quit the piano and studied art on a scholarship at the University of Kansas. Restless, he stayed only one year. Then, he returned to music, trying out composing at the University of Missouri Conservatory of Music at Kansas (graduating in 1957). Following a stint in Hollywood as a songwriter, Ward plunked jazz piano, studying with Oscar Peterson at Toronto’s Advanced School of Contemporary Music, 1962–3. Next, he journeyed to Arizona, where he scribed poetry under the tutelage of the major U.S. poets Stevens and Creeley. Ward’s first book, Poems, appeared in New Mexico in 1964. His next book, the anthology Nine Baha’i Poets, appeared in 1966. This edited anthology included his own verse, but also that of his fellow African American, the splendid poet, Hayden, whose work – with its gorgeous imagery, ecstatic, symphonic lyricism, and homage to black culture – Ward’s own poetry resembles. Landed in Detroit in 1968, Ward, after watching that city burn in an apocalyptic race riot, left for Ville de Québec, staying for two years. In 1970, en route by ship to Denmark to scrutinize piano, Ward was stranded by a dockworkers’ strike in Halifax, Nova Scotia. Here he met exiles from the recently bulldozed (in the name of ‘urban renewal’) village of Africville – a once-seaside enclave of North End Halifax. Bonding with this atomized community, Ward stayed in Halifax, writing and teaching, into the 1980s. During this period, he published the bulk of his extant work: three novels, all inspired equally by Ward’s own childhood memories as well by those of ex-Africville residents: Riverlisp (1974), Nobody Called Me Mine (1977), and A Room Full of Balloons (1981).22 Ward also edited an anthology of pupil-and-teacher verse, titled Present Tense (1972). In 1983, he released his second slim collection of poems, The Curing Berry.23 Through the 1970s and 1980s, Ward also wrote plays, all staged in Montreal, and three screenplays, all produced. At the end of the 1980s, Ward relocated to Montreal, where he taught, until his retirement, at Dawson College. Ward still lives in Montreal, though he also maintains a home in rural Nova Scotia. His work has attracted honours and prizes – an Honorary Doctor of Laws from Dalhousie University of Halifax; the best actor plaque from the 1987 Chicago International Film Festival, in recognition of his role in a film he helped to write (Train of Dreams [1987]). Ward’s odysseys among art, music, film, and poetry, along with his steadfast adherence to the pacifism and the universalism of the Bahá’ì belief, inform his synesthesiac aesthetic and his cosmopolitan attitude. Even so, his humanitarian vision is evinced squarely within a black – really, African-American – cultural matrix as well as within a black – usually, AfricanAmerican – milieu. So, Ward’s characters speak, sing, and think in a ‘black’ lingo that is soul food, soul music, and spiritualistic.24 The best place to begin to encounter the jazz-composer poet and the jazz-playing novelist is in his masterpiece Riverlisp: Black Memories. Here Ward sketches a series of aural/oral vignettes of

frederick ward

199

a community. But the overarching idea of ‘Riverlisp’ is merely a fixed point the author ‘come ’d round’ (to use a favourite Wardism). That is to say, the idea becomes a melody that the author feels free to explore, to move away from as he wishes, just as the jazz artist may depart from a known melody, pursuing its ghost instead. In this way, music guides philosophy. In this book – only conditionally a novel and not a poem – Ward transfigures Africville, Nova Scotia, rendering the village as Ambrose City, a decidedly phantasmal relative. Indeed, although the dustjacket copy of A Room Full of Balloons quotes the Vancouver Sun as claiming that Ward has given us ‘the songs, stories, jokes, and other poems of the citizens of Africville ’ in Riverlisp, the novel really uses Africville as a touchstone for scenes and characters out of African America. After all, for Ward, Africville is not a fixed location. His persona expresses this viewpoint in a poem: ‘You ain’t a place. Africville is us… [I]f we say we from Africville, we are Africville’ (1992b, 19). Thus, Ambrose City is a palimpsest of Africville.25 It has the same relation to the actual Africville that Dante ’s Inferno, though salted and peppered with Italians, has to Italy. This aesthetic distance tempers Ward’s putative realism.26 He eschews realist ‘clarity.’27 Rather, his fiction’s sprightly surface glosses nasty subjects. His recherché realism borders on sur-realism, or over-the-top realism: ‘But some ladies took to hanging clothes lines from [a Japanese bridge over a sewer-pipe stream] and hung up the view’ (F. Ward 1974, 15). Oft, a cliché, a dead metaphor, such as ‘knock-kneed,’ is recast – to cast a startlingly new spell: ‘knot kneed’ (56). Practical surrealism combines with jazz-jointed orality to explode any simplistic mimetic mode.28 In Riverlisp, ‘thot’ (to use Ward’s orthography) is improvisation. And so is plot. This jazz sensibility is documentary – a series of oral portraits (reports). The book is a set of musical sketches ‘to be read with indulgence ... out loud’ (n.p.).29 (Note: Part III of Riverlisp is dubbed, illustratively, ‘Hear-Say’ [61].) It is speech – and reports on speech delivered in a spoken way. Here every text must be heard. Thus, this text is replete with agrammatical angst and ecstasy. Hear Jimmie Lee: ... his dreams and lies ... my thots and determinations DAMN! they’re musical ... perfect fourths and bent ... flated fifths ... illusion ... disillusion ... (119; ellipses and italics in original)

Another character declares, ‘Joy is a stomp! / For the human race’ (110; italics in original). Riverlisp is a tissue of musical rhetorics, of jazzy shiftings every expressive way. To catalogue Ward’s oral and aural devices – the components of his print aesthetics, his text music – is almost as difficult as playing jazz. Begin with Ward’s use of ‘verbatim’ verbs: yell, shout, scream, holler; spit, snort, hiss; mumble, murmur, moan; giggle; ‘stutterin and stamerin and double clutchin for breath’ (1974, 58). These action words invest the text with the gabble of speech and near-speech. But the sonic sensibility is heightened further by Ward’s usage of dialogue, interior monologues, repetitions of words and phrases, phonetic neo-orthographies that border on neologisms (‘dimentions’ [13]; ‘plup’ [22]; ‘arguring’ [24]; ‘payed’ [35]; ‘s’pantion’ [37]; ‘zageratin’ [80]; ‘consomtrate’ [117]); puns (‘MANure’ [15]); editorial interjections (‘He were always singing and whistling “Savior, Near To Me, Be” a song he made up when he git kicked out of the church for hustling ... “Th most sanctified of sisters is willing to be tempted ...”’ [19;

200 Directions home

ellipses in the original], ‘Mr. Jacobs run’d after him but Pee Dee shot him in the leg – where that child git a gun?! – Pee Dee were so scared he dropped his gun ...’ [24]); majuscule spellings (‘I can imagine heaven CAUSE TH STREETS IS A REFLECTION!’ 30); pronunciation guides (‘“Sa-vior, near to me-e, be.” (whistle)’); near-personifications (‘Miss Pillor, Gin Drip and Skippin Daddy (cause he had one leg)’ [19]); keyboard spacing (‘“O Miss Utah, what MY CHILD, MY PEE DEE DONE DONE!”’ [25]); dropped-out punctuation (apostrophes vanished from contractions: ‘didnt’); the spoken-song-form that is poetry – either bluesy rhymes (‘What my baby done done / O LORD! what my baby done done’ [24]) or straight-forward vers libre (22); direct invocation of sound (‘saw-noise-music’ [25], ‘somebodies child made a siren sound’ [80]); oral expressions (‘Ooo!’ [20], ‘huh, huh!’ [39]); and excellent onomatopoeia (‘murmurous yowlin’ [22], ‘squinched’ [31], ‘crunch’ [55], ‘Then the boy moved in close and b’gins to whisper in French – or some tongue – in her ear: spish spish, spish spish! English: spish; spish spish spish spish … ah shp spish … spish ... shp spish? You hip?’ [108]). The ever-present orality of the text syncopates it; perhaps, it even stutters at times, but Ward’s ‘stutters’ enact episodes of melisma. Ward’s techniques could likely exhaust even Richard A. Lanham’s Handlist of Rhetorical Terms (1991). Certainly, the jazzy writer tries out aischrologia – or foul speech (‘“Damn dumbass fool hot damn dumb-ass fool!”’ [1974, 42]; ‘Woman, is this your nigger-boy or just a damn chicken thief?’ [ibid.]; ‘“Hell naw, it was just a little scared white boy bastard. I tol him to kiss it”’ [54]); apheresis or ablatio, or omitting a syllable from the beginning of a word (‘bove,’ ‘tween,’ [24], ‘members,’ ‘fore ’); apocope or abscissio, or omitting the last syllable or letter of a word (‘tol,’ ‘th’ [25]); and aphorisms or proverbs (‘you’ll see that when God turns his head, th devil wont forgit’ [55]). An alphabet of rhetorical ornaments is revealed in Ward’s inventive novel. Poicilogia – ‘overly ornate speech’ (Lanham 1991, 116) – defines preachers like Rev. Mores and Rev. Jubilee Jackson. Polyptoton – ‘repetition of words from the same root but with different endings’ (117) – is an incessant presence in Riverlisp (‘the only womanly thing about the woman’ [1974, 55]; ‘even didnt see things I seen’ [63]; ‘backing back’ [89]).31 Parelcon – the usage of two words when only one is necessary (Lanham 1991, 108) – is a rhetorical device Ward employs for Riverlisp verbs (‘fill-heat’ [1974, 39], ‘hiss spit’ [55], ‘touch grab’ [88]). Antistasis – the ‘repetition of a word in a different or contrary sense’ (Lanham 1991, 16) – is a cousin to parelcon: In Riverlisp, ‘a Mrs. Johnson’ delivers a ‘mess of “greens”’ to ‘Mr. Ward,’ who, noticing that the ‘greens’ are buried in a broth of mud, sends his son out to a restaurant to ensure he will ‘eat no mess’ (1974, 47). Alliteration doubles as a sonic device: ‘Bantu Banshee yell’ (55). Inverted words also appear: ‘friend-girl’ (47). An army of rhetoricians would find years of work in cataloguing Ward’s oratorical-musical exploits in print. An extended example of Ward’s expert word-singing and word-painting occurs in the section of Riverlisp titled ‘Purella Munificance.’ The passage treats the interracial and transcultural love affair between a Black Christian woman – Purella – and a Jewish Bible salesman, Micah Koch. Their amour is bedevilled by so much anti-white bigotry that the couple disintegrates, Purella goes a ‘touch’ insane, and Micah accepts to be baptized in the Black church.32 Before these tragicomic events unfold, Ward, through his narrator, Jimmie Lee, produces emphatically epiphanic poetry in prose: Dear sweet Purella Munificance the huckster man on his produce wagon, put light to your meaning so we can understand huckster man be thinking on your continence he sing the painter’s brush

frederick ward

strokes of your mouth; a low soft soothing: ahhhh sea bird, leaning on the air! and shout:

201

sound of the

‘Oooo, tomatoes’s red ripe! Cabbage tender peas from the vine Sweet...’ and draws them who wish to buy in a voice that forgits what he be selling. The womens is moved, tho. Huckster man be so taken he neglec’d and one woman is put to ask for her change: ‘Owe up, what you owe me, man!’ (36)

Unorthodox orthography, white spaces, quirky but expressive grammar, and ‘watercolours’ and ‘oils’ from an oral palette – onomatopoeia, interjections, and suggestions of extra-textual sound (the sea bird, the vendor’s own song33) – all harmonize to produce an oral-visual34 rendering of a moment in cultural and personal time. The passage demands and deserves the recollection of a similar one in the work of Ward’s precursor Jean Toomer and his Cane (1923): Face flowed into her eyes. Flowed in soft cream foam and plaintive ripples… The soft suggestion of down slightly darkened, like the shadow of a bird’s wing might, the creamy brown color of her upper lip… If you have heard a Jewish cantor sing, if he has touched you and made your own sorrow seem trivial when compared with his, you will know my feeling when I follow the curves of her profile, like mobile rivers, to their common delta. ([1923] 1988, 16)

Where Toomer stresses visual imagery, however, Ward prefers to foreground sound. Toomer shows us – monologically – a portrait of ‘Fern’; but Ward talks about Purella Munificance, while also letting other voices trade notions about her.35 In Cane, Toomer presents a series of poetic sketches of black life and intraracial and interracial amour and its contretemps, all dedicated to revealing the existence of a universal Oversoul via Gurdjieffian patter. In Riverlisp, Ward gives us a series of prose-poems cum sound-poetry with the same optimism (‘vission pictures of lovers that fill-heat the heart’ [1974, 39]). But his concern, being a Bahá’ì, is to reveal the oneness of humanity and the revelation of this ideal in mumbling songs, loud sermons, and screeching poems.36 Though he loves beauty, Ward scruples to scrutinize the terrors and horrors that trouble humanity’s odyssey toward Oneness and Truth. On this journey, feelings and beliefs carry one only so far; knowledge and wisdom provide the best passports and the swiftest transports. In Riverlisp, then, the character Pause is ‘lost’ because he attempts to intuit music, but finds it is always beyond his ken: ‘A musician writer he were, always on the verge of “THE TUNE” but never done. And life, poor soul, be a promise to himselfs: “Won’t be long”’ (1974, 21). His existence is stymied. However, to know the ‘inner’ or the ‘inside’ is to know the heart of true truth. Ward’s Bahá’ì faith informs this understanding. Hence, one must ask, ‘What is a Bahá’ì?’ J.E. Esslemont records an answer: ‘“To be a Bahá’ì simply means to love all the world; to love humanity and try to serve it; to work for universal peace and brotherhood.”… A man may be a Bahá’ì even if He has never heard the name of Baháulláh’ ( [1923] 1970, 83).37 Esslemont expands upon these sentiments: ‘He who would be a Bahá’ì needs to be a fearless seeker after truth, but he should not

202 Directions home

confine his search to the material plane… If his heart is pure, and his mind free from prejudice, the earnest seeker will not fail to recognize the divine glory in whatsoever temple it may become manifest’ (85). Ward articulates these precepts – the spiritual search for Truth and Oneness – in typical down-to-earth, plain-spoken, plainsong ways: Son, when I were little I use to play in the mud lots your whole body could git lost in th feelin of mud. I thinks mud and oneness is th same all earth mix with water – that’s mud – all peoples mix with the spirit – that’s oneness. (1974, 118)

To find ‘oneness’ is to find peace (the ‘music’): The tune – I sees it as a questionin voice turnin way from mens to some Essence, askin to join or be join’d – Sanctified! – the answer comin n goin. I were thinking of the sea when I writes it [music]. You is like the sea n maybe you will know the tune. I think its life is inside the line ’n not judged by its course. git it? (122; italics in original)

The communion – or confrontation – with ‘spirit’ is triggered by ‘feelings,’ moods engendered by hate and love. One needs introspection – a knowledge of ‘inner’ things, the ‘inside ’ – to discover happiness. Only this wisdom engenders harmonious creativity: ‘if you holds a willow seed in your hand to warm it afore it’s planted, the seed will remember your palm print and when the tree grows, its branches will take they direction from the thought. And if it grows to fruition in your lifetime, it will be caused, in its rememberings, to weep fer you throughout all your journeyings to God’ (F. Ward 1981, 68). (This teaching recalls that of Bahá’u’lláh: ‘Man must show forth fruits. A fruitless man, in the words of His Holiness the Spirit (i.e. Christ), is like a fruitless tree, and a fruitless tree is fit for fire’ [quoted in Esslemont 1970, 83; italics in original]). Our troubled quest for self-knowledge, the inner or inside wisdom, is indicated by Ward’s repeated line, in Riverlisp, ‘Fuss is round all beautiful-ness’ (1974, 36), followed by ‘Fuss is round / all beautifull- / ness’ (38; italics in original).38 To sound his humanitarian theology, Ward means to make everything – every noun – speak or sing. All’s alive: ‘… the mud sucked song from bout me ankles’ (1981, 85). In Ward’s (literary) universe, all is spirit – negative or positive – ‘come ’d round’39 the flesh. Nevertheless, Ward’s humanitarian vision is rooted in a black (African-American) cultural matrix, as is that of his influential, Bahá’ì-brother poet Robert Hayden. Coniff reports that critic Rosey Pool ‘used the example of Hayden to invest “negritude” … with unusually extended, personal, and religious overtones: “In light half-nightmare and half-vision he speaks of the face of Bahá’u’lláh, prophet of the Bahá’î faith, in whose eyes Hayden sees the suffering of the men and women who died at Dachau and Buchenwald for their specific Négritude”’ (Coniff 1999, 504n3). A similarly specific black humanitarian spirit animates Ward’s writing, whereby, like Hayden,40 he eschews world-besotted politics, preferring to voice his philosophy via the ‘free ’ stylings of jazz. The English-Canadian poet closest to Ward in style is, arguably, Jewish Montreal poet Abraham Moses Klein,41 whose powerful fusions of English and French, informed by his profound

frederick ward

203

knowledge of Yiddish, Latin, and Greek, and his personal humanitarianism, create texts that approach the style and feel of song – as in ‘Montreal’: O city metropole, isle riverain! Your ancient pavages and sainted routs Traverse my spirit’s conjured avenues! Splendor erablic of your promenades Foliates there, and there your maisonry Of pendant balcon and escalier’d march, Unique midst English habitat Is vivid Normandy! (Klein 1948, 42)

Ward departs from Klein in being less formal, less classicist, and the result is poetry that is so superficially simple that its dexterity and complexity are almost invisible. See – hear – ‘Blind Man’s Blues’: The best thing in my life was a woman named Tjose. We never had to sneak for nothing strong woman Put you in mind of a lone bird at dawn standing without panic in the dew. She kissed me so hard she ’d suck a hum from me The best thing happen to her were my own papa. I found her he had more experience I think the hound in me sniffed out something – something about her And I caught her sucking that same hum from him. I went dumb staring … and she seen it. My to God, she tried to wave me off – Papa say: – O son O son

204 Directions home And I don’t think she wanted me to look on my naked papa like that She throw’d lye in my face.42 (1983, 42; ellipsis in original)

Because I believe in the status of this poem as great art, I beg your indulgence of my repetition, now, of my previously published analysis of its genius: ‘Blind Man’s Blues’ is simple,43 almost irritatingly so. Really, it’s eleven (or, if you split the four-line ninth strophe in half, twelve) unrhymed couplets that stage a dramatic monologue about backwoods filial love and violent sexual jealousy. The phrases – or cadences – are accessibly declarative and appealingly authoritative. The first couplet indicates the general style: The best thing in my life was a woman named Tjose. The first line could be Tin Pan Alley cliché. But what redeems it is the piano-note-like – or singing – fall of each word into its cadenced place. The second line polishes the meaning of the first, and the position of ‘Tjose,’ as its clincher, accents her position as ‘the best thing’ – even as the word thing forces us to ponder the speaker’s objectification – though amiable – of this woman. The placement of ‘Tjose’ reinforces the challenge of its pronunciation. Should it rhyme with rose or rosé? Of course, if pronounced in the first manner, the second line will possess – agreeably – the same number of syllables as the first. If pronounced in the alternative fashion, however, the name will sound more exotic. But how should the dipthong ‘Tj’ be pronounced? To sound like ‘Ch,’ ‘Th,’ ‘J,’ or ‘H’? These questions tease out the suave priminery of Ward’s music-based poetic… Ward … writes with peculiar affinity for the linguistic and tonal music of speech, especially Black English, which he scores more sonorously than any other contemporary writer, whether one reads Toni Morrison or the Africadian poet David Woods. ’Times the blackness of the line is sounded in Ward’s use of a crisp, rich, vernacular utterance, as in the second strophe of ‘Blind Man’s Blues’: We never had to sneak for nothing strong woman.44 (The second line must not be read as a continuation of the first; rather, it is a choral reflection on the first. Crucially too, the empty space after nothing must be read as a ‘rest’ – or ‘stop.’) Or it is sounded in a haiku-like analogy, as in the poem’s third strophe: Put you in mind of a lone bird at dawn standing without panic in the dew. (Hear the lush sonic correspondences among Ward’s words: the consonance between ‘nd’ in ‘mind’ and ‘standing’; the alliteration of ‘d’ in ‘dawn’ and ‘dew’; the inner rhyme between ‘you’ and ‘dew’;

frederick ward

205

the assonance between ‘standing’ and ‘panic’; and the near rhyme between ‘lone’ and ‘dawn.’) Or blackness is sounded in the biblical parallelism of the fifth strophe’s resonant reprising of the first: The best thing happen to her were my own papa.45 Or perhaps it is sounded in the repetition of details such as the pleasure that the speaker and his father derive from coitus with Tjose: She kissed me so hard She’d suck a hum from me. … And I caught her sucking that same hum from him.46 Ward deploys the resources of rhyme and repetition with consummate, breathtaking skill. ‘Blind Man’s Blues’ ends with the revelation that the speaker suspects that Tjose did not want him ‘to look on my naked papa like that // She throw’d lye / in my face.’ At the same time, though, it was and is a revelation for African-Canadian literature, for, here, Ward liberates a black accent – and frees it to say what it likes.47 (2000a, 50–2)

Because the world is perverse in its bestowal of recognition and non-recognition, critics and scholars may continue to ignore Ward’s stellar prose, poetry, and plays. However, no one may legitimately accuse Ward of ‘failure.’ Rather, the stewards of canons must address their own failures of vision and failures of nerve.

Coda, or Ode I commence my conclusion by asserting that Ward resembles Miles Davis, who, as Walser writes, ‘constantly and consistently put himself at risk in his trumpet playing, by using a loose, flexible embouchure that helped him to produce a great variety of tone colors and articulations, by striving for dramatic gestures rather than consistent demonstration of mastery, and by experimenting with unconventional techniques’ (Walser 1996, 176). In his efforts to sound what had not been sounded before, and to sound like no other ‘sound’ trumpeter, Davis made mistakes: ‘Ideally, he would always play on the edge and never miss; in practice, he played closer to the edge than anyone else and simply accepted the inevitable missteps, never retreating to a safer, more consistent performing style ’ (ibid.). For Walser, the untouchable, unimpeachable greatness of Davis resides partly in his daring, glorious errors. Yet, some jazz journalists and music-school musicologists cannot attend to Davis’s achievement because their conventional studies cannot analyse his playing technique: ‘Such methods cannot cope with the problem of Miles Davis: the missed notes, the charged gaps, the technical risk-taking, the whole challenge of explaining how this powerful music works and means’ (179). Likewise, meditating on Bob Kaufman’s masterpiece,

206 Directions home

Golden Sardines (1967), Anderson enthuses, ‘The collection is … important because it is the work of an artist who is unafraid to take risks. The inclusion of poetic “failures” and “successes” certainly marks a heroic moment in literature.’ Kaufman’s resultant ‘miraculous unevenness of work’ (2000, 336) reminds one of the creative power of Davis’s ‘missed’ notes. Yet, Frederick Ward requires, really, none of these defences (i.e., that miscues and mistakes are essential to his aesthetic). But he does need critics able to understand that the tissue of jazz is so close to bone – to notes, not melody – that the naked ear can’t easily ‘see.’ To ‘get’ Ward, the reader must combine the sensitivities of musicologist, performer, and poet. Will you hear him? Hear! Hear!

Notes

Divagation 1 John Fraser, emeritus professor of English from Dalhousie University of Halifax, is the model intellectual: inquisitive, liberal, thoughtful, adventurous. He is also my most correct critic. 2 Frantz Fanon alerts us that ‘colonialism forces the people it dominates to ask themselves the question constantly: “In reality, who am I?”’ (1968, 250). As an African Canadian, I have been doubly colonized – and doubly alienated. As an African-heritage person, I live in a society that disparages me – save as a source of cheap labour and off-colour entertainment. As a Canadian, I live in a country that is the unrecognized offspring of Britain and France – and, currently, a slut for America. Ironically, despite the Euro-Caucasian-Canadian marginalization of black citizens, we do share with the majority the legacy of colonialism that infamously forces us all to continue questioning our identities. 3 Africadia is my neologism for the piece of Canadian terra firma hosting displaced African-American ex-slaves and settlers, namely Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, and Prince Edward Island – the ‘Black Maritimes,’ in other words – and Africadian is my coinage for the people, their essence, and their being (see G. Clarke 1991a, 9.) But the term itself derives from a Mi’kmaq suffix, cadie, which enacts recognition of Aboriginal primordiality, and also the truth of Black and Mi’kmaq métissage. 4 The superiority of Caribbean immigrants to ‘indigenous’ Black Canadians seemed primordial: though they issued from patriarchal, British-modelled, class-conscious, and ‘colourist’ societies (pretty much like Canada, actually), they did have access to high-quality education. Thanks to Canada’s creamof-the-crop immigration system, the first-generation Caribbean immigrants to Canada in the 1950s and 1960s tended to possess higher educational attainments than were possible for native-born blacks, most of whom were just beginning to emerge from a century of segregated – or scarce – schooling. In a 1949 article, Africadian Baptist leader Rev. W.P. Oliver reported that, in Nova Scotia, ‘there are two doctors, two lawyers, all of whom came directly from the West Indies, received their education here and remained here to practice, which indicates that they are not truly products of the local culture.’ Oliver also notes the presence of ‘two nurses,’ also West Indian in origin, and adds, ruefully, ‘although the barrier [against black nurses] was removed by the efforts of the slave descendants [protests by the ‘indigenous’ black population], it was children of West Indian parentage who took advantage of it’ ([1949] 1991, 133). What was true sixty-plus years ago is not true now, however. Ironically, due to the ‘levelling’ pressure of Canadian white supremacist, socio-economic practice as well as the efforts of ‘indigenous’ African Canadians to improve their lot, greater parity exists now between the old, concentrated, land-owning, black communities of the settler-past and the newer, diffused, mainly

208

5

6

7

8

9

10

notes to pages 5–9

rental black communities of the cities. Both groups – qua groups – experience, equally, the harm of ‘glass-ceiling’ opportunity limitations, culturally insensitive public education, and ‘gangsta’-style policing. Sadly, a 1980 prophecy of two commentators on ‘race’ in Canada may have come to pass: ‘Will the West Indians in Canada build a culture that is Canadian and Caribbean but quite different from American Blacks? It is hard to say. Perhaps a couple of generations of ghetto life in Toronto will produce social conditions and cultural responses similar to the nearby cities of Buffalo, Cleveland and Detroit’ (Martin and Smith 1980, 20). Whatever: To notice class-and-culture divisions among African Canadians is not a matter of ‘nativism,’ but of plain-and-simple analysis. Then again, the act of immigration is never pacific; it is class war, both as individual and mass hope and protest. To be fair, though, Goldie also saw, ‘Odysseys is a big book full of knowledge’ (483), and I do appreciate that transparently faint, yet indelibly conciliatory, praise – just as I am thankful that other critiques were unfailingly generous in their endorsement of my work. Université du Québec à Montréal sociologist Micheline Milot suggests that we must jettison the facile binaries of ‘nationalist’ and ‘liberal,’ for, she promises, ‘a nation is no longer defined by the creation of a universal citizenry above social and cultural diversity. On the contrary, it is defined by the search for intercultural communication and social solidarity’ (2003, 39). My interest in ‘African-Canadian literature’ is, then, not a claim to collectivist chest-thumping, but is, realistically, a matter of trying to understand and articulate the location of one set of voices in relation to those of many others. The differences among African Canadians do not erase our similarities. But the differences exist, with occasional poignancy. Hear memoirist Tionda Cain: ‘Growing up in Toronto I was often told that I was “white-washed.” Being of Black Canadian descent didn’t meet the criteria for true “blackness” by some of my of [sic] Black Caribbean, Black African and African American peers’ (Bernard 2006, 116). Uh huh. Martin and Smith promise, ‘There is and will continue to be a Black culture in Nova Scotia and it will continue to have links with the cultures of other New World Blacks’ (1980, 20, my italics). This assertion underlines that the study of African-Canadian literature demands knowledge of the domestic development as well as the offshore contributions. I must also recognize here the masochistic willingness of English Canadians to play supportive roles for British imperialism, not only in the Caribbean, but in Africa, Asia, and any other part of the world where the empire needed extra cultural ambassadors, foot soldiers, Bible toters, and live cannon fodder. It is a dramatic irony that William Hall, an Africadian and the third British North American to win the Victoria Cross – the British Empire ’s highest honour for military valour, did so by almost single-handedly suppressing the Indian rebellion at Lucknow, in 1857. Michaels warns, ‘what makes our commitment to history a commitment to myth is not our sense that the history we learn is true (and only in) the same way that the Greeks thought their myths were true; what makes our history mythological is … our sense that it is remembered and, when it is not remembered, forgotten’ (1996, 7). To believe in history is to believe ‘in cultural identities – exactly as real as Ares and Aphrodite’ (14). (Leon Surette pinpoints the potential for histories to nullify empiricist inquiry, observing, ‘the cognitive process that epistemology understands as learning, Platonism understands as remembering’ [1993, 83]. If I were to claim to be able to remember the crafting of the first African-Canadian texts, I would be indulging in mythopoesis.) To Michaels’s caution against fetishizing history as a source of cultural identity, one may also add Fanon’s proviso against Afrocentrism: ‘The discovery of the existence of a Negro civilization in the fifteenth century confers no patent of humanity on me. Like it or not, the past can in no way guide me in the present moment’ (1967, 225). While I hold these objections in mind, I must still account for the birth of African-Canadian literature

notes to page 9

11

12

13

14

15

16

17

209

amid American colonial, British imperial, French imperial, Canadian colonial, and African and Caribbean migratory cultures … Canadian literary critic Hugh Kenner opines, ‘Minds are in history’ (quoted in Nolde 1984, 17). His precept, pithy and potent, supports my interest in chronology, memory, and the lived experience of temporality. I am guided by Uzoma Esonwanne ’s precept that ‘history remains … that turbulent sea upon whose frothy waves our collective memories are tossed and transfigured’ (1992b, 11). Perhaps it is in entering into the archives and opening up long-closed volumes or caches that one encounters ‘a powerful sense of intensely individual minds rigorously engaged with reality, including social reality, and of the daring that is involved in the naked confrontation of adversaries …’ (Fraser 1974, 122). Fanon reads history as a narrative to be remembered, not just learned, I believe, for ‘it is only when it’s reimagined as the fabric of our own experience that the past can become the key to our own identity’ (Michaels 1996, 7). Michaels insists, ‘A history that is learned can be learned by anyone (and can belong to anyone who learns it); a history that is remembered can only be remembered by those who first experienced it and it must belong to them’ (ibid.). For Fanon, the psychological and cultural emancipation of the once-enslaved and the once-colonized must proceed by those people’s remembering the trauma of slavery and colonization, but also teaching others about this past. Yet, this pedagogy cannot render the people ’s culture a museum piece – ‘antiquarian, essentialist, and antimaterialist’ (Esonwanne 1990, 125). Too, messianic history is just a mess. Hear Roger McTair: ‘History is too complex to lend itself to a melodramatic narrative ’ (1995, 66). Considering four African-Canadian women’s autobiographies, Bina Toledo Freiwald notices their concern with mapping an ‘indigenous’ history: ‘All four … share a strong sense of the familial and collective history that ties them to Canada: [Carol] Talbot descends from a freed slave who came to Canada from Maine in 1841; [Cheryl] Foggo (born 1956) establishes a lineage to maternal greatgrandparents who came to western Canada from Oklahoma in 1912 hoping to escape racism; [Carrie] Best (born 1903 [died 2003]) traces her ancestry back to a small 1787 black settlement in Tracadie in Guysboro County [in Nova Scotia]; and the Buxton [Ontario] [Karen] Shadd-Evelyn (born 1958) grew up in, Elgin Settlement, was founded in 1849 by Rev. William King, who freed the fifteen former slaves he had inherited.’ Freiwald also asserts, ‘All four autobiographers … share a common interest in exploring the complex relationships between self, community, and nation for black subjects in Canada’ (2002a, 42). I suggest that ‘indigenous’ African-Canadian literary creativity has tended, historically speaking, to emphasize these relationships by exploring them in non-fiction forms. Barbara Omolade affirms, ‘As subjects of Western scientific research, the African in the New World is transformed into an entity who constitutes the silent and the missing of history – the slave, the negress, and the nigger’ (1994, 107). As African-Canadian historian Afua Cooper witnesses, ‘the idea that Africans were not fully human circulated in the Western psyche, mind, and culture; their pain, therefore, was not worthy of recognition and acknowledgment. Only this belief explains the long silence about slavery’ (2007, A15). It is precisely because of this enveloping silence, so acute in Canada, that scholars of African-Canadian literature must engage with the history of black settlement and ‘race relations’ here. I also approve African-Canadian social worker Darlamaine Gero-Hagel’s description of this experience of self-examination: ‘In my quest for the truth, it seems I was standing outside myself looking backwards, inwards, sideways, forwards – always reflecting, deconstructing, rebuilding, critically analyzing, and at times turning myself inside out looking for me and who I really was and am today’ (Bernard 2006, 127).

210 notes to pages 10–11 18 This stance will irritate those ‘deconstructionist’ dreamers who believe nations do not exist. Given their views, they should stop paying taxes and they should destroy their passports. Yet, if a nation exists, so does nationalism, for no nation may exist (or continue to do so) without a smidgen of this sentiment. Yet, nationalism is not racism. To say that I am proud to be black, or to be Canadian, and that I wish these modes of identity to persist in the world, is not the same thing as claiming that either Blacks or Canadians are better than other peoples: the claim of superiority is racist, not the assertion of a right to exist. 19 ‘Race’ is a scientifically vaporous term and a socially evil one. It has no scientific validity, but it is socially valid. To quarantine it, I encase it in quotation marks. 20 I do denounce, though, those liberals who are just ‘triumph-of-the-will’ types – tuxedoed fascists with tenure and expense accounts. (See Timothy Brennan’s 2006 article, ‘A Subtle Barbarism.’) I also deplore those liberals who believe in untrammeled, unregulated competition – i.e., ‘free trade’ and robber-baron capitalism: They are bow-tied plutocrats, and their rule means mass poverty and militarized tyrannies. (See Paul Bigioni’s 2005 article, ‘Fascism Then. Fascism Now?’) 21 I exemplify – I hope – the status of each African Canadian: ‘someone who exists on the borderline’ (Esonwanne 2000b, 131). 22 Ronald Bush translates this Latin term as meaning ‘drenched with sunlight’ (Bush [1976] 1989, 264). 23 I attest – categorically – however, that to speak of literature is, unavoidably, to contest laws, mores, customs, traditions, faiths, and governments. Criticism always verges on sedition … Or, rather, ‘Criticism is never innocent. Its grey light chastises us / just when we’d like some sun …’ (G. Clarke 2001a, 137). 24 According to scholar Peter Makin, U.S. poet Ezra Pound ‘insisted that what makes a good regime is not a system; what is needed is active intelligence, accepting no limits on its penetration’ (1992, 221). That is my desire – to follow no system, but to question and judge. I also laud Uzoma Esonwanne’s worries regarding ‘the undesirable consequences of postulating a sweeping hypothesis about African literary criticism’ (1993b, 56). Ditto for the critique of African-Canadian literature. We must accept the Henry Louis Gates, Jr. commission: to ‘redefine “theory” from within our own black cultures,’ making particular use of ‘the black vernacular critical tradition’ (1987a, 44). In Canada, this practice entails looking outside our immediate communities to the larger black world – and to Canada itself. 25 African Canada is to scholars of the African diaspora precisely what Africa is for foreign scholars: ‘always elsewhere, never present, delinquent, and belated’ (Esonwanne 1990, 121). 26 When foreign commentators note the existence of African Canadians, the observance is usually served up with a dollop of condescension. Hence, the African-American Nobel laureate in Literature Toni Morrison, narrating Sula, reports, offhandedly, that ‘even those Negroes who had moved down from Canada to [fictional] Medallion [Ohio], who remarked every chance they got that they had never been slaves, felt a loosening of the reactionary compassion for Southern-born blacks that Sula had inspired in them. They returned to their original claims of superiority’ (1982, 154). True: Morrison’s work is a novel, and thus generically open to exaggerations and distortions of one sort or another; still this passage remains extraordinary for it is patently incredible. Far from claiming to have never been slaves, most Canadian ‘Negroes,’ especially those of West Indian and African-American heritage, recognize that their presence in Canada is a result of slavery and the struggle against it, or a result of postcolonial poverty and an escape from it. Far from asserting ‘superiority,’ most African-Canadian intellectuals (with some West Indian–descended representatives excepted) have felt, if not ‘inferiority’ regarding African America, then some sense of indebtedness to its culture and its political strife, especially when the latter has achieved pan-African resonance, ranging from the creation of Negro

notes to pages 11–12

27

28

29 30

31

32 33

211

History Week to the election of Barack Obama to the U.S. presidency. Morrison’s passage enacts, really, a demarcating of boundaries, of who belongs – or may belong – to the African-American national project of empowering blackness. Hence, in a 2006 article, Euro-Canadian pollster Allan Gregg argues, ‘Despite good efforts and well-intentioned policies, poverty and disenfranchisement in Canada are becoming increasingly racebased’ (2006, 41). His analysis is doubly questionable: First, save for the bête-noire – Tar Baby – of multiculturalism, he does not name the positive policies that are allegedly producing negative effects; secondly, he fails to realize that impoverishment and marginalization have been precisely the lot of those immigrants who have been unable to build their own economic base – or who have been, like Aboriginal peoples, robbed of the resources and lands to do so. The history of class in Canada is one of ethnic, linguistic, and racial competition. The ‘winners’ have been those groups who have been able to dominate a region or a province, economically and electorally. Gregg also feels that the terrorism visited upon England in 2005 and the riots that bloodied France in the fall of 2005 represented ‘a new face of ethnic conflict’ in the West (47). But, again, he ignores history: Aggrieved minorities have turned often to violence to vent frustrations and demand inclusion: hence, blacks rioted in New York City in 1783 to force the British to keep their promise to evacuate them from the new American Republic to land and liberty in the loyal colonies further north. The title of Bajan-Canadian Odimumba Kwamdela’s 1971 novel, Niggers … This is CANADA: C-old A-nti N-iggers A-nd D-efinitely A-merican, though acidly satirical, is perhaps the pithiest, correct critique of Canadian racialism ever written. Canadian pageants – from Canada Day on Parliament Hill to Quebec’s Fête nationale – tend to resemble a Busby Berkeley–style celebration of whiteness – that is, cinematic ‘purity’ and ‘light.’ ‘White supremacy’ is an ugly phrase, but I prefer its vividness to the term racism, for, as U.S. scholar Aldon Lynn Nielsen affirms, ‘there has never been any such thing as a simple racism, a racism that is merely racist.’ No, ‘racism is, after all, an ideology, a complex and overdetermined set of presuppositions and metaphors which are constantly shifting and changing in response to political and social realities’ (2001, 151). In my opinion – and experience, white Canadian racism is so subtle as to be as insubstantial and yet as organic to our social structure as is air to our bodies. But the cumulative effects of this racism may be summed up as ‘white supremacy’ – and black marginality. Oluronke Taiwo, a Nigerian-born, African-Canadian social worker, witnesses that, in beginning her studies at the Dalhousie University School of Social Work in September 2003, she ‘discovered that “whiteness” dominated the curriculum, the culture and the environment.’ ‘Since I came to Canada I realize that colour matters, which I never thought of while growing up in my country, but what I did not expect was the act of racism. I experienced racism on a daily basis both in school and in society at large’ (Bernard 2006, 149). Yep, that’s white supremacy in action … African-American scholar Kevin Young holds that, because of white critical silencing – or discounting – of their art, black writers ‘create their own authentication – their own, alternative system of literacy currency and value, functioning both within and without the dominant, gold-standard system of [white majority, mainstream] culture ’ (2001, 199). Young refers to the American context, but I warrant that a similarly different set of critical and aesthetic criteria operate for African Canadians too. Coleman counsels, ‘Irony is the deconstructive shadow that haunts allegory; it is the ever-present noise of disarticulation in the project of national articulation’ (D. Coleman 2006, 212). White Canadian racialism is obdurate and obvious: the monarchy is the preserve, by blood, of one ethnicity/‘race’ (and religion); state bilingualism and school funding provided on the basis of lan-

212

notes to pages 12–13

guage and (or) religion extend special status to, in effect, two ethnicities (of the same ‘race’). White privilege (supremacy) is built into the very fabric of Canadian society. Although Canada is, on paper and in real life, a multicultural and multiracial society, its adherence to a classist monarchy means that it is also committed to hierarchy, not egalitarianism. If some Canadians – white and British (or French) – are naturally superior to all other citizens (as suggested by the Constitution), then a psychological basis for the practice of white (European) supremacy exists, a fact reinforced by the presence of the white lady – and gentlemen – on the currency and the white faces on postage stamps. Canada’s constitutional (monarchical) commitment to hierarchy (of ethnic power, ‘race,’ and language) nigh vitiates its egalitarian rhetoric. Mary Ann Shadd, writing in 1852, recognizes in Canada West (now southern Ontario), the existence of ‘an aristocracy of birth, not of skin, as with Americans’ ([1852] 1998, 88); the effect of such aristocratic distinction among peoples need not be racist in feeling, though it must seem complicatedly racist in result. Roger McTair reports, ‘racism is a complex hierarchical system, a structured ensemble of social and institutional practices and discourses… Europeans and Euro-Americans with multicultural bellies, full of tacos, falafel, and chow mein, sometimes have monocultural minds.’ Hence, ‘the struggle against racism must take heterogeneity into account’ (1995, 32). 34 Esonwanne insists that, even when one exorcises the phantom of ‘race’ from intellectual critique, a residue of the political remains: ‘Even after we have disposed of the melanin, we cannot dispose of ideology’ (1992a, 565). 35 Some scholars are gracious enough to deem African-Canadian literature as ‘Black writing in Canada.’ But this alternative nomenclature robs the literature of both its continental heritage and its historical connection to the clutch of invasive, British/French colonies-turned-provinces we now call Canada. 36 My judgment here is not merely rhetorical. For example, when Africadian parents protested the teaching of Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird (1960) in the high schools of Digby County, Nova Scotia, in 2002, various august authorities lectured them about the literary greatness and effective anti-racism of Lee’s classic, canonical, and iconic novel. Some folks even stated that the Black Nova Scotian community’s real problem was its insufficient literacy. These benighted rubes could not understand, it was hinted, how the novel transcends and contradicts the brutish circumstances of redneck racism, even if the word nigger, as a matter of vinegary verisimilitude, if not tastefulness, peppers the white-sugar liberalism of the text. Yet, none of the white-liberal critics of the black parents bothered to analyse the novel for the ways it fails to uphold an anti-racism agenda. Indeed, the socio-political hamartia of the novel is that it foregrounds good whites as saviours of blacks; it robs the black characters of agency; they must rely on the charity of a white benefactor to palliate their predicament. Moreover, the false consciousness the novel foregrounds is resolutely American, thus permitting Canadians to continue to revel in our own propaganda that this country did not tolerate slavery or segregation and does not practise racism today. Nevertheless, Lee ’s novel did not and does not merit a ban. Rather, its teaching needs to be supplemented with the teaching of writing by African/Negro-heritage authors, even African-Canadian ones, where their characters are agents, not cast as reactionary mutes. Perhaps the unstated issue for the opposition is the implication that blacks have written nothing worth teaching. Certainly, this presumption was voiced by a visiting professor who taught me Southern U.S. literature in graduate school. This course was memorable partly because the European-American professor did not list a single African-American author on the syllabus. When I challenged him about this omission, he replied that none were good enough. (Yes, I enjoyed reading Carson McCullers, William Faulkner, and William Styron. However, their greatness did not excuse, for me, the absence of Richard Wright, Jean Toomer, Zora Neale Hurston, Alice Walker, and Ernest J. Gaines.) Obviously, the good profes-

notes to pages 13–19

37 38

39

40

213

sor’s argument was based on a convenient, hypocritical liberalism: literature is about quality and excellence; it has nothing to do with society or identities; it is a pristine product of apolitical imagination and is received by blank-slate minds. Hence, a black student who wants to read black-authored texts that discuss his or her reality (which might include racism) is guilty of succumbing to a belief in ‘race’ – which does not exist. Because it does not exist, because social categories and political tendencies do not exist, one must only read works of ‘literary excellence,’ even if that canon is decided principally by folks who happen to be aristocratic, Caucasian, and male. To me, this argument is preposterous, but it appeals to David Solway, who, in a 2002 article, accused me of subscribing to ‘political correctness’ because I have argued – and still do – that To Kill a Mockingbird is more about white guilt than black history and that it should be taught in tandem with black-authored texts, including those by Dionne Brand and M. NourbeSe Philip. Solway relies upon the ‘literary excellence’ trope to assert that Brand and Philip ‘in any fair estimation … cannot be assumed to rival Harper Lee’ (2002, 35). (By ‘fair’ I think Solway means ‘white.’) He then insists, ‘The criteria of [critical] judgment are before anything else aesthetic, substantive and talent-based in nature ’ and that ‘anything else is only a kind of special pleading, a newly-fashionable cliché or the intrusion of a political agenda which belongs in another area of discourse and activity’ (36). In other words, let us pretend that politics neither influences authorship nor readership – and let us accept as evaluative criteria only the aesthetics of ‘me, myself and like-minded others.’ I call this argument poppycock and balderdash. (Thus, in my own fair estimation, Philip’s Harriet’s Daughter [1988] should accompany To Kill a Mockingbird on high school syllabi). I also reiterate that ‘aesthetics’ is a branch of politics: some like their writers white and their texts whitewashed, while claiming that is only because so-and-so are ‘great.’ I believe Esonwanne would lecture Solway on this ‘very unoriginal argument: Hermeneutic systems, no matter how identified, formulated, structured, and codified, are concerned not only with the explication of cultural symbols but with questions of power as well’ (Esonwanne 1992a, 567). Yeah! Close and gentle reader, please note that nothing I have previously published appears here unaltered. The task? Make it beautiful. In ‘Varieties of Exile,’ a short story, European-Canadian author Mavis Gallant bids a white Canadian character nod to the duplicitous dualities of ‘black’: ‘“black” … was a rude and offensive term in my childhood and I would not have been allowed to use it. “Black” was the sort of thing South Africans said’ (1996, 752). I keep in mind, however, Gallant’s warning in her story ‘In Plain Sight,’ ‘Visions of perfection emerge and fade but the written word remains to trip the author who runs too fast for his time or lopes alongside at not quite the required pace ’ (1996, 880). Slyly, I bought a few jackets from the downtown Kingston ‘Sally Ann.’

1. ‘This is no hearsay’: Reading the Canadian Slave Narratives

This paper was presented before the Victorian Studies Association of Ontario, at Victoria University, Toronto, on 7 March 2002. I am grateful to that audience for its helpful critique and comments. 1 I dedicate this essay to Dr. Linda Hutcheon, University Professor Emeritus at the University of Toronto, an internationally acclaimed scholar of irony, postmodernism, and opera, who is also a Canadianist – and my former mentor at the Department of English, University of Toronto.

214 notes to pages 19–22 2 Canadian scholar Nancy Kang reports recent scholarship that claims Equiano was actually born in South Carolina, and then uses this argument to tamp down what she determines to be ‘the fervor of this anti-americocentric bias’ (2005, 455). Her assertion fails to account, though, for Gates’s Americanization of Equiano at a time when his African origin was not questioned. In addition, the current scholarly attempt to claim Equiano as an early African-American writer, whether it succeeds or not, provides yet more evidence of African-American and American centrism. 3 Almonte also attests that Smallwood was ‘the only ex-slave to publish his narrative in Canada’ (2000, 9) and that his Narrative is ‘the sole example of a slave narrative written and published in Canada’ (16). These statements are wrong. Israel Lewis issued a screed in Montreal in 1846; Paola Brown released a squib in Hamilton, Ontario, in 1851; James W. Robertson published his narrative in Halifax in 1854; Josiah Henson’s internationally celebrated narrative, published in Boston in 1849, was reissued in London, Ontario, in 1881; in 1861, the Montreal Gazette published the transcribed narrative of Lavina Wormeny; Jim Henson’s narrative appeared in Owen Sound, Ontario, in 1889; and William Johnson’s text was published in Vancouver in 1901. Smallwood’s own text was printed in Toronto in 1851. There are likely other slave narratives, yet unknown, languishing in Canadian archives. While Almonte’s exclusivist claim for Smallwood is untenable, so is African-Canadian historian Afua Cooper’s notion that her history The Hanging of Angélique: The Untold Story of Canadian Slavery and the Burning of Old Montréal (2006) ‘links Canada as no work has done before to the Atlantic slave trade’ (2006, 10). Her hyperbole must be qualified: literary works by Lorena Gale and Lorris Elliott have performed such intellectual work, though not with the historical rigour Cooper provides. See my essay, ‘Raising Raced and Erased Executions in African-Canadian Literature, or Unearthing Angélique’ (2002b), a revised version of which is included in the present volume. 4 Often marketed under a shorter title, as either The Refugee or as Narratives of Fugitive Slaves in Canada, the original primary title, A North-Side View of Slavery, reminds us that Drew has compiled his narratives to answer a popular book, namely, Nehemiah Adams’s A South-Side View of Slavery (1855), which presented a sympathetic view of slaveholders and of slavery. Hence, Drew’s work is rebuttal propaganda. 5 Joan Sherman notes that ‘the most popular and influential [African-American] writing from the 1830s through the 1850s were thousands of slave narratives … Most appeared in widely read abolitionist newspapers and magazines, but several dozen were full-length books…’ They were beautiful counter-discourse: ‘Such vivid chronicles of human bondage and dramatic escapes became best-sellers; they fueled abolitionist fervor in the North and fearful antagonisms in the South as the fugitives’ firsthand descriptions of slavery’s horrors contradicted Southerners’ propaganda for the benignity of their peculiar institution’ (1992, 5). 6 The postbellum return to the United States of many of the tens of thousands of African Americans who had come to Canada between 1815 and 1861 (and especially during the last decade of that period) cannot be disregarded as one more reason for the discounting of their narratives as constitutive of Canadian and African-Canadian literature. 7 Thus, as Houston Baker testifies, a slave narrator seeks ‘to seize the word. [To make his being] erupt from nothingness. Only by grasping the word could he engage in the speech acts that would ultimately define his selfhood’ (1980, 31). 8 This narrative was transcribed from speech and edited by Samuel Moore, Esq. Although it was published in Detroit, it was, according to the research of African-Canadian historian Paul Lovejoy, penned in Chatham, Ontario. 9 See Smallwood ([1851] 2000), 30. Note, too, that Paola Brown’s earlier publication, ‘Circular Address

notes to pages 22–6

10 11

12

13 14 15 16 17

18

19

20

215

to the Free People of Color throughout the United States’ (1832), written in Quebec City, may also be indebted to David Walker. Historian Frank Mackey’s chapter on Brown, titled ‘Agent of the Liberator,’ in Black Then: Blacks and Montreal, 1780s–1880s, leaves no doubt that he was a scamp, a fraud, and a plagiarist (2004, 76–84). See note 3. Afua Cooper also recognizes, in her history, that historians of Canadian slavery must ransack newspaper advertisements, wills, contracts, and other colonial commercial and legal documents (2006, 302–3). Canadian slave narratives should be periodized thus: 1) narratives treating slavery in colonial Canada (found in trial records, letters, newspapers), from the early seventeenth century to 1833; 2) ‘exodus’ narratives focusing on the experiences of Black Loyalists and War of 1812 refugees (1783–1815); and 3) ‘Canaan’ narratives about fugitives who used the Underground Railroad to reach Canada, meaning, mainly southern Ontario (1830s–61). One irony of this division is that the latter narratives are so rich with almost bombastic praise for Canadian/British ‘liberty’ that earlier, negative accounts of white settler racism are obscured to the point of erasure. See chapter 6 below. See my two essays on Haliburton’s work: ‘White Niggers, Black Slaves: Slavery, Race, and Class in T.C. Haliburton’s The Clockmaker’ (1994) and ‘Must We Burn Haliburton?’ (1997b). This coinage belongs to Paul Gilroy (1993). See Walker (1976). As vivid as this list of hurts may be, Robertson is merely cataloguing what others have experienced. In the narrative of Lavina Wormeny, published by the Montreal Gazette in 1861, one reads that, in her enslavement in Texas, ‘No clothes whatever were allowed …’, and that she was, like other slaves, ‘compelled to go down on their knees, and harnessed to a plough, to plough up the land, with boys for riders, to whip them when they flagged in their work’ (quoted in F. Mackey 2004, 162). On one escape attempt, she ‘travelled on foot without a vestige of clothing, subsisting on herbs and nuts,’ and ‘gave birth to twin children, one of them dead’ (163). Upon recapture, her master slit Wormeny’s ears, branded her on the back of her left hand and on her belly, and axed off her little right finger (163). To pressure her to reveal information about other fugitive slaves, Wormeny was ‘fixed in what is there called a “buck.”’ This machine doubled her in two, ‘until her legs were passed over her head, where they were kept by a stick passed across the back of the neck’ (163–4). Wormeny endured even more violence before she escaped to Montreal. Slave narratives must be viewed not only as a subsection of sentimental or gothic literature, but as a species of true-crime reportage. This strategy is common in slave narratives. In Drew’s compendium, Mrs Nancy Howard alleges, ‘I think the slaveholders don’t read the Scriptures the right way, – they don’t know their danger’ (Drew [1856] 1981, 51). See, for instance, Dorothy Livesay’s poem, ‘New Jersey: 1935,’ wherein the speaker, perhaps Livesay herself, decides to abandon her lodgings after her white American landlady forbids entry to the speaker’s black girlfriend (110–1). This narrative repeats a staple of white Canadian liberal nationalism: to defend set-upon African Americans against white American racists. Problematically though, these same liberal nationalists – Livesay honourably excepted – are seldom present to defend coloured minorities against white Canadian racism, especially in its smiling, ‘slick’ manifestations. Drew is also responding to Nehemiah Adams’s apology for slavery, A South-side View of Slavery; or, Three Months at the South in 1854 (1855). Drew’s publisher, John P. Jewett & Company, in its ‘Publishers’ Advertisement,’ refers to his book as ‘“A North-side View of Slavery”’ (Jewett [1856] 1981, n.p.).

216 notes to pages 26–30 21 Phillip Brian Harper (1993) originated this argument in terms of white audiences ‘overhearing’ black American poetry. 22 Drew even wonders whether ‘a race partly African, partly Saxon’ might not favour ‘the cross of St. George’ in any eventual conflict between England and ‘our stars – and stripes’ (Drew [1856] 1981, 14). 23 See my article ‘Treason of the Black Intellectuals?’ (in G.E. Clarke 2002a), especially 193–5. 24 Introducing the narrative of John W. Lindsey, Drew offers the editorial aside that ‘Mr. Lindsey reached St. Catharines in an entirely destitute condition. He is now reputed to be worth from eight to ten thousand dollars, acquired by industry and economy’ (Drew [1856] 1981, 77). The bare fact is an aphorism – for those with ears to hear and eyes to see: Canada is now the true land of opportunity. 25 Another value of these testaments is their casual historiography. Thus, William Jackson of Queen’s Bush reports that he and his father arrived there in 1846 and that ‘for years scarcely any white people came in, but fugitive slaves came in, in great numbers, and cleared the land’ (Drew [1856] 1981, 189). Thanks to such chronicles, the slave narratives come to resemble mainstream settler, pioneer, and travel narratives. In other words, the recounting of such histories repositions ‘fugitives’ as ‘pioneers’ and ‘settlers’ – and, thus, as builders of Canada West – that is, southern Ontario. At Chatham, too, John Little recalls, ‘the fugitives are as thick as blackbirds in a corn-field’ (ibid., 234). 26 See Mary Ann Shadd’s A Plea for Emigration; or, Notes of Canada West … (1852) for yet further African-American, anti-slavery propaganda that positions Canada as a land of milk, honey, and zero racism. 27 Vital here is humour. So David West, another St. Catharines’s ex-Virginian, undermines republican slavery with this reported exchange: ‘A Baptist preacher told me once, when I was working for him, that there was no country in the world equal to Virginia. My answer was, “Yes, I believe it is the greatest country in the world: for one third of the people are doing nothing, and the other two thirds are working to support them”’ (Drew [1856] 1981, 88). 28 One sign of this ironic reversal is that Mrs Colman Freeman, once of North Carolina, is now of Canada West, although her father ‘fought the British in the [American] Revolution’ (Drew [1856] 1981, 330). 29 Here one must remember that, as Richard Almonte pleads, ‘the nineteenth-century Black Canadian community should not be seen – as it often is in popular Canadian history – as a uniform group of exslaves happy simply to be in Canada’ (2000, 12). Indeed, several narratives compiled by Drew speak of enmity and the failure of some fugitives to do their fair share of work to develop communities and to prosper. Therefore, George Williams, an ex-Kentuckian resident in Sandwich, Canada West, states, ‘In some places, the colored people can manage without aid, – but here not’ (Drew [1856] 1981, 344). In Colchester, on the northern shore of Lake Erie, Robert Nelson, out of Virginia, complains, ‘the prejudice is higher here in this place than in any part of Canada. It arises from a wish to keep the colored people so that they can get their labor’ (ibid., 371). Class – and culture – clashes helped to frustrate the unity and progress of the immigrant nineteenth-century Black Canadian communities in the Canadas and British Columbia.

2. A.B. Walker and Anna Minerva Henderson: Two Afro–New Brunswick Responses to ‘The Black Atlantic’

This paper was presented as the W. Stewart MacNutt Memorial Lecture at the University of New Brunswick – Fredericton and Saint John, on 17 and 18 November 2004 respectively. I am grateful to

notes to pages 30–3

217

my auditors for their helpful critiques and comments. A shorter version, published in Canadian Literature 189 (summer 2006), benefited from advice extended by Laurie Ricou. 1 I dedicate this essay to the memory of one of its subjects, Anna Minerva Henderson, who deserves greater appreciation as a pioneer African-Canadian modernist. 2 See my essays ‘Toward a Conservative Modernity: Cultural Nationalism in Contemporary Acadian and Africadian Poetry,’ ‘Treason of the Black Intellectuals?,’ and ‘Embarkation: Discovering AfricanCanadian Literature,’ all included in Odysseys Home: Mapping African-Canadian Literature (2002a), for elaborations of the diasporic African meanings of ‘liberalism’ and ‘conservatism’ in the Canadian setting. 3 See his Lament for a Nation: The Defeat of Canadian Nationalism (1965), especially chapters 5 and 6, where Grant argues that nationalism requires conservatism, while liberalism dissolves communal bonds to facilitate untrammelled commerce. 4 This sentence is deliberately vague. I mean to suggest here that African-Canadian authors, whatever their original nationalities and ethnicities, share a tendency to convert ‘foreign’ influences into domestic forms. However, for some, the ‘foreign’ influence is African or African-American; for others it is British or French; for still others it is Caribbean; and for the most damned of all, it is Canadian. 5 Euro–Nova Scotian historian Barry Cahill advises that Walker ‘usually signed himself ’ A.B. Walker (1994a, 1). 6 Cahill relates that Walker’s grandfather, William Walker, was one of the free African Americans to settle near Saint John, New Brunswick, following the American Revolution, and that his grandson studied at the King’s College School of Law at Saint John (1994a, 3). Hence, it is fair to say that A.B. Walker enjoyed a long association with the city. Even so, Walker had earned an LLB from a Washington, DC, law school, and he had already had ‘“ten years” standing at the bar’ by the time he matriculated to the King’s College School of Law (5). Despite his familial connection to Saint John, then, Walker did return there, by 1881, after some significant time away. 7 Cahill names Walker ‘the first native African-Canadian law student, attorney and barrister’ (1994a, 9). 8 Cahill records that Walker helped to see a Conservative narrowly elected in Saint John in ‘the decisive “National Policy” election of 1878,’ thanks – perhaps – to ‘the strategic voting of the small Black electorate of Saint John – organized and led by Walker’ (1994a, 10). 9 Cahill feels that, by the time the first issue of Neith appeared, Walker had ‘finally abandoned even the pretence of practising law in order to devote himself entirely to literary editing and publishing’ (1994a, 12). 10 This biography and bibliography is taken from Winks (1997, 398–401). 11 See Cahill (1994b), 1061. 12 This biography and bibliography is drawn from Winks (1997, 393n6). 13 Cahill reports that, according to one observer, ‘one of “Walker’s suggestions was that the white race was deteriorating so badly that a little admixture of Negro blood would be good for it”’ (1994a, 12). If true, he was clearly no purist race-nationalist. 14 McKerrow, a native of Antigua, became, with the appearance of this text, Canada’s first AfricanCanadian author of Caribbean descent. 15 A very learned man, Green attended Newton Theological Institute in West Newton, Massachusetts, then graduated from Colby College, Waterville, Maine, with a Bachelor of Arts degree and then a Master of Arts degree (Sealey 2001, 78). As a professor at Western (Baptist) College, Macon, Missouri, ‘he taught Math, New Testament, Greek, and Hebrew’ (ibid., 79).

218

notes to pages 33–9

16 Johnston died in 1915. 17 ‘In all things purely social we [Negroes and white Southerners] can be as separate as the five fingers, and yet one as the hand in all things essential to mutual [economic] progress,’ so sayeth Washington, disarmingly (Du Bois [1903] 1995, 80). 18 Ethiopianism had more adherents than Walker alone in Atlantic Canada. Rev. Adam S. Green, author of The Future of the Canadian Negro (1904), addressing a Truro, Nova Scotia, congregation in 1904, asserted, ‘Ethiopia had contributed … largely to the civilization and culture of Greece and Rome in Europe’ (quoted in Sealey 2001, 85). 19 In the entry on ‘Imperialism’ in The Canadian Encyclopedia, D.R. Owram records that, ‘When British imperialists founded the Imperial Federation League in 1884, Canadian supporters established branches. They sought a way for Canada to develop beyond colonial status without separating from the empire.’ These Anglo-Canadian – but British – imperialists ‘mixed Christian idealism and antiAmericanism with an effort to have people accept the principle that the Dominions [Canada, South Africa, Australia, and New Zealand] should participate in foreign policy at the imperial level’ (1988, 1050). A.B. Walker’s Pan-Africanist cum Angophilic imperialism is a deliberately blackened ancillary to the white, Anglo-Saxon imperialist yearnings of Canadian Imperial Federationists. 20 Whatever his comfort and currency with transatlantic, African diasporic thought, Walker was also a staunch fan of Anglo-Saxon power. See his pamphlet, Victoria the Good: The Great and Glorious Mother of Liberty, Justice, Right, Truth and Equity, of Modern Civilization; and the Mightiest Force for Righteousness in the World since the Time of Jesus: A Lecture (1901). 21 Neith was no skimpy, intellectual offering. The ‘contents’ for the February 1903 issue includes articles on a coal strike, French novelist Émile Zola, and an art exhibition in the city of Saint John; articles entitled ‘Hayti [sic] and Its Enemies,’ ‘Lost Israel Found,’ and ‘The Negro in New Brunswick’ (a history); several pieces on British Imperial policy toward Africa and ‘Negroes’; two pieces on Canada; and even a piece, apparently, on aesthetics, ‘Pleasures of the Imagination.’ 22 Adrienne Shadd cites a 1968 letter wherein Henderson tells her correspondent, ‘I have quite a number of good books and quite a collection on the Negro… I am trying to dispose of my books as I have quite a collection – nearly 2000…’ (quoted in Shadd 1996, 9). 23 U.S. scholar Aldon Lynn Nielsen confirms that Dunbar was ‘clearly the best known black poet of [his] time’ (2001, 154). 24 In my use of the word mastery, I allude to African-American literary critic Houston Baker’s argument that African-American literary modernism utilized two strategies: 1) ‘mastery of form’ – whereby the black writer establishes his or her equality to whites by working triumphantly with(in) a ‘European’ form (arguably the practice of Henderson); and 2) ‘deformation of mastery’ – whereby the black writer exploits his or her own cultural ‘voice ’ and ‘style,’ satirizing and subverting the ‘official’ – white – ‘norm.’ See Baker’s Modernism and the Harlem Renaissance (1987). 25 Lampman is no more blind to race than is Henderson – even if he does not repress his whiteness as much as she represses her blackness. In Lampman’s poem ‘At the Long Sault, 1660’ (1898), French defenders, led by Daulac, stave off an Aboriginal attack upon the infant settlement of Sault Ste. Marie. In Lampman’s eyes, the ‘Silent, white-faced’ Europeans confront a plain ‘dark with the rush of the foe … the Iroquois horde ’ ([1898] 1984, 83). Eventually vanquished by ‘the red men,’ who shout ‘triumph-songs’ around ‘campfires’ (a vision of savagery), Daulac and his men are transfigured into ‘lilies asleep in the forest’ (84). Here Lampman speaks for white-settler supremacy. 26 See Note 24 and Baker’s theories regarding black ‘mastery of form.’ 27 Ditto.

notes to pages 39–41

219

28 One must note, however, that when Earle Birney (1904–95) resigned from his editorship of the Canadian Poetry Magazine, in 1949, he condemned its sponsoring organization, the Canadian Authors Association, for supporting ‘standards of judgment … of the Victorian age only’ (Birney [1949a] 1970, 148). 29 In his history, The Blacks in New Brunswick (1972), W.A. Spray states, ‘There were probably at least 500 Black slaves in the Saint John area in 1784’ (16). These people enjoyed no rights. Spray tells us that ‘a number of slave-owners’ homes had rooms in the basement equipped with chains, which were used to confine slaves who had attempted to run away’ (21). But even free, Black Loyalist settlers endured privation and much discrimination: they were excluded from voting ‘for many years and there are no records of when Black people were first allowed to vote ’ (34); ‘Blacks were unable to become freemen of the city’ of Saint John, which meant they were not permitted to practise a trade or to open a business (34–5); ‘the free blacks had no spokesman in government and their pleas for aid were repeatedly rejected’ (36). Illiterate and landless, many of these settlers elected to be removed to Sierra Leone in 1792. Those who remained in New Brunswick, plus the later Black refugee arrivals during the War of 1812, were considered ‘little better than slaves’ by the New Brunswick government (43). In 1836, the colonial government allotted ‘1,050 acres in the so called “Black Refugee Tract” … to six White men,’ but only ‘55 acres was considered to be sufficient for the Black settlers’ (49). Spray’s chapter on education verifies that black people, until well into the twentieth century, received only sporadic and insufficient schooling, thus perpetuating their marginal socio-economic status (52–61). 30 Anniversary dates were important for Henderson. She must have been aware, for instance, that, in 1967, she was publishing Citadel not only in her eightieth year, but in the centennial year of the Dominion of Canada. 31 Henderson’s poem ‘Pioneer’ yields more evidence that the settlers and pioneers celebrated in the first sonnet of ‘Market Slip’ are also black. In ‘Pioneer,’ the poet imagines this archetypal settler facing ‘The difficult, the danger-ridden’ and ‘enemies’ who strove ‘In vain … to ensnare him / With the “yoke of iron / And the bands of brass.”’ Again, although this poem may be read as pro-Loyalist propaganda, with the ‘enemies’ cast as tyrannical republican America, it just makes plainer sense read as a displaced slave spiritual. Here the pioneer is an ex-slave, who ‘Hurt, but undaunted, … pressed on’ and ‘overcame’ all obstacles, ‘And then his heart sang’ (Henderson 1967, 16). Even the poem’s imagery replicates the elemental geography of the spiritual: Levels and foothills In green and soft deception, Tested his strength. The mountain Took all of his strength and courage. … The air Grew clearer, keener, as he climbed, And when he reached the top, An instant’s light revealed The world-road he had made. (ibid.) Anyone familiar with such spirituals as ‘Go Tell It on the Mountain,’ ‘Rise, Shine, for the Light Is AComing,’ ‘Wade in the Water,’ and ‘Down by the Riverside ’ (all titles included in my anthology Fire on the Water, vol. 1 [1991a]), just to name a few, will recognize the resemblance between their Biblical and topographical images and those Henderson employs. Nevertheless, Henderson maintains the dual

220

32

33

34

35 36

37

38

notes to pages 41–3

application of her poem to white settler and ex-slave by noting that the pioneer was ‘guided’ by ‘light’ – ‘The Merlin Gleam’ (16). Her speaker implies the rough equality of both the white and black newcomer (‘Adventure claimed him’), but also their mutual investment in Anglo-Christian mysticism. As in ‘Market Slip’ (and ‘The Old Burying Ground’ [11]), then, Henderson skilfully allows, in ‘Pioneer,’ a simultaneous black-and-white reading while arguing for the Anglo-milieu equality of settler and (ex-)slave. Adrienne Shadd, in her trailblazing paper on Henderson, says, of ‘Pioneer,’ ‘Here Henderson proclaims that the African-American fugitives to Canada are just as surely Canadian pioneers as the early French and English explorers or later European settlers who continue to command centre stage in our official historical drama’ (1996, 15). According to a printed version of the ‘Book of the Negro,’ an embarkation list of every African American removed from the United States by Great Britain at the end of the American War of Independence, one ex-slave of John Henderson (of Williamsburg, Virginia), Isaac, described as ‘21, squat stout mulatto’ (Hodges 1996, 18), was transported to Port Roseway (near Shelburne), Nova Scotia, in 1783 (16). Another potential forebear of Anna Henderson’s is Thomas Brown, ‘26, [stout fellow],’ who landed at ‘River St. John’s’ (Saint John), New Brunswick ‘This Negroe came from the Island of Jamaica about 3 months ago & has bound himself to John Henderson for 4 years’ (70). (Presumably, this John Henderson is not the same master who ‘Isaac’ fled in Virginia.) Another possible progenitor of Anna Henderson’s is Gilbert Lafferts, ‘21 years … Mr. James Henderson’s possession, proved to [be] the property of Mr. James Henderson…’ (195). Lafferts arrived in Nova Scotia in late 1783. A supplementary reading of ‘Market Slip’ must acknowledge the ironies of its title. First, it may designate a wharf or dock as a ‘slip’ from the market. But may it not also signal a ‘runaway slave’ – one who has given the (slave) market a ‘slip’ (in the slang sense)? Perhaps, too, ‘slip’ represents a receipt – one acknowledging the poet’s liberty. Also present at Saint John’s downtown ‘heart,’ as Henderson tells us in another sonnet, is King Square: ‘The heart of Saint John is King Square, laid out / Like the Union Jack …’ (Henderson 1967, 12). The square is adjacent to the Old Loyalist Burial Ground. Note here that Henderson, as in ‘Market Slip,’ employs a site of commerce as the grounds for reflection on migration. This poem may also be read as a statement of postcolonial equality. If visiting the corner grocery store on ‘a busy thoroughfare ’ in ‘London-town’ was ‘like coming home when all was said’ (Henderson 1967, 14), then ‘homey’ ‘London-town’ (and her use of this intimate and down-to-earth term is significant) is on a par with Saint John and Boston. Both of these smaller cities are its equals – and all are connected (and equalized) as well by the history of slavery and the struggle for freedom. An Africadian elder in the community of Preston, Nova Scotia, bore the name, ‘Mom Suze’ circa the 1980s. Suzette Mayr, born in 1967, is an African-Canadian writer based in Calgary, Alberta. Peter E. McKerrow’s History of the Coloured Baptists of Nova Scotia (1895) lists many marriages performed by African Baptist ministers. One was of S. Robson to Susan Gibson, in Halifax on 16 August 1844, while another was of W. Rodgers to Sus. Bride on 2 July 1872 ([1895] 1976, 77, 81). This testimony cannot establish that Henderson’s Susie Gray is black, but it should indicate that Susan and its derivations are not uncommon names in the African Maritimes and elsewhere in the African diaspora. African-American literary scholar Henry Louis Gates Jr. states that Wheatley has been attacked by ‘black and white critics alike for being the rara avis of a school of so-called [black – i.e., AfricanAmerican] mockingbird poets…’ (1992, 78). It is probable that Henderson knew of – and identified with – Wheatley. Like the African-American poet, Henderson was well-read, deeply religious,

notes to pages 43–6

221

and stood – as she may have felt – in the vulnerable, terrifying, and lonely position of being ‘the first’ – Negro Canadian woman – to challenge presumed white supremacy in a European art form. Henderson reveals her self-consciousness in a letter to American historian Robin W. Winks: ‘I am enclosing my chap-book ‘Citadel’ published in August [1967]. It is difficult for Canadians to believe that a colored person – or negro, as the U.S. would call me – can write good poetry. I believe I’m the only one in Canada who has ever written a chap-book!’ (quoted in A. Shadd 1996, 9). Henderson is partly incorrect in her assertion. The first poetry collections by African-Canadian men – Nathaniel Dett (1882–1943) and Theodore Henry Shackelford (1888–1923) – appeared in the United States in 1911 and 1916–18 respectively. The U.S.-born, but Canadian citizen, Alma Norman (1930–) published a poetry collection in England in 1964. (See my article ‘A Primer of African-Canadian Literature’ [in G.E. Clarke 2002a].) Still, for most of her life, Henderson was right to think herself the only publishing black poet in Canada, and she was certainly the first to publish a chapbook in her native country. 39 U.S. poet MacLeish (1892–1982) is famed for his much-anthologized ‘Ars Poetica’ (1926). It concludes, ‘A poem should not mean / But be ’ ([1926] 1993, 493). 40 Maureen Honey asserts that early-twentieth-century African-American poets saw no connection between ‘Western cultural domination’ and ‘their adoption of European literary forms’ (Honey 1989, 6). They ‘did not consider the models they followed [the sonnet, the ode, the elegy, etc.] to be the province or reflection of the conqueror’ (7). Like these poets, Henderson, I believe, viewed conventional poetic forms as ‘timeless and universal,’ as ‘a common tongue, to which all might have access and by which all might be spiritually enlightened.’ If ‘mastering’ these forms ‘was a political act’ (6), especially for the descendants of abject slaves, then so could the ‘raceless’ content of a black poet – a poet expected by white readers to be race-obsessed – be viewed as progressive, even radical. Henderson attempted, delicately, to do both: to be a black poet with universal content and to be a raceless poet with black subtext. 41 ‘It has become obvious that reading between the lines is an essential exercise in coming to a fuller understanding of Anna Minerva Henderson’s racial self ’ (A. Shadd 1996, 12–13).

3. Introducing a Distinct Genre of African-Canadian Literature: The Church Narrative This paper emerges from presentations of an earlier version at the conference, ‘Imagining a Region: Constructing and De-Constructing Atlantic Canada,’ Saint Francis Xavier University, Antigonish, Nova Scotia, on 25 August 2001, and also at the conference ‘Multiple Lenses: Voices from the Diaspora Located in Canada,’ Dalhousie University, Halifax, 27 October 2005. I thank the various audiences for their responses. I also thank Dr. Peter J. Paris for his careful and helpful epistolary response to this essay, as well as Ms Donna Byard Sealey for her careful reading and suggestions. 1 I dedicate this essay to Edith Johnson, née King, my late aunt, who was a Believer, and who treasured the many church histories published by the now-defunct Lancelot Press, which was based in Hantsport, Nova Scotia. (It was in her Hantsport home that I first encountered many of these little books.) Born in Hants Border, Nova Scotia, she was the mother of my cousin and poet Kirk Johnson (1973–), who hails from the same community. 2 Three terms are used in this essay to refer to Black Canadian writers and literature. African-Canadian denotes all Black Canadian writers, texts, and contexts; Africadian designates Black–Nova Scotian

222

3 4

5

6

7

8

9

notes to pages 46–7

materials and heritage; AfriCanadian is used almost exclusively in relation to Dorothy Shadd Shreve’s history of the Black church in Ontario. For more information on the origins and evolution of African-Canadian literature, see my article, ‘A Primer of African-Canadian Literature ’ in Clarke (2002a). African-Canadian women church narrative authors such as Pearleen Oliver, Cherry Paris, Donna Byard Sealey, and Dorothy Shadd Shreve may be types of the ‘Black woman griot-historian’ Barbara Omolade expects to be ‘shaped by an African world-view which evolved within democratic/consensus tribal societies where the oral tradition of transmitting information and knowledge is interwoven among music, art, dance, and crafts, and everyday activities intermix with communication and connection with both the spiritual world and the ancestral past’ (Omolade 1994, 106). I think they – and other church narrative writers – respect Omolade ’s command ‘to hear what people truly are saying about their experiences’ and ‘to use their rhythm and cadence of expression to define and describe and not delete it from the retelling’ (111). American scholar Lauri Ramey argues that African-American ‘spirituals are clearly sacred lyric poems that are sufficiently literary to be categorized as such, sufficiently unique to be considered an essential complement to the American poetry canon, and an embodiment of the fusion of the aesthetic and devotional in African American art and culture ’ (2002, 361). Seconding Professor Ramey’s position, I urge that African-Canadian church histories be read as a complement to Canadian literature, and that we understand them as examples of African-Canadian folk creativity, though set down in print as opposed to being voiced ‘anonymously’ in a field. This historiography offers us an African Canada with its own styles of English, a history replete with biblical intertexts, archetypes, heroes, and saints. Too, the historians are people’s intellectuals, sheltered not in universities, but in churches, who handed down from generation to generation – like Medieval monks – the tenets and tales of African-Canadian Christianity. Meditate, though, on Mary Ann Shadd’s circa 1852 finding: ‘It is impossible to observe thoughtfully the workings of that incipient Zion (the Canadian African Church, of whatever denomination), in its present, imperfect state, without seriously regretting that it should have been thought necessary to call it into existence.’ Shadd thinks the African-Canadian church is an expression of ‘hatred against whites’ ([1852] 1998, 62). This form of courtly disparagement appears in Canadian historian Barry Cahill’s 1995 review of Africadian writer Charles R. Saunders’s history, Share and Care: The Story of the Nova Scotian Home for Colored Children (1994), which deals, not with a church, but with a church-linked institution. Concluding his otherwise supportive review, Cahill wagers, ‘The Black [Nova Scotian] community’s attitude towards its own history requires radicalization and objectivization … so that “story” will in due course yield ground to “history”’ (1995, 29). Problematically, Cahill counts an entire community as trapped in some retrograde mode of historiography from which it can only hope to emerge ‘in due course.’ His critique evinces an amiable, academic paternalism. He forgets that it is mainly thanks to African-Canadian ‘lay’ historians that the ‘progressive ’ Africville relocation (1964–70) by the city of Halifax is now viewed as tragedy and that the accused arsonist and ‘Montréalaise’ slave MarieJosèphe Angélique (d. 1734) is now embraced as a heroine, a martyr for liberty. I cannot ignore the powerful critique of the Black (American) church that African-American writer James Baldwin lodges in his polemic The Fire Next Time (1963): ‘the principles governing the rites and customs of the churches in which I grew up did not differ from the principles governing the rites and customs of other churches, white. The principles were Blindness, Loneliness, and Terror, the first principle necessarily and actively cultivated in order to deny the two others’ (47). Baldwin also claims

notes to pages 47–9

10 11 12 13 14 15

16

17 18

19

20

21

223

that ‘there was no love in the church’ (57). He questions, rightly, the sanctity of the Black church, but fails to note that the European Christian churches possessed far more cultural and political legitimacy than did those erected by black congregations. Baldwin does laud one aspect of African diasporic spirituality: stirring music, speech, and song: ‘There is no music like that music, no drama like the drama of the saints rejoicing, the sinners moaning, the tambourines racing, and all those voices coming together and crying holy unto the lord’ (49). Warns Barbara Omolade, ‘The control of history and the writing of history is the means of controlling how people think about themselves and their place in the world and in time’ (1994, 106). As Sealey urges, ‘the history of Zion [church]’s people and the church they built is a potent link in the history and genealogy of Blacks in Nova Scotia’ (2001, 16). See my divagation, ‘Approaching African-Canadian Literature (Again).’ Moreover, if inked in the vernacular, it hurls this printed speech – like acid – into the limestone faces of the literati. My quotations are taken from the edition of this work edited by Frank Stanley Boyd, Jr. (McKerrow [1895] 1976). David George (ca. 1743–1810), an African American, ex-slave, and Baptist missionary who established congregations in North Carolina, Nova Scotia, and Sierra Leone, published a narrative in 1793. However, his text is a spiritual autobiography, not a church history. Although David George organized a portion of Loyalist African-American settlers in Nova Scotia and New Brunswick into Baptist congregations between his arrival in 1783 and his departure in 1792, no formal church organization and church construction occurred until the arrival of the AfricanAmerican War of 1812 refugees to Nova Scotia and New Brunswick between 1812 and 1815. One may wonder, though, just how many white Christians – even those holding multiple degrees – possess ‘a firm grasp of the bible ’s contents…’ Here one must note that Oliver’s first publication, A Brief History of the Coloured Baptists of Nova Scotia (1953), is, as its title indicates, an extension of McKerrow’s 1895 text. Importantly, in her Beechville Church history, Oliver praises the ‘honored and beloved first Black historian, Peter MacKerrow [sic]’ as ‘the first official historian … [who] left to following generations a legacy in his published works’ (P. Oliver 1994, 104, 44). Hear the recording Lord You Brought Me a Mighty Long Way: An African Nova Scotian Musical Journey (1998), a Black Cultural Society of Nova Scotia compilation of contemporary and archival songs written – or sung – by African Nova Scotians, especially track 29, ‘Thank You Jesus, You’ve Brought Me a Mighty Long Way,’ recorded at Cornwallis Street Baptist Church, Halifax, in 1994. For contemporary African Baptists in Nova Scotia, theology is a branch of social work. This impression is supported by my reading of Fighting for Change: Black Social Workers in Nova Scotia, a collection of brief memoirs by professional social workers. In this compendium, edited by Dalhousie University School of Social Work professor Wanda Thomas Bernard, contributors quote scripture and acknowledge the import of faith. For example, Wanda Taylor reports, ‘For months and months, I bore deep, deep guilt for abandoning the preaching of the Bible. I felt continually convicted by the scripture verses in Corinthians 1:10–11 …’ (Bernard 2006, 109). Strikingly, in a social work textbook, aimed at a secular audience, these university-educated, black professional women feel no contradiction or embarrassment in openly discussing their faith. The church-scribe perspective influences African-Canadian secular nonfiction too. Hence, in her memoir, The Colours of My Memories (2006), Christie Cromwell Simmonds records,

224

notes to pages 49–52

On arriving in the promised land of Nova Scotia, freed Blacks encountered a wall of racism… They were given land but only in the most remote wooded, rocky, rough areas, with soil not suitable for agriculture. They had no tools or help of any kind. It has been said that the authorities hoped that the Blacks would not be able to survive. After a long struggle, small lots were allotted to Blacks all over the Province of Nova Scotia… (16)

22 23

24

25

26

27

28

True, God and Christ are not invoked here. But the idea that ‘promised land’ was obtained by Blacks only after ‘long struggle ’ implies divine assistance. Clayton comments, ‘It is to our forefathers’ eternal glory that they would attempt to build for eternity amid such circumstances’ of ‘general hopeless poverty’ and ‘perpetual epidemics’ (1984, 17, 18). In a 28 July 1979 Chronicle-Herald newspaper column, Halifax journalist Allen M. Gibson writes, ‘Music has long been a feature of the Beechville Church and the congregation there has a spiritual of its own.’ He knows that its ‘refrain has a uniquely Canadian motif. “My Saviour promised me a hiding place,” the chant begins and the chorus responds, “I traced my Saviour’s footsteps in the snow”’ (quoted in Martin and Smith 1980, 3). Simmonds remembers, in her secular memoir, her mamma’s ‘pretty voice humming or talking or sweetly singing hymns I often hear in church to this day …’ (2006, 21). She also recalls, ‘Mostly we sang when we worked, usually hymns that Mamma had taught us’ (55). Darlamaine Gero-Hagel reports, ‘My [Scottish] mother disapproved of the Baptist church, so we were removed, and indoctrinated into her Presbyterian church. As my [Africadian] father said, “Your mother got tired of the moaning, groaning, wailing and craziness of the Baptist church as she saw it”’ (Bernard 2006, 135). Discussing Afro-Ontario churches, Dorothy Shadd Shreve opines, ‘In [Upper] Canada, the preference of Blacks for passionate sermons, hymn-singing, and the other expressions of spiritual religion actually provided a rationale for segregation’ (1983, 42). True: Henry’s critique is related to what she perceived, in 1975, to be a dearth of ‘popular’ song among Africadians. My response to this argument, put forward in my introduction to the first volume of Fire on the Water: An Anthology of Black Nova Scotian Writing, in 1991, is that spirituals became the basis of popular and folk song in Nova Scotia (16–20). I will also record that Donna Byard Sealey reports, in a note addressed to me in September 2006, that the Rev. Charles Coleman, a mid-1960s pastor of Cornwallis Street United Baptist Church in Halifax, oversaw the tape recording of some services. These audiotapes would furnish further evidence, presumably, of Africadian musical creativity. In a Halifax Chronicle-Herald report of 30 September 1978, Rev. Donald Skeir of the African United Baptist Association of Nova Scotia (AUBANS) asks, ‘where would [we] be if we had to worship in a white church? There are spiritual expressions that we follow through in our church that we perhaps would not do in a white church’ (quoted in Martin and Smith 1980, 5). Although Boyd feels pressured to challenge McKerrow’s supposed integrationist bias, one may observe that McKerrow’s inking of a history of Coloured Baptists suggests his expression of a modicum of cultural nationalism. Notably too, one of McKerrow’s most poetic passages is his paean to AfricanAmerican abolitionist Frederick Douglass, who ‘worked with pen and tongue, and lived to see [slavery’s] colossal palaces crumbled to the earth, its vicious constitutions torn to atoms, and many of its legislators passed from time to eternity unnoticed by their survivors’ (McKerrow [1895] 1976, 92). In addition, McKerrow protests vehemently against the possibility of the ABANS losing, due to indebtedness, the ‘Mother Church’ – Cornwallis Street Baptist Church, in Halifax, established in 1832: Were

notes to pages 52–6

29 30 31 32

33 34

35 36

37

38 39

40

41

225

its congregation to permit it to slip away, ‘the paving stones in the gutter would arise from their sockets like an army and shout disgust to our implicit trusts. Sixty years has she withstood the scoffs of the skeptic, and for sixty more may she stand within the ownership of a once enslaved people whose eyes are now turned Zionward’ (40). McKerrow does not sound, here, like an abject integrationist. Winks refers to the founding of Acadia College (later University), a Baptist-affiliated postsecondary institution, in Wolfville, Nova Scotia, in 1838. Another way to read this assertion is that, by the early 1820s, separate white churches had been founded in virtually every white community. Peter Conrad reminds us, ‘dreamers have an agility denied to those who remain awake, and can vault over obstacles’ (2002, 7). By highlighting the role of Preston in Africadian church narratives, I do not diminish that of David George. Nevertheless, while George shows up in writings by Pearleen Oliver and other church historians, he is less central a figure than is Preston. Yet, like African-American, ex-slave, and Methodist leader Boston King (c. 1760–1802), insomuch as his 1793 spiritual autobiography discusses church formation, George is a forerunner of Peter E. McKerrow. See Peter Paris, ‘David George: Paramount Ancestral Father of the Black Church in the United States, Canada and Sierra Leone’ (1996). For excerpts from the texts of George and King, see my anthology Fire on the Water, vol. 1 (1991a). Boyd’s provision of this verb to McKerrow’s text suggests an element of deception in Preston that is absent from Pearleen Oliver’s account of this story. My quotations are taken from the edition of The Lord’s Wonderful Dealings with John Marrant, a Black ..., excerpted in my anthology Fire on the Water, vol. 1 (1991a), 40–8. Intriguingly too, it is the Genesis story of Joseph, triumphant but isolated in Egypt, and unknown to his own family, that appeals to Nova Scotian sojourners Marrant and McKerrow, and not, as is the case in ‘purist,’ African-American anti-slavery sermon and song, the Exodus story of Moses and his successful liberation of slaves. Not for Sealey, however. Preston is absent from Colored Zion because Zion Baptist Church was organized decades after Preston’s death and it long maintained a separate existence from the AUBANS. After McKerrow, the main source of Preston’s ‘mother and child reunion’ (to borrow from a Paul Simon song title) legend is Oliver’s History of the Coloured Baptists (1953, 22). It is her version to which both Clayton and Peter Paris defer. In her history of the Windsor Plains Church, Cherry Paris includes several pages featuring the 1995 reunification of minister Rev. B. Moses Adekola, originally of Nigeria, with his family members, now emigrated to Canada (2001, 62–5). This event offers a prosaic revision of the lyricism of the Prestonand-Mother ur-reunion. Note that Oliver’s Song of the Spirit is divided not into chapters, but ‘Epochs.’ Leon Roth’s rewrite of Micah 6:7–9, ‘What doth the National Spirit require of thee but to do justly and to love kindness and to walk humbly with thy National Will to Survive’ (quoted in G. Grant 2005, 100), applied to Jews, has relevance for African-Canadian church historians. Clayton seeks to prevent, in reference to Africadian Baptists, ‘the collapse of dynasties or cultures as a result of their falling away from their original “mission” and precepts laid down by their founding generations’ (Walkiewicz and Witemeyer 1995, 9). Perhaps ‘gothic romanticism’ is the prevailing mode of all blues – or gospel ‘witnessing,’ from Oprah to rap. Walter Benn Michaels points out, usefully, that ‘without the ghosts, history is just a subject we study’ (Michaels 1996, 8). James Baldwin is less positive: ‘Time catches up with kingdoms and crushes them, gets its teeth into

226

42

43

44

45 46

notes to pages 56–60

doctrines and rends them; time reveals the foundations on which any kingdom rests, and eats at those foundations, and it destroys doctrines by proving them to be untrue’ (1963, 72). This Space Age–oriented list of professions is only open to post–Second World War Inglewood High School graduates. Cromwell provides no evidence to illuminate the professional attainments (or lack thereof ) of previous Inglewood generations. Such omissions point to obvious limitations in narratives by non-professional historians. Even so, these chroniclers deem important what trained historians may overlook. Though Welsh and white, Thomas was regarded highly enough by Africadian Baptists to be beatified via the naming of a church in his honour: St. Thomas United Baptist Church, of Preston, Nova Scotia (see McKerrow [1895] 1976, 69–70). In his assessment of French deconstructionist Michel Foucault, Hayden White praises Foucault’s apparent interest in rendering ‘the familiar strange ’ by attempting, like other romanticism-descended historians, to penetrate ‘to the deepest recesses of past lives in order to reconstitute them in all their strangeness and mystery as once vital forces, and in such a way as to remind men of the irreducible variety of human life.’ (H. White 1985, 256). When Foucault promises that ‘a revolutionary undertaking is directed against the rule of “until now”’ (1992, 233), he also refuses to consider the past as a prelude to the present. No, the past is a present in which all other potential presents (including our current one) are already immanent. Verily, in trying to write history, one aspires to the condition of the compact incisiveness and imagistic energy of poetry. In drafting poetry, one writes a historical document that asserts its prophetic beauty. Michaels meditates, ‘if history were learned, not remembered, then no history could be more truly ours than any other’ (1996, 7). Any cultural identity dependent on the transmission of a learned (and learnèd) history is constructed of myth.

4. Afro-Gynocentric Darwinism in the Drama of George Elroy Boyd

A version of this essay was presented to the Theatre and Exile Conference at the Graduate Centre for the Study of Drama, University of Toronto, on 22 March 2002, and to the ‘How to Teach a “Culturally Different” Text’ Symposium at Trinity College, University of Toronto, on 28 November 2003. 1 I dedicate this essay to Ayanna Black, a Jamaican-Canadian poet and pioneering anthologist of African-Canadian literature. 2 In his Discourse on Colonialism ([1955] 1972), Martiniquan poet Aimé Césaire warns that contemporary fascism returns to Adolf Hitler’s ‘vomit,’ such as the defining statement, ‘The supreme goal of the People-State is to preserve the original elements of the race which, by spreading culture, create the beauty and dignity of a superior humanity’ (44). 3 Elam also cites Kobena Mercer’s proviso that ‘identity becomes an issue when it is in crisis, when something assumed to be fixed, coherent, stable is displaced by the experience of doubt and uncertainty’ (1996, 5). 4 In one interview, Boyd states, ‘There ’s no easy way out for a black Canadian adult male in this society’ (quoted in Barnard 1996, D1–2). 5 Another ‘phallic’ image associated with Clarice occurs when Rev. Miner, a black minister, embraces her prior to the funeral for her son: ‘she ’s stiff as an anchor’ (Boyd [1992] 1996, 27).

notes to pages 61–4

227

6 If ‘comin’’ is permitted its slang connotation of signalling the onset of orgasm, then Clarice’s vain attempt to assist her son carries greater irony: Sexual success – in pleasure and procreation – ‘comes’ to barrenness in this sterile, dry, frigid environment. 7 In the popular U.S. film Silence of the Lambs (Jonathan Demme 1991), Jodie Foster plays Clarice Starling, an FBI agent ‘masculine in both manner and career …,’ whose serial-killer ‘prey’ is an ‘effeminate’ man who wishes to be a woman (Clover 1992, 233). Boyd’s Clarice is similarly ‘masculine’ and faces off against an ‘effeminate ’ husband. Even if Boyd does not intend to refer to Silence of the Lambs and its ‘feminist’ protagonist, Clarice is still a nice choice of name for his own ‘hero,’ given that it means, in French, ‘little brilliant one ’ (Dinwiddie-Boyd 1994, 262). Boyd’s Clarice may be less physically imposing than her husband, but she exceeds him in both intellect and ‘fire.’ 8 Note that Willem is likely derived from William, which in German means ‘resolute protector’ (Dinwiddie-Boyd 1994, 161). Willem does not play any such role for Clarice. He is the very spirit of uncertainty: ‘He moves hesitantly toward the door, not wanting to enter, but knowing that he must’ (Boyd [1992] 1996, 17). 9 Boyd recognizes the validity of this argument. In his ‘Author’s Note,’ he remarks that, in the destruction of Africville, ‘“the man” was dictating the African–Nova Scotian community’s fate; once again “the man” was lying… Once again, … I was reminded of the cultural insensitivity of “the man”’ ([1992] 1996, 7). ‘The man’ is automatically white – and empowered, and so black ‘men’ are reduced to ‘boys.’ 10 Willem, a liberal capitalist, can feel no qualms. Preaches his ideology, “It is in the economic best interest of the modern citizen to devalue the sacred” (Bush 1989, 118). 11 This observation contrasts ironically with Clarice ’s remembrance of her ‘Granddaddy,’ who ‘built their place with his bare hands’ (G. Boyd [1992] 1996, 24). 12 Miner’s name suggests he is ‘minor’; thus, his faith cannot overcome modernity’s bulldozers. 13 Louise, the female version of Louis, means, in French, ‘famous warrior’ (Dinwiddie-Boyd 1994, 317). Boyd’s Momma-Lou is certainly a warrior. Note, too, that her two-part name combines both feminine and masculine gender connotations. 14 Gideon is named ironically, for, says Elza Dinwiddie-Boyd, this name of Hebrew derivation means ‘one who cuts down’ and refers to ‘a judge of Israel who won great battles through faith in God.’ While Boyd’s Gideon does ‘cut down’ his wife ’s brother, he is also ‘cut down’ himself, and cannot be said to triumph in any way. Given that this ‘unusual name ’ was used by ‘free blacks in the 19th century’ and is ‘obsolete ’ among African Americans now (Dinwiddie-Boyd 1994, 68), Boyd signals that Gideon has no place in contemporary Nova Scotian / Canadian / North American / Western society. 15 Poppy’s name may also refer, ironically, to the poppy flower, a symbol of valiant military death, but also of opium, a narcotic. Thus, ‘Poppy’ suggests not only God, but also ‘sleep’ and ‘death.’ 16 Momma-Lou notes, for instance, ‘Poppy’s listenin’ and the Lord Jesus Christ –’ (Boyd 1996b, 49). 17 See note 13. 18 Momma-Lou refers here to the ‘great 17th-century African warrior’ and queen who was also a brilliant “administrator and organizer” (Dinwiddie-Boyd 1994, 403). 19 Momma-Lou believes that the black community is in a ‘war’ that is practically genocidal. Here, though, the police ‘let the niggers kill themselves’ (Boyd 1996b, 75) with drug overdoses. She also preaches that ‘You got police arresting our kids for pimpin’ – they slam their black asses in jail! The little white girls, though, they get all the social workers and the Children’s Aid they need. But what about our boys?’ (ibid., 78).

228 notes to pages 66–9 20 Tragedy is also marked here by the failure of the second-generation Steeles to fulfil Cherlene’s dream – à la the Youngers in African-American playwright Lorraine Hansberry’s Raisin in the Sun (1959) – to find suburban prosperity: ‘Just think – my own dishwasher. My washer and dryer. And to live out in one of them high-falutin’ suburbs’ (Boyd 1996b, 42). Gideon’s Blues is a tragedy, and so Cherlene will end her days as a widowed single parent dodging prostitutes and drug pushers amid a ‘war-zone.’ Canadian scholar Jerry Wasserman finds Boyd’s Gideon resembles Hansberry’s Walter Younger Jr. Gideon is also ‘a proud, ambitious black man trapped in an unskilled, dead-end job in a racist society – he’s a Halifax janitor with a university degree ’ (1998, 62). Unfortunately, unlike Walter Younger, Gideon chooses crime as his ticket from poverty, and becomes a beast his own mother must ‘put down.’

5. Seeing through Race: Surveillance of Black Males in Jessome , Satirizing Black Stereotypes in James

This paper evolved from my presentations for the University of King’s College Lecture Series, Halifax, on 23 November 2000, and for the Canadian American Research Symposium at the United States Immigration Museum, Ellis Island, New York, on 10 September 2004. 1 Mona States, my cousin from Three Mile Plains, Nova Scotia, was a blonde-haired, grey-blue-eyed, Black English–speaking ‘sister.’ I dedicate this essay to the memory of her always cheering – yet subversive – laughter. 2 Writing in 1852, Mary Ann Shadd charged that teachers of and missionaries to African-American settlers in Canada West (now southern Ontario) experienced ‘a degrading surveillance, often of serious and abiding consequences …’ ([1852] 1998, 63). 3 Given such conceptions of black masculinity, it is sensible that Bubbles Brazil, the white teen protagonist of Darius James’s Negrophobia: An Urban Parable (1992), should recall an actor ancestor who ‘toured the country in corkface and said, “Unless Othello shot craps, ate watermelon, and cut Desdemona with a razor, playin’ niggers paid better than Shakespeare and got bigger laughs”’ (1992, 154). Like James’s novel, African-American filmmaker Spike Lee ’s film Bamboozled (2000) tries to undercut, all such stereotypes. 4 Willie Horton, a murderer-rapist, was used by the successful 1988 campaign of U.S. Republican presidential candidate George H.W. Bush to symbolize the supposedly lax law-and-order views of his Democratic challenger, Michael Dukakis. Basketball legend Wilt Chamberlain boasted of having had thousands of lovers. During his 1991 U.S. Supreme Court confirmation hearings, Clarence Thomas faced damaging accusations of sexual harassment from Anita Hill, a black law professor. Champion pugilist Mike ‘Iron Mike ’ Tyson, convicted of rape in 1991, served three years in prison. O.J. Simpson, a football star and Hollywood celebrity, fell from grace, despite his acquittal for the 1994 murders of his ex-wife and her friend. Yet, all of these black ‘bad boys’ pale into pure insignificance when placed alongside the ‘race-transcending,’ model brilliance of Barack Obama, the successful AfricanAmerican, Democratic candidate in the 2008 U.S. presidential election. 5 Problematically though, some of us choose to repeat the repetitions, glorying in the badness they represent and refusing to recognize how glamourizing the criminal marginalizes the victims, even if the criminal is dashing and his or her crimes somewhat disruptive of an oppressive status quo. 6 See Globe and Mail columnist Michael Valpy’s article criminalizing all ‘Jamaican-Canadian’ youth after the Just Desserts café robbery and shooting of Georgina Leimonis in Toronto in April 1994.

notes to pages 69–71

7

8

9 10

11

12

13 14

15

16

229

Valpy links ‘a growing tendency toward random, violent crime ’ in Toronto to ‘young black people of Jamaican origin.’ He also imagines the existence of ‘a culture of violence among Jamaican-Canadian youth’ and fears that ‘their dress, patois, and behaviour’ are ‘being imitated’ by other ‘young black people’ (1994, A2). Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. (1929–68) led the U.S. civil rights movement from 1956 till his assassination in 1968 and received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1964. Rodney King, while not resisting arrest by four white Los Angeles policemen, was beaten anyway. Despite videotaped evidence of the assault, the officers were acquitted in a 1992 trial, an event that sparked riots across North America, including a minor one in Toronto. (The offending officers were later convicted in a 1993 trial for having violated King’s civil rights.) In its use of racial tropes in justice narratives, Canada differs from the United States in emphasizing law and order. Both nations may accept stereotypes of black (male) criminality, but, where this figure is romanticized in American texts, in Canadian texts, it is the police and the judiciary who are the unquestionable heroes. Carolyn Strange and Tina Loo find, in Canadian true-crime magazines of the mid-twentieth century, ‘the only legitimate avenging angels were those who were cloaked in uniforms, bearing the authority of the state ’ (2004, 17). In these magazines, ‘stories of shooting the sheriff were, oddly, opportunities to remind readers of the superiority of the law’ (27). Yet, Canadian law enforcement may behave as bitterly towards African Canadians (and Aboriginal peoples) as their American counterparts do towards blacks. A 2006 research report from the Toronto-based African Canadian Legal Clinic suggests, ‘Black residents of Ontario are 10.1 times more likely to become involved in a police shooting than their White counterparts’ (Wortley and Roswell 2006, 22). The cover illustration is by Steven Brower and Ralph Wernli. Of course, the word inside is a staple, pornographic double entendre, while the word ring may signify the female genitalia – as well as a criminal gang or deviant ‘club.’ Jessome’s title plants his text firmly inside the ring of sexual voyeurism. The cover photograph is drawn from the ‘considerable video archive’ (Jessome 1996, viii) of ATV (Atlantic Television System, now called CTV Atlantic), a Halifax-based television station connected to the national Canadian Television Network (CTV), which is headquartered in Toronto. Thus, Jessome’s text is the result of incestuous police–journalist networking in two cities, Halifax and Toronto, which allows one television network to ‘scoop’ the ‘dirt’ involving ‘white victims’ and ‘black criminals’ (ibid., 14). Jessome also terms the crooks ‘the family compact’ (1996, 35), a label also affixed to the Tory oligarchy that controlled Upper Canada (now Ontario), circa 1792–1837. Criminals and capitalists are always close… Jessome’s breathless, panting ‘coverage ’ mandates a prose dismissive of commas. Jessome is right to distrust the stereotypes. But he needs to analyse why black male sexual exploitation of white women appeals to some men (black, white, brown) and why the paraphernalia of procuring – the cars, the clothes, the jewels, and the ‘flash’ – dazzle both the women the pimp markets – and the men who purchase them. Misogyny is at work, yes, but so is a complicated racial revenge negotiated within commodity capitalism… James’s imagery here anticipates the oddly scatological nostalgia that Jessome ascribes to one pimp for whom ‘the sickly sweet scent of raw sewage and petroleum products’ on the Montreal waterfront conjures up fond memories of his Haligonian home (Jessome 1996, 67). Joint signifies a marijuana cigarette, yes, but it is also African-American slang, signally, for the penis. In another context, it may refer to prison.

230 notes to pages 72–5 17 A slang term for underage, thus illegal, sex partners. 18 U.S. scholar Mary Niall Mitchell locates the social interest in the lascivious bondage of white girls as arising from American slavery abolitionist propaganda. She records that abolitionists employed the figure of ‘the white-looking slave girl’ to strengthen their argument that the sexual exploitation inherent in slavery threatened ‘the freedom and purity of the white race’ (2002, 392–3). Ironically, the black procurer – in folklore a creation of slavery – becomes the face of that threatened violation, which is, usually, actually prosecuted by white men. 19 Such surveillance has deep roots in slavery. Introducing his collection of transcribed oral testimonies of fugitive African-American ex-slaves in Canada, editor and compiler Benjamin Drew comments, ‘a strong police must watch the motions of the oppressed – prevent them from meeting together unless some of the oppressors are present – keep them in their quarters at night, etc.’ ([1856] 1981, 7). 20 According to Sairi Wolfe, the pseudonym of a self-confessed Toronto prostitute in the early 2000s, ‘a few girls had pimps making them work hard and often. These girls did not see themselves as being used. They were in love with these men who had turned them out on the streets of Halifax, Toronto, or Vancouver. Several had children with these men’ (2002, A8; my italics). Although it is probable that these women were deluded, their relationships with their pimps – or ‘baby daddies’ – may have been more complex than Jessome or Perry allow. 21 Buppets is seemingly a neologism combining muppets and the slang term buppy, derived from the slang acronym BUP, or ‘black urban professional.’ 22 The Second Buppet refers here to the infamous New York City Central Park jogger rape case of April 1989, in which ‘a white woman in her late twenties, wealthy, well-educated, up-and-coming, an investment banker, and a jogger’ was raped and battered almost to death by ‘a gang of black and Hispanic teenage boys roving the park at night looking for trouble’ (Benedict 1992, 189). Helen Benedict asserts that much of the press coverage was racist: ‘When the assailants are white, the press is willing to explain gang rape in terms of the male ethos. When the assailants are black, the press looks instead to stereotypes of the violent black underclass’ (220). James’s salty satire of this nasty episode underscores Frantz Fanon’s precept that ‘Whoever says rape says Negro’ (1967, 167). 23 Mischievous, lascivious, regressive, these men prefer to be black panderers, not Black Panthers. 24 Then too, for Jessome, the captive sex workers constitute a ‘stable of prostitutes’ (1996, 167) or, merely, a ‘stable.’ Intriguingly, he never encases this bestializing term in quotation marks, thus suggesting that he shares the pimps’ view of their prey and prisoners. But Somebody’s Daughter is, itself, a ‘stable’ of unstable personalities. 25 Yet Jessome cites the police wisdom that ‘all you had to do was abuse a little girl and then wait ten years and you’d have a prostitute ’ (1996, 190). Although Jessome knows that childhood sexual abuse leads to prostitution – and, thus, a pimp socio-economy – he evacuates this scenario. 26 Thus, two white Halifax cops adopt ‘hip’ lingo – ‘the language of the streets.’ Once familiar with the black ‘Scotian’ lexicon, the police stop ‘calling the sex trade prostitution. It was The Game and everyone involved was a player’ (Jessome 1996, 205). 27 Wolfe reports that, of the Toronto prostitutes with whom she worked, ‘about 70 per cent of them … fell into the Scotian category – mainly from Dartmouth or Halifax. They were young, argumentative, impressed me with their tales of physical aggression and hustling finesse. They almost always had pimps with whom they had children’ (2002, A8). Their familial relationships and romances may have led some of these young women to accept the exploitation of ‘The Game.’ 28 Here Fanon must be sounded again: ‘A white woman who has had a Negro lover finds it difficult to return to white men. Or so at least it is believed, particularly by white men: “Who knows what ‘they’

notes to pages 75–9

29

30

31

32

231

can give a woman?” Who indeed does know? Certainly, “they” do not’ (1967, 171). This commentary reveals Jessome’s shrouded sexual anxiety. For her part, Ann DuCille insists that ‘The blackness of black men is evidently so potent that one drop of black semen can turn a white woman brown and a white man green with envy’ (1997, 303–4). The unspoken competition between Jessome/the police and the ‘players’ for the favours of the white, juvenile sex-exchequers is given raw expression in Jessome ’s disapproving note that the white girls were ‘certain that police officers abused and robbed working girls and deliberately targeted black men as the likeliest suspect [sic] in any crime.’ One young woman, Annie Mae, states ‘she’d been forced to give a cop a blow job in a police cruiser.’ Jessome lectures that it would have been ‘better’ for these women ‘to question the increasingly nasty behavior of the pimps’ 1996, 110; my italics). Jessome admires ‘a prominent local businessman,’ who would often invite one woman ‘to spend the night at his well-appointed apartment, where they would sip fine wine, munch popcorn, and watch videos; often sex was not even part of the agenda’ (1996, 180). Thus, the sexual threat of the black pimp is ‘disappeared’ so as to enable white comfort. Otherwise, as James writes, teasingly, the white male might have to say, ‘I hear the word Negro and my penis shrivels’ (D. James 1992, 144). James’s character, Second Buppet, accents the amoral and apolitical usefulness – veiled ruse – of surveillance when he suggests that he and First Buppet film their planned rapes of ‘white women’ in Central Park: ‘Peep dis’, Money! We film th’shit! We film th’shit! Right there! In the park! As it happens! Cinema verité… We screen th’shit at Cannes, win us a Palm D’Or, an’ get our dicks sucked by a bevy of flybabes in bikinis on th’ Riviera!’ (1992, 113, 114). First Buppet’s response shows off the peepshow aspect of all representation: ‘we could open up our own “joint” an’ sell ball caps an’ T-shirts with actual photos of us bangin’ th’ bitches in the bushes!’ (115). When Bubbles opens her eyes, she sees, ‘just inches in front of her nose, a testicle drooping from an open fly, its few strands of pubic hair matted with a crust of dried semen’ (D. James 1992, 20). The instructive difference between Bubbles’s ‘horror’ here and that endured by Jessome’s juvenile filles de joie is that the invasive male genitals faced by the latter women are Caucasian.

6. Raising Raced and Erased Executions in AfricanCanadian Literature: Or , Unearthing AngE2lique This paper was the keynote address at the ‘“Race” into the Twenty-First Century: Canadian Texts and Contexts’ conference sponsored by the Department of English, McMaster University, Hamilton, Ontario, on 17 November 2000. All translations from the French, in the main text and the notes, are my own unless otherwise indicated. 1 The Oxford Companion to African American Literature includes listings for ‘Badman’ and ‘Bad Woman’ as specific types. In ‘Badman,’ Christopher C. De Santis advises that the ‘badman was characterized … by his propensity for gambling, violence, and other acts of lawlessness; by his strength and virility; and … by his purely self-interested antagonism toward both the dominant white social order and the oppressed African American community.’ De Santis notes that scholars differ ‘over the reasons for the proliferation of badmen in African American literature.’ Some think that they represent despairing nihilism, while others view them as ‘an outlet for repressed male sexuality’ or as a semi-trickster whose ‘crimes’ ‘secured some of the benefits that the white social order systematically denied African Americans’ (1997, 42). Trudier Harris, analysing the ‘Bad Woman,’ knows that ‘a judgement of [who

232

2

3

4

5

6

7

notes to pages 79–80

is] “bad” is heavily dependent upon perspective.’ But black women who follow unusual moral codes, rather than living as ‘church-going, respectable women,’ or who exhibit ‘braggadocio’ or commit crimes, are liable to be labelled ‘bad’ (1997, 43). Malcolm X, another pro-violence martyr, recommended in ‘Message to the Grass Roots’ that AfricanAmerican would-be revolutionaries mimic the violent initiatives and attitudes of the American Revolution: ‘Look at the American revolution in 1776. That revolution was for what? For land… How was it carried out? Bloodshed… There ’s no such thing as a nonviolent revolution… Revolution is bloody, revolution is hostile, revolution knows no compromise, revolution overturns and destroys everything that gets in its way’ (1966, 7–9). In ‘The Black Revolution,’ another speech contained in Malcolm X Speaks: Selected Speeches and Statements, X warns, ‘If George Washington didn’t get independence for this country nonviolently, and if Patrick Henry didn’t come up with a nonviolent statement, and you taught me to look upon them as patriots and heroes, then it’s time for you to realize that I have studied your books well …’ (49; ellipsis in original). African-American ‘resistance’ martyrs and heroes were inheritors and makers, as X understood, of what John Fraser characterizes as the ‘history of American liberty seeking and liberty defending’ (1992, 151). African-American poet Robert Hayden, in his lyric ‘Crispus Attucks’ (1975), on the meaning of the death of this African-American – and first – martyr of the American Revolution, satirizes his utility for both American patriots (a symbolic Betsy Ross) and black nationalists (referencing Marcus Garvey). In his exploration of the attractiveness of outlaws for American culture, John Fraser comments, ‘Naturally, the criminal was almost certain to come from a chivalric-martial group’ – that is, a ‘subgroup’ engaged in social struggle (1992, 178, 179). African Americans constitute such a group. Canadianists Carolyn Strange and Tina Loo document the flourishing in the 1940s of EnglishCanadian ‘true-crime’ pulp magazines, which revelled in ‘murder cases with dramatic angles that writers could play to the hilt’ as well as in a ‘moral geography for Canada linking violence and depravity to particular places…’ (2004, 3, 37). I am indebted to Donald Goellnicht and Daniel Coleman, both of McMaster University, for the observation that some minority groups in Canada possess substantial literatures of incarceration and execution. They specify a bevy of First Nations works. Moreover, Goellnicht writes, ‘the other Canadian minority literary tradition that is virtually founded on incarceration – of a very political type where the main focus is race – is the Japanese Canadian, where the internment during World War Two is the foundational event’ (email to the author, 21 August 2001). This insight is wise. I suggest that scrutiny of Italian-Canadian, Ukrainian-Canadian, and similar literary canons – that is, the writings of other, once-persecuted ethnicities – will yield relevant bibliographies. The April 1994 shotgun slaying of a young Greek-Canadian woman, Georgina ‘Vivi’ Leimonis, in Toronto during the robbery of a popular café by two or more African-Canadian men, was one notorious instance of ‘prominence ’ being granted to black ‘outlaws’ here. However, despite the media construction of the perpetrators as ‘Jamaicans’ – a denial of their Canadian identities – and the dissemination of racist anti-black discourses, the black community itself viewed the accused men as ‘thugs.’ They were not defiant strugglers against the status quo. See also the case of Earle Nelson, an African-American serial rapist and murderer, executed in Winnipeg in 1928, a saga recounted in Frank W. Anderson’s true-crime book, The Dark Strangler (1974). Lennox Farrell alleges that ‘the leading cause of death for young black men is a combination of official and unofficial homicides’ (2001, A18). Marion Bethel, musing about the death penalty and its popularity within – and its pernicious devastation of – black societies, preaches, ‘[our] young men use guns and their penises in the same manner and in the same breath – to overpower and destroy – in

notes to pages 80–1

8

9

10

11

12 13

14

233

order to overcome and avoid the terror in their own lives … Too many of our young men’s eyes are ahistorical; their tied tongues, semiliterate; their hands, penises, destructive’ (Bethel 1998, 104). Mascoll mentions Canada in his article, arguing, ‘the last death sentences commuted in Canada were done by Canada’s highest court, not by the British Privy Council’ (2000, A34). He is mistaken. From the end of the prime ministry of Louis Saint-Laurent to the first abolition of capital punishment in 1976, the federal cabinet decided on death-sentence commutations. Repetition of racial stereotypes around ‘lawbreaking’ is spectacularly possible given the inherent biases in court records. This reality is a danger for African-Canadian historians and writers, for legal documents are often the only chronicles available of black Canadian ‘lawbreakers’ and potential ‘heroes.’ Canadian historian Jim Hornby comments, ‘any group is misrepresented when described through the experiences of those members who are charged with criminal offences.’ In addition, ‘while blacks are under-represented in most of the historical records …, they were very probably over-represented in criminal prosecutions, and thus in court records’ (1991, xiv). One example is Antiguan-Canadian dub poet Clifton Joseph’s remembrance of ‘sixteen year old michael habbib,’ who became the victim of ‘a white racist sniper at don mills and sheppard [in Toronto who] looked out of his high-rise with a high-powered gun and said he was going to shoot the first nigger he saw.’ Joseph also recalls the Toronto police ‘killing of buddy evans at the flying disco on king street [in 1978] and of albert johnson, in his own house, in front of his young daughter [in 1979]’ (2001, 18). For instance, the story of Clara Ford, a black woman tried and acquitted for the murder of a white man in Toronto in 1895, merits recitation in dramatic narrative of one form or another. See Brode (2005) and Strange and Loo (2004, 58). Criminologist Neil Boyd arrives at a different figure, charging that ‘Canada hanged 693 men and 13 women’ (1992, xi). Other ‘ethnicities’ registered in this printed necropolis include Chinese, French Canadian, Ukrainian, Italian, ‘Indian’, ‘Half-Breed’, Hungarian, Polish, American, and, of course, British. ‘Exotic’ entries include Acadian, ‘Mahometan Turk’, German, Belgian, Ruthenian, Yugoslavian, Bulgarian, Dutch, Maltese, Swedish, ‘Eskimo’, Galician, Doukhobor, Romanian, Armenian, Czechoslovakian, Finnish, Icelandic, Japanese, Greek, Costa Rican, ‘Hindu’, Serbian, Macedonian, Danish, Jewish, one ‘American of French Canadian origin,’ and one ‘Canadian born in the United States.’ Canada was, despite its racial biases, an equal-opportunity executioner. Then again, these death-penalty-pleasured groups were already well-represented in Canadian crime stories: ‘Anglo-Canadians and Northern Europeans were smart and cool-headed in the pulps (unless addled by drink or maddened by temptresses); Southern and Eastern Europeans and francophones were brutish and lusty; Americans were greedy and sharp; and Native peoples were prone to be passionate and uncivilized.’ In addition, ‘pulp writers pandered to English Canadians’ anti-Native prejudices and fears of European “foreigners”’ (Strange and Loo 2004, 7). Robbery was a chief motive for these crimes. Few of these damnés were even regular labourers, let alone skilled workers or professionals. Boyd notes that ‘most murderers are basically ordinary people in socially and economically desperate circumstances. They were fuelled by alcohol or other drugs, and killed family and friends, usually over money or sexual betrayal’ (N. Boyd 1992, xvii). In Capital Punishment in Canada: A Sociological Study of Repressive Law (1976), David Chandler notes that, of blacks convicted of capital murder with robbery between 1946 and 1967, 57.1% were executed (1976, 217).

234 notes to pages 81–3 15 Precision on this head is impossible, for Canadian capital case files are often incomplete, containing, say, a note that an order for execution has been filed but no proof that said order was ever executed. 16 Dean Jobb cites the possible influence of racism in the application of the death penalty in Nova Scotia in the 1930s: ‘Between 1930 and 1937 nine men – six white and three black – were handed the death sentence for murder in the province. Four of the whites were executed, while two of the blacks died on the gallows’ (1993, 112). Yet, as with the whites, 66.7% of the blacks sentenced to die by Nova Scotian courts during the Depression were executed. Discussing the last people hanged, province by province, in Canada, Allan Hustak insists that ‘it is curious and revealing that of the twelve …, two were blacks, four were French Canadians, two were of Eastern European backgrounds, one was part-Indian, one a homosexual and only two were Anglo-Saxon’ (Hustak 1987, xv). 17 Hornby suspects that the Byers brothers went to the gallows ‘to send a message to the public, and perhaps especially to the black population recently released from slavery’ (1998, 51). 18 Trudel comments, ‘Unfortunately, the press did not preserve for us the spiritual testimony of the negro: we know only that he sustained his innocence until the end and that he submitted to his fate with indifference’ (1960, 87). 19 Celebrating the apparently low criminal rate among slaves held in French Canada – 18 criminals found among 3,604 slaves, in records spanning fifteen years, Trudel opines that such numbers indicate ‘the normal integration of the slave in French-Canadian society’ (1960, 97). This mythology of the well-treated black and the ‘lucky-to-be-in-Canada’ slave is one more species of Euro-Canadian propaganda that African-Canadian writers rail against in their depictions of black suffering under white Canadian legal authority. 20 This suffocating ‘silence ’ is real. U.S. historian Robin W. Winks notes that, by the mid-nineteenth century, ‘writers were maintaining that there had been no slavery in New France at all, and a new popularly held assumption joined those about climate and cotton to obscure any national memory of French slavery’ (Winks 1997, 19). Too, this ignorance about the practice of slavery in what is now Canada is mirrored by the stubborn silence – in historical records – of the slaves in New France and in British North America. We have few notices in the slaves’ own words about their experiences of life, crime, and justice in Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, Prince Edward Island, and the two Canadas. In the Canadian imagination, then, our annals of slavery are as white and pristine as the proverbial snow. For example, in her afterword to her 1999 novel about Marie-Josèphe Angélique, Québécoise writer Micheline Bail claims that ‘the physical closeness of slaves to their masters, their concentration in the cities, and the stability of service created by the system of inheritance served to lessen the distance between Blacks and Whites’ (1999, 383). So, slavery in New France was service in Paradise! The exculpatory immaculateness of such histories does not brook scrutiny. Winks registers, for instance, this Englished statement by Olivier Le Jeune, a slave in New France: ‘You say that by baptism I shall be like you.’ Le Jeune ’s comment underscores his perception that ‘Christian salvation’ will not upgrade his caste position. Even so, as Winks states, Le Jeune was ‘neither the first slave nor the first Negro in New France, but he was the first of whom there is any adequate record’ (1997, 1). By protesting his lot, Le Jeune pierced a silence that, already in 1632, was obliterating the lives of African slaves from Canadian historical consciousness. 21 Tess Chakkalakal’s 2000 article ‘Reckless Eyeballing: Being Reena in Canada’ examines the 1997 murder of the young Indian-Canadian woman, Reena Virk, in Victoria, British Columbia, by a white teen gang (most of them also female) and the resultant media misrepresentations of race, gender, and youth crime. Her essay decries Virk’s death as ‘a Canadian lynching’ (165). Chakkalakal asserts that ‘it is crucial to call the Reena Virk [homicide] case by its proper name’ because it ‘has been errone-

notes to pages 83–7

22 23 24

25 26 27 28

29

30

31

235

ously construed by the Canadian news media as a sensational example of the rising trend in “teen” violence’ (167). The once-hushed-up torture-murder of a Somali youth by members of the Canadian Airborne Regiment in 1993 was yet another ‘Canadian lynching.’ The King v. Farmer is another suspect case. Jobb notes that black Everett Farmer was hanged in 1937 for the murder of his half-brother partly because he ‘could not afford a proper defence’ (1988, 97). The novel is by Paul Fehmiu Brown; the plays are by Lorris Elliott and Lorena Gale; the latest stage play is by Beau Dixon; the film is by Michael Jarvis; the tribute song is by Faith Nolan. Bail’s novel follows several other white-authored works identified by Afua Cooper in her Hanging of Angélique (2006, 289–90). An excerpt from Denyse Beaugrand-Champagne’s Le Procès de MarieJosèphe-Angélique, a history, appears in L’Actualité (Beaugrand-Champagne 2004, 83–7). Other scholars give her age at death as twenty-nine. Winks identifies Thérèse Decouagne by her married name. Paul F. Brown’s coinage is discussed by Loic Vennin (1994–5). The Nova Scotia–born, Toronto-based, singer-songwriter Faith Nolan, whose a cappella song ‘Marie Joseph Angelique’ appears on her second album, Africville (1986), identifies an antiracist, feminist Angélique in her refrain, ‘My soul is my own for no man to keep.’ Two decades after Nolan, AfricanCanadian historian Afua Cooper published her work The Hanging of Angélique: The Untold Story of Canadian Slavery and the Burning of Old Montréal (2006), which was nominated for a GovernorGeneral’s Award for Non-Fiction. Cooper’s history registers Angélique as a deliberate arsonist, a black woman unafraid to speak back to her supposed superiors, and as the first slave narrative author (orally speaking) in North America. Cooper also dwells in detail on Angélique’s martyrdom, thus inscribing the slave woman’s story in a Canadian tradition of gothic settler narratives. (See E.J. Pratt’s mini-epic poem Brébeuf and His Brethren [1940] in this regard.) Brown names some of his characters to remind the reader of Québécois personalities. So Jacques César may be a déclassé version of Julius Caesar – or a mocking version of notorious former Quebec premier Jacques Parizeau. The characters René Bourassa and Jean Peladeau would evoke, for any contemporary Québécois reader, the names of two deceased Quebec premiers, René Lévesque and Robert Bourassa, but also Canadian prime minister Jean Chrétien and Quebec newspaper publisher Pierre Péladeau, all personages central to recent political discourse in Quebec. Longfellow’s long poem Evangeline: A Tale of Acadie (1847), published in a North American French translation by Pamphile Le May in 1865, is one of the constitutive myths of Acadian nationalism. Thus, Brown, an Acadian, likely knows the work and its self-sacrificing heroine. Indeed, according to the publisher’s introduction in Evangeline, Longfellow considered the ur-tale version that inspired his own, reputedly, ‘the best illustration of faithfulness and constancy of woman that I have ever heard or read’ (Longfellow [1847] 1962, v). Evangeline becomes, then, in the course of the Longfellow and LeMay poems, an image of deathless fidelity to her lost fiancé, Gabriel Lajeunesse: ‘Patience and abnegation of self, and devotion to others, / This was the lesson a life of trial and sorrow had taught her’ (52). Likewise, despite the hardships of the Poulin de Francheville-Decouagne household, Angélique remains, hoping that at twenty-five years of age she will be set free. ‘But her true status was so impossible, it was as if she were living with a sword of Damocles suspended just above her head’ (Paul Brown 1998, 96). Brown loves the Greek notion that fate demands Angélique ’s doom. His narrator observes that ‘the young slave was condemned by a completely fabricated accusation But they [her accusers] needed a guilty party and Destiny had chosen Marie-Josèphe Angélique’ (1998, 106). Brown emphasizes that the ‘arson’ resulting in Angélique ’s execution was sparked by Thibault’s failure to close a stove

236 notes to pages 87–91

32

33 34

35

door after setting some logs therein, just before he and Angélique vamoose for Vermont. Brown’s Angélique is pristine and preordained to suffer. She is, like Thomas Hardy’s Tess, ‘A Pure Woman,’ to cite the once-controversial subtitle of Tess of the D’Urbervilles (1891). Thus, her arrest in snowy woods mirrors that experienced by Tess Durbeyfield. Angélique awakens to find herself and her lover, the cowardly Thibault, ‘surrounded by mounted soldiers, who seemed to have appeared from nowhere’ (Paul Brown 1998, 100). Likewise, when Tess awakens from her last night of freedom, after sleeping in the open on an ‘oblong slab’ at Stonehenge, she faces not only her lover and husband, Angel, but also a group of policemen ‘as still as the [stone] pillars around’ (Hardy [1891] 1930, 511, 514). The policemen appeared, one after another, seemingly out of the land itself. A similar point is made in Michael Jarvis’s short dramatic film Angélique (1999), written by Peter Farbridge. In this version of the story, Thibault is a successful, libertine artist; Angélique is his modelmistress; Mme De Couagne [sic] is jealous; César is a would-be rapist; and the executioner is the only true egalitarian. Although Thibault knows that Angélique is innocent of arson (the fire is started by César’s attempt at rape), he refuses – out of cowardice – to tell the truth. While Angélique may be innocent of arson, she is guilty of murder. Rather than see her infant son grow up to be a slave, she smothers him secretly (Gale 2000, 26). This statistic recalls a more recent fire, well reported internationally, that consumed sixty-one houses in Philadelphia in May 1985. Triggered by the explosion of a police bomb atop the headquarters of a black-nationalist-cum-back-to-the-earth movement, MOVE, the fire killed eleven people, including five children. See Kelley and Lewis (2000, 577). However, Gale may also mean to recall the fire at the computer centre at Montreal’s Sir George Williams University (now Concordia University) in February 1969, as a result of a protest against ‘racist’ grades assigned black students in college courses. Afua Cooper suspects that the focus on Angélique ’s love affairs, especially that with Thibault, ‘speaks to ... unease with the race, gender, and power relations intrinsic to slavery’ (2006, 289).

7. Let Us Compare Anthologies: Harmonizing the Founding African-Canadian and Italian-Canadian Literary Collections

This essay was sculpted for three presentations: the keynote address for the Association for Italian Canadian Writers, Toronto, on 27 May 2002; the ‘Canada: Model for a Multicultural State’ Conference, Edmonton, Alberta, on 27 September 2002; and the 19th Annual Reddin Symposium, sponsored by the Canadian Studies Center of Bowling Green State University, Bowling Green, Ohio, on 14 January 2006. 1 Ricardo Scipio is an Afro-Trinidad-born photographer based in Vancouver. His Latinate names are as much a result of slavery as are my Anglo-Celtic ones. 2 Head’s anthology, as I have pointed out in previous scholarship, is actually the third African-Canadian anthology. However, it was the first one to attempt to canvass black writing from across Canada. Its predecessors were Black Chat: An Anthology of Black Poets (1973), edited by Camille Haynes, and One Out of Many: A Collection of Writings by 21 Black Women in Ontario (1975), edited by Liz Cromwell. 3 Thus, Multiculturalism – like one of U.S. poet Ezra Pound’s favoured Chinese dynasties – ‘came in because of a great sensibility’ (Pound 1998, 563). Say Jean Bernabé, Patrick Chamoiseau, and Raphaël Confiant, ‘The capacity to incorporate Diversity has always been the privilege of great powers’

notes to pages 91–2

4 5

6 7

8

9

237

(1990, 902). But there is a danger, alleges Tionda Cain, ‘in the rhetoric of “celebrating diversity”’: it makes it ‘more and more difficult to point out and address racism …’ (Bernard 2006, 123). The precept that each ‘ethnic group has the right to develop its own culture and values within the Canadian context’ means that no culture in Canada may wield state power in an absolutist fashion. Opposing the ‘totalitarian universal crust,’ diversity depends upon, assert Messieurs Bernabé, Chamoiseau, and Confiant, ‘small peoples, small languages, and small cultures’ (1990, 902). That’s multiculturalism. According to the 2003 research of Jack Jedwab of the Association for Canadian Studies, ‘most Canadians believe that ethnic attachments are not an obstacle to strong national identity, hence the substantial support for the philosophy of multiculturalism’ (2003, 16). Perhaps, then, the hopes implicit in Prime Minister Trudeau’s announcement of the multiculturalism program have come to fruition. When capitalized, ‘Multiculturalism’ refers to the official, federal government policy and program; when it is not capitalized, ‘multiculturalism’ refers to the concept. While these two very different cultural groups had (or have) some points of congruency, one must also remember their historical divisions, most principally regarding Fascist Italy’s invasion of Ethiopia (Abyssinia) in 1935, an event repugnant particularly to Rastafarians. As late as 2004, though, African-Canadian poet heronJonse recalls, in a poem ‘Black Like Me’: ‘In grades three and four I led a gang war against the Italians / in my neighbourhood of Downsview’ 2004a, 160). In contrast, Lela, ‘a light-complexioned black woman adopted by white parents,’ tells another character in Jael Ealey’s play Dirty Laundry: ‘I go to an Italian hairdresser in Brampton [a suburb near Toronto]’ (2004, 31). To be viable, Multiculturalism must insist on equity in social relations. The effect of official Multiculturalism mirrors that of the American Bill of Rights, which, says historian Theodore H. White, allows ‘the people [to] become part of the [Constitutional] bargain, too – their loyalties, their privileges, their inalienable rights are directly guaranteed by the Federal government, by the President’ (1975, 137). In the Canadian circumstance, Multiculturalism means that citizens, regardless of ‘race,’ ethnicity, creed, or language, may enjoy a direct dialogue with the federal government. The Liberal government of Trudeau may have sought to use Multiculturalism to secure the electoral allegiances of ‘ethnic’ communities in the largest Canadian cities, as well as to bolster ‘national unity,’ in the wake of the election of the indepéndantiste Parti Québécois in Quebec in 1976. Yet, such Machiavellian manoeuvering is commonplace in governing. In their essay on Canadian multiculturalism, Andrew Cardozo and Louis Musto affirm ‘politics is the stuff of most government policies’ (1997, 8). One critic of Multiculturalism, the Independent member of Parliament Jan Brown, argued in 1997 that Canadians find the concept confusing because it ‘can encompass folk songs, dance, food, festivals, arts and crafts, museums, heritage languages, ethnic studies, ethnic presses, race relations, culture sharing, and human rights.’ Thus, ‘ethnic group is pitted against ethnic group and the country is fragmented into a thousand consciousnesses’ (1997, 65). In its origins, then, federal Multiculturalism was accused of acting as a de facto electioneering scheme that ‘bought off ’ whiny minorities while dividing the common, cultural weal. But, what is most important, really, is what various Canadian minorities did with the program, not what its inventors thought Canadian minorities could do electorally for them. In 1997, Bloc Québécois member of Parliament Christiane Gagnon wagered that the establishing of Multiculturalism was a federal reaction to the ‘expression of Quebec’s desire for independence, coming as it did shortly after the October crisis [of 1970].’ From this nationalist Québécois perspective, Multiculturalism promotes ‘cultural differences’ at the expense of ‘the concept of integration that

238

10

11

12

13 14 15

16

notes to pages 92–4

would recognize the rights of members of ethnic groups and their equal participation in society.’ Most destructively, ‘the whole dialectic of two founding peoples [the formation of Canada as a compact between British and French peoples] with their own language and culture was submerged and diluted in this ocean of other languages and cultures’ (1997, 43). This critique of Multiculturalism has emerged for, as Fo Niemi reported in 1997, ‘since the adoption of multiculturalism in 1971, there has been only one French-speaking minister capable of communicating with and clarifying multiculturalism among seven million French-speaking Canadians who are generally mistrustful of this policy’ (Niemi 1997, 168). But the real issue is, I insist, that francophone – and French ethnic – Canadians are not an ethnic group per se, but a citizenry accorded a specific, constitutional presence. M. NourbeSe Philip’s criticism of Multiculturalism bears iteration: ‘multiculturalism … has no answers for the problems of racism, or white supremacy – unless it is combined with a clearly articulated policy of anti-racism, directed at rooting out the effects of racist and white supremacist thinking’ (1992, 185). Euro-Canadian scholar Daniel Coleman holds that, for some members of the White Anglo-Saxon / Celtic elite in Canada, the nation’s ‘inclusive civility, imaged … as a multi-coloured mosaic, actually insists that all of its tiles will be various shades of white’ (2006, 186). Ironically, though, such rhetoric was already a spent force in 1976. While African-American ‘Black Power’ and ‘Black Arts’ movements flourished from 1965 to 1975, their echoes in Canada arrived later (in 1968 – see the Black Writers Conference in Montreal) and ended later (in 1978 – see the death throes of the National Black Coalition of Canada), but were never as ‘revolutionary’ as their U.S. originators. Reasons for the lesser intensity of these movements in Canada include: 1) a small black population residing in disconnected pockets across the world’s second-largest country; 2) the variegated cultural allegiances of so-called blacks; and 3) the primacy of linguistic issues and statenationalist politics over ‘race ’ (save for discourses on the First Nations). ‘Bicultural’ bears a special political weight here, for Di Cicco is rejecting the premise of the Royal Commission on Bilingualism and Biculturalism, established in the 1960s, that ‘bicultural’ refers to French- and English-Canadian experience. Euro-Canadian scholar Nathalie Cooke holds that Di Cicco anticipates, in 1978, ‘the establishment of a broader, more multicultural canon,’ but, for now, focuses on ‘the paradoxical interspaces’ of a ‘bicultural’ – Italian and English Canadian – identity (2004, 5). One must question Di Cicco’s intellectual violence here: Why must he wipe away the Italian childhoods of his writers? Head also ‘Canadianizes’ his writers, classifying all of them as ‘Canadian’ – ‘new’ or not (1976, 10). Yet, their blackness trumps their Canadian citizenship. In an email communication to me of 15 July 2010, Head recalls meeting Di Cicco in the mid-1970s: ‘Regarding Pier Giorgio di Cicco: I don’t know whether he ’d be able to remember who I am as I was one of hundreds he saw daily in the licensed lounge for graduate students at Uof T [University of Toronto] where he was a bar-tender at the time around the mid-70’s. I had a chap-book of poems, Bushman’s Brew [1974] published by a Queen St. publisher called ‘goat-hair press’. I showed George the chap-book for his edification, I thought, and after careful scrutiny and a long pause, I remember him saying: “I wish I had written this.” I was thrilled. I was quite busy at this time: writing, organizing poetry readings under the umbrella ‘Othello’s Countrymen’ which included persons like Charles Roach, Liz Cromwell, Vibert Cambridge et al. …’ Given this encounter, it seems that Di Cicco was aware of Head’s work. Perhaps he did later chance upon a copy of Canada in Us Now. The rhetoric about ‘hyphenated’ identities in Canada hearkens back to Progressive Conservative prime minister John George Diefenbaker (1957–63), whose nationalism insisted on a singular Cana-

notes to pages 94–6

17

18

19

20

239

dian identity: ‘One Canada, one nation, my Canada, your Canada, cannot be a hyphenated Canada’ (quoted in Nishiguchi 1997, 111). Diefenbaker himself seems to have imported this sentiment from U.S. President Theodore Roosevelt (1901–9), who warned against the dangers of ‘hyphenated Americans’ in a New York City speech in October 1915: ‘There is no room in this country for hyphenated Americanism… The one absolutely certain way of bringing this nation to ruin, of preventing all possibility of its continuing to be a nation at all, would be to permit it to become a tangle of squabbling nationalities’ (quoted in Barnett 2005, 14). According to this liberal perspective, whether Rooseveltian or Diefenbakerian, to be ‘hyphenated’ – as in ‘Japanese-Canadian’ – is to be divided. In defence of the ‘hyphen,’ Italian-Canadian scholar Joseph Pivato argues that, given the history of terms like ‘French-Canadian’ in Canada, it is difficult to see how other, generally smaller, minorities could eschew the hyphenation of their own identities (1994, 48). Pivato also notes that ‘hyphenation in Western Canada does not seem to carry the same negative connotation as in Central Canada. It is common practice here to use terms like: Ukrainian-Canadian, Chinese-Canadian, Hungarian-Canadian, Haitian-Canadian, Italian-Canadian, and Polish-Canadian’ (51n1). A Chinese-Canadian commentator issues a strong defence of the hyphen in her self-conception. Hear Lillian To: ‘Am I less Canadian because I am a woman or because I am of Chinese origin? … We cannot all be Anglo-Saxon white males… Unless you produce clones or go through a purge, you cannot eliminate hyphenated Canadians’ (1997, 203). Perhaps Head was influenced by the thought of Trinidadian-Canadian playwright Lennox Brown, who declares, ‘There is no substantial Black culture in Canada’: ‘Black culture in Canada was born in the cradle of Whiteness’ (1972, 8, 6). Antonio D’Alfonso notes, ‘Italy is not a unity but a mosaic’ (1996, 37). Anna Makolkin wagers that the very term Italian-ness refers to ‘the unique catholic quality of the Italian civilization, which tended always to preserve rather than expunge the tides of complimentary otherness from its cultural history and collective memory, celebrating the inclusion of the migrant, the foreigner and welcoming the stranger’ (2002, 72). She also anatomizes Latin – the forebear of Italian – as including ‘the legacy of Phoenicia, Greece, Egypt, and Etruria’ (74). Di Cicco’s anthology of ‘Italian’ poets is then, by nature, as multicultural as Head’s florilegium of ‘Negro’ ones. Neil Bissoondath has inked the Canadian version of this critique. In Selling Illusions: The Cult of Multiculturalism in Canada (1994), he fears that Canadian Multiculturalism means, ‘Officially. Legally … you [immigrant] do not have to change. Here you could – indeed it was your duty to – remain what you are … You do not have to adjust to the society, the society was obligated to accommodate itself to you’ (quoted in Dossa 1995, 31). Like Schlesinger, Bissoondath sees the state besieged and disintegrated by a thousand competing ‘tribes,’ who refuse to become ‘Canadian’ – i.e., shut up and make money quietly. Bissoondath ignores not only the ways in which Canada, despite Multiculturalism, still empowers two linguistic and cultural ethnicities above all others, but also that a WASP who lives overseas, in the United Kingdom, remains, constitutionally, the head of state, and that the same position will fall upon her heirs. Shiraz Dossa is more accurate about what Canadian Multiculturalism intends: It ‘is about outlawing irrational prejudice …, it is about making liberals and liberalism live up to their professed ideals of equal rights, respect, autonomy and dignity for all citizens. Multiculturalism is not about supplanting the core cultural and political values of white liberal societies; its aim is to lay the foundation for the eventual acceptance of its third world immigrants as full citizens’ (ibid., 33). Introducing The Battle over Multiculturalism, editors Cardozo and Musto defend the concept, recognizing that ‘cultural diversity existed in Canada well before the arrival of European settlers. The

240

notes to pages 96–8

Aboriginal and Inuit peoples were here first, and each were composed of sub-groups with their own language, culture, and social organization’ (1997, 7). Pivato affirms that, the appearance of the Roman Candles anthology, its contributors (including himself ) ‘answered the call, discovered a group of writers, a receptive audience and we never looked back’ (1994, 35). In fact, ‘the literary phenomenon of Italian-Canadian writing as a new body of writing was first recognized by Pier Giorgio Di Cicco in 1975–6 when he began to collect poems for his, now famous, anthology.’ (ibid., 38). Introducing the anthology Swallowing Clouds: An Anthology of Chinese-Canadian Poetry (1999), co-editor Andy Quan observes, ‘This anthology of poetry comes from a place that is both real and mythical – a place that exists concretely, and one that is created as we speak its name: Chinese-Canada’ (1999, 7). Like Head and Di Cicco before him, he recognizes that the construction of an anthology announces the existence of a ‘new’ and ‘multicultural’ community: I had to see how diverse a people we [are]. Not only from Canton, immigrants came from all parts of China, from Taiwan, and from bustling Hong Kong. Perhaps they arrived in Canada by way of other continents, via Europe, Africa, Latin America, and Australia, or East Asian countries such as Malaysia, Singapore, Indonesia, and Vietnam … It is a diverse group such as this that can give meaning to a name. Chinese-Canada. And if the poets here are all to be grouped together in a Chinese-Canadian poetry anthology, then we are witnessing multiple creations. First of all, it is the creation of a community, a ‘we’ rather than ‘I,’ a gathering of diverse people who presume a cultural coherence due to our ‘Chinese’ness. Next, we see how this characteristic of race and culture attaches itself to a nation-state, the great snowy plains and water country – oh, Canada … (ibid., 7) Quan’s discovery of a multicultural ‘Chinese-Canada,’ one created by its artists, also creates the grounds for an engagement with other multicultural communities in Canada. Thus, when Quan writes, ‘With our poems, we ’re also saying … We are here’ in Canada, he echoes not only Head’s introduction, ‘We have come,’ but also a concluding phrase of my introduction to my edited anthology Eyeing the North Star: Directions in African-Canadian Literature: ‘And we are here. Where we have always been. Since 1605’ (1997a, xxv). 21 In an email to me of 30 June 2010, Gasparini requests that I use this revised version of the poem: Every evening he would sit for hours in his old wooden rocking chair, with a glass of homemade red wine, the Divina Commedia in his lap and a snuff-box on the table beside him. Under a parchment-shaded floorlamp that haloed his balding head, my mother’s father, Luigi Minello, would immerse himself in profundities. And while the rest of our family played cards or listened to the radio, I would watch my grandfather Reading Dante sotto voce.

notes to pages 98–102

241

He was once photographed without even knowing it … 22 See my article ‘Contesting a Model Blackness’ (in G. Clarke 2002a) for a full discussion of these major aspects of African-Canadian identity. 23 Both anthologies contest, then, aspects of ‘the allegory of national [Canadian] maturation [that] articulates the hierarchies of race and gender in such a way that categories of privilege such as whiteness, Britishness, heterosexuality, and masculinity are naturalized as leading the vanguard of modernity’ (Coleman 2006, 172).

8. The Idea of Europe in African-Canadian Literature This paper emerges from presentations of an earlier version at Prof. Maurice Wallace’s course in African and African American Studies at Duke University, Durham, North Carolina, on 24 September 2004; at the Traverse: Writing Travel Graduate Student Conference, sponsored by the Department of English, University of Western Ontario, London, on 30 April 2004; and at the Gesellscaft für Kanada-Studien – 25 Jahrestagung, at the Hotel am Badersee, Grainau, Germany, on 21 February 2004. I thank the various audiences for their responses. 1 I dedicate this essay to a proud African Nova Scotian, my father, William Lloyd Clarke, an artist who appreciated many aspects of Europe, especially classical music and Renaissance art. Thus, he followed the example of his aunt, Portia White (1911–68), a world-renowned contralto, whose repertoire included Italian bel canto, French chansons, German lieder, English art-songs, and ‘Negro’ spirituals, classically arranged. 2 John Ralston Saul argues that ‘Canada is profoundly un-European’ because it was unable to fulfil, unlike the United States, ‘the model of the monolithic frontier-conquering nation-state’ (1998, 102). But this ‘European’ idea was not advanced primarily by nation-states qua nation-states but by nationstates qua empires. In other words, while it is true that colonial Canada did not set forth to conquer territories, both of its sponsoring powers, Britain and France, did so, and Canada was the result of their armed pacification and occupation of the northern reaches of North America. Too, the relationship of the federal government to Aboriginal peoples and to its actual ‘colonies’ (the North-West Territories, Nunavut, and Yukon) is arguably imperialist. According to French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre, we ‘New World’ cast-offs constitute ‘that super-European monstrosity, North America …’ (1968, 26). Complicatedly too, ‘settler colonies are founded on a paradox in that “they simultaneously resisted and accommodated the authority of an imperialist Europe”’ (D. Coleman 2006, 15). 3 ‘The Hartzian approach,’ writes Horowitz, ‘is to study the new societies founded by Europeans (the United States, English Canada, French Canada, Latin America, Dutch South Africa, Australia) as “fragments” thrown off from Europe ’ ([1966] 1995, 22). Intriguingly, Hartz ignores the colonies, European-dominated, that developed into African or Afro-Asian-majority nations in the Caribbean, Africa, and Asia. Horowitz does not note this omission. Nor does either consider the ways in which racial attitudes, vis-à-vis Aboriginal peoples or African slaves (or both), served to modify the practice of European ideologies in the ‘new’ lands. 4 Yet the socialist tinge in the Canadian polity mirrors a fascist temptation too. Both elements have been viscerally visible in Quebec – and in Western Canada. The forerunner to the leftist New Democratic

242

5

6

7

8 9

10

11 12

13

notes to pages 102–3

Party, the western-based Co-operative Commonwealth Federation, voiced a philosophy of unionand-industry partnership. According to U.S. scholar Kathryne V. Lindberg, this ideal ‘all sounds very much like later versions of the (Italian) Corporate [Fascist] State’ (2001, 69n20). In this sense, too, Canada replicates the contradictory impulses of Europe. In the 1930s, French Canadians, says Filippo Salvatore, saw Italian Fascist dictator Benito Mussolini’s successful invasion of Ethiopia (Abyssinia) as ‘a lesson taught to the British Empire by a Catholic and Latin country’ (1998, 30). It usually sweeps urban ‘Eastern’ Canada, but wins only spotty support in the rural West. Too, the Liberal Party, since 1993, has lost its dominance in Quebec. According to Horowitz, ‘the key to understanding the Liberal Party in Canada is to understand it as a centre party with influential enemies on both right and left’ ([1966] 1995, 35). Saul confirms, ‘successful Canadian governments have always stood to the left of the political spectrum …’ (1998, 66). Grant’s philosophical essay Lament for a Nation: The Defeat of Canadian Nationalism (1965) eschews precise evidence for its claims. At some point in Canadian history, Grant suspects, English-speaking or ‘British’ Canadians stopped feeling the ‘pull’ of Britain and succumbed to the lures – luridly commercial – of the United States. Perhaps the decline in pro-British feeling began with the Great War (1914–18) and the wanton loss of Canadian lives in defence of the empire (1970, 72). Or perhaps it is sourced in ‘the 1957 election … the Canadian people ’s last gasp of nationalism’ (5), wherein the Progressive Conservative Party ended decades of federal Liberal Party – and supposedly continentalist – rule. Or perhaps it can be dated as having begun in 1963, when the Progressive Conservative prime minister, John George Diefenbaker, lost an election after he opposed a plan for Canada to accept American nuclear missiles. Frantz Fanon is less charitable: ‘Two centuries ago, a former European colony decided to catch up with Europe. It succeeded so well that the United States of America became a monster, in which the taints, the sickness, and the inhumanity of Europe have grown to appalling dimensions’ (1968, 313). For Canadian scholar Daniel Coleman, the debates about ‘American liberty’ versus ‘British [Canadian] … law and order’ are merely ‘a struggle between men over degrees of whiteness’ (2006, 55). George Grant insists that ‘the old Church with its educational privileges has been the chief instrument by which an indigenous French culture has survived in North America’ and that Quebec nationalist Henri Bourassa was ‘surely right when he said that Catholicism as well as Frenchness was necessary to make Quebec a nation’ ([1970, 80, 82). Fascinatingly, African-American writer Richard Wright, who, in the mid-1950s, ‘spent some months living in the heart of French Quebec, on an island in the St. Lawrence River, about fifteen miles from the city of Quebec,’ believes ‘the Province of Quebec represents one of the few real surviving remnants of feudal culture on the American continent’ (1957, 106). Wright contrasts Quebec’s religiosity with his own ‘Westernness’ that ‘resides fundamentally in my secular outlook upon life ’ (82). By dubbing his domestic, anti-terrorism bureaucracy the Department of Homeland Security, President George W. Bush (2001–9) became the first U.S. president to admit, in a de facto fashion, that the United States is (or possesses) an empire. Only empires have ‘homelands.’ (‘Fatherland,’ anyone?) Canadian scholar Richard Almonte wonders how much Frye ’s theories apply to Canadian writers who are not, unlike Frye, ‘transplanted Europeans’ (1998, 29). According to Frye, ‘the imperial and the regional are both inherently anti-poetic environments, yet they go hand in hand; and together they make up what I call the colonial in Canadian life.’ The literary consequence of this division is that the English tend ‘to specialize in the imperial [theme] and the French in the regional [parochial/provincial] aspects of it’ ([1943] 1970, 89). Grant mourns the potential truth that ‘the collapse of nineteenth-century Europe automatically

notes to pages 103–6

14

15

16

17

18

19

20

21

22

243

entailed the collapse of Canada’ (1965, 50). He seems to mean, here, that the imperial rivalries that led to both the Great War and the Anti-Fascist War reduced Great Britain to a European rump of American imperialism, and, given this ‘collapse,’ Canadians, especially empowered Liberal Party apparatchiks, between the 1920s and 1960s, felt they had little choice but to accept U.S.-dominated continentalism. Even the atrocious Adolf Hitler offered a scenario, during a September 1942 dinner conversation reported in Richard E. Osborne ’s If Hitler Had Won, that, if America believed the British Empire was disintegrating, it might occupy Canada. In the same conversation, Hitler named a Canadian, Lord Beaverbrook (William Aitken), as an acceptable leader of any post-Churchill British government, one that would arrange a peace with Germany (2004, 199). Saul notes the spectacle of the Aboriginal-influenced paintings of twentieth-century Euro-Canadian artist Emily Carr suffering rejection from West Coast British Canadians ‘busy imitating irrelevant English imagery and rejecting any Native role in the land they wished to claim entirely for themselves’ (1998, 39). Caribbean literature scholar Gordon Rohlehr observes, ‘Significantly, the call for a comparatist approach [in literary criticism] arose in Europe after the Napoleonic wars so jumbled nations together that a tension was created between a new cosmopolitanism and the still recognizable individual distinctness of older nationalities’ (1980, 30). Let us reject any implication that ‘the aesthetics of post-colonial literature lags in its development behind the metropolitan center,’ for such an argument is ‘Eurocentric, condescending, falsely totalizing and just plain wrong.’ Yet, while we contest the idea of a ‘time-lag’ between off-shore metropolitan innovation and domestic repetition, one of the determining features of postcolonialist writing is, still, ‘the rewriting of central, canonical works of literature with a complex mixture of parodic and serious intent’ (Dasenbrock 2001, 113). Postcolonial ‘lateness’ permits postcolonial deconstruction (i.e., critical – caustic – reconstruction) of forebears’ and settlers’ canons … Harry H. Hiller suggests that ‘the most important factor sustaining ethnicity as a critical variable in Canadian society is not immigration but a regional concentration of francophones in the province of Quebec’ (1991, 171). This notable example is a model for all other ethnic groups in the country: the key to wielding power and gaining equality is to concentrate numbers of one’s ethnicity in a particular territory. Yes, Chinese (Cantonese) is Canada’s ‘third’ language; Chinese, Japanese, and South Asian communities figure significantly in British Columbia and Ontario; ‘Black’ people are visible constituents of Nova Scotia, Quebec, Ontario, and Alberta; and Aboriginal peoples are vividly present in Quebec, northern Ontario, and the entirety of the West and the North. But my emphasis here is on the European connection to region and province. The ethnographic context is fluid. In a 2004 paper, John Considine forecasts two possible linguistic futures in Canada, asking, ‘Will Canadians in the coming century see the value of language as primarily economic, or will they also see it as spiritual?’ If the former valuation prevails, then ‘the linguistic future of Canada will be impoverished …: economically important languages such as Mandarin will doubtless be seen as useful, but many others will become obsolescent’ (2004, 26). In such a Canada, most European tongues, along with many others, would be swallowed up by English. Petrine Archer-Straw informs us, ‘Rousseau’s noble savage, Darwin’s evolutionary theories and Lucien Lévy Bruhl’s la pensée sauvage coalesce into [Cunard’s] poetry that advocates nature, biological regression and reconstructive history to promote the African’ (Archer-Straw 2000, 167). Think here of Prime Minister William Lyon Mackenzie King’s establishment of ‘ruins’ at his estate,

244

23 24 25 26

27 28

29

30

31

notes to pages 106–9

Kingsmere, in the Quebec wilderness just north of Ottawa: King felt the royal need to impose the agony of violent European history upon the oblivious, savage innocence of Canadian land. I exempt First Nation peoples from this analysis. Hence, African-American Beat poet Ted Joans describes his own artistic shuttling succinctly: ‘Surrealist american [sic] / Europe ’ (2001, 10). U.S. scholar Aldon Lynn Nielsen follows suit, suggesting ‘a potential African genesis of Modernity, and of Modernism’ (2001, 155). Canada was not immune to such sentiments. English-Canadian writer Stephen Leacock holds, in 1907, that ‘imperialism means but the realization of a greater Canada, the recognition of a wider citizenship’ (quoted in D. Coleman 2006, 26). Yet, ‘the Negro breathes in [the] appeal of Europe like pure air’ (Fanon 1967, 21). In The Wretched of the Earth, Fanon examines European ‘Manicheism’ towards the colonized, coloured world – that which turns the colonized ‘into an animal’: ‘In fact, the terms the settler uses when he mentions the native are zoological terms. He speaks of the yellow man’s reptilian motions, of the stink of the native quarter, of breeding swarms, of foulness, of spawn, of gesticulations’ (1968, 42). In The Fire Next Time, Baldwin recognizes that ‘the American Negro is a unique creation; he has no counterpart anywhere, and no predecessors.’ Like Du Bois in The Souls of Black Folk (1903), Baldwin insists upon an African-American exceptionalism predicated upon Europeanization and Christianization: ‘I am, then, both visibly and legally the descendant of slaves in a white, Protestant country, and this is what it means to be an American Negro’ (Baldwin 1964, 114). Baldwin does not seem to recognize the similar situation of Africans in South America, and, yes, Canada: ‘visible’ minority populations, Europeanized and Christianized. (The situation is different in the Caribbean, only in that the ‘settler’ African populations are often the majority, or nearly so.) Then again, his desire is to assume an über-American identity: ‘I am not a ward of America; I am one of the first Americans to arrive on these shores’ (132). But his position as an overseas African-American also permits Baldwin to develop another Du Boisian discourse, pan-Africanism: ‘The word “independence” in Africa and the word “integration” here [in the U.S.] are almost equally meaningless; that is, Europe has not yet left Africa, and black men here are not yet free ’ (118). A. James Arnold reminds us that the term négritude was coined by Martiniquais poet Aimé Césaire, whose classical French education rendered him part of an Antillean élite, ‘European in culture if not in pigmentation’ ([1981] 1998, 44, 8). Ironically then, when Césaire became a politician encouraging Martinique’s uplift, ‘his struggle was to prove especially painful and its outcome especially problematical, because in attacking modern Europe, he was at the same time attacking a part of himself ’ (ibid., 70). In literary terms, too, Césaire ’s négritude apes a European discourse: ‘Although its subject matter is blackness in a white world, its forms are a sophisticated hybridization of many elements of modern European literary tradition. Césaire frequently corrodes, or parodies, European modes and even specific works’ (168). Later, Arnold declares (with what should strike Africentrists as a damning clarity or clear damnation) that, ‘only the dominant European high culture (modernism) authenticates for Césaire the creative treatment of a Creole subject (negritude close to home)’ (277). So, a profoundly black aesthetic – négritude – arrives in European ‘fetters.’ Until the 1960s, the ‘chief brokerage ’ of the ‘reactionary’ U.S. Congressional House Judiciary Committee had been, reports historian Theodore H. White, ‘suppression of black rights in return for special immigration bills for other [European] ethnics ’ (1975, 281). Ironically, African Americans flocked to a Europe where they were celebrated, just as, simultaneously, millions of Europeans were welcomed to America so long as they agreed tacitly to support the suppression of blacks.

notes to pages 109–10

245

32 In his 1970 review of African-American expat Marion Brown’s jazz album Le Temps Fou, John Sinclair voices these sentiments: ‘if there is a new-music scene on this planet, it must be in Europe now, where this record of Marion’s was recorded and released, and where so many of our free musicians have gone to work and perform for real audiences’ (1971, 9). The American context is bad for blacks, bad for commerce, and bad for art: ‘They have not gone there by choice – although many brothers have found out that Europe is a whole different living experience than Raceland, USA, that the level of official violence perpetrated by the consumer-capitalist society on its people is far lower and far less intense at all times there – but because they have been almost systematically excluded from the remunerative music business in this country, and likewise from any possibility of an audience’ (ibid., 9–10). Europe, here we come! 33 One exception to this general truth is those Haitian-Canadian intellectuals whose predilection is for French culture, as opposed to Haitian culture, and who therefore look to Paris, not Port-au-Prince (or, for that matter, Montreal), for their sustenance. But there is also a strong anglophile element among West Indian–heritage African Canadians. Yet, these enthusiasms (or nostalgic recollections) make sense, for, in the English-speaking Caribbean, even after independence, many nations continue to respect British standards in education and emulate British culture, while, in Haiti, among the intelligentsia, France continues to exercise cultural influence. The result of these primary identifications is the surprising statistic, based on an analysis of the 1991 Canadian census, that ‘43 per cent of African Canadians did not identify themselves as “Black.”’ Indeed, Walton O. ‘Wally’ Boxhill of the Treasury Board Secretariat reports that ‘some Haitians called themselves French, and some Jamaicans called themselves British, so they were counted as people of European origin’ (quoted in G. Clarke 2002a, 41). And Barbados is also known fondly as ‘Little England.’ 34 See Clarke’s novel The Question, translated by Isabella Maria Zoppa. 35 After the United States, the next major site of expatriation for African Canadian artists and intellectuals is the Caribbean. Here one finds Robert Edison Sandiford, a native Montréalais, residing in and writing from Barbados (see his Sand for Snow [2003]), while Austin Clarke spent years there in the 1970s. For her part, poet and writer Dionne Brand was working for a Canadian aid agency in Grenada, just north of her native Trinidad, when a 1983, Yankee-led invasion toppled her belovèd socialist government – and altered her writing. After the Caribbean, Africa is a preferred site for African-Canadian journeying. See Djanet Sears’s play, Afrika Solo (1990) and Yvonne Blackwood’s travelogue Into Africa (2000). 36 Short fiction by Zetta Elliott, a Toronto native now living in the United States, exemplifies this point. In her piece titled ‘Plastique,’ the protagonist, Rina, during a visit home to Toronto, laments the relative absence of black people: ‘Doesn’t it ever bother you being the only black person in a room, Colin? Not seeing another black face on the street?’ (2004, 6) Later, walking, Rina feels ‘in the dreary spring light all the [Canadian] faces looked ashen and dull.’ Even the ‘occasional’ black face seemed ‘wan and sapped of warmth’ (9). Considering Canada and its indifference towards or disdain for its black citizens, Rina knows ‘she would never be a national treasure, but what might it mean to be loved, truly wanted, not merely tolerated, pitied, or scorned?’ (12) Forced to choose between enduring the cool ‘liberal’ racism of Canada, where blacks are a disempowered minority, and the hotblooded, ‘pro-and-con’ passions of the Republic, where African Americans wield some clout, Rina, walking down Toronto’s University Avenue, ‘continued heading south’ (14): Toward the United States. 37 Thus, Jamaican-born Nalo Hopkinson, a fantasy–sci fi novelist, saw her talent first recognized in the United States, where she won the New York–based Warner Books First Novel Contest with her

246

38

39 40 41 42

43

44 45

46

notes to pages 110–15

manuscript for Brown Girl in the Ring (1998). Her attempts to find a Canadian publisher had met with rebuff. This summary rejection of Europe means that the greatest influences on African-Canadian writers are African American and European Canadian, a point I argue in my essay “Contesting a Model Blackness” (2002a). But another terrific influence, especially for spoken word and dub poets, is JamaicanCanadian culture, a point verified by constant evocations of its accent and heroes/heroines in T-Dot Griots: An Anthology of Toronto’s Black Storytellers (2004), edited by Karen Richardson and Steven Green. Strangely, perhaps, the ‘influence ’ largely absent from African-Canadian literature and culture is that of Black Britain, save for the postcolonial theories of Paul Gilroy and Stuart Hall, which, I observe, seldom suit African-Canadian contexts. Her insight is relevant here, for she deems Canada ‘a society which is still very much colonial’ (Philip 1989, 12). Césaire’s desire is not easily attained, for literary ‘blackness’ shadows European aesthetics. See note 21. Consult www.infoniagara.com/d-dare-annie.html Mayr may be conversant with Harris’s book. Even ignoring the biographical truth that Harris was Mayr’s teacher, suggestive connections can be made between The Conception of Winter and The Widows. In her poem, ‘Post Cards: Driving Down,’ Harris records a driver, explaining that buying a house in ‘ritzy / Barcelona’ requires “… / sacks full of money / cataracts / what am I saying / Niagara…” / his images tumble / over each other’ (C. Harris 1989, 25). Too, the search for selfliberation that brings Mayr’s German trio to Canada is also what draws Harris’s Canuck threesome to Spain: ‘we have chose to lose // our place in the world ... three women searching / a ledge for freedom ... excitement ... for self ’ (ibid., 27). Her attitude mirrors C.K. Doreski’s interpretation of African-American poet Melvin B. Tolson’s perspective on European imperialism in the 1930s: ‘The imperial path of treachery – from Chamberlain to Mussolini to Hitler, from England to Ethiopia to Poland – led to deeper colonial enslavement’ (Doreski 2001, 95). Harris’s persona understands the profound imbrication of Europe with racist violence. How easily Brunhuber’s Stacey flouts Fanon’s proviso, ‘My life should not be devoted to drawing up the balance sheet of Negro values’ (Fanon 1967, 229). Picasso’s art (see his cubism) was highly influenced by African art. But Torrie may not realize that European contact with this art was a result of violence: ‘The European “discovery” of African art began with the British punitive expedition against Benin in 1897… It was the looting of Benin that made African art visible to Europeans’ (J. Jones 2003, R12). Sarsfield may intend a measure of irony by making Lars, the signally white man who informs Torrie of the African influence on European art, complicit with the Nazi conquest of Denmark. Both ‘appropriations’ are episodes of imperialism. African-American jazz musician Donald Byrd, raised in Detroit, just across the border from Windsor, Ontario, reflects, ‘Windsor represented Europe to me… So I always had a feeling for the foreign, the European thing, because Canada was right there.’ For this African American, Canada represented Europe. Moreover, it suited the terms of African-American mythology regarding Canada (and Europe): ‘For black people, you see, Canada was a place that treated you better than America’ (quoted in Gilroy 1993, 18). After visiting Quebec in the 1950s, African-American writer Richard Wright wrote: ‘The distance between these two cultures [i.e., Catholic, religious Quebec and secular individualism] is the distance between feudal Europe and present-day, vibrant, nervous, industrial America’ (1957, 109).

notes to pages 115–16

247

47 Alexis’s adoration of Europe is also reminiscent of Euro-American writer Henry Miller, who tells us, in ‘A Saturday Afternoon’ (1963), ‘I have such a sense of being at home [in Paris] that it seems incredible that I was born in America’ (1963, 37). Another passage in the same piece seems to anticipate Alexis’s use of the ‘bridge ’ metaphor in ‘The Road to Santiago de Compostela’: ‘And as I cross the bridge at Sèvres, looking to the right of me and left, crossing any bridge, whether it be over the Seine …, the East River or the Hudson, the Mississippi …, the Jordan, the Tigris …, crossing any and every bridge... I have crossed them all’ (41). Miller’s cosmopolitan bridge crossing does not rely upon the Christian (or Catholic) vision that Alexis implicitly extols, but it is just as mystical. Indeed, Miller foreshadows the beatific concerns of the American Beats. 48 Alexis runs afoul of Fanon, who views Christianity as a form of passive-aggressive, Euro-American imperialism, laying coloured peoples (intellectuals above all) prostrate before their foes: ‘The Church in the colonies is the white people ’s Church, the foreigner’s Church. She does not call the native to God’s ways, but to the ways of the white man, of the master, of the oppressor. And as we know, in this matter many are called but few are chosen’ (1968, 42). From this perspective, Alexis’s Christian humanism, though narrated via scientific hells and deus ex machina heavens, is suspect. 49 Dorsinville traces Fanon’s concept that the ‘native intellectual’ engages in the liberation struggle of his or her people. However, where Dorsinville outlines the radical adoption of a European model of multiculturalism, Fanon narrates ‘the backward surge of intellectuals toward bases grounded in the people’ (1968, 46). Thanks to this healthy nativism (or progressive atavism), ‘all the Mediterranean [European] values – the triumph of the human individual, of clarity, of beauty – become lifeless, colorless knickknacks …, simply because they have nothing to do with the concrete conflict in which the people are engaged’ (47). 50 Warns Fanon: ‘If we want to turn Africa into a new Europe, and America into a new Europe, then let us leave the destiny of our countries to Europeans. They will know how to do it better than the most gifted among us’ (1968, 315). But, according to Reed Way Dasenbrock, the Caribbean Nobel Laureate in Literature Derek Walcott would refuse this judgment: ‘Walcott would insist that for his New World culture there is more than one Old World: there is both Africa and Europe and there is no need to choose between them as a poet’ (2001, 121).

9. Does (Afro-) Caribbean-Canadian Literature Exist? In the Caribbean?

This paper was shaped by presentations at the Department of English, Universität Köln, in Cologne, on 13 January 2005; at the John F. Kennedy-Institut, Berlin, on 11 January 2005; at Marburger Zentrum für Kanada-Studien, Philipps-Universität Marburg, Marburg, Germany, on 10 January 2005; at the International Canadian Studies Association conference at l’Université du Québec à Montréal, Montreal, on25 May 2003; and at ‘The African Atlantic: The Making of Black Diasporas’ Conference, sponsored by the Collegium for African American Research and King Alfred’s College, in Winchester, England, on 14 April 2003. 1 I dedicate this essay to Peter Evander McKerrow, a native of Antigua, who may be considered the first Afro-Caribbean-Canadian author: His Brief History of the Coloured Baptists of Nova Scotia, and Their First Organization as Churches, A.D. 1832, appeared in Halifax in 1895. A claim to a version of primogeniture may be exercised by Sir James Douglas (1803–77), a mixed-race gent from British Guyana

248

2

3

4

5

notes to pages 116–17

who became governor of British Columbia (1858–64). Douglas kept a journal and diary in the 1840s and 1860s, portions of which were published by the Vancouver Public Library in 1965. See Wayde Compton, Bluesprint: Black British Columbian Literature and Orature (2002). Thus, African-Canadian writer Robert Edison Sandiford, the son of Barbadian immigrant parents, chastises Barbadian-born Cecil Foster for presenting, in a short story, ‘an assessment of Canadians that it far too harsh and one of Barbadians that is far too nostalgic’ (1998, 71). Sandiford also critiques Trinidad native Dionne Brand for expressing ‘a view of life in the Caribbean’ that is ‘a touch myopic’ (ibid.). From Sandiford’s perspective, both Foster and Brand appeal to a stereotyped dichotomy that puts Canada on ice and panders to ‘sentimentality’ respecting the Caribbean. For her part, AntiguanCanadian writer Althea Prince regrets the seeming disconnectedness of the annual Caribbean-Canadian carnival in Toronto, once dubbed Caribana, from the reality of the African-Canadian context. She urges that ‘the cultural festival … not be presented as a commodity, a thing, a material object, in and of itself, but [as] a place where a wider cross-section of African Canadians’ truths – their stories – get told’ (2001, 85). Prince also feels that the resultant ‘dialogue needs to be centred on what it means to be human and African in the objective realities of Toronto, Canada, the world’ (86). A major irony here is that Afro-Caribbean-Canadian writers are not only central to any canon of African-Canadian literature, but also, increasingly, to Canadian literature itself. Many of Canada’s top literary prizes have been won by Austin Clarke, Dionne Brand, and André Alexis, while Clarke, Nalo Hopkinson, Louise Bennett, Olive Senior, Dany Laferrière, and M. NourbeSe Philip have received international awards. In addition, Alexis, Brand, Clarke, Philip, Lillian Allen, and Claire Harris are prominent public intellectuals. Any decent history or anthology of contemporary English-Canadian writing cannot acceptably omit these figures. If we consider writers who are not native to the Caribbean, but hold parental ties to the region, the list of vital Afro-Caribbean-Canadian writers must expand to include Suzette Mayr, Andrew Moodie, Djanet Sears, and Robert Edison Sandiford (who was born and raised in Quebec, but now lives in the parental homeland of Barbados, where he received the Governor-General’s Award for Creative Arts [Literature] in 2003 and 2006). However, Mayr, Moodie, and Sears focus on Canada, not the Caribbean, in their writings. Three other writers must be mentioned at this juncture: Rachel Manley won Canada’s chief nonfiction prize in 1997, but this Jamaican-parented Brit is a non-resident in the literature; Tessa McWatt is Guyanese by birth, and now lives in London, England, but is viewed as a redoubtable Canadian novelist (perhaps because she writes in part about her upbringing in Canada); Malcolm Gladwell, born in Britain and raised in Canada by Caribbean parents, is globally famed as a New York–based, ‘African-American’ pop philosopher. (Gladwell is claimed, in Canada, as a Canadian, but his focus is neither Canada nor the Caribbean, but the cosmos.) In sum, first-generation Afro-Caribbean-Canadian writers who achieve acclaim in Canada may yet fail to secure an audience in the Caribbean or to classify themselves as Canadian. The reason for their ‘domestic’ estrangement is that Canada provides them no intellectual or emotional ‘home.’ Instead, it is a limbo, a vantage point, a kind of remote, frozen Pluto (but with central heating), from which they may train their telescopes and binoculars upon ‘real-life’ elsewhere – even if that ‘elsewhere ’ is obstinately oblivious to their inspection. To be fair, in the 2004 edition of The West Indian Novel and Its Background, Ramchand provides an ‘Author Bibliography’ and a ‘Year by Year Bibliography,’ both of which include many African-Caribbean-Canadian writers: André Alexis, Vanessa Alleyne, Dionne Brand, Jan Carew, Austin Clarke, etc. The ideal of authenticity, as we will see, motivates the standard dismissal of Afro-Caribbean-Canadian writers: Those who no longer reside in the Caribbean are considered to have lost touch with authentic forms of Caribbean culture. This observation is debatable, and a debate is entertained in note 16.

notes to pages 118–20

249

6 One major exception to this general pattern is Searching for Safe Spaces: Afro-Caribbean Women Writers in Exile (1997), by Myriam J.A. Chancy, who canvasses writers Dionne Brand, M. NourbeSe Philip, and Makeda Silvera with due attention to their Canadian locations. However, Chancy has good personal reasons for this attentiveness, for she herself is an immigrant, woman, Afro-Caribbean intellectual who lived in Canada (and now the United States). 7 Alexander references, likely without knowing it, three Canadian black male intellectuals: Montreal native son Hearne; African–Nova Scotian–born, but now U.S.-based, theologian Peter J. Paris, and transplanted Barbadian Keith A. Sandiford. 8 In a presentation at the University of Toronto on 14 March 2005, Jamaican-Canadian poet Olive Senior was introduced with the observation that her book Gardening in the Tropics (1995) is now a required poetry text for the CXC. 9 While critics of postcolonial literature are frequently unable to perceive Afro-Caribbean writers as also Canadian ones, critics of ‘Commonwealth’ literature fare no better. The rubric allows a consideration of Canadian literature, yes, but not that authored by racial minorities. Arguably, the central fixation of ‘Commonwealth literature ’ is the relationship among Britain, its black and brown excolonies, and its Caucasian-dominated confederates (Australia and New Zealand). In such analyses, Canada is collapsed into a province of the United States, while its citizen black writers are perceived as principally African American, Caribbean, or African. For instance, in Howard Erskine-Hill’s essay, ‘The Nuisance Grounds: The Theme of Relegation in Two Canadian Novels’ (1999), he treats only Euro-Canadian authors, namely Margaret Laurence and Timothy Findley. Erskine-Hill distinguishes Laurence as ‘not simply as a Canadian but as specifically a Commonwealth writer’ (251), while Findley’s work is far more dependent on Canadian-ness (262). ‘Commonwealth literature’ is as vaporous a concept as ‘Caribbean Canadian.’ 10 Dash’s analysis also neglects to note the ways in which Laferrière’s notorious satire recapitulates French Guiana novelist Bertène Juminer’s Les Bâtards (1961). Gary Warner tells us that Juminer ‘systematically explores black-white relationships in a European setting, the principal actors being male Guianese students and the French girls they associate with.’ This plot resembles that of Laferrière, including the fact that ‘students indulge in theoretical discussions on colonialism and on existence’ (1974, 3). 11 This statement must be qualified in light of an email communication to me from Professor Michael Bucknor (9 May 2005), who teaches ‘classes on Afro-Caribbean/Canadian writers’ at the University of West Indies at Mona, Jamaica. Professor Bucknor also avers that, ‘by the late 1990s to the present, more Canadian and Caribbean/Canadian writers have been taught at Mona because recently hired faculty had studied in Canada … and these scholars had developed an interest in Caribbean/Canadian writers.’ As a result, the Mona campus of the University of the West Indies has hosted courses on ‘Dionne Brand, Lillian Allen, Olive Senior, and Nalo Hopkinson and a course exclusively focussed on Austin Clarke’s work.’ It remains fascinating, however, that Glyne A. Griffith’s monograph Deconstruction, Imperialism, and the West Indian Novel (1996), which began its life as ‘a PhD thesis presented at the Mona Campus of the University of the West Indies’ (xi), makes no room for Carew and Clarke, both of whom were well-established writers in 1996, let alone any other Afro-CaribbeanCanadian novelist, save for Hearne. Moreover, Griffith’s discussion of Hearne never reflects on his Canadian origins. Perhaps Griffith’s lack of attention to Canada in 1996 further cements Professor Bucknor’s welcome insight that consciousness of Canada is much greater now at the University of the West Indies, Mona, than it was a decade (plus) ago. 12 In my 18 December 2000, interview with Prof. Gordon Rohlehr of the University of the West Indies, St. Augustine, Trinidad, he said, in reference to the Caribbean academy and its attitude towards émigré writers in Canada, ‘We ’ve never really taught Austin Clarke.’

250 notes to pages 120–2 13 Another Afro-Caribbean-Canadian writer to seek to promote women’s writing in the Caribbean is Jamaica native Makeda Silvera, who participated in a May 1989 women’s publishing conference at Mount St. Benedict, Trinidad. Introducing the resultant publication, Publishing Handbook for Caribbean Women Writers (1992), Joan Ross-Frankson allows that workshop participants ‘readily advanced the idea of this Handbook for they had come to recognize how much more they needed to know about writing, about publishers and about publishing’ (1992, 7). 14 Professor Rohlehr also indicated that the adopted ‘nationalities’ of Caribbean émigré writers do not register in the Caribbean: ‘One doesn’t think of Sam Selvon as someone who went to Canada, but rather as the author of specific titles’ (2000). 15 This bias in favour of ‘authenticity’ or ‘authentic experience ’ is significant. Thus, introducing her jointly edited collection, Poems of a Child’s World: An Anthology for the Caribbean (1969, Gloria M. Box admits, in her preface, ‘The title of this anthology indicates its content. Poems have been selected which are within the experience of the West Indian primary school child. Some indeed have a West Indian setting quite familiar to our pupils’ (1969, n.p.; my italics). Given the emphasis on finding poems that reflect the West Indies back to West Indians, the only ‘Canadian’ poet included in the anthology is H.D. Carberry, represented by two poems. In Bite In: Stage 1, A Three-Year Secondary Course in Reading Poems (1972), Cecil Gray states the anthologized poems were chosen ‘on the basis of direct appeal for Caribbean adolescents who are being taught how to read poetry for meaning and enjoyment’ (xi; my italics). 16 In an email communication to me (9 May 2005), Professor Bucknor contests the claims of Ms Springer and Mr Gibbons, stating that their ‘framing of the authenticity question is problematic,’ as is Springer’s allegation that ‘very little [writing by Caribbean émigrés] touches our [domestic] reality.’ Professor Bucknor points out that, in courses at the University of the West Indies, Mona, Jamaica, ‘many of our students are really interested in the course because they see the contexts of Caribbean migrants abroad as an extension of their world; their aunts, grandmothers, friends are migrants in Canada and some of them aspire to be there too.’ Moreover, he notes that critic Bruce King has posited that ‘the white metropolis, whether London or Toronto, now provides an important, authentic extension of West Indian society.’ I am grateful for these powerful challenges to the prejudice against the ‘external’ as constituting the ‘inauthentic.’ But what is most significant here is the truth that respect for the rendition of ‘authenticity’ – whether in documenting domestic conditions or immigrant experience – is what drives the reception of authors, both those located within the Caribbean and those gone abroad. Introducing his Faber Book of Contemporary Caribbean Short Stories (1990), editor Mervyn Morris insists on the authenticity of the fiction, observing, ‘their language is often distinctively Caribbean, … they project characters and situations which we in the Caribbean identify as ours’ (xi; my emphasis). Similarly, introducing Three Caribbean Plays (1979), a collection intended ‘for use by students in senior forms of secondary schools,’ editor Errol Hill pledges that the chosen plays ‘present aspects of life as it is found in the Caribbean today.’ Hill determines that each playwright uses ‘incidents’ in each drama ‘to tell us something about the community and hence about the country of which it forms a part’ (1, 3). Hill declares – boldfacedly – ‘Because these are Caribbean plays we may expect that the life they depict will be rooted in the Caribbean experience’ (4). So, Ms Springer and Mr Gibbons are not alone in sensing that the ‘valued’ work by a Caribbean writer is one ‘authentic’ to Caribbean ‘experience.’ Where Professor Bucknor and others rightly disagree is on whether expatriation and emigration also constitute ‘authentic Caribbean experience.’ Surely they do. Even so, we cannot forget that Ms Springer and Mr Gibbons believe that Afro-Caribbean-Canadian writing lacks authenticity in the eyes of a mass, Caribbean-based, audience.

notes to pages 123–4

251

17 Gibbons noted that only ‘big-name writers’ appear on school syllabi. However, in 2000, a figure such as Afro-Trinidadian-Canadian writer Dionne Brand was not listed because ‘not much by her is available here’ (2000). 18 In an interview in Caribbean Writers: Between Orality and Writing (1994), Jamaican – and JamaicanCanadian – author Pamela Mordecai confirms that book publication, circulation, and distribution are difficult endeavours in the Caribbean. A textbook monopoly in ‘a secure market’ (174) marginalizes ‘extra-curricular’ literary works. 19 Yet the ‘metropolitan model’ was highly injurious to local culture and ‘race’ pride. Ruby King and Mike Morrissey report that these ‘textbooks portrayed the power and beneficence of the “Mother Country” and the necessity for colonial peoples to be loyal and obedient, industrious and humble. History and geography were of the mother country and the world, rather than of the colony. There were no black heroes’ (1990, 22). This British-model education was, objectively speaking, absurd: ‘Caribbean children … learned … how to dissect the dog-fish, imported from England for the purpose, stinking of formaldehyde, and strove to visualize “a host of golden daffodils”’ (21). In truth, its only purpose was to inculcate conservative beliefs, to wit that ‘the [American] colonists … were rebels who out of gross ingratitude overthrew their lawful sovereign, George the Third, [and] that slavery was abolished because the great Queen Victoria was moved to pity by the eloquent pleading of Wilberforce, the great liberator and advocate of emancipation’ (22). 20 One may wonder how much the problem of book production is related to issues of book circulation in an environment governed by ‘the near monopoly of British multinational publishing.’ In turn, how many Caribbean readers have been repelled by ‘official’ literature because ‘the textbooks used in the Caribbean continue to reflect the perspectives and biases of the colonial power’? (King and Morrissey 1990, 18) Summing up research undertaken in the mid-1980s, Ruby King and Mike Morrissey state, ‘A significant number of [Caribbean textbooks] continue to portray non-whites and their cultures negatively … Far from helping Caribbean children to build positive self-images and to be appreciative of their cultural heritage, textbooks with such biases help to destroy their self-respect and foster negative concepts of self and society’ (43). 21 One other hiccough in the circulation of Carib-Can-authored texts within the Caribbean is that of book production itself. In 1994, Maureen Henry, then the head of the Technical Services Section of the Main Library of the University of the West Indies, St. Augustine, Trinidad, issued Book Production in the Caribbean: A Concise Guide for Authors, Publishers and Printers, to encourage publishers, especially self-publishing authors, to produce quality texts. Henry observes, ‘Many local and regional publications … do not conform to the most basic and minimal criteria of book production and this [fact] seems to imply that these criteria are not known to the persons who should be most knowledgeable about them’ (1994, ix). 22 Gibbons exaggerates. He really means to underline the non-popularity of domestic, Caribbean ‘literary’ literature. In our interview, he explained that Anglo-Caribbean people do read ‘Anything … British literature, Caribbean writing, books on pop stars, Harlequin romances, thrillers. Religious books would have an audience among the religious’ (2000). Ironically, Gibbons’s citation of Harlequin, the Toronto-based publisher of romance novels, suggests the existence of one popular form of ‘Canadian’ literature in the Caribbean. 23 As early as 1967, Caribbean intellectual and scholar Elsa Goveia lectures, ‘Language in the West Indies is a double-edged sword. It is European on the one hand, and it is West Indian Creole on the other’ (Walmsley 1992, 97). 24 As noted (see chapter 7, note 2 above), Head’s collection was the third African-Canadian anthology.

252 notes to pages 125–6 25 Like A.M. Clarke, African-Canadian writer Robert Edison Sandiford relates the oral dimension of black writing to ‘authenticity’: ‘In fact, the use of dialect [by African-Canadian writers], which can be off-putting to some, brings home this reality [i.e., the originality of African-Canadian literature]. If poorly executed, it can result in the caricature of a character. In [one African-Canadian anthology], it authenticates experience ’ (1998, 70; my italics). 26 Allen seems fairly a Caribbean nationalist. To discuss ‘fast movement and slow movement style’ in poetry, she chooses a lyric that uses ‘run-on lines and harsh-sounding words’ to imitate ‘the fast pace of living and mechanical and automatous [sic] life in the United States and the struggle of the black people there.’ However, in the same poem, ‘long-vowel sounds and a predominance of “s” sounds’ function to suggest the ‘peace and slow movement of life in the Caribbean’ (C. Allen 1976, 13), or, one might say, Paradise. It is an open question how much such nationalist attitudes serve to sideline ‘foreign’ writings by once-upon-a-time ‘homeys.’ 27 African-Canadian literacy tutor Alfred Jean-Baptiste insists that ‘there are at least five variations of English in use in the Caribbean today’ (1995, 36): ‘Creole English, Rasta English [Rastafarianinfluenced spelling and pronunciation (42–4)], Foreign English [American, British, and Canadian-influenced speech (39–41)], Erudite English [deliberately elaborate talk (41–2)] and Standard English.’ Too, ‘Most Caribbean people can operate in Creole English and … at least one other’ (36). 28 But that ‘optional accent’ is also the result of the West Indies’ British-oriented educational system, which urges middle-class students to spurn demotic expressivity. Indeed, among the ‘errors’ that British examiners found in the Caribbean-taken General Certificate of Education Examination, Ordinary Level, in 1960, were ‘“high-flown” vocabulary,’ ‘Americanisms,’ ‘loose and slangy expressions,’ and ‘non-English [grammatical] patterns’ (Deonanan and Deonanan 1975, 112–14). Additional ‘errors’ attest to the appeal of demotic standards and structures over standard English in its printed form: ‘We enjoy a fine weather … This is the third year I was at this school … I shooked her … Everyone have a different way of learning … We make furnitures from trees … They must try they best … I would rather have this from that … Let us recast our minds to ancient times’ (ibid., 116–17). The British (imperial) desire to replicate its own expressive norms in the Caribbean must needs be consciously resisted by Afro-Caribbean-Canadian writers so tutored. Thus, M. NourbeSe Philip, the TobaganCanadian author, informed me, in our 17 April 2002 discussion/interview at the Hotel Intercontinental’s Harmony Lounge, in Toronto, that her greatest struggle is to learn to accept the Tobagan ‘Creole’ tongue that her schoolteacher father had deplored. She seeks to overcome what Manthia Diawara terms as ‘Englishness.’ He warns, ‘Englishness is the privileging of a certain use of language, literature, ideology, and history of one group over populations that it subordinates to itself.’ Indeed, the adoption of the colonial dichotomy of ‘good English / broken English’ results in the ‘broken’ version being understood as an inferior ‘copy’ of the British ‘original’ (1990, 830). Gary Warner underlines the sentiment: ‘A logical corollary of the superiority of European civilization is the primitivism of the non-European natives’ (1974, 6). Many critics of West Indian education fear the usage of Creole English relegates their students and pupils to the category of the second-rate. Yet, in actuality, the mass insistence on using Creole forms is a vocal form of linguistic independence from the English ‘model.’ The Deonanans state, simply, ‘the control of the General Certificate of Education Examination, Ordinary Level, over the high schools in Trinidad and the lives of students, manifests an attitude of [British] imperialism and colonialism’ (1975, 46). 29 Pan-Africanism is not, however, a synonym for radicalism. One of its influential architects, George Padmore, aligns it with liberalism: ‘In our struggle for national freedom, human dignity, and social redemption, Pan-Africanism offers an ideological alternative to Communism on the one side and Tribalism on the other. It rejects both white racialism and black chauvinism. It stands for racial co-

notes to pages 126–8

30 31

32

33

34

35

36 37

38 39

253

existence on the basis of absolute equality and respect for human personality’ (quoted in Austin 2003, 113). ‘Equality,’ respect for self-hood: Here are concepts reminiscent of Tom Paine and even Robespierre. If these ideals are not, in themselves, expressive of liberalism, this further quotation from Padmore leaves no doubt regarding the underpinnings of pan-Africanism: ‘Pan-Africanism looks above the narrow confines of class, race, tribe and religion. In other words, it wants equal opportunity for all… Its vision stretches beyond the limited frontiers of the nation-state. Its perspective embraces the federation of regional self-governing countries and their ultimate amalgamation into a United States of Africa’ (ibid., 113). U.S. scholar Kathryne V. Lindberg affirms ‘the Caribbean’s special black internationalism’ (2001, 71n32). In his 1992 short story ‘Letter of the Law of Black,’ Austin Clarke presents a protagonist who, on writing to his Toronto-transplanted son, observes, ‘The colonial is the fact that transcends blackness’ (1992a, 59). Notably, too, Gary Warner reminds us, ‘The colonial situation has its roots in slavery, that most traumatic experience which has left an indelible mark on the West Indian psyche’ (1974, 3). Chamberlin agrees. Due to slavery, ‘a shuttling between despair and hope continues to be part of West Indian consciousness’ (1993, 27). Head’s insight may be supported by referring to any number of anti-imperialist, pro–‘Third World’ rhetorics. When Manthia Diawara informs us that ‘the Caribbean appropriation of modernization, i.e. cricket, literacy, Christianity, and industrialization, demonstrated that there was more than one way, the English way, of apprehending modernity’ (1990, 841), he could easily be mistaken, with only a slight twist of references (say to ‘repatriation of the Constitution’ or to ‘control of national resources’), for a Canadian nationalist espousing a ‘Canadian’ form of modernity. In reality, this sensibility – that the rest of the world should learn decolonization from the Caribbean example – has a long history. No less an intellectual than C.L.R. James believed ‘anticolonial revolutionaries in the twentieth century have a great deal to learn from the failures and successes of [Haitian revolutionary] Toussaint L’Ouverture and the rebels who overthrew the most brutal of repressive regimes’ (Nielsen 1997b, 65). Bertram Boldon asks that one register that the equality extended to ‘Black Immigrants in [this] Foreign Land’ isn’t worth the paper upon which it is pronounced: ‘the black immigrant first has to come to grips with one basic truth: that irrespective of the initial facade of being welcomed as a visitor; whether it be the fallacy of a member of a Commonwealth country as originally put forward by Britain; or the fallacy of democracy as proclaimed by the U.S.A.; or yet further whether it be the non-racist pose put forward by Canada; it soon becomes clear that there is a significant inconsistency between the official ideology espoused and the actuality of Blacks enjoying these so-called rights’ (1971, 24). Boldon’s article appeared in 1971, but it remains, I wager, relevant. For Caribbean immigrants from nations that retained the monarchical connection, Canada could seem a Caucasian version of Ethiopia, idealized by African-American poet Melvin B. Tolson as ‘a monarchical Christian democracy’ (Doreski 2001, 98). This quotation from David Austin has been edited in line with suggestions the author emailed to me on 8 July 2010. Austin points out that, ‘in North America, Fanon’s influence was prominent in nationalist circles in … Québec, amongst proponents of Black Power and within the Black Panther Party’ (2003, 53). Fanon represented a ‘French connection’ between white Canadian and black immigrant leftists. The authoritative historian of African Canada, Robin W. Winks, monitors these waxing-waning, Canadian, imperial aspirations in his Canadian–West Indian Union: A Forty-Year Minuet (1968). Carl Lumumba protests this fact in a ferocious paragraph that goes so far as to denigrate ‘slave food’:

254

notes to pages 128–30

‘It seems obvious that Canadian exploitation of the West Indies is deep-rooted in history. The salted pig offal – ears, snout, neckbone, rib bones, knuckles, feet, and backbone – which fed the negro slaves were [sic] supplied by Canada. Supplied under similar circumstances were third-rate, dried salted cod, herrings, and mackerels. These forms of food which white Canadians disdain to eat, are still supplied to the West Indies, in keeping with these three-hundred-year-old depraved trade agreements. In other words, the proud, free West Indian masses are still eating the inferior food of slaves’ (1971, 177). Austin Clarke disagrees! See his Pig Tails ’n’ Breadfruit: Rituals of Slave Food (1999). Afua Cooper also cites the long commerce between Canada and the Caribbean: ‘There was a brisk trade between the capitalists of eastern Canada and the slaveholders of the Caribbean. Fish from Newfoundland and eastern Canada fed the enslaved people in the West Indies. The maritime products were then exchanged for slave-grown products: sugar, rum, molasses, tobacco, coffee, and the like. West Indian slaves were also bought by Canadian slaveholders and merchants’ (2007, A15). 40 Consult Daniel J. Baum, The Banks of Canada in the Commonwealth Caribbean (1974). 41 Moreover, serious overtures from the Turks and Caicos Islands, in both 1974 and 1985, to be accepted into Canadian Confederation as a new ‘province ’ were rejected by the government of Canada, not only because of the neo-colonial appearance of this plan but also because of racism: opponents feared that the black-majority islands, though attractive as tourism sites, would prove a welfare burden. 42 Intriguingly, few Afro-Caribbean-Canadian authors have treated the Euro-Canadian exploitation of the Caribbean territory, preferring instead to denounce American imperialism and aggression (against Jamaica, Cuba, Grenada, and Haiti), or to attack white Canadian racism against peoples of colour in Canada. Jamaican-Canadian Dub poet Lillian Allen, however, names two Canadian corporations as among those occupying, ‘honourably,’ the West Indies, while she and other immigrants face, ironically, discrimination in Canada: ‘ITT ALCAN KAISER / Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce / These are priviledged names in my County / But I AM ILLEGAL HERE (1982, 15; spelling as in original). Later on in the poem, Allen’s persona sets the black immigrant’s plight against the context of white Canadian ‘romantic’ racism: And Constantly they ask ‘Oh Beautiful Tropical Beach With Coconut Tree and Rum Why did you Leave There Why on Earth did you Come?’ AND I SAY: For the Same Reasons Your Mothers Came. (1982, 15) Afro-Caribbean-Canadian writers need to undertake more such analyses, to limn the ways in which Anglo-Canadian imperialism has invested in what Daniel Coleman calls ‘race, Britishness and the ideology of “enterprise”’ (2001, 138). 43 J. Edward Chamberlin claims that, for West Indian-born writers in Canada, ‘Canada must feel at least a little bit like home.’ Why? ‘It shares the [Caribbean] region’s preoccupation with language, but with a twist. For Canada has a long history of both preserving and destroying languages.’ This relationship is signal: ‘Perhaps the most pressing issue we face [is] … how to reconcile attachments to place with allegiances to language, and how to accommodate different allegiances and attachments, different lands and languages, within a single community’ (1998, 8). Too, Canada and the Caribbean share ‘indissoluble ties of rum and commerce and calypso’ (9).

notes to pages 130–2

255

44 Canadian-Barbadian author Robert Edison Sandiford quotes a Bajan shopkeeper as saying, ‘Barbados is the closest country to God… You can’t get ’way with anything here’ (2003, 32). 45 Trinidad native George Padmore, an architect of pan-Africanism (see note 29), comments, in a December 1942 interview with Nancy Cunard, a wealthy British socialist, ‘The West Indies have reached a higher degree of civilisation [than British Empire colonies in Africa and Asia] because of their longer contact with Western culture and its assimilation.’ This remark exhibits conservatism. But Padmore goes further: ‘The [West Indian] people …, as a whole, are Christians, their mother tongue today is English; ways and customs, virtues and vices of Europe have become their own. These people are Westernised Africans’ (Cunard [1942] 2002, 157–8). Padmore omits, astonishingly, the goodly Hindu and Muslim portions of the Caribbean, so as to ‘skin whiten’ the ‘coloured’ majority of the West Indies. 46 The Deonanans expect teachers ‘to teach in such a way that the students are encouraged in the development and refinement of their character’ (Deonanan and Deonanan 1975, 6). They also aver that ‘people change their ideas of education when their ideas of God and society change’ (132). 47 According to Harold Cruse, ‘West Indians are essentially conservatives fashioned in the British mold’ ([1967] 1984, 119). So powerful is this tendency that, on occasion, even canonical British poetry may be critiqued by one West Indian educator as too ponderous and boring (Wordsworth), too dependent on obscure dialect (Tennyson’s ‘Northern Farmer’), ‘much too adult in feelings’ (Hardy), ‘very serious disturbing, unhappy’ (Owen), and ‘gloomy’ (Eliot) (Hewitt 1980, 93–5). Similarly, a collection of West Indian poetry was chastised for including ‘fAr [–] too many … in a dark vein (a preponderance of Martin Carter, writing out of the bitterness of the Guyanese)’ (96). 48 Gordon Rohlehr called for just this type of investigation in 1980, instructing Caribbean teachers to encourage ‘Understanding’ in their ‘Literature and Social Studies’ students by examining such socialhistorical ‘factors’ as ‘the situation of these [Caribbean] ex-colonies caught as they general are in a process of transition between the old colonial system and the new’ (1980, 31–2). He also asked that Caribbean teachers seek to develop, in their students, ‘clear and balanced attitudes about … countries to which West Indians migrate (England, Canada, the USA etc)’ (32). 49 Notably, French-Caribbean writers Jean Bernabé, Patrick Chamoiseau, and Raphaël Confiant proclaim ‘Caribbeanness’ to be ‘a province of Americanness like Canadianness’ (1990, 894), meaning that it is also essentially a ‘migrant culture,’ one that has ‘adapted … to new [host culture’s] realities’ without being completely modified by them’ (893). This analysis suggests further congruencies between the Caribbean and Canada.

10. Voluptuous Rapine: The Viscous Economy of ‘Vice’ in the Short Fiction of H. Nigel Thomas and Althea Prince’

This paper was presented at the colloquium ‘Conflict and Cooperation: Wealth and Creativity,’ sponsored by the Canadian Association for Commonwealth Literature and Language Studies and the Association of Canadian College and University Teachers of English, and held at the University of King’s College in Halifax on 31 May 2003. I am grateful to the audience for its questions. 1 I dedicate this essay to Alfonso Theodore Roberts, a St. Vincent native who became an influential black public intellectual in his adopted Montreal. See A View for Freedom: Alfie Roberts Speaks (2005).

256 notes to pages 132–4 2 I prefer this spelling of postcolonial, for I believe that First World imperialism persists, though now it is so skilfully diffused within ‘objective ’ economic constructs and ‘professional’ management styles that it is invisible (save for those occasions when an interested ‘power’ decides to ‘intervene’ in the Third World – to secure a strategic commodity). Cagily, as the old imperial powers pulled down their flags and shipped home their constables, they sent in their bankers. Thus, the looting goes on – but under new flags. Frantz Fanon remarks, ‘The almighty dollar … is only guaranteed by slaves scattered all over the globe, in the oil wells of the Middle East, the mines of Peru or of the Congo, and the United Fruit or Firestone plantations’ (1968, 91). British scholar Shirley Chew comments that the labels ‘“new literatures in English” and “post-colonial literature”, appear to be equally problematic.’ She prefers ‘the less snappy but more accurately descriptive title, “literature from Commonwealth countries”’ (Chew 1997, 7). I do not: (post)colonial is cognizant of the political tensions that remain in ex-colonies. ‘Commonwealth literature ’ is just too pacific a term. 3 I capitalize ‘Imperial’ and ‘Native ’ to picture their combat as physical, not just metaphysical. 4 Fanon insists, ‘Why, colonization itself must be brought to trial!’ (1967, 97) 5 Perhaps H. Nigel Thomas dubs the dystopian island of his stories ‘Isabella’ in ironic recognition of the monarch whose support for Cristoforo Colombo (or Christopher Columbus) helped to inaugurate modern genocide and slavery. 6 Manthia Diawara theorizes, ‘As a postcolonial instrument Englishness continues to lay paternity claims to the categories of modernism and to render invisible or minimize the contribution of blacks to science, literature, art, and philosophy’ (1990, 830). 7 Diawara senses that ‘the Caribbean appropriation of modernization, i.e., cricket, literacy, Christianity, and industrialization, demonstrated that there was more than one way, the English way, of apprehending modernity’ (1990, 841). Maybe. Then again, this ‘appropriation’ of what Diawara deems ‘the expressive techniques of modernity,’ apprehended to render their stewards ‘uncolonizable’ (831), may contribute to their self-colonization – i.e., neo-colonialism: Black Skins, British Accents. Uzoma Esonwanne reminds us of a point I repeat here for Diawara: ‘far from forgetting their African history, nationalist intellectuals who criticized African modernist ideology (négritude) … had been inspired by their awareness of the epistemological, political, and aesthetic costs exacted by the specific manner in which these movements and arts had appropriated European modernism’ (2003, 31). My shadow critique of Diawara shadows his demand that black ex-colonials forge a shadowy Englishness to be ‘modern’ and realize ‘blackness [as] a way of being human in the West’ (Diawara 1990, 831). 8 Jamaica’s Joan of Arc – Nanny-of-the-Maroons – graces the nation’s currency. 9 Alfie Roberts critiques Williams, the Trinidad and Tobago prime minister, for implementing ‘the policies that were being carried out in [U.S. dependent] Puerto Rico – the Puerto Rican Operation Bootstrap problem.’ So, not only was Williams beholden to Anglo-Saxon cultural imperialism, he also accepted American-style development, ‘industrialization by invitation’ (A. Roberts 2005, 63), becoming a kind of comprador. 10 Carl Lumumba: ‘The foreign-gained professional status is a passport to profitable political pickings.’ ‘Having become saturated with a greedily-consumed Europeanism,’ the repatriated ‘expert’ is ‘a surrogate colonial master’ (1971, 158). 11 Fanon also sees ‘the extreme ambivalence inherent in the colonial situation’ (1967, 83). 12 Ambivalence even marks the leader of the greatest slave revolt in the Caribbean: Toussaint L’Ouverture, the champion of freedom in what is now Haiti. Historian C.L.R. James cites the writings of a French priest as the chief philosophical inspiration for L’Ouverture ([1938] 1963, 24–5), and even after he defeats Napoleon Bonaparte ’s army, the great slave emancipator maintains ‘pro-French

notes to pages 134–42

13

14

15

16

17 18

19

20 21

257

leanings’ (333). This fact leads to his ‘untimely and cruel death’ (213), for L’Ouverture accepts an invitation from Napoleon to come to France: As soon as he yields to these convivial sentiments, he is arrested and transported to France, where he expires in a French jail – without ever being received by ‘Fuhrer’ Napoleon. Ambivalence scores Paul Gilroy’s The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (1993). On one hand, he deplores ‘the construction of canons … on an exclusively national basis,’ naming this procedure a form of ‘cultural nationalism’ (33), but then holds that British Blacks – as a distinct nationality – represent ‘a pan-Caribbean culture ’ (82). Then he charges that Black Britons who articulate cultural nationalism crave ‘the Victorian certainties and virtues of Caribbean cultural life’ (86), thus dismissing the reality, which is that British backwardness regarding racial and class equality drives disadvantaged immigrants and their descendants to look back in adoration on their homelands. Rather, Gilroy attacks ‘the parochialism of Caribbean memories’ (87), somehow missing, again, the poignancy of Nelson’s column in Trafalgar Square, London: a memorial to a British naval supremacy now long-vanished with that empire. Too, as I have mentioned elsewhere, Gilroy’s Black Atlantic is a synthesis of contradictions. (See my ‘Must All Blackness Be American? Locating Canada in Borden’s “Tightrope Time,” or Nationalizing Gilroy’s The Black Atlantic’ [in G. Clarke 2002a].) By attending to ‘love’ stories so richly in her fiction, Prince intervenes in a cultural context – black women’s reading circles in urban Canada – wherein the romance genre is popular. Yes, one of the few elements of Canadian culture to saturate the Caribbean is the Harlequin imprint of romance novels. Read Prince through this formula: Harlequin romance plus Frantz Fanon. In Prince’s fiction, Caribbean cultural traditions interrupt and disrupt conventional romance expectations, which, at bottom, may be bankrupt. Prince highlights what Uzoma Esonwanne terms ‘the sexual component of imperialism’ (Esonwanne 1993a, 248). Her female characters are complex (as are, in fact, her males): their behaviour transcends normalizing codes of morality because they respond to the overarching (if invisible) practices of economic marginalization, patriarchy, and macho cultural imperialism. This allegation is neither simple nor clear, and Prince does not assert it in any facile or direct way. While a feminist reading must damn Samuel’s ‘cheatin’ heart’ as an expression of patriarchal attitudes, it may be that two out of the three adults in this story have found a temporary solution to the inflexible monogamy inherited from Christianity. Yet, the pain of the abandoned wife and child cannot be ignored. My reading here has been informed by Uzoma Esonwanne’s article, ‘Enlightenment Epistemology and “Aesthetic Cognition”: Mariama Bâ’s So Long a Letter’ (1997). Thomas’s short stories present just what Daniel Albright says about a work by U.S. poet Ezra Pound, ‘the opera of mankind …: tavern, church, brothel’ (2001, 74). Thomas’s depiction of mean-spirited McBain may answer V.S. Naipaul’s spiteful depiction of blacks – and ‘browns’ – in his fiction and non-fiction. But one may also sense the presence of Edgar Mittelhölzer, the part-Asian, part-Negro, part-Caucasian Caribbean writer who flirted with Nazism in the 1930s, and hated other people of colour and his own mixed-race skin so much that he committed suicide by setting himself alight. Anishalo is of a type with those members of the colonial elite who steal from their own people to advance themselves. Fanon comments, ‘The people find out that the iniquitous fact of exploitation can wear a black face, or an Arab one; and they raise the cry of “Treason!” But the cry is mistaken… The people must be taught to cry “Stop thief!”’ (1968, 145). McBain may be, itself, an allusion to Macbeth. In my essay ‘Does Afro-Caribbean-Canadian Literature Exist? In the Caribbean?’ (see chapter 9

258 notes to pages 142–5

22

23

24 25

above), I note that an important Caribbean criterion for judging the effectiveness of writing from the region is the undefined notion of authenticity. Dennis Forsythe reminds us that ‘the giant figures of slavery, capitalism, and colonialism, overshadow our institutions and our minds, and dictate the bounds of our universe within which we are further shackled. These haunting monsters continue on the rampage ’ (1971, 15). Prince’s stories witness this engagement with violation, social violence, because it ‘can indeed compel one into thought about oneself and man and society, sometimes very painful and disconcerting thought’ (Fraser 1974, 110). Likewise, Thomas’s characters ‘go the limit in terms of [value-systems] … embodying and vitalizing [them].’ And thus staging ‘meaningful confrontations’ (ibid., 108). Both Prince and Thomas allow ‘a penetration into and empathy with other consciousnesses in action’ (ibid., 53). The source of (post)colonial creativity is the ‘immoral’ resistance of socio-economic and political inequalities. Unignorable too is the following – and final – quatrain of the poem: ‘We learned too that greed’s / our worst impediment, / is almost always the creature / hidden in power’s clothing’ (Thomas 1999, 50). Think of Anishalo McBain…

11. Repatriating Arthur Nortje Versions of this paper were first presented at the Transculturalisms Canada Symposium at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver, on 23 February 2002, and at the 2002–3 colloquium series exploring ‘Cultural Appropriation’ at Laurentian University, Sudbury, Ontario, on 28 February 2003. I am grateful to the audiences at these venues for their questions and suggestions for improvements. 1 As this poem’s title – ‘À Arthur Nortje (1942–1970)’ – verifies, the paper is dedicated to Arthur Nortje. I should also note, however, that the poem appears, with some different words, in my Black (2006). 2 This biographical information is drawn from ‘Nortje, Arthur,’ an entry in The Companion to African Literatures (Killam and Rowe 2000, 180). I also draw upon the ‘Chronology of Arthur Nortje’s Life and Work’ by Dirk Klopper (Klopper 2000, xix–xxiii). 3 I will cite poems mainly from Dead Roots (1973a). 4 See Paton’s novel Cry, the Beloved Country (1948). 5 The list of these lyrics is found in the acknowledgements in Nortje’s Dead Roots (1973a, xi). Nortje was also initially published posthumously in 1971 in Apartheid: A Collection of Writings on South African Racism by South Africans, edited by Alex La Guma (Klopper 2000, xxii). 6 See Charles Dameron (1976, 155). 7 Sponsored as a landed immigrant, Nortje takes a teaching post at Hope Secondary School in British Columbia’s Fraser Canyon in 1967; in June 1969, moving to Toronto, he teaches at Alderwood Collegiate in the suburb of Etobicoke; in February 1970, he sojourns for a month in England, then leaves Canada for good to study at Oxford University. He applies for British citizenship, but dies between 8 and 10 December 1970. He is buried in Oxford. (See Klopper 2000, xxi–xxii.) 8 Nigerian-born African-Canadian scholar Uzoma Esonwanne, in a commentary on criticism of Nigerian poet Christopher Okigbo, prophecies, ‘Far from diminishing, our anxieties about who we are and how we are (African), about how we live and why, and about what and how we think our material,

notes to pages 145–7

9

10 11 12 13

259

cultural, and sociopolitical circumstances are, will grow more intense and inevitably drive us toward criticism that … attempts to demythologize [African writers] and demystify [their] works’ (2000a, 32). Nortje requires such re-examination, including scrutiny of him as ‘Canadian’ … Whatever his negative emotions towards women and, perhaps, his own mother, it is she, Cecilia Potgeiter, who holds the copyright for Dead Roots and who, thus, presumably, ensured the posthumous publication of her son’s work. See Pound’s ‘A Pact’: ‘We have one sap and one root – / Let there be commerce between us’ (1957, 27). For Farred, ‘dogbodies’ represent the ‘politically insignificant’ (2000, 57). Nortje is speaking from a geographically ambiguous position, as an unhappy immigrant in a ‘sister’/‘daughter’ of the British Empire (or Union of Anglo-Saxon-Governed States). This condition begins early in Nortje ’s decade-long oeuvre. In ‘Separation’ (1964), which deals ostensibly with a heterosexual divorce, a racial apartness is intimated: … The darkness surrounds, a black stance at a distance. All life too the inner circle ’s apart, further than I can reach at once with the heart. Separation seems all … Only that inward poignance craves nearness and meaning, totally lonely. (1973a, 18)

While Nortje’s metaphysical poetic tends to obscurity, the lyric permits a reading of resonant and trenchant racial and emotional exile. 14 In his 1963 poem ‘Synopsis,’ written in South Africa, Nortje asks two prime questions reflective of his dun and thus ‘done-in’ status: Is the heart’s country all this loneliness? ................ Where have the men gone who fought colour theories, cracked spectrums – back to the prisms? (Nortje 1973, 4) 15 In ‘Song for a Passport’ (1965), the poet sings, ‘O ask me all but do not ask allegiance!’ (Nortje 1973a, 30). 16 According to Jacques Alvarez-Pereyre, ‘Nortje ’s poems read like a story: the story of the 1960s, his own story. A story in the form … of fragments of a diary, of letters. Poems in the form of a malaise, of “ill-being”’ (1984, 154). Oui, but we should read Dead Roots as a temporal travelogue, of dated and post-dated confession(alism). 17 Alvarez-Pereyre observes that Nortje ‘took the road of exile. Legally, as a student, but it was exile all the same…’ (1984, 154). 18 Maureen Moynagh comments, regarding African-heritage intellectuals and their travels in the early

260

19 20 21

22 23 24

25 26 27 28 29

30 31

32

33

notes to pages 147–9

twentieth century, ‘This criss-crossing of the Atlantic between Africa, Europe and the Americas constituted an eccentric modernism, one not bound to a central metropole, and one whose trajectories reversed those of imperial travel’ (2002, 17). Her insight applies to Nortje: he was surely a late and eccentric modernist, not bound by a ‘central metropole ’ (though London was a touchstone); however, his travel was no reversal of ‘imperial’ directions, but, rather, a deliberate – if ironic – recapitulation. In Anatomy of Dark, this poem is titled ‘Initial Impulses’ (Nortje 2000, 128–9). Fascinatingly, both T.S. Eliot and Sylvia Plath are American poets who ‘passed’ as British, though only Eliot has been annexed by the English-English canon. Alvarez-Pereyre acknowledges that, ‘like visible signs on the pages of the poems written between 1963 and 1965, these chilling words are constantly repeated: “lonely,” “alien,” “alone,” “silent”…’ (1984, 156). Titled ‘Under Landsdowne Bridge ’ in Anatomy of Dark (Nortje 2000, 98) Actually, Anatomy of Dark collects thirty-four poems from 1968 and twenty from 1969. To eye Nortje only as a ‘poet of exile ’ is to marginalize the half of his corpus written ex South Africa, for critics such as Alvarez-Pereyre either focus on the native Nortje or, in reading the travel lyrics, glean only their commentary on the poet’s roots – that is, on race. Thus, Nortje’s oeuvre splits into a prelapsarian, semi-mystical diatribe against tribalism and a postlapsarian, Beatles cum beatnik odyssey. Pre–Highway 61 Revisited (Bob Dylan 1965), Nortje addresses politicized biological – race/ sex conundrums; post–Rubber Soul (The Beatles, 1965), he turns scatological, speaking of posting notes ‘from underground urinals’ and asking, ‘Who can distinguish / the dialogue from the graffiti?’ (1973a, 78). Perhaps the exemplary, English suicide of the U.S. expat Plath influenced the S.A. expat Nortje to die just as narcotically – in ‘the Old Country’… In Anatomy of Dark, ‘For Sylvia Plath’ is one poem with two parts (Nortje 2000, 182–5). Plath’s poetry is full of love-hate tensions for a father figure. See her “Daddy” (1965, 56). Titled ‘Affinity (for Maggie)’ in Anatomy of Dark (Nortje 2000, 180). Nortje’s poem, with its air of Nazi brutality and Inquisition torture, and with its mortician’s vocabulary, appears a pastiche of the Plath manner. Compare Nortje ’s lines on apartheid South Africa’s rejection of its black children with lines from Plath’s ‘Lady Lazarus’ (1965, 18). Nortje’s lines conjure up Eliot’s ‘Prufrock’: ‘No! I am not Prince Hamlet …; / Am an attendant lord … / Full of high sentence, but a bit obtuse …’ ([1917] 1972, 14). Anatomy of Dark: Collected Poems of Arthur Nortje (2000), a collection that includes poems previously available only in manuscript, more than triples the number Nortje authored in Canada. Arranging the poems chronologically as well as by residence, editor Dirk Klopper provides 166 poems for the South African years (1960–5), 75 poems for Nortje ’s first UK period (1965–7), 91 poems from the Canadian sojourn (1967–70), and a final 35 poems from the final residencies in England (1970). From a total of 367 poems, then, 91 – or 25 percent – were written in Canada. In addition, of a total of 394 pages of poetry in Anatomy of Dark, 111 – or 28 percent – are devoted to Nortje’s Canada-composed works. (Klopper claims that Anatomy of Dark contains 411 poems [2000, xxiv], but the individually titled poems in the table of contents number, by my count, 367.) As note 31 indicates, Anatomy of Dark forces a revision of the statement. Nortje wrote only slightly fewer poems in Canada than he did in England (91 to 110), while 166 were written while he was still in South Africa. Nortje did attempt to apply for British citizenship in his final days (Klopper 2000, xxii).

notes to pages 149–52

261

34 Touring London’s Trafalgar Square, Nortje would have noticed that Canada House and South Africa House – the two nations’ embassies – flank this centre of the old empire. 35 In the version printed in Anatomy of Dark, this last line reads, ‘I find I can read road signs’ (2000, 250). 36 However, imperial federation was not everyone ’s ‘cup of tea’ in post-Confederation Canada. In his classic text, The Race Question in Canada (1907), André Siegfried notes that, thanks to the unsatisfactory British handling of the Alaska Boundary dispute in 1903, ‘Imperialistic dithyrambs were now no longer to be heard in Canada ... Canadian imperialism has ceased to be what it was. If no one, absolutely no one, wishes to break the bonds that attach the colony to the mother country, those who seriously wish to draw them closer are few indeed’ ([1907] 1978, 218–19). 37 In ‘Return to the City of the Heart,’ Nortje ’s persona labels himself ‘a cool drunk, Afro-Saxon bred / winsome intellectual (ex / dark Continent – congratulate me here)’ (1973a, 102). 38 Following Berger, European-Canadian scholar Daniel Coleman holds, ‘Canadian imperialists … represent a peculiar progeny of British imperialism in that they advocated loyalty to Britain at the same time as they believed Canada’s newly acquired wealth of resources (once it had annexed the Northwest) would cause the young, giant nation to supplant Britain as the centre of the British Empire ’ (2006, 137). 39 Initially, however, Nortje may have approved the 1948 yearning of Italian author C. Pellizzi for the rise of ‘a new Eurafrican system of which England would have been the natural and undisputed leader’ (quoted in Swabey [1950] 1973, 190). 40 London is also ‘the city of the heart – of darkness’? 41 Perhaps Canada is an ‘Invisible Empire ’ (the nickname of the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan) – in two ways: 1) as an inchoate, international power; 2) as a site of empowered white racism. 42 I refer here to the English title of Fanon’s Les Damnées de la terre (1961). 43 The name Chaka is spelled ‘Tshaka’ in the version in Anatomy of Dark (Nortje 2000, 383). 44 See Neruda’s ‘El Canto’ for an example of his catalogues of elements (1972, 30). 45 The phrase is no joke. U.S. evangelist Herbert W. Armstrong goes so far as to identify Caucasiandominated, anglophone nations with God’s ‘Chosen People ’: ‘our white, English-speaking peoples today – Britain and America – are actually and truly the Birthright tribes of … the lost House of Israel …’ (Armstrong 1972, 128–9). For the record, his notion of ‘Britain’ includes Canada… 46 This line carries the resonance of Fanon’s conclusion to the English translation of Peau noire, masques blanches (1952), or Black Skin, White Masks: ‘O my body, make of me always a man who questions!’ (1967, 232) 47 In a fascinating chronological coincidence, Nortje abandoned Canada in the same year that Brand arrived: 1970. 48 As noted above, Head’s anthology was actually the third to appear. See chapter 7, note 2 above. 49 Head’s anthologizing instincts are cosmopolitan. Canada in Us Now includes two Indo-Caribbean writers – Daryl Dean and Harold Sonny Ladoo – and an ‘Arawak’ Guyanese writer – David Campbell – all under the rubric ‘Black.’ 50 Thus, in 1997, introducing my own anthology Eyeing the North Star: Directions in African-Canadian Literature, I state that I would have included Nortje (along with several other writers), had I ‘space enough and cash’ (1997a, xxv). 51 Editor Donna Bailey Nurse omits Nortje from her Revival: An Anthology of Black Canadian Writing (2006). 52 Compton utilizes three poems: ‘Waiting,’ ‘Immigrant,’ and ‘Hope Hotel [sic]’ (2002, 147–52). This trio bespeaks Nortje’s experience of British Columbia.

262 notes to pages 153–5 53 In his foreword to Bluesprint, Compton avers, ‘Another reason for this project is to “rescue,” so to speak, some of the texts herein, meaning, at the very least, to bring them into the public consciousness, and into the Canadian and African-Canadian literary canons’ (2002, 14; my italics). 54 McCarthy argues that ‘Canadian literary history is doomed to remain a prisoner of its founding monomania, endlessly repeating the same story to itself, moving the same or similar canonic units like chess pieces in an irresolvable stalemate ’ (McCarthy 1991, 45). We may anticipate that disputes regarding ‘African-Canadian’ texts and writers will evolve similarly. Some will endorse Nortje, others will not. 55 In this regard, one could feel moved to induct the African-American ‘Beat’ poet Ted Joans into African-Canadian literature, thanks to his publication Our Thang: Several Poems, Several Drawings (2001), issued in Vancouver, where ‘he resides, as a seasonal residence ’ (Joans 2001, 95). His verse also references Canada here and there: ‘Burnt Church / Medicine Hat / Yellow Knife / What poems await / In those concealed / Canadian places / When shall they / Become world renown’ (32).

12. Locating the Early Dionne Brand: Landing a Voice This paper was first presented at the Symposium on Book and Print Culture, at the University of Toronto, in Toronto, on 28 May 2002. It also served as the keynote address for ‘Literary and Cultural Inquiries,’ the 4th Annual Graduate Student Conference in Comparative Canadian Literature, at the Université de Sherbrooke, in Sherbrooke, Quebec, on 29 March 2003. I am grateful for the audience responses. Although this paper has benefited from the contributions of others, it is constrained, sadly, by the preference of the subject – Ms Brand – to disallow quotation of her juvenilia as well as some of her mature poetry. I must simply direct readers to look up some material that I would otherwise quote. For the record, copies of Spear magazine, an important early publishing site for Ms Brand, may be consulted at the Killam Library, Dalhousie University, Halifax. 1 Hubert Nigel Thomas is Professor Emeritus of English from Université Laval. He is also an excellent writer and critic of African-Canadian literature. 2 Yes, I do mean John McCrae and his poem, ‘In Flanders Fields’ (1915). Although Canadian poets Earle Birney and Ralph Gustafson both served in the Anti-Fascist War, 1939–45, with Birney participating in the liberation of Holland and Gustafson serving the needs of British propaganda in New York, Birney’s significant wartime writing is a novel, Turvey (1949), and Gustafson never saw livefire action. Milton Acorn set out for the war, but injury kept him back in Canada. Raymond Souster’s stint in the Royal Canadian Air Force saw him land in Europe on the final day of the Second World War. In contrast, Douglas LePan served as a gunner with the First Canadian Field Regiment in Italy, 1943–5. This experience informs his award-winning poetry volume The Net and the Sword (1953) as well as his much later poetic work Macalister, or Dying in the Dark (1995). 3 Brand’s literary career and concerns dovetail with Martiniquan-Algerian psychiatrist and theorist of decolonization Frantz Fanon’s analysis of the political trajectory of the ‘native writer’: ‘In the first phase, the native intellectual gives proof that he has assimilated the culture of the occupying power’; ‘In the second phase we find the native is disturbed; he decides to remember what he is’; ‘Finally, in the third phase …, he turns himself into an awakener of the people; hence comes a fighting literature, a revolutionary literature, and a national literature ’ (1968, 222–3). 4 Fanon asserts that, in preparing the quest for independence from offshore authorities, native politi-

notes to pages 155–62

5 6 7

8 9

10 11

12 13

14

15

263

cians ‘make the people dream dreams’ (1968, 68). It is just this kind of collective, stasis-inducing hallucinating that Brand contests. Ayanna Black, ed., Voices: Canadian Writers of African Descent (1992). The first national black writers conference took place in Ottawa, in October 1995. In the United States, the rhetoric of black solidarity could become fact; in Canada, because of our relatively small numbers and disparate backgrounds, it could earn only a pretend practicality: its gains could only be ecstatic and utopian, not institutional. I allude here to a publication of the Watchtower Bible and Tract Society of Pennsylvania. In A Map to the Door of No Return, Brand argues that ‘allegory cannot lift race in its universal wings’ (2001, 134). Yet, what is lifted up here for our examination is a consciousness, one sometimes saturated with ‘race.’ Then again, if allegory were always raceless, how could Brand insist earlier in A Map, ‘The narrative of race is embedded in all narratives’? (128) The motifs of the ‘leap’ and exemplary, politically motivated suicide recur throughout Brand’s oeuvre. See notes 13 and 15 below. See, in ‘Hard Against the Soul – X,’ lines that indicate that the yellow dress ill-suited a girl who challenged gender constraints (1998, 48). The dress also seems to materialize in ‘Every Chapter of the World – XV’ (1997, 95). In Head’s version, the poem is titled, correctly, ‘Day, dayze …’ (1976, 21). Brand describes the dégringolade of the Grenadian Revolution as a ‘fall,’ as an original sin, at least according to her analysis. Intriguingly though, the counterpart of the ‘fall’ is the ‘leap,’ a verb of equivalent consequence in Brand’s work. See also note 15 below. Brand’s suppression of ‘I’ in favour of ‘you,’ a technique she pioneers in ‘Poem for a Place Once’ is one that she reuses, consistently, later on. This pronominal exchange puts the reader exactly where she wants him or her, in the midst of an experience, having to make a decision. However, it is also a device that summons the reader to take sides with the poet, and, as such, allows for a complication of complicity. Reading Brand’s you, one is invited to feel its pain and rage, but not necessarily its empathy. In “Poem of a Place Once,” she is a term of objectivity (L. Cromwell 1975, 7); but in ‘Hard Against the Soul – I,’ you is named as equivalent to me (Brand 1998, 3). Frequently, in Brand’s work, a protagonist executes a suicidal ‘leap’ to achieve liberation from diurnal oppression. See, for instance, the conclusion of In Another Place, Not Here, where the heroine, Verlia, is ‘awake,’ ‘not sleeping’ (1996, 244) – that is, is politically hyper-conscious, and, in full rejection of the forces invading her island, executes a ‘leap off [a] cliff ’ (246), while ‘firing in the air’ (245), and plummets to her suicidal and revolutionary death ‘off the cliff ’s side into the sea’ (246). Signally, this death mirrors the heroic action of Caribbean slaves at Carib’s Leap in Grenada (the real-world setting for Brand’s novel), who leapt ‘to their deaths in 1651 rather than surrender to French colonists.’ It is now ‘just a sheer, 100-foot drop at the end of a parched cemetery in Sauteurs’ (Sandiford 2003, 166) – perhaps the same cemetery where Brand’s Verlia insists, ‘I’m not dying in this fucking cemetery today.’ Brand’s description of Verlia’s death-dive is a deliberate resurrection of the deaths of the slaves at Carib’s Leap: ‘Someone … saw’ Verlia and her ‘comrades’ (Brand 1996, 244) ‘tumble, hit, break their necks, legs, spines, down the cliff side and some of them flew, leapt into the ocean’ (246). While Verlia’s death-leap at the conclusion of In Another Place, Not Here speaks to Caribbean history, it also echoes African-American literature, specifically the conclusion of Toni Morrison’s novel Song of Solomon. Of the protagonist, Milkman, facing a deathly showdown with Guitar, we are told, ‘Without wiping away the tears, taking a deep breath, or even bending the knees – he leaped … For now he knew … If you surrendered to the air, you could ride it’ ([1977] 1987, 337).

264 notes to pages 162–7 16 See note 14. 17 The South African–Canadian poet Arthur Nortje, in his later verse, seems to offer Brand a useable style too. 18 If Ezra Pound is able to utilize ‘predominantly prosaic and predominantly lyrical generic mixtures’ in his Cantos (Coyle 1995, 126), Brand does something similar. Indeed, if The Cantos ‘could be called an epic of cultural imperialism, with the poet pedagogue [Pound] as imperator of one’ (Gibson 1995, 107n16), then Brand’s own cantos constitute an anti-imperialist reply.

13. Maxine Tynes: A Sounding and a Hearing This paper was first presented at Saint Mary’s University, Halifax, on 1 March 2004. 1 Dr. Howard D. McCurdy, PhD, is a microbiologist, author of at least forty-five scientific papers, a Professor Emeritus of the University of Windsor, where he was chair of the Department of Biology, a president of the now-defunct National Black Coalition of Canada, a candidate for the leadership of the federal New Democratic Party, and Canada’s second (after Hon. Lincoln Alexander, 1968–84) and, from 1984 to 1993, only black member of Parliament. 2 I choose to identify myself and other African–Nova Scotian writers as ‘Africadian’ (G. Clarke 1991a, 9). During her life, Tynes opposed this coinage, and so I will not apply it to her or her work. However, the reader should know that I do position Tynes within my Africadian rubric. 3 African-American scholar Nghana tamu Lewis reminds us that ‘Black feminism is not a monolithic enterprise’ (2003, 599). It is by personalizing her identities that Tynes establishes, to tap Lewis, ‘a kind of tenet by which she hopes that women and men who identify with her will live’ (607). 4 Stone explains that ‘Tynes’ strong desire to connect with a diverse community of women occasionally leads to rhetorical blandness that diminishes the effect of some of her feminist poems’ (1997, 244). Stone also accepts that Tynes’s ‘dialectic of inclusion …, held in a creative tension with the dialogics of difference, … results [at times] in poems that become strangely homogenized through their very endorsement of diversity’ (245–6). Stone agrees then, in part, with my early critique of Tynes. 5 To address her multiple, identity constituencies (race, gender, dis/abled), especially in regards to ‘issues,’ Tynes will sometimes engage in directing – even hectoring – her readers and hearers about what to think, feel, and do. Tibor Frank describes the peril of this approach: ‘Although efforts to bring the literary text closer to everyday speech widen and democratize its readership, the price we pay for this can be the loss of complexity, sophistication, and intricacy and a limiting of the literary worldview to that of a sitcom’ (2004, 83). Stone notes, too, that Tynes can sound ‘strangely homogenized’ due to her ‘very endorsement of diversity’ (1997, 246). But Frank’s suggestion that the populist voice may assume the blather and smarminess of the ‘sitcom’ is telling: Tynes’s discourse dialogues with mass media, a fact that may induce her to ‘dumb down’ her poetics so as to ‘reach the masses’ (of a given constituency). 6 MacLaine pans ‘agenda-driven poetry’ as ‘a hard sell, leaning as it does toward propaganda’ (2001, 13). 7 Even country and western music is, in the end, ruled by a city: Nashville, Tennessee. 8 Tynes’s short story ‘In Service II’ discusses a black woman who travels between rural, marginal North Preston – the black village where she lives – and South End Halifax, where she is a domestic servant. 9 True: Tynes’s subaltern resistance to the standard versions of Atlantic Canadian life risks instituting

notes to pages 167–76

10

11

12 13

14 15

16

17 18

19

20

21

22

265

a salt-spray multiculturalism. U.S.-Asian Americanist Shu-mei Shih warns, ‘In the end, in the selfethnographies of the diasporic, the political and the ideological melt into culture’ (Shih 2004, 24). A misty multiculturalism may shroud the would-be indelible statement of difference. Marshall McLuhan suggests that ‘the spoken word involves all of the senses dramatically …’ (1966, 81; my italics), while the written word – ‘the phonetic alphabet’ – releases ‘the individual … from the tribal web’ (86). By writing, Tynes projects an individual ideology; by performing / orating, she articulates (acts out) a collective consciousness. In an interview, Tynes verifies her sense of ‘landscape ’ as a figment of psychology: ‘As a poet, I find myself dipping into a pallette and replicating a landscape of experiences both external, and private and intimate’ (Lynes 1999, 119). See W.H. Gardner ([1953] 1984, xxii). Unhesitatingly, I compare Tynes to Whitman, but Stone feels that Tynes is also related to another American poet, Emily Dickinson: in both women poets, the ‘Great Outdoors,’ so to speak, is repressed in favour of elliptical, aphoristic, self-scrutiny. Ironically, though, basketry is also a Mi’kmaq cultural practice, and, thus, Clayton’s art interweaves African and Aboriginal cultures. Africadian social worker Erin Desmond celebrates this poem for validating her belief that ‘Black people come in many different shades and colours of brown and black’ (Bernard 2006, 154). Her response evinces Tynes’s ability to reach many audiences. Strikingly, in ‘Black Song Nova Scotia,’ the speaker (really, spokesperson for Black Nova Scotians) intones, thrice, ‘We are here ’ (Tynes 1990, 63), but never explains where here is, beyond identifying Nova Scotia in the title. The poem defends the existence of Black Nova Scotians as a people, but offers no sustained definition of their location. The phantom of Marshall McLuhan lurks in the shadow of Tynes. East Coast iconography usually focuses on farmers, fishers, forestry workers, and fiddlers. But an honest set of representative characters would include sailors, soldiers, steelworkers, sluts, snoops, scandalmongers, and speculators. Then again, in the McLuhan world of the 1,000-channel universe, everything is flattened into an image, transitory and static, fleeting and archived. Tynes’s genius is that she shows us this truth, recurrently, amid the supposedly unchanging tranquility of the East Coast and its rocks (gravel), trees (pulp and paper), and water (dead fisheries). A comment from McLuhan is pertinent: ‘Language does for intelligence what the wheel does for the feet and the body. It enables them to move from thing to thing with greater ease and speed and ever less involvement’ (1966, 83). This poem must be read in association with ‘The Portrait Speaks and Soars and Flares in Big Colour,’ a poem in which Tynes addresses the image of herself in a painted portrait. This painted version of Tynes ‘swims and pushes out to me / through strokes of pigment’ (1990, 77). Here, again, a parallel with Emily Dickinson may be drawn. See note 13.

14. Bring Da Noise: The Poetics of Performance, chez d’bi.young and Oni Joseph 1 Gilbert R. Daye is a right-on black bluesman – unrecorded – straight outta our ‘hood’ of North End Halifax.

266 notes to pages 176–8

2 3 4 5 6

7

8

9

Dear reader, have mercy: I confess that my childhood nickname was ‘Professor.’ If Shakespeare haunts all writers in English, then James Brown haunts all black ones. See Walcott’s The Odyssey (1993). Frantz Fanon charges caustically, ‘The Negro … will be proportionately whiter – that is, he will come closer to being a real human being – in direct ratio to his mastery of [a European] tongue’ (1967, 18). Euro-Canadian critic Scott Ellis, drawing a distinction between a book of poetry by me and that by a white Canadian writer, felt empowered to draft an ontological divide between the Caucasian poet’s ‘private, idiomatic language of modern verse ’ and my alleged rendition of ‘the muscular euphony of the Black Protestant church’ (1995, 49). Blithely, Ellis imagined an easily apprehensible private/white and public/Black dichotomy, one that replicates the usual mind-versus-body racist construct. Yet, it is difficult to segregate expressive modes in poetry, and dangerous to do so in ‘race.’ In this essay, I use ‘Negro’ to refer to all black people, whatever their cultural, ethnic, or geographic affiliation. To refer to specific groups, I use ‘African American,’ ‘African Canadian,’ ‘Caribbean,’ and ‘Afro-Caribbean,’ accordingly. Although Negro has been tainted by racist usage, I do not forget that one of the foremost African diasporic intellectuals of our Common Era, namely, W.E.B. Du Bois, preferred it due to its racially collectivizing connotation. See his The Negro (1915). J. Edward Chamberlin insists that the Caribbean poetic inheritance splits between historical, European literary and linguistic ‘power’ and the once-impaired ‘local imaginative expression in a local language’ (1993, 125). Orality enacts violence Against somnolescence. It replaces silence With insolence. Ain’t it funky?

10 Studying a James Brown song, French journalist Bertrand Dicale sees, ‘Peu importe le sens des mots, d’ailleurs: le sens est dans le rythme, dans les riffs de cuivres, la régularité de la guitare électrique en arrière du temps, les breaks de batterie, les cries et les bruits de voix, la structure hachée de la chanson …’ (2007, 31; ellipsis in the original). 11 For Peter Conrad, ‘the steady, incremental rhythm of literary narrative … takes its tempo from the disciplined and deliberate way our eyes work through a page of print’ (2002, 177). The culturally Negro poet may find this rote rhythm imprisoning, and will seek to explode it through inventive vocalization or through giving the printed text the spatial ‘freedom’ of a jazz composition. U.S. poet Ezra Pound lectures, ‘Rhythm is the hardest quality of a man’s style to counterfeit …’ ([1910] 2005, 103). 12 Perhaps every black writer must, like European psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud, ‘[count] Hannibal among his personal heroes, and [admire] his march across the Alps to topple the proud, rational citadel [Rome]’ (Conrad 2002, 247). French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre asserts, speaking of emancipated black writers, ‘If I were them …, I’d prefer my Mumbo-Jumbo to their [the West’s] Acropolis’ (1968, 20). 13 How could it be otherwise? ‘Black’ poetry is, a conscious counter-propaganda against the grammatical and literary ‘standards’ of any number of European tongues. It stages ‘uprisings against the government of the tongue ’ (Chamberlin 1993, 84). Caribbean poetry arises, then, from ‘broken words and dislocated peoples’ (ibid., 5). Speaking of what he terms ‘the Afro-American Language,’ U.S. scholar Richard Sieburth recognizes Ezra Pound’s opinion, circa the early 1940s, that ‘“One race and one race alone” has resisted “the various caucasian and semi-eastern strains” that have “thinned out

notes to pages 178–9

14 15

16

17

18 19

267

the vowel sounds” and “has fostered in America a speech softer mellower and fuller than the south midland and having a charm not inferior to the 18th century phonetics preserved and tempered in our land”’ ([1948] 2003, xxi). Another U.S. critic, Jonathan Gill, suspects ‘Pound … heard in the language of African Americans a natural vitality and vernacular spontaneity that he felt standard English lacked – indeed, Pound seems to have considered black English the model for a contemporary vernacular’ (2001, 84). young has appended to her name the suffix ‘anitafrika,’ prefaced by a period. Yet, her debut book is signed ‘d’bi.young,’ and so that it is the name I choose to use in this essay. young’s comments echo typical Jamaican Rastafarian beliefs about reggae music and dub poetry. William David Spencer endorses ‘reggae ’s identification as a vehicle of protest’ (1998, 268). Maria Caridad Casas reports, ‘Dub poetry is a performance-and-print genre that developed under the inspiration of reggae, both politically and aesthetically,’ and voices an ‘emancipatory activist content’ (2002, 10). Too, ‘Dub poetry by women tends to be socialist- or radical feminist in its politics’ (11). Spencer affirms that reggae ‘has championed education, women’s causes, the value of indigenous cultures, and a variety of religious stances, primarily … Rastafari in Jamaica… It has been employed to inspire freedom fighters, to awaken black identity and pride, to lift up new cultural heroes, to inspire repatriation, to publicize various locales, and to promote peace among all people …’ (1998, 280): young’s very themes. For African-Canadian scholar Peter Hudson, dub is ‘a politically-charged oral poetry that draws on … dialect poems …, the “rapping” of Jamaican DJs over instrumental versions of reggae songs, the language of rastafarianism …’ (1999, 194). Pertinent here is Stephen Scobie ’s examination of Euro-American pop bard and 2004 Nobel Prize for Literature nominee Bob Dylan. Scobie deems Dylan ‘not, strictly speaking, a poet; he is a songwriter’ (1991, 32–3). Too, Dylan’s voice, changing ‘from record to record and from concert to concert … is the most varied and expressive of the instruments he plays’ (33). Because ‘live performance’ is ‘the most vital and productive milieu for his art’ (20), Dylan’s printed lyrics – his ‘literary’ texts – in their multiple versions showcase ‘variability’ (45) and ‘indeterminacy’ (46). Scobie explains that, in performance, Dylan’s voice ‘is played as an instrument more interested in the rhythmic pattern than in the strict meaning of the words’ (35). Like a classic Negro performer, then, Dylan treats words – text – not as immutable stone, but as lava, a molten substance that emotion may mould in the heat of the moment. To cite Scobie again, ‘the ostensible meaning of [Dylan’s] lyrics is modified by the performance’ (70). In short, this recording artist is, ironically, ‘a creation of live performance’ (27). I will add that, not only should Dylan be read as a black (blues) singer, so should some Negro poetry be understood as aiming for the emotional mutability and immediacy of song. Perusing an interview with Jamaican-Canadian poet Lillian Allen, in which she provides a culturally informed, phonetic reading of poetry as ‘poor-e-tree,’ Gingell remarks, ‘Such a comment should remind non-Jamaican readers how important it is to actually voice, in an approximation of whatever version of Black English they can muster, the words of a dub poem and even syllables when they are set off as units in any part of the poem’ (2005, 237). In turn, Gingell’s analysis reminds us that ‘Negro’ accents, pronunciations, and speech styles – I mean, orality, even when staged as literature – must be performed to render the distinctively, even inimitably, Negro… See Lee M. Jenkins, ‘If We Must Die ’: Winston Churchill and Claude McKay’ (2003). In her review of a 2002 edition of writings by Aboriginal-Canadian poet E. Pauline Johnson (Tekahionwake), European-Canadian scholar Shelley Hulan (2002) recognizes two issues that Johnson’s editors miss: 1) how Johnson has been mobilized as a symbol of Aboriginality – and thus, dismissed concomitantly as a poet conversant with the intellectual orientations of modern English-Canadian po-

268

20

21

22

23 24

25

26

27

notes to pages 179–80

etics; and 2) how Johnson’s performance (dramatic and oral recitation) of her poetry has been received as a projection of autobiography, thus reinforcing her status as a memorable stage act, rather than as a writer of canonical consequence. This quandary applies to the critique of African diasporic writers too: If he or she is read primarily as a performer, then the value of his or her work is centred on his or her physical representation of it, thus demarcating the poem as ephemeral as the body is mortal. The form of the poem is thus the body, and as the body withers and vanishes, so must the poem. The black communal bias in favour of live performance is so pronounced that, says African-American pop culture critic Mark Anthony Neal, some singers and musicians have prospered spectacularly in this genre: ‘Live performances are where a litany of black performers have made their money and staked their legacies.’ Some artists, he claims, ‘produced career-defining recordings in live contexts’ (Neal 2003, 32). African-Canadian literacy worker Alfred Jean-Baptiste holds that Anglo-Caribbean speakers of ‘Erudite English’ embrace ‘performance, biblical and proverbial English’ and their sole intention ‘is to impress [audiences] by sound, length, or unusual combinations of words.’ The ‘listener most often does not seek any great meaning or philosophical content, but reacts as one normally does to poetry and music.’ Jean-Baptiste also finds that ‘meetings, religious services, songs or social functions were most often the contexts for the use of extreme forms of performance English. At these events, the speeches would contain long sentences with many Latin and Greek words and biblical phrases’ (1995, 41–2). Hudson designates ‘the use of performativity, non-English syntax, neologisms and vernacular lexicons, and code- or register-switching [as] typical of black Canadians …’ (1999, 194). Peter A. Roberts’s West Indians and Their Language (1988) holds, ‘From the lowest to the highest levels, Church-controlled education involved rote learning, especially of the Bible … Even now knowledge in this area is not judged by one ’s understanding of philosophical and theological concepts but by the ability to recite biblical passages and identify where they occur in the Bible’ (1988, 29). This insight defines the entire Afro-Christian world – without exception. Then again, the anglophone Caribbean tends to be Christian fundamentalist in socio-political culture, even as its pop culture borders festively on the risqué. Karen Richardson announces, in her poem ‘The Story of My Life,’ ‘we read our first sentences from the pages of scripture ’ (2004b, 69). Spencer: ‘in oral cultures, music, poetry, drama, painting, sculpture, and dance become part of the means of educating and disseminating information’ (1998, 280). Hence the post-bellum superstar popularity of African-American poet Paul Laurence Dunbar among his recently emancipated fellows and sisters. Also ballyhooed by white America for his apparent plantation-nostalgia, Dunbar was disturbed by this double-edged praise. He considered himself a serious versifier, a point articulated in ‘The Poet’: ‘He sang of love when earth was young, / and Love, itself, was in his lays. / But ah, the world, it turned to praise / A jingle in a broken tongue’ ([1903] 1997, 905). Stephen M. Finn remarks that ‘performed poetry … is aimed not at the intelligentsia and the literary elite but at the proletariat, [and] can be regarded as helping bring people together and unite them in hope’ (1993, 8). Randolph Chase, commenting on the relative currency, among the West Indian ‘folk,’ of ‘protest’ in reggae songs rather than printed poetry, registers, ‘One must realize that both types of protest are recorded – one electronically and the other in print. This is an important difference since print has a way of establishing a permanent record’ (1988–9, 27). Carrie Noland assures us that ‘making noise … is of course the very opposite of making poetry in the traditional sense’ (1997, 43). But every successful poem is, one must imagine, a kind of can(n)on

notes to pages 180–5

28

29

30

31 32

33

34

35 36

269

blast. Every true anthology is a raucous babble. Then again, as Ian Fleming states, “Talking starts with the stomach muscles” ([1963] 2006, 190). Consider also the hip hop staple of the dance ‘mix’ or the ‘mix tape,’ which, observes Neal, ‘deals with real-time concepts like flow, fluidity, and hybridity as means to construct sound, ideas, and, most important, black identity’ (Neal 2003, 12–13). I will also insist, however, that it is only in the context of performance that the organic atavism of bodily expression (including the speaking aloud of a poem) combines – or collides – with any apparent styling of the avant-garde. In relation strictly to poetry, performance is the unstable enabler and disabler of form. Whatever its formal properties in print, the poem assumes an utterly new form, received differently, when performed. The performance itself will ‘reform’ – or ‘deform’ – the printbound original. This array of verse techniques supports African-Canadian poet Andrea Thompson’s perception that performance poetry includes ‘everything from rap music to Shakespeare’ and ‘steals from actors, singers, musicians and comedians.’ Multifaceted, ‘it walks a thin line between entertainment, education, revolution and revelation’ (2002, 21). Peter Hudson alleges, ‘The dub poets and their progeny remain the step-children of the CanLit establishment’ (1999, 194). Although young imbibed dub along with speech from her mother (a dub practitioner in her native Jamaica), what is vital here is her self-positioning as having ‘come to voice’ via the experience of Toronto’s immigrant-dominated streets. Hence, her putative autobiography connects her with many other urban writers-performers who have found their art among spray paint and bullet spray… Jean-Baptiste terms some Jamaican speech ‘Rasta English’ (1995, 42). It is characterized by the inventive altering of Standard English words to reflect the Rastafarian philosophy of Black uplift in the face of White oppression and the veneration of the Ethiopian Emperor Haile Selassie I (Ras Tafari). I have written elsewhere about the influence of African-American writers upon African-Canadian ones. Certainly, young’s stanzas and literary devices recall Ntozake Shange’s remarkable ‘choreopoem’ for colored girls who have considered suicide / when the rainbow is enuf (1977). This relationship is definite. In ‘children of a lesser god …,’ young cites Shange: ‘blood / is the colour of the rainbow/ when brown girls consider suicide ’ (2006, 16). In ‘ain’t I a oomaan,’ young refers to ‘ahdri zhina’ (19) – Ahdri Zhina Mandiela – whose 1991 verse-play, Dark Diaspora – in Dub is itself a domestication (Canadianization) of Shange ’s verse-play. (See my Odysseys Home: Mapping African Canadian Literature [2002a], principally pages 51–7). Discussing poets Dionne Brand and Lillian Allen, Casas tells us that she has ‘followed a Caribbean canonical line of descent’ for them ‘rather than an AfricanAmerican one because their themes and orientation seem to me fundamentally Caribbean – and Canadian – rather than American.’ Casas recognizes that ‘African-American women writers’ have been influential for ‘African-Caribbean women poets’ (2002, 30), but she discounts this influence. I maintain that African-American models retain a distinct provenance in African-Canadian letters. Brand has indicated she left Trinidad in 1970 to be nearer the Black Power movement of the United States, while Oni the Haitian Sensation (Oni Joseph),’ has titled her first book Ghettostocracy (2006), for it is, in part, a response to her experience of South Central Los Angeles. Presumably, in performing this piece, young would explain precisely who Douglas was – and his importance to Black Canadian and Caribbean history. Casas alerts us to this truth: ‘spoken language can … be written, by representing its “dialectal forms” and characteristic vocabulary and syntax. Although it [may not be] heard, or even written with attention to individual sounds, it can evoke strong subvocalizations’ (2002, 19).

270 notes to pages 185–91 37 Jean Bernabé, Patrick Chamoiseau, and Raphaël Confiant praise ‘Creole orality’ because, ‘even repressed in its aesthetic expression, [it] contains a whole system of countervalues, a counterculture’ (1990, 895). Agreeably, Casas elsewhere scribes, ‘Caribbean English creoles as oral languages are a powerful poetic resource for the subversion of colonialism’ (1998, 5). 38 Spoken word requires syncopation; print poetry requires punctuation – and/or its absence, including the use of space or gaps. 39 No one can deny Oni’s claim to diverse influences. She declares, ‘I am a rap poet, a beat poet, a spoken word poet, a dub poet, a rock poet, a jazz poet, a blues poet, a sound poet, a punk poet, a slam poet, a spoken word poet’ (Oni 2006, 12). The repetition of ‘spoken word poet’ emphasizes this label’s importance to the poet. Says Hudson, the difference between writers such as young and Oni is that, while the former is influenced by ‘dub, reggae, as well as … dancehall’s elaborate, insiderist configurations of patois,’ the African-American orientation of Oni means that her writing ‘draws on constructions of a black nationalist subject …, Negritude, or nation-conscious rap artists, and uses idealized notions of blackness and Africa,’ but also yields ‘a place for feminist critique, sometimes radical, sometimes limited to a plea for the reformation of male/female relationships in the black community’ (1999, 195). 40 The ‘@’ symbol allows Oni to avoid spelling out an ugly epithet; yet it also may represent the circular marking on the bottom of a bullet. 41 In 2007, a Canada Council for the Arts jury rejected the request of Oni’s publisher, McGilligan Books, for funding assistance. The jury pinpointed Oni’s ‘lack of literary merit’ as a reason for its negative decision. May I say these jurors merely displayed their cultural illiteracy, their empowered incompetence? 42 Diana Brydon wagers that, in the academy, ‘poetry coming out of an African tradition can be valued as popular music, but not as Literature ’ (1997, 212). Then again, Michael Alexander suspects some literary criticism is ‘actually suspicious of the musical power of poetry’ ([1979] 1995, 28).

15. Frederick Ward: Writing as Jazz This paper has enjoyed three previous incarnations: It was first delivered as the keynote address, for ‘Improving the Future: Jazz in the Global Community,’ the Guelph Jazz Festival Colloquium, at the University of Guelph, Guelph, Ontario, on 7 September 2000; as the Anne Szumigalski Memorial Lecture for the League of Canadian Poets, at Hart House, University of Toronto, on 11 June 2005; and then as a public lecture for Prairie Fire at the University of Winnipeg, Eckhardt-Grammaté Hall, Centennial Hall, in Winnipeg, on 10 February 2006. 1 I dedicate this essay to the memory of Dutch/English-Canadian poet Diana Brebner. 2 Peter Hudson allows that ‘the work produced by younger [African-Canadian] poets in the 1990s occasionally has less of an explicit debt to the Caribbean. While the influence of dub and reggae … can still be heard, often this more recent poetry is indistinguishable in form and content from that of their African American peers’ (1999, 195). 3 In beautiful contradiction, Ward appears in almost every African-Canadian anthology. 4 In 1992, Montreal writer Ann Diamond observes ‘a critical shortage of Ward’s work’ – despite his excellence (1992, 18). 5 Paul Gilroy avers that the critical ‘consensus stipulates that … after moving to France [in 1947]

notes to pages 191–3

6

7

8

9 10

11 12 13

271

Wright’s work was corrupted by his dabbling in philosophical modes of thought [‘the alien influences of Freudianism and Existentialism’] entirely alien to his African-American history and vernacular style’ (1993, 156). The result of this dismissive attitude is that the eight books ‘written or assembled for publication in Europe’ have been ignored. Wright is celebrated for his early, American-centred writing. Says Michel Fabre, ‘When Wright’s collection of short stories, Eight Men, appeared posthumously in 1961, [African-American critics] expressed the view that he had been away [from the United States] too long’ (1991, 271). An expatriate in Europe from 1952 until his death in 1991, the ‘successful popular writer’ Frank Yerby, who published thirty-three novels ‘which sold more than 55 million copies’ (J. Hill 1997, 797), is now so forgotten that editors Kwame Anthony Appiah and Henry Louis Gates, Jr., omit him from their encyclopedia, Africana (1999). James L. Hill comments, ‘Too long discounted as an anomaly in African American literature, Yerby deserves more critical attention’ (1997, 798). John Sobol challenges the idea that any evolutionary connection exists between ‘sound poetry’ and ‘Spoken Word’: ‘I don’t believe that sound poetry as a contemporary art form actually exists... Sound poetry … refers to a self-consciously avant-garde tradition of wordless poetic verbalizing whose origins lie in Futurism and Dadaism.’ Sobol continues on to state, damningly, ‘in 1999, sound poetry is history, but the SOUND of POETRY is all around us’ (Sobol 1999, 39). One reason for Sobol’s poignant and exceptional racial inclusivity is, as he states playfully in Digitopia Blues (2002), ‘You should see my record collection. It’s as black as I am white.’ Sobol confesses that ‘the qualities that [draw] me to black music are characteristic of orality, of oral cultures… Collectively, Africans and their diasporic descendants possess an idiomatic musical vocabulary that is remarkable for its breadth, subtlety, and passion’ (xiv). Appreciating the vitality of the musical-oral linkage is crucial for any critique of Ward, African-Canadian literature, and, for that matter, the development of a non-segregated, English-Canadian literary history. Commenting on the sympathies and the separations between U.S. poets Ezra Pound (white) and Langston Hughes (black), U.S. scholar Jonathan Gill forwards an assessment that Canadian critics need ponder: ‘In every way that counts – the mask [persona], the fragment [form], the vernacular, the myth [allusion], the reworking of genealogies – the literary movements that Pound and Hughes spear-headed are truly distinguishable only in terms of race ’ (2001, 87). Gill’s point – like Sobol’s – is that to read non-whites out of our explicit chronologies and implicit canons renders our literary history false. In a notable contrast, white beat – and hippy – jazz-poets have been practically automatically documented, remembered, celebrated, from Jack Kerouac to Kenneth Rexroth to Allen Ginsberg to Diane di Prima. For the record, Ward is also absent from this compendium. Vitally, however, Kaufman is an influence for Afro-Jamaican-Québécois and bilingual poet Kaie Kellough (see his Lettricity [2004]), who may also know that Kaufman was ‘held in high esteem in avantgarde Paris circles’ (Fabre 1991, 268n2). To borrow a telling phrase from Alvin H. Rosenfeld, Ward has been ‘rendered inaudible by a consensus of silence’ (1981, 162). Diamond casts Ward’s language as ‘invented, “composed,” pulled together from different places, times, and influences,’ and knows ‘jazz has a lot to do with it’ (1992, 19). In referencing the African-American literary technique of ‘signifyin’,’ Walser is referring to Henry Louis Gates, Jr.’s theory of literary criticism that holds that black – African-American – texts participate in a form ‘of intertextual revision, by which texts establish their relation to other texts, and authors to other authors’ (Mason 1997, 665). Clear is the relevance of this theory to interpreting jazz performance.

272 notes to pages 193–9 14 Maureen Anderson asserts, ‘In striving to analyze and to understand the concepts of jazz music, white critics often hid behind black stereotypes’ (2004, 135). In her article ‘The White Reception of Jazz in America,’ Anderson reads European-American critics of 1917–30, but, as the attitude of H. Saal exemplifies, the need to ‘primitivize ’ black-originated jazz remained sound well into the 1970s – if not later. 15 Here it means Maestro. 16 Sobol feels that this oral culture reaches back to Africa, which ‘was, is, and always will be an oral world’ (2002, 6). In fact, Sobol identifies characteristics of African-originated orality that, he implies, also extend to the African-American variant: Orality is ‘functional,’ ‘public,’ ‘communal,’ ‘participatory,’ ‘interdisciplinary’ (involving music, song, dance), ‘experiential’ (based in a sense of eternal becoming), ‘vocal’ (‘I am the drum. I am a talking drum’), and ‘playful’ (‘Words open like windows’) (6–8). Arthur Jafa adds, ‘Black American culture … developed around those areas we could carry around in our heads – our oratorical prowess, dance, music, those kinds of things’ (1992, 251). 17 Ward provides this translation: ‘Our are / Is us / Hearts // Great / The friends // Space and between / That // Our hearts / Are great friends / and that / Is the space between / Us.’ (G. Clarke 1992, 27n3). 18 Jazz emerged ‘in the first decades of the twentieth century from the artistic meeting of elements including ragtime, marching band music, opera, and other European classical musics, Native American musics, spirituals, work songs, and especially the blues. No seedbed for the new music was richer than that of New Orleans, where, in spite of separatist racial policies, musicians could tap into the city’s spectacularly broad range of musical influences’ (Anonymous 1997, 55). Avant-garde jazz is aggressively multicultural: ‘Characterized mainly by African, Asian, and Caribbean musical elements, this form of music emphasizes the importance of the collective ensemble rather than the soloist. Hence, its production, which may sound like chaos and disorder to some, is very Afrocentric in nature’ (Anonymous 1998a, 1393). 19 Ward himself says, ‘What I’ve tried to do, from a jazz point of view, is image the language according to continuous lines, you know, melodic lines that are improvised. I literally sit down and say, “Alibalibalibalibalibalibalup!” And then try to see what that is if I slow it down’ (quoted in Diamond 1992, 20). 20 Sobol points out that, ‘in scat singing, black oralists found a means of escape, a playful arena where their improvisatory urges could be given free rein and they could explode the restrictive limitations of banal lyrics’ (2002, 36). 21 Ward’s Room Full of Balloons refutes any link between jazz and aggression. 22 The tenuous Africville connection in the first novel vanishes in the next two. 23 No new, independent book by Ward has appeared in almost three decades, though new work by him surfaces, from time to time, generally in African-Canadian anthologies. 24 For Diamond, ‘Among the many pleasures of Ward’s writing are references to states of being, evoked but never quite explained, which gather authority through offhand repetition in story after story’ (1992, 21). 25 But Riverlisp (Ambrose City) is also a locale where the author can test – no, illustrate – Bahá’ì teachings. 26 May Cutler references Ward’s ‘way of making the human connection to poverty that makes you feel it when you read him’ (Kimber 1981, 36). Stephen Kimber posits that Ward ‘has … brought the now long gone community of Africville to life for the rest of the world’ (ibid., 33). 27 ‘Ward … maintains he isn’t writing [in Riverlisp] just about the flesh-and-blood Africville or even about blacks; he is writing, he says, to bring to life the people – black and white – society finds “insignificant. What I write about,” Ward says, “isn’t black or white. It’s universal”’ (ibid., 36).

notes to pages 199–202

273

28 Discussing one African-American poet’s work, Nielsen finds that it ‘makes the case for a black vernacular base for African-American surrealism, a jazz-and-blues-based surrealism’ (1997a, 70). Ward’s work fits this paradigm. 29 This same instruction introduces A Room Full of Balloons (F. Ward 1981, n.p.). 30 Ward uses majuscules – and italics – to register sophisticated concepts, intellectual or religious, or simply to ‘pump up the volume ’ of deserving, vernacular words and sounds. Ward’s majuscules and italics embody preacherly insights or just ‘loud’ ones. See these Riverlisp (1974) examples: ‘orchestra’ (25) and ‘DONT LIE WOMAN!’ (80). 31 Riverlisp is characterized by the yokings of similar words, using both polyptoton and antistasis, but Nobody Called Me Mine features verb pairs (the first colouring or illustrating the second), a type of parelcon – or deliberate, verbal redundancy. 32 This event is two-sided: on one side, it seems a picture of integration (the black community accepts a white church member); on the other, it denies Judaism. Most damningly, Micah’s ‘conversion’ was unnecessary for him to love Purella – and his church-acceptance is no remedy for their communityforced, racism-inflected split. 33 Here one may flag again the links between black speech, other sounds, and jazz: ‘Young [Louis] Armstrong’s musical education included a pie man named Santiago who blew a bugle to attract customers, a banana man whose musical cries advertised the virtues of his ripe yellow fruit, a waffle man whose customers enjoyed his mess call as much as his waffles, and the barroom quartets ‘who hung around the saloons with a cold can of beer in their hands, singing up a breeze while they passed the can around’ (Levine 1977, 204–5). 34 According to Lawrence Levine, Bruce Jackson maintains that ‘Negro songs don’t tend to weave narrative elements together to create a story but instead accumulate images to create a feeling’ (1977, 240). I think that Ward adopts/adapts this principal principle. By so doing he achieves what Nielsen, speaking of another poet, terms ‘the palpable nature of [his] imagery, the insistent physicality of even the most fantastic-seeming imagery’ (1997a, 226). The practice of this blues aesthetic means, as Barry Keith Grant’s reading of Samuel Charters insists, ‘the blues creates poetry out of daily events and objects surrounding the singers, attempting to achieve in the frequent homeliness and concreteness of its language an articulation of lived experience ’ (Grant 1995, 295). The power of Ward’s imagery derives from his lyrical concretization of the workaday real and the everyday surreal. 35 Riverlisp is a revisiting of Cane, with Ward’s Ambrose City replacing Toomer’s Sparta, Georgia; Washington, DC; and Chicago, Illinois. 36 Ward’s narrative of the shooting-lynching of ‘Miss Jessup’s Boy’ employs a poem – ‘meet me in th hills / sweet Miss Martha / I bring us a picnic’ (1974, 42) – which recalls Toomer’s similar narrative, ‘Blood-Burning Moon.’ But, just as Toomer is more gothic than Ward, so is his verse: ‘Red nigger moon. Sinner! / Blood-burning moon. Sinner! / Come out that fact’ry door’ ([1923] 1988, 31). 37 Basic principles of the Bahá’ì faith include the oneness of mankind and the unity of all religions; the harmony of science, religion, and faith; the universal attainment of shared wealth, peace, and education; and the equality of peoples and of the sexes. To be a Bahá’ì is to be a perfect, radical humanitarian without having to be an atheist. Interestingly too, Bahá’ìs want to establish an ‘international auxiliary language’ (Macdonald 2005, H10). This intent may also inform Ward’s linguistic experimentation. 38 True: Fuss is actually, in this fiction, a cat. But I credit an allegorical intent in the feline’s contextually felicitous name. 39 This eccentric construction is practically a mantra in Ward’s work. 40 ‘A Bahá’ì by faith, Hayden was committed to “the affirmation of independent investigation of the truth” and to abstinence from partisan politics of any kind’ (Coniff 1999, 489).

274 notes to pages 202–5 41 I do not liken Ward to Leonard Cohen – another obvious candidate, given his dexterity as a musician, singer, songwriter, poet, and novelist – for Cohen, although experimental in his novels, is much less so in his poetry. Indeed, his poetry invests in a medieval mysticism that upholds linguistic conservatism (a point also true for his songs). 42 These two ‘O’s in the third-last verse quoted here may represent concrete-lyric symbols of the speaker’s blinded eyes. The possibility is real, for Ward views words as colours, sounds, and things. Note, too, that Tjose’s action of throwing ‘lye ’ is akin to throwing a ‘lie’ – a veil – over this taboo violation. 43 But it is also fiendishly intricate. This black aesthetic understands Amiri Baraka’s existentialist statement: ‘Life is complex in the same simplicity’ (Baraka [1967] 1979, 162). 44 While the speaker and Tjose did not need to ‘sneak,’ she and ‘papa’ did. The love that the speaker first ‘found’ is transformed – deformed – by suspicion: ‘I think the hound in me sniffed out something…’ The son is driven to ‘sneak’ around, ‘sniff ’ about, only to come upon his lover and his father in an act of biological cum sociological betrayal that is prosecuted right in his staring and unbelieving face. 45 When the speaker first states, ‘The best thing in my life / was a woman named Tjose,’ he engages in a casual objectification of his lover – a sin most lovers commit, and his atonement is mandated by the repetition cited here. The shift in tense between ‘was’ and now ‘were’ (a folk form of ‘had been’) indicates that Tjose may have been nastying and honeying with ‘papa’ long before ‘Junior’ drooled and whimpered at her drawers. 46 Ward delineates Tjose’s femme fatale charms with breathtaking visual orality. The alliteration among ‘She,’ ‘she’d,’ and ‘suck’ sexualizes Tjose as a French-kissing fellatrix, a perception underlined by the assonance between ‘suck’ and ‘hum,’ the alliteration between ‘hard’ (provoking an erection) and ‘hum’ (orgasm), and the rhyme between ‘hum’ and ‘from.’ There is no innocence in this poem about lost innocence – not even at the level of sound. (All morals are unsound here.) Indeed, the speaker soon reveals: ‘I caught her sucking that same hum from him. / I went dumb’ (Ward 1983, 42). Again: rhyme, alliteration, consonance, assonance, and repetition combine to clarify the mental, ‘parental’ screwing that the speaker receives from his lover and his father. Tjose is ‘found’ doing with ‘papa’ what she has done to and with the ‘son.’ The spectacular ‘humming’ ensemble – tableau of supine ‘papa’ and crouched over him Tjose – composed by the adulterers renders the speaker ‘dumb’ – just as it will render him blind. He confesses, complains: ‘I went dumb staring … and she seen it.’ Ward’s audacious near-synesthesia here allows us to recognize the dual, sensory assault on the speaker’s innocence: he both witnesses and hears his sexual betrayal by Tjose and ‘papa.’ 47 I need to add that this sung narrative unfurls a seemingly Southern, backwoods, True Confessions–like concoction of adultery – psychologically incestuous adultery, revising a superficially pastoral poem into a dramatic monologue, one ugly, gothic, and Greek. There’s a hint of a revised Oedipus Rex here in the son’s self-blinding discovery of his father’s tryst with the son’s ‘woman,’ Tjose. (Who’s to say that Tjose is not, secretly, the son’s mother?) Too, one must not overlook the poem’s parallels to the Genesis story about the shame of Noah’s sons at discovering him raving, drunk, and naked. ‘Blind Man’s Blues’ is a great and grotesquely beautiful achievement: a sharply nuanced story told with exceedingly classical restraint, and yet with the steamy, seamy details laid bare within the oral/aural complexities of the text. The more closely it is examined, the more soundly it is heard, the more its Baudelairean-evil, Catullus-explicit riches emerge.

Bibliography

Abella, Irving. 1997. Multiculturalism, Jews, and the Forging of the Canadian Identity. In Cardozo and Musto 1997, 71–89. Adams, Nehemiah. 1855. A South-Side View of Slavery; or, Three Months at the South in 1854. n.p.: T.R. Marvin. Albright, Daniel. 2001. Early Cantos I–XLI. In The Cambridge Companion to Ezra Pound, ed. Ira B. Nadel, 59–91. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Alexander, Michael. 1979. The Poetic Achievement of Ezra Pound. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Alexander, Simone A. James. 2001. Mother Imagery in the Novels of Afro-Caribbean Women. Columbia: University of Missouri Press. Alexis, André. 1994. Despair, and Other Stories of Ottawa. Toronto: Coach House. Alim, H. Samy. 2006. Roc the Mic Right: The Language of Hip Hop Culture. New York: Routledge. Allen, Cynthia. 1976. The Creation and Appreciation of Poetry and Lyrics. Port-of-Spain, Trinidad: Cynthia Allen. Allen, Lillian. 1982. I Fight Back. In Rhythm an’ Hardtimes, 15. Toronto: Domestic Bliss. Almonte, Richard. 1998. Introduction. In A Plea for Emigration, Or, Notes of Canada West, by Mary A. Shadd, 9–42. Toronto: Mercury Press. – ed. 2000. Introduction. In A Narrative of Thomas Smallwood (Coloured Man), by Thomas Smallwood, 9–20. Toronto: Mercury Press. – 2002. Must a Black Text Always Be Written by a Black Author? Race, Authorship, Ethics, and the Plays of Andrew Moodie and George F. Walker. Essays on Canadian Writing 75 (winter): 142–58. Alvarez-Pereyre, Jacques. 1984. The Poetry of Commitment in South Africa. Trans. Clive Wake. London: Heinemann. Translation of Les Guetteurs de L’Aube: Poésie et Apartheid. 1979. Grenoble: Universitaires de Grenoble. Anderson, Benedict. 1991. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origins and Spread of Nationalism. London: Verso. Anderson, Frank W. 1974. The Dark Strangler: A Study in Strange Behaviour. Calgary: Frontier. Anderson, Maureen. 2004. The White Reception of Jazz in America. African American Review 38.1: 135–45. Anderson, T.J., III. 2000. Body and Soul: Bob Kaufman’s Golden Sardine. African American Review 34.2 (summer): 329–46.

276 bibliography Andrews, William L., Frances Smith Foster, and Trudier Harris, eds. 1997. The Oxford Companion to African-American Literature. New York: Oxford University Press. Appel, Alfred, Jr. 2004. Jazz Modernism: From Ellington and Armstrong to Matisse and Joyce. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Appiah, Kwame Anthony, and Henry Louis Gates Jr., eds. 1999. Africana: The Encyclopedia of the African and African-American Experience. New York: Basic Civitas Books. Archer-Straw, Petrine. 2000. Negrophilia: Avant-Garde Paris and Black Culture in the 1920s. New York: Thames & Hudson. Armstrong, Herbert W. 1972. The United States and British Commonwealth in Prophecy. Pasadena, CA: Ambassador College Press. Arnold, A. James. [1981] 1998. Modernism and Negritude: The Poetry and Poetics of Aimé Césaire. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Augustin, Désirée Sharon. 1997. The Status of Literature in the Secondary School System of Trinidad and Tobago. MA thesis, School of Education, Faculty of Humanities and Education, St. Augustine (UWI). Austin, David. 2003. The Unfinished Revolution: Linton Kwesi Johnson, C.L.R. James, Radical PanAfricanism and the New Society. Unpublished manuscript. – 2010. Email communication to the author. 8 July. Avant-Garde Jazz. 1998. In Patricia Liggins Hill et al. 1998, 1393. Aylward, Carol A. 1999. Canadian Critical Race Theory: Racism and the Law. Halifax: Fernwood. Bail, Micheline. 1999. L’Esclave. Montreal: Libre expression. Bakan, Abigail B. 2008. Reconsidering the Underground Railroad: Slavery and Racialization in the Making of the Canadian State. Socialist Studies 4.1: 3–29. Baker, Houston A. 1980. The Journey Back: Issues in Black Literature and Criticism. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. – 1987. Modernism and the Harlem Renaissance. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Baldwin, James. [1955] 1984. Notes of a Native Son. New York: Beacon. – [1956] 1963. Giovanni’s Room. New York: Dial Press. – 1964. The Fire Next Time. New York: Dell. – 1985. The Evidence of Things Not Seen. New York: Holt. Bandara, Samuel B. 1983. A Bibliography of Theses and Dissertations Written in English on Caribbean Novels. Commonwealth Novel in English 2.2 (July): 50–94. Baquaqua, Mahommah G[ardo]. 1854. Biography of Mahommah G. Baquaqua, ed. Samuel Moore, Esq. Detroit: Pomeroys & Co. Baraka, Amiri. [1967] 1979. The Changing Same (R&B and New Black Music). In Selected Plays and Prose of Amiri Baraka / LeRoi Jones, 157–77. New York: Morrow Quill. Barnard, Elissa. 1996. Crossing a Racial Divide. Halifax Chronicle-Herald (4 Jan.): D1–2. Barnett, Derek. 2005. Letter to the editor. Times (London) (17 Aug.): 14. Baugh, Edward, ed. 1970. West Indian Poetry, 1900–1970. Kingston, Jamaica: Savacou. – 1978. Critics on Caribbean Literature. London: George Allen & Unwin. Baum, Daniel J. 1974. The Banks of Canada in the Commonwealth Caribbean. New York: Praeger Publishers. The Beatles. 1965. Rubber Soul. EMI/Parlophone. Record album. Beaugrand-Champagne, Denyse. 2004a. Moi, Angélique, pendue en Nouvelle-France. L’Actualité (15 Nov.): 83–7. – 2004b. Le Procès de Marie-Josèphe-Angélique. Montreal: Libre expression.

bibliography

277

Benedict, Helen. 1992. Virgin or Vamp: How the Press Covers Sex Crimes. New York: Oxford University Press. Bennett, Ethel Hume, ed. 1938. New Harvesting: Contemporary Canadian Poetry, 1918–1938. Toronto: Macmillan. Benson, Eugene, and William Toye, eds. 1997. The Oxford Companion to Canadian Literature. 2nd ed. Toronto: Oxford University Press. Berger, Carl. 1970. The Sense of Power: Studies in the Ideas of Canadian Imperialism, 1867–1914. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Bernabé, Jean, Patrick Chamoiseau, and Raphaël Confiant. 1990. In Praise of Creoleness. Trans. Mohamed B. Taleb Khyar. Callaloo 13: 886–909. Bernard, Wanda Thomas, ed. 2006. Fighting for Change: Black Social Workers in Nova Scotia. Lawrencetown Beach, NS: Pottersfield Press. Berton, Pierre. 1992. Niagara: A History of the Falls. Toronto: McClelland & Stewart. Bérubé, Michael. 1992. Marginal Forces / Cultural Centers: Tolson, Pynchon, and the Politics of the Canon. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Bethel, Marion. 1998. I’ll Fly Away: Reflections on Life and the Death Penalty. In Winds of Change: The Transforming Voices of Caribbean Women Writers and Scholars, ed. Adele S. Newson and Linda StrongLeek, 101–6. New York: Peter Lang. Bibb, Henry. 1849. Narrative of the Life and Adventures of Henry Bibb, an American Slave, Written by Himself. New York: n.p. Bigioni, Paul. 2005. Fascism Then. Fascism Now? Toronto Star (27 Nov.): D10–D11. Binavince, Emilio S. 1997. The Role of Ethnic Minorities in the Pursuit of Equality and Multiculturalism. In Cardozo and Musto 1997, 90–100. Birney, Earle. [1949a] 1970. Letter of Resignation from the Editorship of Canadian Poetry Magazine. In The Making of Modern Poetry in Canada: Essential Articles on Contemporary Canadian Poetry in English, ed. Louis Dudek and Michael Gnarowski. 147–8. Toronto: Ryerson. – 1949b. Turvey: A Military Picaresque. Toronto: McClelland & Stewart. Bissoondath, Neil. 1994. Selling Illusions: The Cult of Multiculturalism in Canada. Toronto: Penguin. Black, Ayanna, ed. 1992. Voices: Canadian Writers of African Descent. Toronto: HarperPerennial. Black Cultural Society of Nova Scotia and Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. 1998. Lord You Brought Me a Mighty Long Way: An African Nova Scotian Musical Journey. Cherrybrook, NS, and Halifax. (Record.) Blackwood, Yvonne. 2000. Into Africa: A Personal Journey. Toronto: Abbeyfield Publishers. Bloom, Harold, ed. 1997. Caribbean Women Writers. Philadelphia: Chelsea House. Boccaccio, Giovanni. [1349–51] 1949. The Decameron of Giovanni Boccaccio. Trans. Richard Aldington. Garden City, NY: Garden City Books. Boldon, Bertram. 1971. Black Immigrants in a Foreign Land. In Let the Niggers Burn! The Sir George Williams University Affair and Its Caribbean Aftermath, ed. Dennis Forsythe, 22–39. Montreal: Black Rose Books / Our Generation Press. Bone, Robert A. 1969. The Negro Novel in America. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Bongie, Chris. 1998. Islands and Exiles: The Creole Identities of Post/Colonial Literature. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Booker, M. Keith, and Dubravka Juraga. 2001. The Caribbean Novel in English: An Introduction. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann; Kingston, Jamaica: Ian Randle Publishers; Oxford: James Currey. Bop and Cool Jazz. 1998. In Patricia Liggins Hill, et al. 1998, 1099–101. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.

278 bibliography Bourassa, Henri. 1918. La langue, la gardienne de la foi. Montreal: Action française. Box, Gloria M. 1969. Preface. In Poems of a Child’s World: An Anthology for the Caribbean, ed. Dudley R.B. Grant and Gloria M. Box, n.p. London: Longman, Green. Boyd, George Elroy. 1988. Shine Boy. [Unpublished play] – [1992] 1996. Consecrated Ground [Teleplay]. In George Elroy Boyd 1996a, 9–33. – 1996a. Two, By George! La Have, NS: Stage Hand Publishers. – 1996b. Gideon’s Blues. In George Elroy Boyd 1996a, 35–124. – 1999. Consecrated Ground [Play]. [Winnipeg]: Blizzard Publishing. Boyd, Frank Stanley, Jr., ed. 1976. McKerrow: A Brief History of the Coloured Baptists of Nova Scotia, 1783–1895. Edited and annotated edition of History of the Coloured Baptists of Nova Scotia, 1783–1895, by Peter E. McKerrow, 1895. Halifax: Afro–Nova Scotia Enterprises. Boyd, Neil. 1992. The Last Dance: Murder in Canada. Toronto: Seal. Brand, Dionne. 1971a. Black Woman. Spear 4 (Nov.): 17. – 1971b. Miss Anne Slave Boy. Spear 4 (Nov.): 17. – 1972. Behold! The Revolutionary Dreamer! Spear 6 (Jan.): 46. – 1975a. Day Doyze. In Cromwell 1975, 20. – 1975b. Poem of a Place Once. In Cromwell 1975, 17. – 1975c. Sleep. In Cromwell 1975, 19. – 1976a. Day, dayze. In Head 1976, 21. – 1976b. Lament. In Head 1976, 20. – 1976c. Once a peaceful place. In Head 1976, 18. – 1976d. This poem needs a name. In Head 1976, 22. T – 1978. ’Fore Day Morning. Toronto: Khoisan Artists. – [1979] 1993. Earth Magic: Poetry for Young People. Toronto: Sister Vision. – 1982. Primitive Offensive. Toronto: Williams-Wallace. – 1983. Winter Epigrams and Epigrams to Ernesto Cardenal in Defence of Claudia. Toronto: WilliamsWallace. – 1984. Chronicles of the Hostile Sun. Toronto: Williams-Wallace. – [1990] 1998. No Language Is Neutral. Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1998. – 1996. In Another Place, Not Here. Toronto: Alfred A. Knopf. – 1997. Land to Light On. Toronto: McClelland & Stewart. – 2001. A Map to the Door of No Return: Notes to Belonging. Toronto: Doubleday. Brawley, Benjamin, ed. 1935. Early Negro Writers: Selections with Biographical and Critical Introductions. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Brennan, Timothy. 2006. A Subtle Barbarism. Toronto Star (3 Sept.): D1, D9. Brode, Patrick. 2005. Death in the Queen City: Clara Ford on Trial, 1895. Toronto: Natural Heritage / Natural History Inc. Brown, Jan. 1997. Culture as an Individual Responsibility. In Cardozo and Musto 1997, 60–8. Brown, Lennox. 1972. A Crisis: Black Culture in Canada. Black Images 1.1 (Jan.): 4–8. Brown, Paola. 1832. Circular Address to the Free People of Color throughout the United States. Boston Liberator (27 Oct.): 1. – 1851. Address Intended to Be Delivered in the City Hall, Hamilton, February 7, 1851, on the Subject of Slavery. Hamilton, Canada West: Author. Brown, Paul Fehmiu. 1998. Marie-Josèphe-Angélique: Montreal, Quebec 21 juin 1734. Saint-Léonard, QC: Éditions Publishing 5 Continents.

bibliography

279

Bruce, Dickson D., Jr. 1989. Black American Writing from the Nadir: The Evolution of a Literary Tradition, 1877–1915. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press. Brunhuber, Kim Barry. 2003. Kameleon Man. Vancouver: Beach Holme / Porcepic Books. Brydon, Diana. 1997. One Poem Town? Contemporary Canadian Cultural Debates. In Voices of Power: Co-Operation and Conflict in English Language and Literature., ed. M. Maufort and J.P. Van Nappen, 211–20. Liège, Belgium: Université de Liège. – 2001. Re-Routing the Black Atlantic. Topia 5: 94–100. Buckler, Ernest. 1952. The Mountain and the Valley. Toronto: Clarke Irwin. Bucknor, Michael. 2005. Email communication to the author. 9 May. Burton, Richard D.E. 1997. Afro-Creole: Power, Opposition, and Play in the Caribbean. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Bush, Ronald. 1989. The Genesis of Ezra Pound’s Cantos. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Cahill, Barry. 1994a. First Things in Africadia; or, The Trauma of being a Black Lawyer in Late Victorian Saint John, New Brunswick. Unpublished manuscript. – 1994b. Walker, Abraham Beverley. In Dictionary of Canadian Biography. Vol. 13. 1901–1910, 1066–67. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. – 1995. Afro–Nova Scotian History in Microcosm. Review of Share and Care: The Story of the Nova Scotia Home for Colored Children, by Charles R. Saunders. New Maritimes 13.4 (March/April): 25–9. Cambridge, Vibert. 1976a. Historical Position No. 2. In Head 1976, 28–9. – 1976b. The West Indian … a continuous position. In Head 1976, 24–7. Canada. 1971. House of Commons. Debates (Hansard). 8 Oct. Cardozo, Andrew, and Louis Musto, eds. 1997. The Battle over Multiculturalism: Does It Help or Hinder Canadian Unity? Vol. 1. Ottawa: PSI Publishing. Carmichael, Trevor A. 2001. Passport to the Heart: Reflections on Canada Caribbean Relations. Kingston, Jamaica: Ian Randle Publishers. Carroll, Lewis [Charles Dodgson]. [1871] 1986. Jabberwocky. In The Norton Anthology of English Literature, 5th ed., ed. M.H. Abrams, 1594–95. New York: W.W. Norton. Casas, Maria Caridad. 1998. Orality and Literacy in a Postcolonial World. Social Semiotics 8.1: 5–24. – 2002. Orality and the Body in the Poetry of Lillian Allen and Dionne Brand: Towards an Embodied Social Semiotics. ARIEL 33.2 (April): 7–32. Cayley, Jennifer. 1988. Uncharted territory. Ottawa Ethnic Writers Series [newsletter] (Sept.–Oct.): 11. Cayne, Bernard S., ed. 1988. The New Lexicon Webster’s Dictionary of the English Language. New York: Lexicon Publications. Césaire, Aimé. [1955] 1972. Discourse on Colonialism. Trans. Joan Pinkham. New York: Monthly Review Press. Chakkalakal, Tess. 2000. Reckless Eyeballing: Being Reena in Canada. In Rude: Contemporary Black Canadian Cultural Criticism, ed. Rinaldo Walcott, 159–67. Toronto: Insomniac. Chamberlin, J. Edward. 1993. Come Back to Me My Language: Poetry and the West Indies. Toronto: McClelland & Stewart. – 1998. The Canadian Caribbean Descant: An Introduction. Descant 101, 29.2 (Summer): 7–10. Chancy, Myriam J.A. 1997. Searching for Safe Spaces: Afro-Caribbean Women Writers in Exile. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. Chandler, David. 1976. Capital Punishment in Canada: A Sociological Study of Repressive Law. Toronto: McClelland & Stewart.

280 bibliography Chariandy, David. 2002. ‘Canada in Us Now’: Locating the Criticism of Black Canadian Writing. Essays on Canadian Writing 75 (winter): 196–216. Chase, Randolph. 1988–9. “Protest in West Indian Folk Poetry.” Kola 2.3 (fall –spring): 20–7. Chew, Shirley. 1997. Is There Such a Thing as Commonwealth Literature? Ottawa Spectrum 14.10 (Oct.– Nov.): 7. Chew, Shirley, and Anna Rutherford, eds. 1997. Unbecoming Daughters of the Empire. Sydney, Australia: Dangaroo Press. Childs, Peter, and Patrick Williams. 1997. An Introduction to Post-Colonial Theory. Hemel Hempstead, UK: Harvester. Clare, Bill, and Evie Sheppard. 1991. Primary Textbooks and Materials for the OECS: A Study of Affordable and Sustainable Options. Ottawa: CIDA. Clarke, A.M. [1943] 1999. Introduction. Best Poems of Trinidad. Comp. A.M. Clarke, xvii–xviii. Dover, MA: Majority Press. Clarke, Austin. 1992a. Letter of the Law of Black. In In This City, 55–74. Toronto: Exile Editions. – 1992b. Public Enemies: Police Violence and Black Youth. Toronto: HarperCollins. – 1996. The Question. Trans. Isabella Maria Zoppa. Turin: University of Turin, La Rosa, Centro per lo Studio delle Letterature e delle Culture delle Aree Emergenti. – 1999. Pigtails ’n’ Breadfruit: Rituals of Slave Food. Toronto: Random House. Clarke, George Elliott. [1990] 2000. Whylah Falls. Vancouver: Raincoast/Polestar. – ed. 1991a. Fire on the Water: An Anthology of Black Nova Scotian Writing. Vol. 1. Lawrencetown Beach, NS: Pottersfield Press. – 1991b. An Unprejudiced View of Two Africanadian Poets. Arc 27 (autumn): 73–81. – ed. 1992. Fire on the Water: An Anthology of Black Nova Scotian Writing. Vol. 2. Lawrencetown Beach, NS: Pottersfield Press. – 1994. White Niggers, Black Slaves: Slavery, Race, and Class in T.C. Haliburton’s The Clockmaker. Nova Scotia Historical Review 14.1: 13–40. – ed. 1997a. Eyeing the North Star: Directions in African-Canadian Literature. Toronto: McClelland & Stewart. – 1997b. Must We Burn Haliburton? In The Haliburton Bi-centenary Chaplet: Papers Presented at the 1996 Thomas Raddall Symposium, ed. Richard A. Davies, 1–40. Wolfville, NS: Gaspereau Press. – 2000a. Reading Ward’s ‘Blind Man’s Blues.’ Arc 44 (summer): 50–2. – 2000b. Walter Borden’s Tightrope Time, or Voicing the Polyphonous Consciousness. In Testifyin’: Contemporary African Canadian Drama, ed. Djanet Sears, 473–6. Toronto: Playwrights Canada Press. – 2001. Blue. Vancouver: Raincoast/Polestar. – 2002a. Odysseys Home: Mapping African-Canadian Literature. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. – 2002b. Raising Raced and Erased Executions in African-Canadian Literature, or Unearthing Angélique. Essays on Canadian Writing 75 (winter): 30–61. – 2006. À Arthur Nortje. In Black, by George Elliott Clarke, 45. Vancouver, BC: Raincoast / Polestar Books. – 2008. ‘How White Are Your Whites?’ A Response to Daniel Coleman’s White Civility: The Literary Project of English Canada. International Journal of Canadian Studies 38: 208–20. Clarke, Lewis, and Milton Clarke. 1846. Narratives of the Sufferings of Lewis and Milton Clarke, Sons of a Soldier of the Revolution, during a Captivity of More Than Twenty Years among the Slave-Holders of Kentucky, One of the So Called Christian States of America. Boston: B. Marsh. Clayton, Willard Parker. 1984. Whatever Your Will, Lord: A Brief History Written in Commemoration of the

bibliography

281

139th Anniversary of Emmanuel Baptist Church, Upper Hammonds Plains, Nova Scotia. Hantsport, NS: Lancelot Press. Cleaver, Eldridge. 1970. Soul on Ice. New York: Dell Ramparts. Clover, Carol J. 1992. Men, Women, and Chain Saws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Coleman, Daniel. 2001. The National Allegory of Fraternity: Loyalist Literature and the Making of Canada’s White British Origins. Journal of Canadian Studies 36.3 (fall): 131–56. – 2006. White Civility: The Literary Project of English Canada. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Coleman, J[ohn]. Clay. 1898. The Jim Crow Car; or Denouncement of Injustice Meted Out to the Black Race. Toronto: Hill. Colley, Shernera D. 1996. Reverend Father Richard Preston, 1790–1861. In Reflections: The East Preston United Baptist Church on Its 150th Anniversary, ed. Carolyn G. Thomas, 22–3. Halifax: East Preston United Baptist Church 150th Anniversary Committee. Collier, James Lincoln. 1987. Duke Ellington. New York: Oxford University Press. Colombo, John Robert. 1978. My Genealogy. In Di Cicco 1978, 10–11. Compton, Wayde, ed. 2002. Bluesprint: Black British Columbian Literature and Orature. Vancouver: Arsenal Pulp Press. Condé, Mary, and Thorunn Lonsdale, eds. 1999. Caribbean Women Writers: Fiction in English. New York: St. Martin’s Press. Coniff, Brian. 1999. Answering ‘The Waste Land’: Robert Hayden and the Rise of the African American Poetic Sequence. African American Review 33.3 (fall): 487–506. Conrad, Peter. 2002. The Hitchcock Murders. London: Faber and Faber. Considine, John. 2004. Language and Languages in Contemporary Canada. Anglistik 15.2 (Sept.): 11–26. Cooke, Nathalie. 2004. Bread, Biscotti, and Cappuccino: Tabling the Conversation of Culture. Italian Canadiana 14: 1–13. Cookson, William. [1985] 2001. A Guide to The Cantos of Ezra Pound. New York: Persea Books. Cooper, Afua. 2006. The Hanging of Angélique: The Untold Story of Canadian Slavery and the Burning of Old Montréal. Toronto: HarperCollins. – 2007. The Invisible History of the Slave Trade. Toronto Star (25 March): A15. Coyle, Michael. 1995. Ezra Pound, Popular Genres, and the Discourse of Culture. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press. Cromwell, Edith. 1993. Inglewood, My Community. Bridgetown, NS: Edith Cromwell. Cromwell, Liz , ed. 1975. One Out of Many: A Collection of Writings by 21 Black Women in Ontario. Toronto: WACACRO productions. – 1976. We have come. In Head 1976, 60. Cruse, Harold. [1967] 1984. The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual. New York: Quill. Cunard, Nancy. [1942] 2002. The White Man’s Duty: An Analysis of the Colonial Question in Light of the Atlantic Charter. London: W.H. Allen, 1942. Repr. in Essays on Race and Empire: Nancy Cunard, ed. Maureen Moynagh, 127–77. Peterborough, ON: Broadview Press. D’Alfonso, Antonio. 1996. In Italics: In Defense of Ethnicity. Toronto: Guernica. Dameron, Charles. 1976. Arthur Nortje: Craftsman for His Muse. In Aspects of South African Literature, ed. Christopher Heywood, 155–62. London: Heinemann. Daniells, Roy. 1974. High Colonialism in Canada. In Colony and Confederation: Early Canadian Poets and Their Background, ed. George Woodcock, 42–53. Vancouver: UBC Press.

282 bibliography Dasenbrock, Reed Way. 2001. Why the Post in Post-Colonial Is Not the Post in Post-Modern: Homer, Dante, Pound, Walcott. In Ezra Pound and African American Modernism, ed. Michael Coyle, 111–22. Orono, ME: National Poetry Foundation. Dash, J. Michael. 1998. The Other America: Caribbean Literature in a New World Context. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia. Davis, Angela. 1974. Angela Davis: An Autobiography. New York: Random House. Davis, Geoffrey, and Hena Maes-Jelinek, eds. 1990. Crisis and Creativity in the New Literatures in English. Amsterdam: Rodolphi. Davis, Miles, with Quincy Troupe. 1990. Miles: The Autobiography. New York: Simon and Schuster / Touchstone. Daymond, Douglas, and Leslie Monkman, eds. 1978. Literature in Canada. Vol. 1. Toronto: Gage. Dearborn, Dorothy. 1999. The Gallows of New Brunswick. Saint John, NB: Neptune. De Man, Paul. [1969] 1983. Lyric and Modernity. In Blindness and Insight: Essays in the Rhetoric of Contemporary Criticism, 166–86. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Demme, Jonathan, dir. 1991. The Silence of the Lambs. (Film) Deonanan, Carlton R., and Venus E. Deonanan. 1975. Curriculum Insights and Outlines: Learning and Teaching English Composition and Literature. New York: Vantage Press. Desai, Anita. 1997. Eye to Eye: Women. Oxford: New Internationalist Publications. De Santis, Christopher C. 1997. Badman. In Andrews et al. 1997, 42. De Tocqueville, Alexis. 1835–40. De la démocratie en Amérique. Paris: Pagnerre. Diamond, Ann. 1992. Life at Full Tilt. Books in Canada 31.9 (Dec.): 18–21. Diawara, Manthia. 1990. Englishness and Blackness: Cricket as Discourse on Colonialism. Calaloo 13: 830–44. Dicale, Bertrand. 2007. ‘I Got You (I Feel Good)’: un cri irrésistible. Le Figaro (Paris) (4–5 Aug.): 31. Di Cicco, Pier Giorgio, ed. 1978. Roman Candles: An Anthology of Poems by Seventeen Italo-Canadian Poets. Toronto: Hounslow Press. di Michele, Mary. 1978a. Across the Atlantic. In Di Cicco 1978, 60. – 1978b. Enigmatico. In Di Cicco 1978, 62. Dinwiddie-Boyd, Elza. 1994. Proud Heritage: 11,001 Names for Your African-American Baby. New York: Avon. Dixon, Beau. 2006. Once a Flame. Unpublished manuscript. Donnell, Alison, and Sarah Lawson Welsh, eds. 1996. The Routledge Reader in Caribbean Literature. London: Routledge. Doreski, C.K. 2001. Reading Tolson Reading Pound: National Authority, National Narrative. In Ezra Pound and African American Modernism, ed. Michael Coyle, 89–109. Orono, ME: National Poetry Foundation. Dorsinville, Max. 1974. Caliban without Prospero: Essay on Quebec and Black Literature. Erin, ON: Press Porcépic. Dossa, Shiraz. 1995. Trashing ‘Coolies.’ Rungh 3.2: 30–3. Douglas, Stephen. 2000. Historic Hangings in the Chadee Gang. Toronto: Douglas. Drew, Benjamin, ed. [1856] 1981. A North-Side View of Slavery; The Refugee; or The Narratives of Fugitive Slaves in Canada. Related by Themselves. Boston: John P. Jewett, 1856. Repr. as The Narratives of Fugitive Slaves in Canada. Toronto: Coles. Du Bois, W.E.B. [1903] 1995. The Souls of Black Folks. New York: Signet/Penguin. – [1915] 2002. The Negro. Amherst, NY: Humanity-Prometheus.

bibliography

283

DuCille, Ann. 1997. The Unbearable Darkness of Being: ‘Fresh’ Thoughts on Race, Sex, and the Simpsons. In Morrison and Lacour 1997, 293–338. Duff, Louis Blake. 1949. The County Kerchief. Toronto: Ryerson. Dunbar, Paul Laurence. 1898. Lyrics of Lowly Life. New York: Dodd, Mead. – 1899. Lyrics of the Hearthside. Toronto: George N. Morang. – 1997. The Poet. In The Norton Anthology of African American Literature, ed. Henry Louis Gates Jr. and Nellie Y. McKay, 905. New York: W.W. Norton. Dylan, Bob. 1965. Highway 61 Revisited. Columbia. Record album. – 1965. Like a Rolling Stone. Columbia. Record. Ealey, Jael. 2004. Dirty Laundry. In Richardson and Green 2004, 31–5. Egan, Susanna, and Gabriele Helms. 2004. Life Writing. In The Cambridge Companion to Canadian Literature, ed. Eva-Marie Kröller. 216–40. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Elam, Harry J., Jr. 1996. Colored Contradictions in the Postmodern Moment: An Introduction. In Colored Contradictions: An Anthology of Contemporary African-American Plays, ed. Harry J. Elam, Jr. and Robert Alexander, 1–15. New York: Penguin/Plume. Eliot, T.S. [1917] 1972. The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock. In The Waste Land and Other Poems. 9–14. London: Faber & Faber. – [1922] 1972. The Waste Land. In The Waste Land and Other Poems, by T.S. Eliot, 25–51. London: Faber & Faber. Elliott, Lorris, ed. 1985a. Other Voices: Writings by Blacks in Canada. Toronto: Williams-Wallace. – 1985b. The Trial of Marie-Joseph Angelique: Negress and Slave. In Elliott 1985a, 55–65. – 1986. Bibliography of Literary Writings by Blacks in Canada. Toronto: Williams-Wallace. Elliott, Zetta. 2004. Plastique. In Richardson and Green 2004, 3–14. Ellis, Scott. 1995. Review. Books in Canada (April): 49. Ellison, Ralph. [1947] 1995. Invisible Man. New York: Vintage International. Equiano, Olaudah. 1789. The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, The African, Written by Himself. London: n.p. Erskine-Hill, Howard. 1999. The Nuisance Grounds: The Theme of Relegation in Two Canadian Novels. In Imagined Commonwealths: Cambridge Essays on Commonwealth and International Literature in English, ed. T.J. Cribb, 246–68. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Esonwanne, Uzo[ma]. 1990. The Madness of Africa(ns): Or Anthropology’s Reason. Cultural Critique 17 (winter 1990–1): 107–26. – 1992a. ‘Race’ and Hermeneutics: Paradigm Shift – From Scientific to Hermeneutic Understanding of Race. African American Review 26.4: 565–82. – 1992b. ‘Race’ and Interpretation. Voices of the African Diaspora 8.1: 9–12. – 1993a. Feminist Theory and the Discourse of Colonialism. In ReImagining Women: Representations of Women in Culture, ed. Shirley Neuman and Glennis Stephenson, 233–55. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. – 1993b. The Nation as Contested Referent. Research in African Literatures 24.4: 49–62. – 1997. Enlightenment Epistemology and ‘Aesthetic Cognition’: Mariama Bâ’s So Long a Letter. In The Politics of (M)Othering: Womanhood, Identity, and Resistance in African Literature, ed. Obioma Nnaemeka, 82–100. New York: Routledge. – 2000a. Introduction. In Critical Essays on Christopher Okigbo, ed. Uzoma Esonwanne, 1–38. New York: G.K. Hall. – 2000b. Paths within the Onion. Canadian Literature 165 (summer): 130–3.

284 bibliography – 2003. Coming to Terms with Cultural Nationalism: On Gikandi’s ‘Short Century.’ New Formations 51 (winter 2003–4): 26–31. Esslemont, J.E. [1923] 1970. Bahá’u’lláh and the New Era: An Introduction to the Bahá’ì Faith. 3rd ed. Wilmette, IL: Bahá’ì Books. Fabre, Michel. 1991. From Harlem to Paris: Black American Writers in France, 1840–1980. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Fanon, Frantz. [1952] 1971. Peau noire, masques blancs. Paris: Editions du Seuil. – 1961. Les Damnées de la terre. Paris: François Maspero éditeur. – 1967. Black Skin, White Masks. Trans. Charles Lam Markmann. New York: Grove Press. – 1968. The Wretched of the Earth. Trans. Constance Farrington. New York: Grove Press. Farred, Grant. 2000. Midfielder’s Moment: Coloured Literature and Culture in Contemporary South Africa. Boulder, CO: Westview Press. Farrell, Lennox. 2001. Dead Black Men, Talking. Toronto Star (1 Aug.): A18. Feinstein, Sascha, and Yusuf Komunyakaa. 1991. Preface. In The Jazz Poetry Anthology, ed. Sascha Feinstein and Yusuf Komunyakaa, xvii–xx. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. – 1996. Preface. In The Second Set: The Jazz Poetry Anthology. Vol. 2, ed. Sascha Feinstein and Yusuf Komunyakaa, xi–xiv. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Finn, Stephen M. 1993. Transcolonial Metapoetry in South Africa. SPAN 36. Available at http:// wwwmcc.murdoch.edu.au/ReadingRoom/litserv/SPAN/36/Finn.html Fleming, Ian. [1963] 2006. On Her Majesty’s Secret Service. Toronto: Penguin. Forsythe, Dennis. 1971. By Way of Introduction: The Sir George Williams Affair. In Let the Niggers Burn! The Sir George Williams University Affair and Its Caribbean Aftermath, ed. Dennis Forsythe 7–21. Montreal: Our Generation Press / Black Rose Books. Foucault, Michel. [1977] 1992. Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews. Ed. Donald F. Bouchard. Trans. Donald F. Bouchard and Sherry Simon. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Frank, Tibor. 2004. Supranational English, American Values, and East-Central Europe. PMLA 119.1 (Jan.): 80–91. Fraser, John. 1974. Violence in the Arts. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. – 1992. America and the Patterns of Chivalry. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Freiwald, Bina Toledo. 2002a. Identity, Community, and Nation in Black Canadian Women’s Autobiography. In Identity, Community, Nation, ed. Danielle Schaub and Christl Verduyn, 34–54. Jerusalem: Magnes Press, Hebrew University. – 2002b. Nation and Self-Narration: A View from Québec/Quebec. Canadian Literature 172 (spring): 17–38. Fry, Hedy. 1997. Liberal Party: A Continued Commitment to the Ideals of Multiculturalism. In Cardozo and Musto 1997, 35–41. Frye, Northrop. [1943] 1970. Canada and Its Poetry. Canadian Forum 23.275 (Dec.): 207–10. Repr. in The Making of Modern Poetry in Canada: Essential Articles on Contemporary Canadian Poetry in English, ed. Louis Dudek and Michael Gnarowski, 86–97. Toronto: Ryerson Press. – 1953. Letters in Canada: 1952. Poetry. University of Toronto Quarterly 22.3 (April): 269–80. – 1976. Conclusion. In Literary History of Canada: Canadian Literature in English. Vol. 2. 2nd ed., ed. Carl F. Klinck, 333–61. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Fuller, Charles. [1981] 1995. A Soldier’s Play. In Classic Plays from the Negro Ensemble Company, ed. Paul Carter Harrison and Gus Edwards, 1–53. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press.

bibliography

285

Gadoury, Lorraine, and Antonio LeChasseur, eds. 1992. Persons Sentenced to Death in Canada, 1867–1976. Ottawa: National Archives. Gagnon, Christiane. 1997. Bloc Québécois: Integration Rather than Multiculturalism. In Cardozo and Musto 1997, 42–5. Gale, Lorena. 2000. Angélique. Toronto: Playwrights Canada. Gallant, Mavis. 1996. Selected Stories. Toronto: McClelland & Stewart. Gardner, W.H. [1953] 1984. Introduction. In Gerard Manley Hopkins: Poems and Prose, ed. W.H. Gardner, xiii–xxxvi. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books. Gasparini, Len. 1978. The Photograph of My Grandfather Reading Dante. In Di Cicco 1978, 28. Gates, Henry Louis, Jr. 1987a. Authority, (White) Power and the (Black) Critic: It’s All Greek To Me. Cultural Critique 7 (fall): 19–46. – ed. 1987b. The Classic Slave Narratives. New York: Penguin / Mentor. – 1992. Loose Canons: Notes on the Culture Wars. New York: Oxford University Press. – 1994. Preface. In Black Male: Representations of Masculinity in Contemporary American Art, ed. Thelma Golden, 11–14. New York: Whitney Museum of Modern Art. Gibbons, Rawle. 2000. Interview by G.E. Clarke. 13 Dec. St. Augustine, Trinidad. Gibson, Mary Ellis. 1995. Epic Reinvented: Ezra Pound and the Victorians. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Gill, Jonathan. 2001. Ezra Pound and Langston Hughes: The ABC of Po’try. In Ezra Pound and African American Modernism, ed. Michael Coyle, 79–88. Orono, ME: National Poetry Foundation. Gilroy, Paul. 1993. The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Gingell, Susan. 2005. ‘Always a Poem, Once a Book’: Motivations and Strategies for Print Textualizing of Caribbean-Canadian Dub and Performance Poetry. Journal of West Indian Literature 14.1/2 (Nov.): 220–59. Goellnicht, Donald, and Daniel Coleman. 2001. Email communication to the author. 21 August. Golden, Thelma, ed. 1994a. Black Male: Representations of Masculinity in Contemporary American Art. New York: Whitney Museum of Modern Art. – 1994b. My Brother. In Golden 1994a, 19–43. Goldie, Terry. 2004. Review of Odysseys Home: Mapping African-Canadian Literature, by George Elliott Clarke. Modern Language Review 99.2 (April): 482–4. Grant, Barry Keith. 1995. Purple Passages or Fiestas in Blue? Notes Toward an Aesthetic of Vocalese. In Representing Jazz, ed. Krin Gabbard, 285–303. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Grant, George. 1970. Lament for a Nation: The Defeat of Canadian Nationalism. Carleton Library Edition. Toronto: McClelland & Stewart. – 2005. Collected Works of George Grant. Vol. 3. 1960–1969. Ed. Arthur Davis and Henry Roper. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Gray, Cecil, comp. 1972. Bite In: Stage 1, A Three-Year Secondary Course in Reading Poems. London: Thomas Nelson and Sons. Green, Adam S. 1904. The Future of the Canadian Negro: A Paper Read before the African Baptist Association, Halifax, N.S., Monday Evening, Sept. 5, 1904. Truro, NS: Author. Green, Steven. 2004. What Makes Us Griots? Introduction in Richardson and Green, ed., 2004, v–ix. Greenlee, Sam. [1969] 1990. The Spook Who Sat by the Door. Detroit: Wayne State University Press. Gregg, Allan. 2006. Identity Crisis. Walrus 3.2 (March): 38–47.

286 bibliography Griffith, Glyne A. 1996. Deconstruction, Imperialism, and the West Indian Novel. Mona, Jamaica: University of the West Indies Press. – 1993. Veiled Politics in West Indian Criticism. Kunapipi 15.2: 104–12. Griffiths, Gareth. 1978. A Double Exile: African and West Indian Writing between Two Cultures. London: Marion Boyars. Haliburton, Thomas Chandler. 1836. The Clockmaker; or the Sayings and Doings of Sam Slick, of Slickville. [First Series.] Halifax: Joseph Howe. Hansberry, Lorraine. [1959] 1966[?]. Raisin in the Sun. New York: New American Library / Signet. Hardy, Thomas. [1891] 1930. Tess of the D’Urbervilles. London: Macmillan. Harper, Phillip Brian. 1993. Nationalism and Social Division in Black Arts Poetry of the 1960s. Critical Inquiry 19.2 (winter): 234–55. Harris, Claire. 1989. The Conception of Winter. Stratford, ON: Williams-Wallace. Harris, Trudier. 1997. Bad Woman. In Andrews et al. 1997, 42–3. New York: Oxford University Press. Harry, Sharmila. n.d. West Indian immigrant experience in Canada. PhD diss., University of the West Indies. Hartz, Louis. 1964. The Founding of New Societies. New York: Harcourt, Brace. Hatlen, Burton. 1985. Ezra Pound and Fascism. In Ezra Pound and History, ed. Marianne Korn, 145–72. Orono, ME: National Poetry Foundation. Hayden, Robert. 1985. Collected Poems. New York: Liveright. Haynes, Camille, ed. 1973. Black Chat: An Anthology of Black Poets. Montreal: Black and Third World Students Association, Dawson College. Head, Harold. 1974. Bushman’s Brew. Toronto: Goathair Press. – ed. 1976. Canada in Us Now: The First Anthology of Black Poetry and Prose in Canada. Toronto: NC Canada Press. Hearne, John, ed. 1976. Carifesta Forum: An Anthology of Twenty Caribbean Voices. Kingston, Jamaica: Carifesta 76. Hémon, Louis. [1914] 1916. Maria Chapdelaine: récit du Canada français. Lausanne: Guilde du livre. Henderson, Anna Minerva. 1937. Parliament Hill, Ottawa. Canadian Poetry Magazine 2.1 (June): 51. – 1938. Parliament Hill, Ottawa. In New Harvesting: Contemporary Canadian Poetry, 1918–1938, ed. Ethel Hume Bennett, 54. Toronto: Macmillan. – 1967. Citadel. Fredericton: Author. Henry, Frances. 1975. Black Music from the Maritimes. Canadian Folk Music Journal 3: 11–21. Henry, Maureen. 1994. Book Production in the Caribbean: A Concise Guide for Authors, Publishers and Printers. St. Augustine, Trinidad: Main Library, University of the West Indies. Henson, Jim. [1889] 2001. Broken Shackles. Ed. Glenelg John Frost Jr. Owen Sound, ON, 1889. Repr. as Broken Shackles: Old Man Henson from Slavery to Freedom. Ed. Peter Meyler. Toronto: Natural Heritage Books. Henson, Josiah. 1849. Life of Josiah Henson, Formerly a Slave, Now an Inhabitant of Canada, Narrated by Himself. Boston: A.D. Phelps. heronJonse [Kevin Jones]. 2004a. Black Like Me. In Richardson and Green 2004, 160–1. – 2004b. Statement. In Richardson and Green 2004, 160. – 2005. I Am a Child of the Sun. Toronto: Poetic Soul Publishing. Hewitt, R. 1980. ‘Choice of Poets’. Report of the CXC English … Workshop held at the School of Education, UWI, St. Augustine, 1980, 93–7. St. Augustine, Trinidad: School of Education, University of the West Indies.

bibliography

287

Hill, Errol, ed. 1979. Three Caribbean Plays. London: Longman Caribbean Limited Trinidad and Jamaica. Hill, James L. 1997. Yerby, Frank. In Andrews et al. 1997, 797–8. Hill, Patricia Liggins, et al., eds. 1998. Call and Response: The Riverside Anthology of the African American Literary Tradition. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. Hiller, Harry H. 1991. Canadian Society: A Macro Analysis. 2nd ed. Scarborough, ON: Prentice-Hall. Hodges, Graham Russell, ed. 1996. The Black Loyalist Directory: African Americans in Exile After the American Revolution. New York: Garland Publishing, Inc., in association with the New England Historical Genealogical Society. Hohn, Nadia L. 2004. Statement. In Richardson and Green 2004, 103. Holland, Sharon Patricia. 2000. Raising the Dead: Readings of Death and (Black) Subjectivity. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Honey, Maureen, ed. 1989. Shadowed Dreams: Women’s Poetry of the Harlem Renaissance. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. hooks, bell. 1994. Feminism Inside: Toward a Black Body Politic. In Black Male: Representations of Masculinity in Contemporary American Art, ed. Thelma Golden, 127–40. New York: Whitney Museum of Modern Art. Hopkinson, Nalo. 1998. Brown Girl in the Ring. New York: Warner Books. Hopkinson, Slade [Abdur-Rahman]. 1976a. The Friend. Georgetown, Guyana: Ministry of Education and Social Development, Curriculum Development Centre. – 1976b. The Madwoman of Papine. Georgetown, Guyana: Ministry of Education and Social Development, Curriculum Development Centre. Hornby, Jim. 1991. Black Islanders: Prince Edward Island’s Historical Black Community. Charlottetown: Institute of Island Studies. – 1998. In the Shadow of the Gallows: Criminal Law and Capital Punishment in Prince Edward Island, 1769– 1941. Charlottetown: Institute of Island Studies. Horowitz, Gad. [1966] 1995. Conservatism, Liberalism, and Socialism in Canada: An Interpretation. In Canada’s Origins: Liberal, Tory, or Republican? ed. Janet Ajzenstat and Peter J. Smith, 21–44. Ottawa: Carleton University Press. Howe, Samuel Gridley, comp. 1864. The Refugees from Slavery in Canada West: Report to the Freedmen’s Inquiry Commission. Boston: Wright and Potter. Hudson, Peter. 1999. Primitive Grammars. Sulfur 44 (spring): 193–5. Hughes, Albert, and Allan Hughes, dirs. 2000. American Pimp. (Film) Hulan, Shelley. 2002. Calm, Cool, and Selected: The New Life of Johnson’s Work. Canadian Poetry: Studies, Documents, Reviews 52 (fall–winter): 91–7. Hustak, Alan. 1987. They Were Hanged. Toronto: Lorimer. Ingle, Lorne, comp. and ed. 1989. The British North America Act. In Meech Lake Reconsidered, ed. Lorne Ingle, 119–41. Hull, QC: Voyageur. Jackson, Blyden. 1989. A History of Afro-American Literature. Vol. 1. The Long Beginning, 1746–1895. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press. Jackson, George. 1972. Blood in My Eye. New York: Random House. Jafa, Arthur. 1992. 69. In Black Popular Culture, by Arthur Jafa, 249–54. Seattle: Bay Press. James, C.L.R. [1938] 1963. The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L’Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution. New York: Random House / Vintage. James, Darius. 1992. Negrophobia: An Urban Parable. New York: Citadel Press. Jarvis, Michael, dir. 1999. Angélique. [Montreal:] Rightime Productions. (Film)

288 bibliography Jazz. 1997. In The Norton Anthology of African American Literature, ed. Henry Louis Gates Jr. and Nellie Y. McKay, 55–7. New York: W.W. Norton. Jean-Baptiste, Alfred. 1995. Caribbean English and the Literacy Tutor: Tutor’s Kit. Toronto: Toronto ALFA Centre. Jedwab, Jack. 2003. Democratic Dimensions of Identity in Canada and the United States at the Beginning of Century 21. Canadian American Research Symposium 1.1 (fall): 14–20. Jefferson, Thomas. [1776] 1988. Declaration of Independence. In The New Lexicon Webster’s Dictionary of the English Language: Encyclopedic Edition, ed. Dir. Bernard S. Cayne, 249–50. New York: Lexicon Publications. – [1782] 1955. Notes on the State of Virginia. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Jenkins, Lee M. ‘If We Must Die ’: Winston Churchill and Claude McKay. Notes and Queries 50: 333–7. Jessome, Phonse. 1996. Somebody’s Daughter: Inside the Toronto/Halifax Pimping Ring. Halifax: Nimbus. Jewett, John P., and Company. [1856] 1981. Publishers Advertisement. In The Refugee; or The Narratives of Fugitive Slaves in Canada. Related by Themselves, ed. Benjamin Drew. Boston: John P. Jewett, 1856. Repr. as The Narratives of Fugitive Slaves in Canada. Toronto: Coles. Joans, Ted. 2001. Our Thang: Several Poems, Several Drawings. With drawings by Laura Corsiglia. Victoria, BC: Ekstasis Editions. Jobb, Dean. 1988. Shades of Justice: Seven Nova Scotia Murder Cases. Halifax: Nimbus. – 1993. Bluenose Justice: True Tales of Mischief, Mayhem, and Murder. Lawrencetown Beach, NS: Pottersfield. Johnson, William H.H. 1901. The Horrors of Slavery. Vancouver: n.p. Jones, Gayl. 1976. Eva’s Man. New York: Random House. – 1991. Liberating Voices: Oral Tradition in African American Literature. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Jones, Jonathan. 2003. The Punishing Roots of African Art. Globe and Mail (12 Sept.): R12. Joseph, Clifton. 2001. Recollections: A Seventees [sic] Black RAP. Introduction in Being Black, by Althea Prince, 13–21. Toronto: Insomniac. Juminer, Bertène. 1961. Les Bâtards. Paris: Présence Africaine. Kang, Nancy. 2005. ‘As if I had entered a Paradise ’: Fugitive Slave Narratives and Cross-Border Literary History. African American Review. 39.3 (fall 2005): 431–57. Kaufman, Bob. 1967. Golden Sardine. San Francisco: City Lights. Kelley, Robin D.G., and Earl Lewis. 2000. To Make Our World Anew: A History of African Americans. New York: Oxford University Press. Kellough, Kaie. 2004. Lettricity: Poems. Montreal: Cumulus Press. Killam, Douglas, and Ruth Rowe, eds. 2000. Nortje, Arthur. In The Companion to African Literatures, ed. Douglas Killam and Ruth Rowe, 180. Oxford: James Currey. Kimber, Stephen. 1981. Halifax’s Hot, but Unknown, Author. Halifax (Nov.): 33–7. King, Lloyd. n.d. Towards a Caribbean Literary Tradition. St. Augustine, Trinidad: Author. King, Martin Luther, Jr. 1964. Letter from Birmingham Jail. In Why We Can’t Wait, by Martin Luther King, Jr. New York: NAL/Mentor. King, Ruby, and Mike Morrissey. 1990. Images in Print: Bias and Prejudice in Caribbean Textbooks. Mona, Jamaica: Institute of Social and Economic Research, University of the West Indies, Mona. Kinsella, Noël A. 1997. Guiding Our Future through an Understanding of the Past. In Cardozo and Musto 1997, 54–9. Kirpal, Viney. 1989. The Third World Novel of Expatriation: A Study of Emigre Fiction by Indian, West African, and Caribbean Writers. New Delhi: Sterling Publishers.

bibliography

289

Klein, A.M. 1948. The Rocking Chair and Other Poems. Toronto: Ryerson Press. – 1990. A.M. Klein: Complete Poems, ed. Zailig Pollock. 2 vols. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Klopper, Dirk, ed. 2000. Anatomy of Dark: Collected Poems of Arthur Nortje. Pretoria: University of South Africa Press. Kwamdela, Odimumba [John Ashton Braithwaite]. 1971. Niggers … This Is CANADA: C-old A-nti Niggers A-nd D-efinitely A-merican. Toronto: 21st Century Book. Laferrière, Dany. 1985. Comment faire l’amour avec un nègre sans se fatiguer: Roman. Montreal: VLB Editeur. La Guma, Alex, ed. 1971. Apartheid: A Collection of Writings on South African Racism by South Africans. n.p.: International Publishers. Lampman, Archibald. [1898] 1984. At the Long Sault: May, 1660. In Poets of the Confederation, ed. Malcolm Ross, 82–4. Toronto: McClelland & Stewart. – [1900] 1978. In the City. In Literature in Canada. Vol. 1, ed. Douglas Daymond and Leslie Monkman, 375. Toronto: Gage. Lane, Dorothy F. 1995. The Island as Site of Resistance: An Examination of Caribbean and New Zealand Texts. New York: Peter Lang. Lanham, Richard A. 1991. A Handlist of Rhetorical Terms. 2nd ed. Berkeley: University of California Press. La Rose, John, and Andrew Salkey. 1974. Introduction. Savacou 9/10: 10–12. Las Casas, Bartolomé de. [1552] 1974. The Devastation of the Indies: A Brief Account. Trans. Herma Briffault. New York: Seabury Press. Layton, Irving. 1977. On Seeing the Statuettes of Ezekiel and Jeremiah in the Church of Notre Dame. In The Poems of Irving Layton, ed. Eli Mandel, 19. Toronto: McClelland & Stewart. Lecker, Robert, ed. 1991. Canadian Canons: Essays in Literary Value. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. – ed. 1997. English-Canadian Literary Anthologies: An Enumerative Bibliography. Teeswater, ON: Reference Press. Lee, Harper. 1960. To Kill a Mockingbird. New York: J.P. Lippincott. Lee, Spike, dir. 2000. Bamboozled. (Film) Leonard, Neil. 1986. The Jazzman’s Verbal Usage. Black American Literature Forum 20: 151–60. LePan, Douglas. 1953. The Net and the Sword. London: Chatto and Windus. – 1995. Macalister, or Dying in the Dark. Kingston, ON: Quarry Press. Les Cenelles: Choix de poésies indigènes. 1845. Ed. Armand Lanusse. New Orleans: Lanusse. Levine, Lawrence W. 1977. Black Culture and Black Consciousness: Afro-American Folk Thought from Slavery to Freedom. New York: Oxford University Press. Lewis, G.K. 1968. The Growth of the Modern West Indies. New York: Monthly Review Press. Lewis, Israel. 1846. Crisis in North America: Slavery, War, Balance of Power and Oregon. Montreal: Harrison Printer. Lewis, Nghana tamu. 2003. In a Different Chord: Interpreting the Relations among Black Female Sexuality, Agency, and the Blues. African American Review 37.4 (winter): 599–609. Lindberg, Kathryne V. 2001. Rebels to the Right / Revolution to the Left: Ezra Pound and Claude McKay in ‘The Syndicalist Year’ of 1912. In Ezra Pound and African American Modernism, ed. Michael Coyle, 11–77. Orono, ME: National Poetry Foundation. Lipset, Seymour Martin. 1990. Continental Divide: The Values and Institutions of the United States and Canada. New York: Routledge. Lipsitz, George. 1997. The Greatest Story Ever Told: Marketing and the O.J. Simpson Trial. In Morrison and Lacour 1997, 3–29.

290 bibliography Livesay, Dorothy. 1968. New Jersey: 1935. In The New Romans: Candid Canadian Opinions of the U.S., ed. Al Purdy, 110–11. Edmonton: Hurtig. Logan, John Daniel. 1923. Thomas Chandler Haliburton. Toronto: Ryerson. Loguen, Jermain Wesley. 1859. The Rev. J.W. Loguen, as a Slave and as a Freeman: A Narrative of Real Life. Syracuse, NY: J.G.K. Truair. Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth. [1847] 1962. Evangeline. Toronto: McClelland. Lumumba, Carl. 1971. The West Indies and the Sir George Williams Affair: An Assessment. In Let the Niggers Burn! The Sir George Williams University Affair and Its Caribbean Aftermath, ed. Dennis Forsythe, 144–91. Montreal: Our Generation Press / Black Rose Books. Lynes, Jeanette, ed. 1999. Medicine, Magic, Weaponry, Love: Maxine Tynes’ Poetry. In Words Out There: Women Poets in Atlantic Canada, ed. Jeanette Lynes, 117–28. Lockeport, NS: Roseway Publishing. MacDonald, Hugh, and Brent MacLaine, eds. 2001. Landmarks: An Anthology of New Atlantic Canadian Poetry of the Land. Charlottetown: Acorn Press. Macdonald, Vivian. 2005. Giving It the College Try. Toronto Star (22 Oct.): H10. Mackey, Frank. 2004. Black Then: Blacks and Montreal, 1780s–1880s. Montreal and Kingston: McGillQueen’s University Press. Mackey, Nathaniel. 1993. Discrepant Engagement: Dissonance, Cross-Culturality, and Experimental Writing. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. MacLeish, Archibald. [1926] 1993. Ars Poetica. In The Broadview Anthology of Poetry, ed. Herbert Rosengarten and Amanda Goldrick-Jones, 493. Peterborough, ON: Broadview Press. Macon, Wanda. 1997. Charles H. Fuller, Jr. In Andrews et al. 1997, 301–2. Madden, Paula C. 2009. African Nova Scotian–Mi’kmaw Relations. Halifax: Fernwood Publishing. Mahlis, Kristen. 2005. M. NourbeSe Philip: Language, Place, and Exile. Journal of West Indian Literature 14.1/2 (Nov.): 166–201. Mailer, Norman. 1964. The Presidential Papers of Norman Mailer. Toronto: Bantam Books. Makin, Peter. 1992. Pound’s Cantos. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Makolkin, Anna. 2002. Transporting Italianness through the Ages. Italian Canadiana 16: 71–90. Mandiela, Ahdri Zhina. 1991. Dark Diaspora – in Dub: A Dub Theatre Piece. Toronto: Sister Vision Press. Mao Tse-Tung. 1968. Four Essays on Philosophy. Peking: Foreign Languages Press. Marrant, John. 1785. The Narrative of the Lord’s Wonderful Dealings with John Marrant, a Black (Now Going to Preach the Gospel in Nova-Scotia) Born in New-York, in North America. London: Gilbert and Plummer, 1785. – [1785] 1991. The Narrative of the Lord’s Wonderful Dealings with John Marrant, a Black (Now Going to Preach the Gospel in Nova-Scotia) Born in New-York, in North America. In G.E. Clarke 1991a, 40–8. Marshall, Susanne. 2004. Words Doing Battle. Review of Odysseys Home: Mapping African-Canadian Literature, by George Elliott Clarke. Postcolonial Text 1.1. Accessed at postcolonial.org/index.php/pct. Marshall, Yannick. 2004. Statement. In Richardson and Green 2004, 81. Martin, H., and G. Smith. 1980. Cultural Continuity between American Blacks and the Blacks of Nova Scotia. Unpublished manuscript. Martin, Tony. [1943] 1999. Foreword to the Second Edition. In Best Poems of Trinidad, comp. A.M. Clarke, ix–xiii. Dover, MA: Majority Press. Mascoll, Philip. 2000. Mother England and Her Long Reach. Toronto Star (15 Nov.): A34. Mason, Theodore O. 1997. Signifying. In Andrews et al. 1997, 665–6. New York: Oxford University Press.

bibliography

291

Matthews, John. 1965. The Canadian Experience. In Commonwealth Literature: Unity and Diversity in a Common Culture, ed. John Press, 21–31. London: Heinemann Educational Books. Mayr, Suzette. 1991. Zebra Talk. Calgary: disOrientation Press. – 1995. Moon Honey. Edmonton: NeWest Press. – 1998. The Widows. Edmonton: NeWest Press. – 1999. Drei Witwen und ein Wasserfall: Roman. [The Widows]. Trans. Christine Struh and Ursula Wulfekamp. Munich: Schneekluth, 1999. Mazza, Antonino. 1978a. Canadese. In Di Cicco 1978, 39. – 1978b. Death in Italy. In Di Cicco 1978, 40–1. McCarthy, Dermot. 1991. Early Canadian Literary Histories and the Function of a Canon. In Canadian Canons: Essays in Literary Value, ed. Robert Lecker, 30–45. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. McCrae, John. [1915] 1982. In Flanders Fields. In The New Oxford Book of Canadian Verse in English, ed. Margaret Atwood, 61. Toronto: Oxford University Press. McKay, Claude. [1919] 1963. If We Must Die. In American Negro Poetry, ed. Arna Bontemps, 31. New York: Hill and Wang. McKerrow, Peter E. 1895. A Brief History of the Coloured Baptists of Nova Scotia, and Their First Organization as Churches, A.D. 1832. Halifax: Nova Scotia Printing Company. – [1895] 1976. McKerrow: A Brief History of the Coloured Baptists of Nova Scotia, 1783–1895, ed. Frank Stanley Boyd, Jr. Halifax: Afro-Nova Scotian Enterprises. McKittrick, Katherine. 2001. ‘Their Blood Is There, and They Can’t Throw It Out’: Honouring Black Canadian Geographies. Topia 7: 27–37. McLuhan, Marshall. 1966. Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. Toronto: New American Library of Canada / Signet Books. McNaught, Kenneth. 1978. The Pelican History of Canada. London: Allen Lane / Penguin Books. McTair, Roger, ed. 1995. The Black Experience in the White Mind: Meditations on a Persistent Discourse. Toronto: Author. McWatt, Mark, and Hazel Simmons-McDonald. 1994. A World of Poetry for CXC. Oxford: Heinemann Educational Publishers. Michaels, Walter Benn. 1996. ‘You who never was there ’: Slavery and the New Historicism, Deconstruction and the Holocaust. Narrative 4.1 (Jan.): 1–16. Miller, Henry. 1963. A Saturday Afternoon. In Black Spring, by Henry Miller, 35–55. New York: Grove Press. Milot, Micheline. 2003. From Tolerance to Religious Acceptance. Canadian American Research Symposium 1.1 (fall): 36–9. Milton, John. [1674] 1962. Paradise Lost: A Poem in Twelve Books. New York: Odyssey Press. Minutes of the Eighth Session of the African Baptist Association of Nova Scotia. 1861. Halifax: African Baptist Association of Nova Scotia. Mitchell, Mary Niall. 2002. ‘Rosebloom and Pure White,’ Or So It Seemed. American Quarterly 54.3 (Sept.): 369–410. Moodie, Susanna. [1852] 1989. Roughing It in the Bush: Or, Life in Canada. Toronto: McClelland & Stewart. Mordecai, Pamela. 1994. Publishing in the Caribbean. Interview conducted by Holger G. Ehling. In Caribbean Writers: Between Orality and Writing / Les Auteurs Caribéens: entre l’oralité et l’écriture, ed. Marlies Glaser and Marion Pausch, 171–7. Amsterdam: Rodopi. Mordecai, Pam, and Betty Wilson, eds. 1992. Introduction. In Women Poets of the Caribbean. Special Issue. Literary Review 35.4 (summer): 445–8.

292 bibliography Mori, Aoi. 2003. Review of Negritude Women, by T. Denean Sharpley-Whiting. African American Review 37.4 (winter): 658–60. Morris, Mervyn, ed. 1990. The Faber Book of Contemporary Caribbean Short Stories. London: Faber and Faber. Morrison, Toni. Sula. [1973] 1982. New York: Penguin / Plume. – [1977] 1987. Song of Solomon. New York: Penguin / Plume. – 1992. Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. – 1997. The Official Story: Dead Man Golfing. In Morrison and Lacour 1997, vii–xxviii.. Morrison, Toni, and Claudia Brodsky Lacour, eds. 1997. Birth of a Nation ’hood: Gaze, Script, and Spectacle in the O.J. Simpson Case. New York: Pantheon. Mortune, Felizze. 1976. The raping of the womb. In Head 1976, 102. Moses, Wilson Jeremiah. 1988. The Golden Age of Black Nationalism, 1850–1925. New York: Oxford University Press. Moynagh, Maureen. 2002. Introduction. In Essays on Race and Empire, by Nancy Cunard, 9–63. Toronto: Broadview Press. – ed. 2005. African-Canadian Theatre: Critical Perspectives on Canadian Theatre in English. Vol. 2. Toronto: Playwrights Canada Press. Naipaul, V.S. [1962] 1969. The Middle Passage. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Nancoo, Stephen E., et al., ed. 1995. Indo-Caribbean-Canadian Who’s Who: Profiles of Achievement. Mississauga, ON: Canadian Educators Press. Naylor, R.T. 1975. The History of Canadian Business, 1867–1914. Vol. 2. Industrial Development. Toronto: Lorimer. Neal, Mark Anthony. 2003. Songs in the Key of Black Life: A Rhythm and Blues Nation. New York: Routledge. Neith. 1903. Saint John, NB (Feb.): n.p. Neruda, Pablo. 1972. New Poems (1968–1970). Ed. and trans. Ben Belitt. New York: Grove Press. New, W.H., ed. 1989. A History of Canadian Literature. Houndmills, UK: Macmillan. – ed. 2002. Encyclopedia of Literature in Canada. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Newton, Norman. 1974. Classical Canadian Poetry and the Public Muse. In Colony and Confederation: Early Canadian Poets and Their Background, ed. George Woodcock, 7–23. Vancouver: UBC Press. Nielsen, Aldon Lynn. 1997a. Black Chant: Languages of African-American Postmodernism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. – 1997b. C.L.R. James: A Critical Introduction. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi. – 2001. Ezra Pound and ‘The Best-Known Colored Man in the United States.’ In Ezra Pound and African American Modernism, ed. Michael Coyle, 143–56. Orono, ME: National Poetry Foundation. Niemi, Fo. 1997. Quebec, Canada and Multiculturalism: A Vision for the 21st Century. In Cardozo and Musto 1997, 164–72. Ottawa: PSI Publishing. Nishiguchi, R.L. Gabrielle. 1997. True North Strong and Hyphen-Free. In Cardozo and Musto, 111–14. Nolan, Faith. 1986. Marie Joseph Angelique. Africville. Record album. Noland, Carrie. 1997. Poetry at Stake: Blaise Cendrars, Cultural Studies, and the Future of Poetry in the Literature Classroom. PMLA 112.1 (Jan.): 40–55. Nolde, John J. 1984. Blossoms from the East: The China Cantos of Ezra Pound. Orono, ME: National Poetry Foundation and the University of Maine. Nortje, Arthur. 1973a. Dead Roots. London: Heinemann. – 1973b. Lonely against the Light. Grahamstown, SA: New Coin.

bibliography

293

– 1976. Immigrant. In Head 1976, 112–13. – 2000. Anatomy of Dark: Collected Poems of Arthur Nortje. Ed. Dirk Klopper. Pretoria: University of South Africa Press. – 2002a. Hope hotel. In Compton 2002, 152. – 2002b. Immigrant. In Compton 2002, 149–51. – 2002c. Waiting. In Compton 2002, 147–8. Nurse, Donna Bailey, ed. 2006. Revival: An Anthology of Black Canadian Writing. Toronto: McClelland & Stewart. Odhiambo, David. 1998. diss/ed banded nation. Victoria, BC: Polestar. Oliver, Pearleen. 1953. A Brief History of the Coloured Baptists of Nova Scotia, 1782–1953. Halifax: African United Baptist Association of Nova Scotia. – 1994. Song of the Spirit: 150th Anniversary, Beechville United Baptist Church. Hantsport, NS: Lancelot Press. Oliver, W.P. [1949] 1991. The Negro in Nova Scotia. In G.E. Clarke 1991a, 129–35. Omolade, Barbara. 1994. The Rising Song of African American Women. New York: Routledge. Oni the Haitian Sensation [Oni Joseph]. 2006. Ghettostocracy. Toronto: McGilligan Books. Osborne, Richard E. 2004. If Hitler Had Won: The Plans He Made, The Plans He Carried Out, The Plans He Hoped to Achieve. Indianapolis: Riebel-Roque. Osinubi, Taiwo Adetunji. 2004. Odysseys. Review of Odysseys Home: Mapping African-Canadian Literature, by George Elliott Clarke. Canadian Literature 182 (autumn): 102–3. Ottley, C.R., comp. 1966. Sayings of Trinidad and Tobago: Old and New. Little Books on Trinidad and Tobago, no. 3. Trinidad: Ottley. Ovid (Publius Ovidius Naso). 1955. The Metamorphoses. Trans. Mary M. Innes. Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin. Owram, D.R. 1988. Imperialism. In The Canadian Encyclopedia, 2nd ed. ed. James H. Marsh. 2: 1049–50. Edmonton: Hurtig. Padmore, George. [1956] 1972. Pan-Africanism or Communism? New York: Anchor Books / Doubleday. Palmer, C. Everard. [1951] 1982. The Broken Vessel. Kingston, Jamaica: Heinemann Educational Books. Paris, Cherry M. 2001. Windsor Plains United Baptist Church: A Brief History. Windsor, NS: Windsor Plains United Baptist Church. Paris, Peter J. 1989. The Moral, Political and Religious Significance of the Black Churches in Nova Scotia. Cherrybrook, NS: Black Cultural Centre for Nova Scotia. – 1996. David George: Paramount Ancestral Father of the Black Church in the United States, Canada, and Sierra Leone. The 1995 Alumnus of the Year Address. Criterion 35.1 (winter): 2–9. Paton, Alan. 1948. Cry, the Beloved Country. San Francisco: Charles Scribner’s Sons. Patteson, Richard F. 1998. Caribbean Passages: A Critical Perspective on New Fiction from the West Indies. Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner / Three Continents. Petesch, Donald. 1989. A Spy in the Enemy’s Country: The Emergence of Modern Black Literature. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press. Philip, M. NourbeSe. 1988. Harriet’s Daughter. Toronto: Women’s Press; Oxford: Heinemann. – 1989. She Tries Her Tongue, Her Silence Softly Breaks. Charlottetown: Ragweed Press. – 1992. Frontiers: Essays and Writings on Racism and Culture. Toronto: Mercury Press. – 1997. A Genealogy of Resistance and Other Essays. Toronto: Mercury Press. – 2002. Interview by G.E. Clarke. 17 April. Toronto. Pieterse, Cosmo, ed. 1971. Seven South African Poets. London: Heinemann. Pignataro, Tony. 1978. The Immigrant. In Di Cicco 1978, 48–9.

294 bibliography Piper, Adrian. [1986] 1994. Vanilla Nightmares #8. Illustration. In Black Male: Representations of Masculinity in Contemporary American Art, ed. Thelma Golden, 81. New York: Whitney Museum of Modern Art. Pivato, Joseph. 1994. Echo: Essays on Other Literatures. Toronto: Guernica. – ed. 1998. The Anthology of Italian-Canadian Writing. Toronto: Guernica. Plath, Sylvia. 1965. Ariel. London: Faber & Faber. A Poet of the Streets. 1977. Caribbean Contact 5.4 (July): 24. Posey, Thomas. 1983. Preface. In The AfriCanadian Church: A Stabilizer, by Dorothy Shadd Shreve, 7–17. Jordan Station, ON: Paideia Press. Postgraduate Information Pamphlet, 2000–2001. 2000. Department of Language, Linguistics and Literature. Cave Hill, Barbados: University of the West Indies, Cave Hill Campus. Pound, Ezra. [1910] 2005. The Spirit of Romance. New York: New Directions. – 1957. A Pact. In Selected Poems of Ezra Pound, by Ezra Pound, 27. New York: New Directions. – 1998. The Cantos of Ezra Pound. New York: New Directions. Pratt, E.J. 1940. Brébeuf and His Brethren. Toronto: Macmillan. Prevatte, Ceronne. 2000. Interview by G.E. Clarke. 16 Dec. Port-of-Spain, Trinidad. Prince, Althea. 1993. Ladies of the Night and Other Stories. Toronto: Sister Vision Press. – 2001. Being Black: Essays. Toronto: Insomniac. Prince, Mary. 1831. The History of Mary Prince: A West Indian Slave. Ed. Susanna Moodie. London: Maunder. Publisher’s Note. 1973. In Dead Roots, by Arthur Nortje. London: Heinemann. Quan, Andy. 1999. Introduction. Swallowing Clouds: An Anthology of Chinese-Canadian Poetry, ed. Andy Quan and Jim Wong-Chu, 7–10. Vancouver: Arsenal Pulp Press. Questel, Victor D. 1977. Review of The Mad Woman of Papine and The Friend, by Slade Hopkinson. Caribbean Contact 5.4 (July): 3. Radano, Ronald M. 1996. Critical Alchemy: Anthony Braxton and the Imagined Tradition. In Jazz among the Discourses, ed. Krin Gabbard, 189–216. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Ramchand, K., and C. Gray. 1980. West Indian Poetry. In Report of the CXC English … Workshop Held at the School of Education, UWI, St. Augustine, 1980, 1–8. St. Augustine, Trinidad: School of Education, University of the West Indies. Ramchand, Kenneth. [1970] 2004. The West Indian Novel and Its Background. Kingston, Jamaica: Ian Randle Publishers. Ramey, Lauri. 2002. The Theology of the Lyric Tradition in African American Spirituals. Journal of the American Academy of Religion 70.2 (June): 347–63. Richardson, Karen. 2004a. A Footfall in the Snow. Afterword in Richardson and Green 2004, 165–6. – 2004b. The Story of My Life. In Richardson and Green 2004, 68–70. Richardson, Karen, and Steven Green, eds. 2004. T-Dot Griots: An Anthology of Toronto’s Black Storytellers. Victoria, BC: Trafford Publishing. Rivers, Conrad Kent. 1964. Four Sheets to the Wind and a One-Way Ticket to France, 1933. In American Negro Poetry, ed. Arna Bontemps, 176–7. New York: Hill & Wang. Roberts, Alfie. 2005. A View for Freedom: Alfie Roberts Speaks. Ed. David Austin. Montreal: Alfie Roberts Institute. Roberts, Peter A. 1988. West Indians and Their Language. New York: Cambridge University Press. Robertson, John William. 1854. The Book of the Bible against Slavery. Halifax: Author. – [1854] 1991. The Book of the Bible against Slavery. In G.E. Clarke 1991a, 58–64.

bibliography

295

Robinson, Lisa. 1999. Slave Narratives. In Africana: The Encyclopedia of the African and African American Experience, ed. Kwame Anthony Appiah and Henry Louis Gates Jr., 1717–19. New York: Basic / Civitas Books. Rohlehr, Gordon. 1980. Comparative Reading. In Report of the CXC English … Workshop held at the School of Education, UWI, St. Augustine, 1980, 29–42. St. Augustine, Trinidad: School of Education, University of the West Indies. – 2000. Interview by G.E. Clarke. 18 Dec. St. Augustine, Trinidad. Roper, Moses. 1838. A Narrative of the Adventures and Escape of Moses Roper, from American Slavery with an Appendix Containing a List of Places Visited by the Author in Great Britain and Ireland and the British Isles, and Other Matter. London: Darton, Harvey and Darton. Rose, Tricia. 1994. Rap Music and the Demonization of Young Black Males. In Black Male: Representations of Masculinity in Contemporary American Art, ed. Thelma Golden, 149–57. New York: Whitney Museum of Modern Art. Rosenfeld, Alvin H. 1981. Steiner’s Hitler. Salmagundi 52–3 (spring–summer): 160–74. Ross-Frankson, Joan. 1992. Introduction – A Word to Women Writers: This Book’s For You! In Publishing Handbook for Caribbean Women Writers, 7–9. Caribbean Association for Feminist Research and Action. Tunapuna, Trinidad: CAFRA. Royal Canadian Mounted Police. 1935. The Hefferman [sic] Case. In Journal of Assembly: Appendix 27, 10. Halifax: Nova Scotia Assembly. Saal, H. 1977. Two Free Spirits. Newsweek (8 Aug.): 52–3. Salvatore, Filippo. 1978. Three Poems for Giovanni Caboto. In Di Cicco 1978, 13–16. – 1998. Fascism and the Italians of Montreal: An Oral History, 1922–1945. Trans. George Tombs. Toronto: Guernica. Sandiford, Robert Edison. 2003. Sand for Snow: A Caribbean-Canadian Chronicle. Montreal: DC Books. – 1998. West Indians on a Frozen Landscape. Antigonish Review 115 (autumn): 69–72. Sarsfield, Mairuth. 1997. No Crystal Stair: A Novel. Norval, ON: Moulin Publishing. Sartre, Jean-Paul. 1968. Preface. In The Wretched of the Earth, by Frantz Fanon, 7–31. New York: Grove. – 1976. Black Orpheus. Trans. S.W. Allen. Paris: Présence Africaine. Saul, John Ralston. 1998. Reflections of a Siamese Twin: Canada at the End of the Twentieth Century. Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin. Saunders, Charles R. 1994. Share and Care: The Story of the Nova Scotia Home for Colored Children. Halifax: Nimbus Publishing. Saunders, Patricia. 2005. Trying Tongues, E-raced Identities, and the Possibilities of Be/longing: Conversations with NourbeSe Philip. Journal of West Indian Literature 14.1/2 (Nov.): 202–19. Scaggs, John. 2005. Crime Fiction. London: Routledge. Scantlebury, Michael G. 1982. The Geography in the Novels of Austin ‘Tom’ Clarke. PhD diss., University of the West Indies. Scobie, Stephen. 1991. Alias Bob Dylan. Red Deer, AB: Red Deer College Press. Scobie, Stephen, and Douglas Barbour, eds. 1999. CARNIVOCAL: A Celebration of Sound Poetry. Red Deer, AB: Red Deer College Press. Scott, F.R. [1927] 1982. The Canadian Authors Meet. In The New Oxford Book of Canadian Verse in English, ed. Margaret Atwood, 91. Toronto: Oxford University Press. Sealey, Donna Byard. 2001. Colored Zion: The History of Zion United Baptist Church and the Black Community of Truro, Nova Scotia. Dartmouth, NS: Author. Sears, Djanet. 1990. Afrika Solo. Toronto: Sister Vision.

296 bibliography – ed. 2000. Testifyin’: Contemporary African Canadian Drama. Toronto: Playwrights Canada Press. – ed. 2003. Testifyin’: Contemporary African Canadian Drama. Vol. 2. Toronto: Playwrights Canada Press. Sechaba. 1967–90. 24 volumes. Dar es Salaam: African National Congress of South Africa. Selvon, Samuel. [1975] 1984. Moses Ascending. London: Heinemann. Senior, Olive. 1995. Gardening in the Tropics. Toronto: McClelland & Stewart. Shadd, Adrienne. 1996. Memory, Race and Silence: The Poetry of Anna Minerva Henderson (1887–1987). Unpublished manuscript. Shadd, Mary Ann. [1852] 1998. A Plea for Emigration, or, Notes of Canada West. Detroit: Pattison, 1852. Repr. Toronto: Mercury Press. Shakespeare, William. 1594. 1995. The Most Lamentable Roman Tragedy of Titus Andronicus. Ed. Jonathan Bate. The Arden Shakespeare, 3rd series. London: Routledge. – [1604] 1964. Measure for Measure. Ed. S. Nagarajan. New York: Signet. Shakur, Sanyika [Monster Kody Scott] 1994. Monster: The Autobiography of an L.A. Gang Member. New York: Penguin Books. Shange, Ntozake. [1977] 1981. for colored girls who have considered suicide / when the rainbow is enuf. Toronto: Bantam. Sherman, Joan, ed. 1992. African-American Poetry of the Nineteenth Century: An Anthology. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Shih, Shu-mei. 2004. Global Literature and the Technologies of Recognition. PMLA 119.1 (Jan.): 16–30. Shreve, Dorothy Shadd. 1983. The AfriCanadian Church: A Stabilizer. Jordan Station, ON: Paideia Press. Sieburth, Richard. [1948] 2003. Introduction. In The Pisan Cantos, by Ezra Pound, ix–xliii. New York: New Directions Publishing. Siegfried, André. [1907] 1978. The Race Question in Canada. Ed. and trans. Frank H. Underhill. Toronto: Macmillan. Simmonds, Christie Cromwell. 2006. The Colours of My Memories. Lockeport, NS: Community Books. Sinclair, John. 1971. A Review of Marion Brown’s Le Temps Fou. In Music and Politics, by John Sinclair and Robert Levin, 9–13. New York: World Publishing Company. Sinclair, Lister. 1954. The Canadian Idiom. In Our Sense of Identity: A Book of Canadian Essays, ed. Malcolm Ross, 234–40. Toronto: Ryerson Press. Slim, Iceberg [Robert Beck]. [1969] 1987. Pimp: The Story of My Life. Los Angeles: Holloway House. Smallwood, Thomas. [1851] 2000. A Narrative of Thomas Smallwood (Coloured Man). Ed. Richard Almonte. Toronto: Mercury Press. Smith, Charles C., ed. 1985. sad dances in a field of white. Toronto: Is Five Press. Sobol, John. 1999. Anti-Anthrax Thorax: Sound Poetry in the Post-Literate Age. Review of CARNIVOCAL: A Celebration of Sound Poetry, by Stephen Scobie and Douglas Barbour. MIX 25.3 (winter 1999– 2000): 38–40. – 2002. Digitopia Blues: Race, Technology, and the American Voice. Banff, AB: Banff Centre Press. Solway, David. 2002. The Colour of Literature. Books in Canada 31.4 (June/July): 35–6. Spencer, William David. 1998. Chanting Change around the World through Rasta Ridim and Art. In Chanting Down Babylon: The Rastafari Reader, ed. Nathaniel Samuel Murrell, William David Spencer, and Adrian Anthony McFarlane, 266–83. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. Spray, W.A. 1972. The Blacks in New Brunswick. Fredericton: Brunswick Press. Springer, Eintou Pearl. 2000. Interview by G. E. Clarke. 12 Dec. Port of Spain, Trinidad. Stanford, C. Lloyd. 1997. How to Advance National Unity: A Professional and Personal Perspective. In Cardozo and Musto 1997, 173–82.

bibliography

297

States, Wellington N. 1903. Hymns Sung at the Services. Halifax: Author. Steeves, David. 2009. Maniacal Murderer or Death Dealing Car: The Case of Daniel Perry Sampson 1933–1935. Unpublished manuscript. Steward, [Theophilus] Austin. 1856. Twenty-Two Years a Slave, and Forty Years a Freeman; Embracing a Correspondence of Several Years, While President of Wilberforce Colony. Rochester, NY: Alling & Cory. Steyn, Mark. 2003. The Death of Europe as We Know It. National Post (13 March): A18. Still, William, comp. 1872. The Underground Rail Road. Philadelphia: Porter and Coates. Stone, Marjorie. 1997. The Poet as Whole-Body Camera: Maxine Tynes and the Pluralities of Otherness. Dalhousie Review 77.2 (summer): 227–58. Strange, Carolyn, and Tina Loo. 2004. True Crime, True North: The Golden Age of Canadian Pulp Magazines. Vancouver: Raincoast Books. Surette, Leon. 1991. Creating the Canadian Canon. In Canadian Canons: Essays in Literary Value, ed. Robert Lecker, 17–29. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. – 1993. The Birth of Modernism: Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot, W.B. Yeats, and the Occult. Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press. Swabey, Henry. [1950] 1973. Towards an A.B.C. of History. In An Examination of Ezra Pound, ed. Peter Russell, 186–202. New York: Gordian Press. Tatsumi, Takayumi. 2004. Literary History on the Road: Transatlantic Crossings and Transpacific Crossovers. PMLA 119.1 (Jan.): 92–102. Tepper, Elliott L. 1997. Multiculturalism as a Response to an Evolving Society. In Cardozo and Musto 1997, 183–200. Thomas, H. Nigel. 1995. How Loud Can the Village Cock Crow? In Stories, by H. Nigel Thomas, 1–124. St-Laurent, QC: AFO Enterprises. – 1999. Moving through Darkness. St-Laurent, QC: AFO Enterprises. – 2006. Why We Write: Conversations with African Canadian Poets and Novelists. Toronto: TSAR. Thompson, Andrea. 2002. Performance Poetry. Fine Print (winter): 21. Thurston, John. 2002. Susanna Moodie. In Encyclopedia of Literature in Canada, ed. W.H. New, 752–55. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. To, Lillian. 1997. A Must for B.C., a Must for Canada. In Cardozo and Musto 1997, 201–6. Toomer, Jean. [1923] 1988. Cane. New York: W.W. Norton. Troy, William. 1861. Hair-Breadth Escapes from Slavery to Freedom. Manchester, UK: W. Bremner. Trudel, Marcel. 1960. L’Esclavage au Canada français. Montreal: Les Éditions de l’horizon. Turner, Nat. [1831] 1998. The Confessions of Nat Turner. Ed. Thomas R. Gray. In Hill et al. 1998, 420–32. Tynes, Maxine. 1987. Borrowed Beauty. Lawrencetown Beach, NS: Pottersfield Press. – 1990. Woman Talking Woman. Lawrencetown Beach, NS: Pottersfield Press. – 1991. Save the World for Me. Lawrencetown Beach, NS: Pottersfield Press. – 1993. The Door of My Heart. Lawrencetown Beach, NS: Pottersfield Press. Underhill, Frank H. 1978. Introduction to The Race Question in Canada [1907], by André Siegfried. Carleton Library Edition, ed. Frank H. Underhill, 1–13. Toronto: Macmillan. Vaidhyanathan, Siva. 1997. Jazz. In Andrews et al. 1997, 395–6. Valpy, Michael. 1994. After the Funeral: A Look at Social Order. Globe and Mail (12 April): A2. Van Deburg, William L. 1984. Slavery and Race in Popular American Culture. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. Vennin, Loic. 1994–5. Les AfroAcadiens. Petit-Rocher (NB) Le Ven’ d’est (winter): 16–17.

298 bibliography Vernon, Karina. 2004. Writing a Home for Prairie Blackness: Adeena Sumter Freitag’s Stay Black and Die and Cheryl Foggo’s Pourin’ Down Rain. Canadian Literature 182 (autumn): 67–83. Walcott, Derek. 1993. The Odyssey: A Stage Version. New York: Farrar Straus Giroux / Noonday Press. Walcott, Rinaldo. 1997. Black Like Who? Toronto: Insomniac Press. – 1999. Rhetorics of Blackness, Rhetorics of Belonging. Canadian Review of American Studies 29.2: 1–24. Walker, A.B. 1890. The Negro Problem; or, the Philosophy of Race Development from a Canadian Viewpoint. Atlanta: Author. – 1901. Victoria the Good: The Great and Glorious Mother of Liberty, Justice, Right, Truth and Equity, of Modern Civilization; and the Mightiest Force for Righteousness in the World since the Time of Jesus: A Lecture. Saint John, NB: Author. – 1905. A Message to the Public. Saint John, NB: African Civilization Movement. Walker, David. 1829. David Walker’s Appeal, in Four Articles; Together with a Preamble, to the Coloured Citizens of the World, but in Particular, and Very Expressly, to Those of the United States of America. Boston: n.p. Walker, James St. G. 1976. The Black Loyalists: The Search for a Promised Land in Nova Scotia and Sierra Leone, 1783–1870. Halifax: Dalhousie University Press. – 1985. The Black Identity in Nova Scotia: Community and Institutions in Historical Perspective. Cherrybrook, NS: Black Cultural Centre for Nova Scotia. Walkiewicz, E.P., and Hugh Witemeyer, eds. 1995. Ezra Pound and Senator Bronson Cutting: A Political Correspondence, 1930–1935. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press. Wallenstein, Barry. 1991. Poetry and Jazz: A Twentieth-Century Wedding. Black American Literature Forum 25.3 (fall): 595–620. Walmsley, Anne. 1992. The Caribbean Artists Movement, 1966–1972: A Literary and Cultural History. London: New Beacon Books. Walser, Robert. 1996. ‘Out of Notes’: Signification, Interpretation, and the Problem of Miles Davis. In Jazz among the Discourses, ed. Krin Gabbard, 165–88. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Ward, Fred. 1964. Poems. Albuquerque, NM: Duende. – ed. 1966. Anthology of Nine Baha’i Poets. Detroit: n.p. – ed. 1972. Present Tense. Halifax: New Options School. – 1974. Riverlisp: Black Memories. Montreal: Tundra Books. – 1977. Nobody Called Me Mine. Montreal: Tundra Books. – 1981. A Room Full of Balloons. Montreal: Tundra Books. – 1983. The Curing Berry. Toronto: Williams-Wallace. – 1992a. The Death of Lady Susuma. In G.E. Clarke 1992, 21–23. – 1992b. Dialogue #3: Old Man (to the Squatter). In G.E. Clarke 1992, 19–20. Ward, Samuel Ringgold. 1855. Autobiography of a Fugitive Negro: His Anti-Slavery Labours in the United States, Canada, & England. London: J. Snow. Warner, Ashton. 1831a. Ashton Warner, A Native of St. Vincents. Ed. Susanna Moodie. London: Maunder. – 1831b. Negro Slavery Described by a Negro. Being the Narrative of Ashton Warner, a Native of St. Vincents. London: Maunder. Warner, Gary. 1974. Bertène Juminer: The Ethics of Revolt. Black Images 3.3 (autumn): 3–18. Washington, Booker T. 1901. Up from Slavery: An Autobiography. New York: Doubleday, Page, & Co. Wasserman, Jerry. 1998. Where the Soul Still Dances: The Blues and Canadian Drama. Essays on Canadian Writing 65 (fall): 56–75.

bibliography

299

Waters, Erika J. 1994. New Writing from the Caribbean: Selections from the Caribbean Writers. London: Macmillan. Wells, H.G. 1897. The Invisible Man. London: C. Arthur Pearson. Wheatley, Phillis. 1773. Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral. London: A. Bell. White, Armond. 1997. Eye, The Jury. In Morrison and Lacour 1997, 339–66. New York: Pantheon. White, Dorcas. 1977. The Press and the Law in the Caribbean. Part Two of the Report of the Workshop on Caribbean Women in Communication for Development, University of the West Indies, Mona Campus, Jamaica, June 13–15, 1975. Bridgetown, Barbados: Cedar Press. White, Hayden. 1985. Tropics of Discourse: Essays in Cultural Criticism. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. White, Theodore H. 1975. Breach of Faith: The Fall of Richard Nixon. New York: Atheneum Publishers and Reader’s Digest Press. Whitfield, Harvey Amani. 2006. Blacks on the Border: The Black Refugees in British North America, 1815– 1860. Burlington: University of Vermont Press. Williams, Sherley Anne. 1992. Two Words on Music: Black Community. In Black Popular Culture, by Sherley Anne Williams, 164–72. Seattle: Bay Press. Wilson-Tagoe, Nana. 2001. Historical Thought and Literary Representation in West Indian Literature. Gainesville: University Press of Florida. Winks, Robert [sic]. 1968. Canadian–West Indian Union: A Forty-Year Minuet. London: University of London / Athlone Press. Winks, Robin. 1997. The Blacks in Canada: A History. 2nd ed. Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press. Wiwa, Ken. 2000. In the Shadow of a Saint. Toronto: Knopf. Wolfe, Sairi. 2002. From Middle Class to High-class Escort. Toronto Star (14 April): A1, A8. Woodcock, George. 1997. Biography and Memoirs in English. In Benson and Toye 1997, 102–6. Wormeny, Lavina. [1861] 2004. Narrative of the Escape of a Poor Negro Woman from Slavery. Transcribed and edited by Anonymous. Montreal Gazette (31 Jan.). Repr. in Black Then: Blacks and Montreal, 1780s–1880s, by Frank Mackey, 162–6. Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press. Wortley, Scot, and Terry Roswell. 2006. Police Use of Force in Ontario: An Examination of Data from the Special Investigations Unit, Preliminary Report. Toronto: African Canadian Legal Clinic. Wright, Richard. [1940] 1998. Native Son. New York: HarperCollins / Perennial Classics. – 1957. White Man, Listen! New York: Doubleday. X, Malcolm. 1966. Malcolm X Speaks: Selected Speeches and Statements. London: Secker. young, d’bi [Debbie Young]. 2006. art on black. Toronto: Women’s Press. Young, Kevin. 2001. Visiting St. Elizabeths: Ezra Pound, Impersonation, and the Mask of the Modern Poet. In Ezra Pound and African American Modernism, ed. Michael Coyle, 185–204. Orono, ME: National Poetry Foundation.

This page intentionally left blank

Permissions

Works by George Elliott Clarke ‘“This is no hearsay”: Reading the Canadian Slave Narratives.’ Papers of the Bibliographical Society of Canada / Cahiers de la Société bibliographique du Canada 43.1 (spring 2005): 7–32. Reproduced with the permission of Dr. Jennifer J. Connor, Editor, Papers of the Bibliographical Society of Canada / Cahiers de la Société bibliographique du Canada. ‘Anna Minerva Henderson: An Afro-New Brunswick Response to Canadian (Modernist) Poetry.’ Canadian Literature 189 (summer 2006): 32–48. Reproduced with the permission of Donna Chin, managing editor of Canadian Literature. ‘Afro-Gynocentric Darwinism in the Drama of George Elroy Boyd.’ Canadian Theatre Review 118 (spring 2004): 77–84. Reproduced with the permission of Ms. Jessica Shulist, Permissions Department, University of Toronto Press. ‘Raising Raced and Erased Executions in African-Canadian Literature: Or, Unearthing Angélique.’ Essays on Canadian Writing 75 (winter 2002): 30–61. Reprinted in Racism, Eh? A Critical Inter-Disciplinary Anthology on Race in the Canadian Context. Ed. Camille A. Nelson and Charmaine A. Nelson. North York, ON: Captus Press, 2004, 65–84. Reproduced with the permission of Dr. Kevin Flynn, former editor of Essays on Canadian Writing. ‘Correspondences and Divergences between Italian-Canadian and African-Canadian Writers.’ In Canadian Multiculturalism: Dreams, Realities, Expectations. Ed. Matthew Zachariah, Allan Sheppard, and Leona Barratt. Edmonton: Canadian Multicultural Education Foundation, 2004, 99–108. (Conference Proceedings. ‘Canada: Model for a Multicultural State,’ Edmonton, 27 September 2003.) Revised and reprinted as ‘Let Us Compare Anthologies: Harmonizing the Founding African-Canadian and Italian-Canadian Literary Collections.’ In Belonging in Canada: Immigration and the Politics of Race and Ethnicity, proceedings from the 19th Annual Reddin Symposium. Ed. Mark Kasoff. Bowling Green, OH: Canadian Studies Center, Bowling Green State University, 2006, 37–57. Reproduced with the permission of Dr. Mark Kasoff, editor of the 2006 Reddin Symposium Proceedings.

302 permissions ‘The Idea of Europe in African-Canadian Literature.’ Zeitschrift für Kanada-Studien. Ed. Martin Kuenster 26.2 (2006): 39–60. Augsberg, Germany: Wisser-Verlag, 2006. Reproduced with the permission of Prof. Dr. Ingrid Neumann-Holzschuh, general editor of Zeitschrift für Kanada-Studien. ‘Does (Afro-) Caribbean-Canadian Literature Exist? In the Caribbean?’ Journal of West Indian Literature 14.1–2 (November 2005): 260–302. Reproduced with the permission of Dr. Victor L. Chang, chief editor of the Journal of West Indian Literature. ‘Repatriating Arthur Nortje.’ In Canadian Cultural Exchange: Translation and Transculturation. Ed. Norman Cheadle and Lucien Pelletier. Waterloo, ON: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2007, 121–38. Reproduced with the permission of Brian Henderson, Wilfrid Laurier University Press. ‘Frederick Ward: Writing as Jazz.’ Prairie Fire 26.4 (winter 2005–6): 4–31. © 2006 by George Elliott Clarke.

Other Works Despair and Other Stories of Ottawa © 1998 by André Alexis. Published by McClelland & Stewart. Used with permission from the Author. Excerpts from The Creation and Appreciation of Poetry and Lyrics (Port-of-Spain, Trinidad: Cynthia Allen, 1976), by Cynthia Allen, are reproduced with the kind permission of her sister, Mrs. Stephanie Ram. Excerpt from ‘I Fight Back,’ by Lillian Allen, is reproduced with the permission of Three O’Clock Press Inc. Excerpts from Negrophobia: Avant-Garde Paris and Black Culture in the 1920s, by Petrine Archer-Straw. © 2000 Petrine Archer-Straw. Reproduced by courtesy of Thames & Hudson Ltd., London. Excerpts from ‘The Unfinished Revolution: Linton Kwesi Johnson, C.L.R. James, Radical Pan-Africanism and the New Society’ (2003), by David Austin, are reproduced with the kind permission of David Austin. Excerpts from Virgin or Vamp: How the Press Covers Sex Crimes, by Helen Benedict (1992). By permission of Oxford University Press. Excerpts from ‘Black Immigrants in a Foreign Land,’ by Bertram Boldon, from Let the Niggers Burn! The Sir George Williams University Affair and Its Caribbean Aftermath, ed. Dennis Forsythe (Montreal: Black Rose Books – Our Generation Press, 1971), are reproduced with the kind permission of Bertram Boldon. Excerpts from Author Note, Consecrated Ground, and Gideon’s Blues, by George Elroy Boyd, from Two, By George! by George Elroy Boyd (La Have, NS: Stage Hand Publishers, 1996), are reproduced with the kind permission of his agent, Charles Northcote.

permissions

303

Excerpt from In Another Place, Not Here, by Dionne Brand © 1996 Dionne Brand. Reprinted by permission of Knopf Canada. Excerpt from A Map to the Door of No Return: Notes to Belonging, by Dionne Brand © 2001 Dionne Brand. Reprinted by permission of Doubleday Canada and Dionne Brand. Excerpts from ‘Historical Position No. 2’ and ‘The West Indian … a continuous position,’ by Vibert Cambridge, from Canada In Us Now: The First Anthology of Black Poetry and Prose in Canada, ed. Harold Head (Toronto: NC Canada Press, 1976), are reproduced with the kind permission of Vibert Cambridge. Excerpts from Come Back to Me My Language: Poetry and the West Indies (Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1993), by J. Edward Chamberlin, are reproduced with the kind permission of J. Edward Chamberlin. Excerpts from Whatever Your Will, Lord: A Brief History Written in Commemoration of the 139th anniversary of Emmanuel Baptist Church, Upper Hammonds Plains, Nova Scotia (Hantsport, NS: Lancelot Press, 1984), by Willard Parker Clayton, are reproduced with the kind permission of his widow, Jean Clayton. Excerpts from ‘Reverend Father Richard Preston: 1790–1861,’ by Shernera D. Colley, in Reflections: The East Preston United Baptist Church on Its 150th Anniversary, ed. Carolyn G. Thomas (Halifax: East Preston United Baptist Church 150th Anniversary Committee, 1996), are reproduced with the kind permission of Shernera D. Colley. Excerpts from ‘My Genealogy,’ by John Robert Colombo, from Roman Candles: An Anthology of Poems by Seventeen Italo-Canadian Poets, ed. Pier Giorgio Di Cicco (Toronto: Hounslow Press, 1978), are reproduced with the kind permission of John Robert Colombo. Excerpts from the Introduction, by Liz Cromwell, from One Out of Many: A Collection of Writings by 21 Black Women in Ontario (Toronto: WACACRO productions, 1975), ed. and comp. Liz Cromwell, and from the poem, ‘We have come,’ by Liz Cromwell, from Canada In Us Now: The First Anthology of Black Poetry and Prose in Canada, ed. Harold Head (Toronto: NC Canada Press, 1976), appear with the kind permission of her daughter, Mrs. Carol Clarke-Nash. Excerpts from the poetry, introduction, and biographical notes, composed by Pier Giorgio Di Cicco, from Roman Candles: An Anthology of Poems by Seventeen Italo-Canadian Poets, ed. Pier Giorgio Di Cicco (Toronto: Hounslow Press, 1978), are reproduced with the kind permission of Pier Giorgio Di Cicco. Excerpts from ‘Across the Atlantic’ and ‘Enigmatico,’ both by Mary di Michele, from Roman Candles: An Anthology of Poems by Seventeen Italo-Canadian Poets, ed. Pier Girogio Di Cicco (Toronto: Hounslow Press, 1978), are reproduced with the kind permission of Mary di Michele. Excerpts from Caliban Without Prospero: Essay on Quebec and Black Literature (Erin, ON: Press Porcépic, 1974), by Max Dorsinville, are reproduced with the kind permission of Max Dorsinville. Excerpts from ‘Trashing “Coolies,”’ by Shiraz Dossa, from Rungh 3.2 (1995), are reproduced with the kind permission of Shiraz Dossa.

304 permissions Excerpts from ‘The Trial of Marie-Joseph Angelique: Negress and Slave,’ by Lorris Elliott, from Other Voices: Writings by Blacks in Canada, ed. Lorris Elliott (Toronto: Williams-Wallace, 2005), are reproduced with the kind permission of his sister, Aura Meave Elliott Vaucrosson. Excerpts from Black Skin, White Masks by Frantz Fanon, copyright © 1967 by Grove Press, Inc. Used by permission of Grove/Atlantic, Inc. Excerpts from The Wretched of the Earth by Frantz Fanon, copyright © 1963 by Présence Africain. Used by permission of Grove/Atlantic, Inc. Excerpts from ‘Identity, Community, and Nation in Black Canadian Women’s Autobiography,’ by Bina Toledo Freiwald, from Identity, Community, Nation, ed. Danielle Schaub and Christl Verduyn (Jerusalem: Magnes Press, Hebrew University, 2002), are reproduced with the permission of the Hebrew University Magnes Press. Excerpts from ‘The Photograph of My Grandfather Reading Dante,’ by Len Gasparini, from Roman Candles: An Anthology of Poems by Seventeen Italo-Canadian Poets, ed. Pier Giorgio Di Cicco (Toronto: Hounslow Press, 1978), are reproduced with the kind permission of Len Gasparini. Excerpts from Angélique (Toronto: Playwrights Canada, 2000), by Lorena Gale, are reproduced with the permission of Playwrights Canada Press Ltd. Excerpt from Loose Canons: Notes on the Culture Wars, by Henry Louis Gates, Jr. (1992). By permission of Oxford University Press. Gates, Henry Louis, Jr. ‘Preface.’ In Thelma Golden, ed., Black Male: Representations of Masculinity in Contemporary American Art. New York: Whitney Museum of Modern Art, 1994, pp. 11–14. Excerpts reproduced with the permission of the Whitney Museum for American Art. Excerpts from ‘“Always a Poem, Once a Book”: Motivations and Strategies for Print Textualizing of Caribbean-Canadian Dub and Performance Poetry,’ Journal of West Indian Literature 14.1 & 2 (November 2005), by Susan Gingell, are reproduced with the kind permission of Susan Gingell. Excerpt from ‘This Is a Post Card’ was originally published in The Conception of Winter copyright © 1995 by Claire Harris. Reprinted by permission of Goose Lane Editions. Excerpt from ‘Jane in Summer’ was originally published in The Conception of Winter copyright © 1995 by Claire Harris. Reprinted by permission of Goose Lane Editions. Excerpt from ‘Kay’ was originally published in The Conception of Winter copyright © 1995 by Claire Harris. Reprinted by permission of Goose Lane Editions. Excerpt from ‘Post Cards: Under the Feet of Heaven’ was originally published in The Conception of Winter copyright © 1995 by Claire Harris. Reprinted by permission of Goose Lane Editions.

permissions

305

Excerpt from ‘Post Cards: Driving Down’ was originally published in The Conception of Winter copyright © 1995 by Claire Harris. Reprinted by permission of Goose Lane Editions. Excerpt from ‘[Three bells calm the passing hour]’ was originally published in The Conception of Winter copyright © 1995 by Claire Harris. Reprinted by permission of Goose Lane Editions. Excerpts from ‘Bad Woman,’ from Oxford Companion to African American Literature, by Trudier Harris, edited by William Andrews et al. (1997). By permission of Oxford University Press. Excerpts from ‘In Babylon,’ ‘Resumé,’ and ‘We have come,’ by Harold Head, from Canada In Us Now: The First Anthology of Black Poetry and Prose in Canada, ed. Harold Head (Toronto: NC Canada Press, 1976), are reproduced with the kind permission of Harold Head. hooks, bell. ‘Feminism Inside: Toward a Black Body Politic.’ In Thelma Golden, ed., Black Male: Representations of Masculinity in Contemporary American Art. New York: Whitney Museum of Modern Art, 1994, pp. 127–40. Excerpts reproduced with the permission of the Whitney Museum for American Art. Excerpts from Negrophobia: An Urban Parable (New York: Citadel Press, 1992), by Darius James, are reproduced with the kind permission of Darius James. Excerpts from Somebody’s Daughter: Inside the Toronto/Halifax Pimping Ring (Halifax: Nimbus, 1996), by Phonse Jessome, are reproduced with the permission of Nimbus Publishing. Excerpts from Our Thang: Several Poems, Several Drawings (Victoria, BC: Ekstasis Editions, 2001), by Ted Joans, are reproduced with the kind permission of Ekstasis Editions. Excerpt from Towards a Caribbean Literary Tradition (St. Augustine, Trinidad: Lloyd King, n.d.), are reproduced with the kind permission of Lloyd King. Excerpts from ‘Heirloom’ and ‘Montreal.’ by A.M. Klein, are reproduced with the kind permission of the Estate and the University of Toronto Press. Excerpts from Black Culture and Black Consciousness: Afro-American Folk Thought from Slavery to Freedom, by Lawrence Levine (1977). By permission of Oxford University Press. Excerpt from Black Culture and Black Consciousness: Afro-American Folk Thought from Slavery to Freedom by Lawrence Levine (1977). By permission of Oxford University Press. Excerpt from Oxford Companion to African-American Literature, by Wanda Macon, edited by William Andrews, et al (1997). By permission of Oxford University Press. Excerpt from ‘Signifying,’ from Oxford Companion to African-American Literature, by Theodore Mason, edited by William Andrews, et al (1997). By permission of Oxford University Press. Excerpts from ‘Canadese’ and ‘Death in Italy,’ by Antonino Mazza, from Roman Candles: An Anthology of

306 permissions Poems by Seventeen Italo-Canadian Poets, ed. Pier Giorgio Di Cicco (Toronto: Hounslow Press, 1978), are reproduced with the kind permission of Antonino Mazza. Excerpt from ‘Introduction,’ by Pam Mordecai and Betty Wilson, from ‘Women Poets of the Caribbean, Special Issue’ (The Literary Review 35.4 (summer 1992), ed. Pam Mordecai and Betty Wilson, is reproduced with the kind permission of Pam Mordecai and Betty Wilson. Excerpt from Golden Age of Black Nationalism, 1850–1925, by Wilson Jeremiah Moses (1988). By permission of Oxford University Press. Excerpt from ‘Classical Canadian Poetry and the Public Muse,’ by Norman Newton, from Colony and Confederation: Early Canadian Poets and Their Background, ed. George Woodcock (Vancouver: UBC Press, 1974), are reproduced with the kind permission of Norman Newton. ‘Affinity (for Maggie),’ ‘For Sylvia Plath,’ ‘Immigrant,’ ‘Initial Impulses,’ ‘Nasser is dead,’ ‘Under Landsdowne Bridge,’ from Anatomy of Dark: Collected Poems of Arthur Nortje, ed. Dirk Klopper (Pretoria: University of South Africa, 2000). Used by permission of University of South Africa (Unisa Press). Excerpts from A Brief History of the Coloured Baptists of Nova Scotia, 1782–1953 (Halifax: African United Baptist Association of Nova Scotia, 1953) and Song of the Spirit: 150th Anniversary, Beechville United Baptist Church (Hantsport, NS: Lancelot Press, 1994), both by Pearleen Oliver, are reproduced with the kind permission of her sons, Jules R. Oliver, Leslie H. Oliver, and Steven D. Oliver. Excerpts from Ghettostocracy (Toronto: McGilligan Books, 2006), by Oni the Haitian Sensation (Oni Joseph), are reproduced with the kind permission of Oni Joseph. Excerpts from The Moral, Political and Religious Significance of the Black Churches in Nova Scotia (Cherrybrook, NS: Black Cultural Centre for Nova Scotia, 1989), by Peter J. Paris, are reproduced with the kind permission of Peter J. Paris. Excerpts from ‘The Immigrant,’ by Tony Pignataro, from Roman Candles: An Anthology of Poems by Seventeen Italo-Canadian Poets, ed. Pier Giorgio Di Cicco (Toronto: Hounslow Press, 1978), are reproduced with the kind permission of Tony Pignataro. Excerpts from ‘Three Poems for Giovanni Caboto,’ by Filippo Salvatore, from Roman Candles: An Anthology of Poems by Seventeen Italo-Canadian Poets, ed. Pier Giorgio Di Cicco (Toronto: Hounslow Press, 1978), are reproduced with the kind permission of Filippo Salvatore. Excerpts from Preface, by Thomas Posey, from The AfriCanadian Church: A Stabilizer, by Dorothy Shadd Shreve (Jordan Station, ON: Paideia Press, 1983), are reproduced with the kind permission of his daughter, Anita Posey Lowe. Excerpts from Ladies of the Night: Stories (Toronto: Insomniac Press, 2000), by Althea Prince, are reproduced with the permission of Insomniac Press.

permissions

307

Excerpts from Being Black: Essays (Toronto: Insomniac Press, 2001), by Althea Prince, are reproduced with the permission of Insomniac Press. Excerpts from the Introduction, by Andy Quan, are reprinted from Swallowing Clouds: An Anthology of Chinese-Canadian Poetry, ed. Andy Quan and Jim Wong-Chu (Vancouver: Arsenal Pulp Press, 1999), with permission of the publisher. Excerpts from No Crystal Stair: A Novel (Norval, ON: Moulin Publishing, 1997), by Mairuth Sarsfield, are reproduced with the kind permission of Mairuth Sarsfield. Excerpt from New Oxford Book of Canadian Verse in English: ‘The Canadian Authors Meet,’ by F.R. Scott, edited by Margaret Atwood (1982). By permission of Oxford University Press. Excerpts from ‘Memory, Race and Silence: The Poetry of Anna Minerva Henderson (1887–1987),’ by Adrienne Shadd (1996), are reproduced with the kind permission of Adrienne Shadd. Excerpts from ‘A Review of Marion Brown’s Le Temps Fou,’ by John Sinclair, from Music and Politics, by John Sinclair and Robert Levin (New York: The World Publishing Company, 1971), are reproduced with the kind permission of John Sinclair. Excerpts from The Colours of My Memories (Lockeport, NS: Community Books, 2006), by Christie Cromwell Simmonds, are reproduced with the kind permission of her widower, Neville Simmonds. Excerpts from ‘Anti-Anthrax Thorax: Sound Poetry in the Post-Literate Age. Review of CARNIVOCAL: A Celebration of Sound Poetry, by Stephen Scobie and Douglas Barbour,’ by John Sobol, from MIX 25.3 (winter 1999/2000), are reproduced with the kind permission of John Sobol. Excerpts from Digitopia Blues: Race, Technology, and the American Voice (Banff, AB: Banff Centre Press, 2002), by John Sobol, are reproduced with the kind permission of John Sobol. Excerpts from ‘Emancipation,’ ‘The Empire Writes Back (To Whom? For What?),’ and ‘My People: 7 (for Audre Lorde),’ by H. Nigel Thomas, from Moving Through Darkness, (St-Laurent, QC: AFO Enterprises, 1999), are reproduced with the kind permission of H. Nigel Thomas. ‘Fern,’ ‘Blood-Burning Moon,’ from CANE by Jean Toomer. Copyright 1923 by Boni & Liveright, renewed 1951 by Jean Toomer. Used by permission of Liveright Publishing Corporation. Excerpts from the works of Maxine Tynes are reproduced with the kind permission of her power-ofattorney grantee, Wayne Thompson. Excerpt from Oxford Companion African- American Literature: ‘Jazz,’ by Siva Vaidhyanathan, edited by William Andrews, et al (1997). By permission of Oxford University Press. Excerpts from The Black Identity in Nova Scotia: Community and Institutions in Historical Perspective. Cher-

308 permissions rybrook, NS: Black Cultural Centre for Nova Scotia, 1985), by James St. G. Walker, are reproduced with the kind permission of James St. G. Walker. Excerpts from ‘Poetry and Jazz: A Twentieth-Century Wedding,’ by Barry Wallenstein, from Black American Literature Forum 25.3 (fall 1991), are reproduced with the kind permission of Barry Wallenstein. Excerpts from the works of Frederick Ward are reproduced with the kind permission of Frederick Ward. Excerpts from art on black, by d’bi.young (Toronto: The Women’s Press, 2006), are reproduced with the permission of Three O’Clock Press Inc.

NAME index

Abella, Irving 92 Acorn, Milton 174, 262n2 Adams, James 28 Adams, Nehemiah 214n4, 215n20 Adekola, B. Moses 225n37 Aesop 126 Albright, Daniel 257n17 Alexander, Lincoln 264n1 Alexander, Michael 270n42 Alexander, Simone A. James 118–19, 249n7 Alexis, André 14, 44, 114–15, 247nn47–8, 248nn3–4 Alim, H. Samy 181 Allen, Cynthia 125, 252n26 Allen, Lillian 3, 157, 190–1, 248n3, 249n11, 254n42, 267n17, 269n34 Alleyne, Vanessa 248n4 Almonte, Richard 5, 12–13, 20, 214n3, 216n29, 242n11 Alvarez-Pereyre, Jacques 144, 148, 259nn16–17, 260n21, 260n24 Anderson, Benedict 166 Anderson, Frank W. 232n6 Anderson, Maureen 272n14 Anderson III, T.J. 191–2, 197 Angélique, Marie-Josèphe 7, 14, 22, 78, 83–7, 89–90, 222n8, 234n20, 235–6nn30–3, 236n35 Antar (Antara Ibn Shaddad) 126 Appel, Alfred, Jr 179 Appiah, Kwame Anthony 271n5 Aquin, Hubert 119

Archer-Straw, Petrine 107–8, 243n21 Armstrong, Herbert W. 261n45 Armstrong, Louis 194, 196, 273n33 Arnold, A. James 11, 178–9, 244n30 Arnold, Matthew 29 Attucks, Crispus 232n2 Atwood, Margaret 118–19 Augustin, Désirée Sharon 123 Austin, David 127, 253nn36–7 Aylward, Carol A. 82 Bail, Micheline 84, 234n20, 235n24 Bailey, A. 49 Bailey, Lousia 49, 56 Bailey, Pearl 170 Bakan, Abigail B. 28 Baker, Houston 214n7, 218n24, 218n26 Baker, Josephine 114 Baldwin, James 11, 16, 79, 105, 107–8, 110, 147, 222–3n9, 225–6n41, 244n29 Balzac, Honoré de 32, 39 Bandara, Samuel B. 117 Baquaqua, Mahomma G. 22 Baraka, Amiri 191–2, 197, 274n43 Barbour, Douglas 191–2 Barreto-Rivera, Rafael 191 Baugh, Edward 117 Baum, Daniel J. 254n40 Beaugrand-Champagne, Denyse 235n24 Beaverbrook, Lord (William Aitken) 243n14 Beethoven, Ludwig van 16

310 name index Bell, Bernard 41 Bellocq, Ernest J. 73 Benedict, Helen 230n22 Bennett, Ethel Hume 31, 37, 39 Bennett, Louise 117, 248n3 Benson, Eugene 20 Berger, Carl 150, 261n38 Bernabé, Jean 236–7n3, 255n49, 270n37 Bernard, Wanda Thomas 223n20 Berton, Pierre 111 Bérubé, Michael 155 Best, Carrie 209n14 Bethel, Marion 232–3n7 Bibb, Henry 22 Binavince, Emilio S. 92 Birney, Earle 219n28, 262n2 Bissoondath, Neil 118, 121, 239n19 Blackwood, Yvonne 245n35 Blake, William 52, 94, 126, 164, 198 Bloom, Harold 118 Boccaccio, Giovanni 114 Boldon, Bertram 253n34 Bonaparte, Napoleon 257n12 Bone, Robert A. 30, 59 Bongie, Chris 119 Book, Shane 109 Booker, M. Keith 118 Borden, Edwin Howard 33 Borden, Robert 128 Borden, Walter 109 Bourassa, Henri 43, 242n9 Bourassa, Robert 235n29 Box, Gloria M. 250n15 Boxhill, Walton O. ‘Wally’ 245n33 Boyd, Frank Stanley, Jr. 52, 224n28 Boyd, George Elroy 13, 57–61, 63, 65–7, 226n4, 227n9 Boyd, Neil 81, 233n12 Brand, Dionne 3, 14–15, 80, 116, 118–19, 121, 131, 151–63, 190–1, 213n36, 245n35, 248nn2–4, 249n6, 249n11, 251n17, 261n47, 262–3nn3–4, 263nn9–15, 264nn17–18, 269n34 Brant, Joseph 28 Brawley, Benjamin 29, 106 Braxton, Anthony 193

Breton, André 179 Bride, Sus. 220n37 Broox, Klyde 190 Brougham, Henry Lord 28 Brower, Stephen 229n9 Brown, J.C. 27, 29 Brown, James 16, 55, 178, 266n3, 266n10 Brown, Jan 96, 237n8 Brown, Lennox 46, 130, 239n17 Brown, Marion 245n32 Brown, Paola 22, 214n3, 214–15n9 Brown, Paul Fehmiu 84–7, 89–90, 235n23, 235nn29–30, 235–6n31 Brown, Thomas 220n32 Browning, Robert 94, 126 Bruce, Charles 39 Bruce, Dickson D., Jr. 37 Bruhl, Lucien Lévy 243n21 Brunhuber, Kim Barry 14, 112, 246n44 Brutus, Dennis 143–4 Brydon, Diana 11–12, 270n42 Buckler, Ernest 168 Bucknor, Michael 123, 249n11, 250n16 Bulman, Dr. 24 Burns, Robert 28 Burton, Richard D.E. 134–5, 142 Bush, George H.W. 228n4 Bush, George W. 242n10 Bush, Ronald 210n22 Byers, Henry 82 Byers, Peter 82 Byers, Sancho 82 Byrd, Donald 107, 246n46 Byron, George Gordon, Lord 28, 94, 106, 126, 164, 178 Caboto, Giovanni 97 Caesar, Julius 235n29 Cahill, Barry 31, 217nn5–9, 217n13, 222n8 Cain, Tionda 208n7 Cambridge, Vibert 98–100, 238n15 Campbell, David 99, 261n49 Campbell, Thomas 28 Camus, Albert 188 Carberry, H.D. 117, 119–20, 250n15

name index

Cardozo, Andrew 96, 237n8, 239–40n20 Carew, Jan 46, 109, 117–18, 248n4, 249n11 Carman, Bliss 37 Carmichael, Trevor A. 128 –9 Carr, Emily 106, 243n15 Carroll, Lewis [Charles Dodgson] 187 Carson, Johnny 170 Carter, Martin 255n47 Casas, Maria Caridad 185–6, 267n15, 269n34, 269n36, 270n37 Case, Frederick Ivor 119 Cayley, Jennifer 192 Cayne, Bernard S. 26 Cendrars, Blaise 180 Césaire, Aimé 11, 110, 132–4, 178–9, 226n2, 244n30, 246n40 Chaka [Shaka kaSenzangakhona, a.k.a. Shaka Zulu] 151 Chakkalakal, Tess 234–5n21 Chamberlain, Neville 246n43 Chamberlain, Wilt 68, 228n4 Chamberlin, J. Edward 126, 177, 180, 253n31, 254n43, 266n8 Chamoiseau, Patrick 236–7n3, 255n49, 270n37 Chancy, Myriam, J.A. 249n6 Chandler, David 233n14 Chariandy, David 5, 12 Charters, Samuel 273n34 Chase, Randolph 268n26 Chase-Riboud, Barbara 107 Chaucer, Geoffrey 104, 114, 179 Chew, Shirley 118, 256n2 Childs, Peter 11 Chrétien, Jean 235n29 Churchill, Winston 179 Clancier, G.E. 178 Clare, Bill 122–3 Clare, John 198 Clarke, A.M. 124–5, 129, 252n25 Clarke, Austin 3–4, 46, 80, 109, 116–18, 120–2, 126–7, 129, 131, 156, 190, 245n35, 248nn3–4, 249nn11–12, 253n31, 254n39 Clarke, Geraldine Elizabeth 16 Clarke, Lewis 22 Clarke, Milton 22

311

Clarke, William Lloyd ‘Bill’ 16 Clayton, Edith 168, 265n14 Clayton, Willard Parker 48–50, 53–6, 224n22, 225n36, 225n39 Cleaver, Eldridge 79 Cleopatra [Cleopatra VII Philopator] 168 Coffin, E.L. 33 Cohen, Leonard 274n41 Coleman, Charles 224n26 Coleman, Daniel 11, 13, 15, 211n32, 232n5, 242n8, 254n42, 261n38 Coleman, John Clay 33–4 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor 176 Coleridge-Taylor, Samuel 177 Colley, Shernera D. 54 Collier, James Lincoln 107 Colombo, John Robert 96 Columbus, Christopher 256n5 Compton, Wayde 7, 12, 152–3, 190, 261–2nn52–3 Condé, Mary 118 Condé, Maryse 118 Confiant, Raphaël 236–7n3, 255n49, 270n37 Coniff, Brian 197, 202 Conrad, Peter 225n31, 266n11 Considine, John 243n20 Cooke, Michael 40 Cooke, Nathalie 238n12 Cookson, William 8, 180 Cooper, Afua 7, 12, 190, 209n16, 214n3, 215n11, 235n24, 235n28, 254n39 Cowper, William 28 Crail, Archie 153 Crawford, Isabella Valancy 39 Creeley, Robert 197–8 Creft, Jacqueline 80 Cromwell, Edith 55–7, 226n42 Cromwell, Liz 96, 126, 157–8, 160, 162, 236n2, 238n15 Cruse, Harold 255n47 cummings, e.e. 179, 185, 197 Cunard, Nancy 105, 243n21, 255n45 Cunard, Samuel 105 Curran, John Philpot 28 Cutler, May 191, 272n26 Cutten, Josiah 82

312 name index Dabydeen, Cyril 120 D’Alfonso, Antonio 239n18 Dameron, Charles 144, 148, 153 Daniells, Roy 28 Dante [Dante Alighieri] 97, 199 Darwin, Charles 107, 243n21 Dasenbrock, Reed Way 8, 247n50 Dash, J. Michael 119, 130, 249n10 Daulac, Adam 218n25 Davis, Angela 78–9, 107 Davis, Geoffrey 119 Davis, Miles 107, 193, 205–6 Dawes, Kwame 190 Daymond, Douglas 20–1 Dean, Darryl 99, 261n49 Dearborn, Dorothy 82 Decouagne, Thérèse [Mme. François Poulin de Francheville] 84, 235n26 De Man, Paul 153 Denison, George Taylor 150 Deonanan, Carlton R. 130, 252n28, 255n46 Deonanan, Venus E. 130, 252n28, 255n46 Desai, Anita 118 De Santis, Christopher C. 231n1 Descartes, René 32 Desmond, Erin 265n15 Desmond, Viola 80 De Toqueville, Alexis 28 Dett, Nathaniel 46, 109, 221n38 Diamond, Ann 198, 270n4, 271n12, 272n24 Diawara, Manthia 127, 253n32, 256nn6–7 Dicale, Bertrand 266n10 Di Cicco, Pier Giorgio 91–7, 99–101, 238nn12–13, 238n15, 239n18, 240n20 Dickinson, Emily 265n13, 265n22 Diefenbaker, John George 238–9n16, 242n6 di Michele, Mary 100 Dinwiddie-Boyd, Elza 227n14 di Prima, Diane 271n28 Dixon, Beau 235n23 Dixon, George 60 Donald, J.M. 39 Donnell, Alison 119 Doreski, C.K. 246n43 Dorsinville, Max 30, 103–4, 108, 110, 115, 247n49

Douglas, James 247–8n1 Douglas, Roosevelt ‘Rosie’ 182–3, 269n35 Douglas, Stephen 80 Douglass, Frederick 107, 224n28 Drew, Benjamin 20–2, 26–9, 214n4, 215n20, 216n22, 216n24, 216n29, 230n19 Du Bois, W.E.B. 30, 34–6, 39, 107–8, 110, 244n29, 266n7 DuCille, Ann 68, 75–6, 231n28 Duff, Louis Blake 82 Dukakis, Michael 228n4 Dumas, Alexandre 39, 126 Dumas, Henry 198 Dunbar, Paul Laurence 37, 218n23, 268n24 Dutton, Paul 191 Dylan, Bob 9, 188, 267n16 Ealey, Jael 237n5 Egan, Susanna 21 Einstein, Albert 16, 105 Elam, Harry J., Jr. 58–9, 226n3 Eliot, T.S. 147–50, 153, 255n47, 260n20, 260n30 Ellington, Duke 107 Elliott, Lorris 84–5, 87, 89–90, 152, 157, 214n3, 235n23 Elliott, Zetta 109, 245n36 Ellis, Robert 83 Ellis, Scott 266n6 Ellison, Ralph 12, 196 Equiano, Olaudah 19–20, 214n2 Erskine-Hill, Howard 249n9 Esonwanne, Uzo(ma) 209n12, 210n24, 212n34, 257nn15–16, 258–9n8 Esslemont, J.E. 201–2 Evans, Bill 197 Evans, Buddy 233n10 Fabre, Michel 106–8, 270n5 Fanon, Frantz 5–6, 9–10, 68–70, 76–7, 107–8, 110, 128, 151, 153, 155, 177–8, 207n2, 209n13, 230n22, 230–1n28, 242n7, 244n28, 246n44, 247nn48–50, 253n37, 256n4, 256n11, 257n14, 257n19, 261n42, 261n46, 262–3nn3–4, 266n5 Farbridge, Peter 236n32 Farmer, Everett 235n22

name index

Farred, Grant 145–6, 259n11 Farrell, Lennox 80, 232n7 Faulkner, William 74, 197, 212n36 Fearon, Rudyard 190 Feinstein, Sascha 192, 197 Finch, Robert 39 Findley, Timothy 249n9 Finn, Stephen M. 8, 268n25 Fisher, William Arms 194 Fitzgerald, Ella 198 Fitzgerald, William [Nathan Boya] 111–12 Fleming, Ian 16, 269n27 Foggo, Cheryl 209n14 Ford, Clara 233n11 Forsythe, Dennis 258n22 Foster, Cecil 120 Foster, Jodie 227n7 Foucault, Michel 226n44 Frank, Tibor 167, 264n5 Fraser, John 232nn2–3 Freeman, (Mrs.) Colman 216n28 Freiwald, Bina Toledo 10, 12, 209n14 Freud, Sigmund 266n12 Frost, Robert 185 Fry, Hedy 92 Frye, Northrop 29, 103–4, 242n12 Fugard, Athol 146 Fuller, Charles 65–6 Gadoury, Lorraine 81 Gagnon, Christiane 237n9 Gaines, Ernest J. 212n36 Gale, Lorena 84, 87–90, 214n3, 235n23, 236n34 Gallant, Mavis 213nn38–9 Garcia Lorca, Federico 179 Garvey, Marcus 29, 35–6, 232n2 Gasparini, Len 97–8, 240–1n21 Gates, Henry Louis, Jr. 19–20, 68–70, 210n24, 214n2, 220n38, 271n5, 271n13 Gauguin, Paul 174 George III (king) 251n19 George, David 223nn15–16, 225n32 Gero-Hagel, Darlamaine 209n17, 224n24 Gibbons, Rawle 122–4, 250–1nn16–17, 251n22 Gibson, Allen M. 224n23

313

Gibson, Mary Ellis 15 Gibson, Susan 220 Gill, Jonathan 267n13, 271n7 Gilroy, Paul 11, 13, 30, 58–9, 63, 67, 107–8, 150, 215n15, 246n38, 257n13, 270–1n5 Gingell, Susan 181, 267n17 Ginsberg, Allen 164, 179, 271n8 Gladwell, Malcolm 109, 248n3 Godard, Barbara 12 Goellnicht, Donald 232n5 Golden, Thelma 68, 70 Goldie, Terry 4–5, 208n5 Goldsmith, Oliver 28 Goler, William Harvey 33 Gomes, Albert 129 Goodison, Lorna 119 Goveia, Elsa 251n23 Gowens, Henry 27 Grant, Barry Keith 196, 273n34 Grant, George 5, 16, 27, 30, 102–3, 217n3, 242n6, 242n9, 242–3n13 Gray, Cecil 125, 250n15 Green, Adam Simpson 33–4, 57, 217n15, 218n18 Green, Steven 179 Greenlee, Sam 79 Gregg, Allan 211n27 Griffith, Glyne A. 130, 249n11 Griffiths, Gareth 117 Grose, William 27 Groulx, Abbé Lionel 104 Group of Seven 106 Guillén, Nicolás 163 Gustafson, Ralph 39, 262n2 Habib, Michael 233n10 Haliburton, Thomas Chandler 23 Hall, Stuart 246n38 Hall, William 208n9 Hamilton, John 56 Hamilton, Luke 82 Hannibal 266n12 Hansberry, Lorraine 228n20 Hanson, Rick 173–4 Hardy, Thomas 84, 86, 236n31, 255n47 Harper, Frances Ellen Watkins 37

314 name index Harper, Phillip Brian 216n21 Harris, Claire 3, 14, 112–13, 118–19, 121, 190, 246n42, 248n3 Harris, Trudier 231–2n1 Harry, Sharmila 120 Hartz, Louis 102 Hatlen, Burton 59 Hayden, Robert 197–8, 202, 232n2, 273n40 Haynes, Camille 157, 236n2 Head, Harold 91–101, 124, 126–8, 152–4, 157, 160, 162, 236n2, 238nn14–15, 239n17, 251n24, 253n32, 261nn48–9, 263n12 Hearne, John 117–19, 249n7, 249n11 Hedgebeth, Thomas 29 Heffernan, Bramwell 83 Heffernan, Edward 83 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich 107–8 Helms, Gabriele 21 Hémon, Louis 153 Hemsley, Alexander 26–7 Henderson, Anna Minerva 13, 29, 31, 32, 36–46, 218n22, 219–20nn30–1, 220nn34–5, 220–1n38, 221n41 Henderson, Henrietta 41 Henderson, James 220n32 Henderson, John 220n32 Henderson, William 41 Hendrix, Jimi 190 Henry, Frances 49–50, 224n26 Henry, Maureen 251n21 Henry, Patrick 79, 232n2 Henson, Jim 20, 22, 214n3 Henson, Josiah 22, 191, 214n3 heronJonse [Kevin Jones] 12, 237n5 Hill, Anita 228n4 Hill, Errol 250n16 Hill, James L. 271n5 Hill, Lawrence 6 Hill, Patricia Liggins 195 Hiller, Harry H. 243n18 Himes, Chester 107 Hitler, Adolf 226n2, 243n14, 246n43 Hohn, Nadia L. 12 Holland, Sharon Patricia 90 Honey, Maureen 39–42, 221n40

hooks, bell 68 Hopkins, Gerard Manley 168, 197 Hopkinson, Nalo 245–6n37, 248n3, 249n11 Hopkinson, (Abdur-Rahman) Slade 118, 124 Hornby, Jim 82, 233n9, 234n17 Horne, Richard 87 Horowitz, Gad 102, 241n3, 242n5 Horton, Willie 68, 228n4 Hosein, Clyde 118 Howard, Nancy 215n18 Howe, Joseph 55 Howe, Samuel Gridley 22 Hudson, Peter 12, 268n21, 269n31, 270n2 Huggan, Isabel 118 Hughes, Albert 71, 73 Hughes, Allan 71, 73 Hughes, Langston 6, 162, 271n7 Hugo, Victor 32 Hulan, Shelley 267–8n19 Hurston, Zora Neale 212n36 Hustak, Alan 81, 234n16 Hutcheon, Linda 119 Ingle, Lorne 78 Iqbal 126 Jackson, Blyden 19–20 Jackson, Bruce 273n34 Jackson, George 79 Jackson, Lydia 24 Jackson, William 216n25 Jafa, Arthur 195–6 James, C.L.R. 36, 124, 134, 142, 155, 253n33, 256–7n12 James, Darius 14, 69–71, 74–77, 109, 228n3, 230n22, 231nn30–1 Jarvis, Graham 170 Jarvis, Michael 235n23, 236n32 Jean-Baptiste, Alfred 252n27, 268n21, 269n33 Jedwab, Jack 237n3 Jefferson, Thomas 26, 43 Jessome, Phonse 14, 69–77, 229n10, 229nn12–15, 230nn24–5, 231nn29–30 Joan of Arc [Jeanne d’Arc] 84, 256n8 Joans, Ted 107, 191, 244n24, 262n55

name index

Jobb, Dean 81–2, 234n16 Johnson, Albert 233n10 Johnson, Amelia Etta Hall 109 Johnson, Angus ‘Sock’ 47 Johnson, E. Pauline [Tekahionwake] 267–8n19 Johnson, Edith 47 Johnson, Samuel 28 Johnson, T.L. 33 Johnson, William H.H., 21–2, 214n3 Johnston, James Robinson 33–4, 218n16 Jones, Gayl 79, 197 Jones, Quincy 107 Joseph, Clifton 157, 190–1, 233n10 Joseph, Oni. See Oni the Haitian Sensation Joyce, James 197 Juminer, Bertène 249n10 Juraga, Dubravka 118 Kang, Nancy 214n2 Kaufman, Bob 191–2, 197–8, 205–6, 271n10 Keats, John 94, 126, 129 Keens-Douglas, Richardo 120 Kellough, Kaie 190, 271n10 Kenner, Hugh 209n11 Kenyatta, Jomo 6 Kerouac, Jack 191, 271n8 Kimber, Stephen 191–2, 272n26 Kincaid, Jamaica 118 King, Boston 225n32 King, Bruce 250n16 King, Lloyd 129–30 King, Martin Luther, Jr. 69, 79, 194, 229n7 King, Rodney 69, 229n7 King, Ruby 251nn19–20 King, William 209n14 King, William Lyon Mackenzie 243–4n22 Kinsella, Noël A. 92 Kirpal, Viney 117 Klein, A.M. 97–8, 202–3 Klopper, Dirk 144–5, 148, 260n31 Knowles, Ric 12 Komunyakaa, Yusuf 192, 197 Kwamdela, Odimumba 211n28 Ladoo, Harold ‘Sonny’ 99, 126–7, 261n49

315

Laferrière, Dany 109, 119, 190, 248n3, 249n10 Lafferts, Gilbert 220n32 L’Amour, Hilaire 24 Lampman, Archibald 37–9, 43, 218n25 Lane, Dorothy F. 119 Langlois, Marie-Judith 87 Lanham, Richard A. 200 La Rose, John 133 Larsen, Nella 107 Las Casas, Bartolomé de 133 Laurence, Margaret 249n9 Laurier, Wilfrid 32 Layton, Irving 97 Leacock, Stephen 150, 244n26 LeChasseur, Antonio 81 Lecker, Robert 21, 152 Lecompote-Dupré, Louise 82 Lee, Harper 212–13n36 Lee, Spike 228n3 Leimonis, Georgina ‘Vivi’ 228n6, 232n6 Le Jeune, Olivier 24, 234n20 Le Jeune, Paul 24 Le May, Pamphile 235n30 Lenin, Vladimir 155 Leonard, Neil 196 LePan, Douglas 262n2 Lévesque, René 235n29 Levine, Lawrence W. 57, 194, 273n34 Lewis, G.K. (Gordon) 134 Lewis, Israel 22, 214n3 Lewis, Nghana tamu 264n3 Lindberg, Kathryne V. 129, 242n4, 253n30 Lindsey, John W. 216n24 Lipset, Seymour Martin 59, 102 Lipsitz, George 73 Little, John 27, 29, 216n25 Livesay, Dorothy 39, 215n19 Logan, John Daniel 36 Loguen, Jermain Wesley 22 Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth 28, 84, 86, 235n30 Lonsdale, Thorunn 118 Loo, Tina 229n8, 232n4 L’Ouverture, Toussaint 80, 253n33, 256–7n12 Lovejoy, Paul 214n8 Lowell, Amy 39

316 name index Lumumba, Carl 134, 253–4n39, 256n10 Maart, Rozena 153 Mabley, Moms 170 MacDonald, Hugh 165–7 Machiavelli, Niccolo 6 Mackey, Frank 24, 215n9 Mackey, Nathaniel 196 MacLaine, Brent 165–7, 264n6 MacLeish, Archibald 43, 221n39 Macon, Wanda 65 Madden, Paula C. 7 Maes-Jelinek, Hena 119 Mahlis, Kristen 181 Mailer, Norman 16, 178 Makin, Peter 210n24 Makolkin, Anna 239n18 Malik, Abdul [Delano de Couteau] 130 Mandela, Nelson 80 Mandiela, Ahdri Zhina 190, 269n34 Manley, Rachel 120, 248n3 Mao Tse-Tung (Zedong) 9 Marinelli, Peter 166 Marlatt, Daphne 118 Marley, Bob 6 Marrant, John 46, 53, 225n34 Marshall, Paule 118, 131 Marshall, Susanne 5 Marshall, Yannick 12 Marsman, Walter Kenneth 50 Martin, H. 208n8 Martin, Tony 125, 129 Marx, Karl 155 Mascoll, Philip 80, 233n8 Matthews, John P. 16, 130 Mayr, Suzette 14, 110–12, 220n37, 246n42, 248n3 Mazza, Antonino 99 McCaffrey, Steven 191 McCarthy, Dermot 153, 262n54 McCrae, John 262n2 McCullers, Carson 212n36 McGregor, Gaile 59 McKay, Claude 179 McKerrow, Peter E. 33–4, 48–9, 52–6, 57, 217n14, 220n37, 223n18, 224–5n28, 225nn32–4

McKittrick, Katherine 4 McLuhan, Marshall 175, 179–80, 265n10, 265n17, 265n19, 265n20 McNaught, Kenneth 128 McTair, Roger 118, 209n13, 212n33 McWatt, Mark 119 McWatt, Tessa 109, 248n3 Melfi, John 93 Mendel, Gregor 145 Mendes, Joan 16 Mendes, Rex 16 Mercer, Kobena 226n3 Michaels, Walter Benn 9, 208n10, 209n13, 225n40, 226n46 Miller, Henry 16, 247n47 Milot, Micheline 208n6 Milton, John 28, 63 Minello, Luigi 98 Mitchell, Lucy (‘Crazy Luce’) 169–71 Mitchell, Mary Niall 230n18 Mittelhölzer, Edgar 257n18 Molière [Jean-Baptiste Poquelin] 32 ‘Mom Suze ’ 220n37 Monkman, Leslie 20–1 Montaigne, Michel de 185 Montesquieu, Baron de 32 Moodie, Andrew 248n3 Moodie, Susanna 21, 83 Moore, Roger 129 Moore, Samuel 214n8 Mordecai, Pamela 118, 120, 251n18 Morgan, Dwayne 190 Mori, Aoi 175 Morris, Mervyn 118, 125, 250n16 Morrison, Toni 69, 73, 82–3, 107–8, 210–11n26, 263n15 Morrissey, Mike 251nn19–20 Mortune, Felizze 100 Moses, Wilson Jeremiah 34–6 Mosley, Walter 79 Motion [Wendy Braithwaite] 190 Moynagh, Maureen 6–7, 12, 259–60n18 Muhammad, Elijah 11 Murray, Brittain 82 Mussolini, Benito 242n4, 246n43

name index

Musto, Louis 96, 237n8, 239–40n20 Naipaul, V.S. 104, 121, 131, 133–4, 257n18 Nancoo, Stephen E. 120 Nanny-of-the-Maroons 256n8 Nash, Johnny 159 Nasser, Gamal Abdel 151–2 Naylor, R.T. 128 Neal, Mark Anthony 268n20, 269n28 Nefertiti 168 Nelson, Earle 232n6 Nelson, Horatio 257n13 Nelson, Robert 216n29 Neruda, Pablo 151, 153, 163, 261n44 New, W.H. 20, 23 Newton, Norman 104 nichol, bp 191 Nielsen, Aldon Lynn 191–2, 194, 196, 211n39, 218n23, 244n25, 273n28, 273n34 Niemi, Fo 92, 238n9 Nin, Anaïs 16 Nishiguchi, R.L. Gabrielle 96 Nolan, Faith 235n23, 235n28 Noland, Carrie 180, 268n27 Norman, Alma 221n38 Norman, Jessye 107 Nortje, Arthur 14, 99, 142–53, 258n5, 258n7, 259n9, 259nn12–18, 260nn24–5, 260–1nn29– 35, 261n37, 261n39, 261n47, 261nn50–2, 264n17 Nurse, Donna 12, 261n51 Obama, Barack 211n26, 228n4 Odhiambo, David 109, 153, 190 Okigbo, Christopher 258–9n8 Oliver, Pearleen 48–9, 53–6, 222n4, 223n18, 225n33 Oliver, W.P. 207n4 Olson, Charles 196 Omolade, Barbara 209, 222n4, 223n10 Oni the Haitian Sensation [Oni Joseph] 15, 175–6, 185–9, 269n34, 270nn39–41 Osborne, Richard E. 243n14 Osinubi, Taiwo Adetunji 7 Ottley, C.R. 125

317

Owen, Wilfred 255n47 Owram, D.R. 218n19 Padmore, George 252–3n29, 255n45 Padolsky, Enoch 12 Paine, Tom 253n29 Palmer, C. Everard 117 Palmer, Hazelle 118, 120 Paris, Cherry 47, 49, 52, 55–6, 222n4, 225n37 Paris, Peter J. 49, 51, 54, 225n36, 249n7 Parizeau, Jacques 235n29 Parker, Charlie 193, 198 Parks, Rosa 80 Pater, Walter 28 Paton, Alan 144 Patteson, Richard F. 117–18 Péladeau, Pierre 235n29 Pellizzi, C. 261n39 Perry, Dave 73 Peterson, Oscar 15, 198 Petesch, Donald 29 Philip, M. NourbeSe 3, 9, 44, 110, 118–19, 121, 131, 180–1, 190, 213n36, 238n10, 248n3, 249n6, 252n28 Picasso, Pablo 114, 246n45 Pickthall, Marjorie 39 Pierce, Lorne 39 Pieterse, Cosmo 144 Pignataro, Tony 99 Piper, Adrian 70 Pivato, Joseph 96, 100, 240n20, 240nn26–7, 240n29 Plath, Sylvia 147–50, 153, 260n20 Pool, Rosey 202 Pooley, Sophia 28 Pope, Joseph 128 Posey, Thomas 47, 50–1 Potgeiter, Cecilia 145, 259n9 Poulin de Francheville, François 86 Pound, Ezra 15, 146, 162, 180, 210n24, 236n3, 257n17, 259n10, 264n18, 266n11, 266–7n13, 271n7 Pratt, E.J. 39, 235n28 Preston, Richard 48, 52–7, 225n33, 225nn35–6 Prevatte, Ceronne 120

318 name index Prince, Althea 14, 124, 126–7, 131, 135–6, 138–9, 141–2, 257nn14–16, 258n23 Prince, Mary 20–1 Pushkin, Alexander 114, 126 Pynchon, Thomas 155 Quamina, Odida T. 120 Quan, Andy 240n20 Questel, Victor D. 124 Radano, Ronald M. 193 Ramchand, Kenneth 117, 125, 248n4 Ramey, Lauri 222n5 Ranallo, Joseph 93 Randle, Ian 120 Reed, Ishmael 198 Rexroth, Kenneth 191, 271n8 Richardson, Arthur 33 Richardson, Karen 179, 268n22 Riel, Louis 79 Riley, James Whitcomb 28 Rivers, Conrad Kent 105 Roach, Charles 238n15 Roberts, Alfie [Alfonso Theodore Roberts] 256n9 Roberts, Charles G.D. 37, 39 Roberts, Peter A. 268n22 Robertson, John William 3, 20, 22, 24–5, 214n3, 215n17 Robeson, Paul 114 Robespierre, Maximilien 253n29 Robinson, Lisa 21 Robson, S. 220n37 Rockefeller, Nelson 163 Rodgers, W. 220n37 Rodney, Walter 127 Rohlehr, Gordon 121–3, 243n16, 249n12, 250n14, 255n48 Romero, George 158 Roosevelt, Theodore 239n16 Roper, Moses 22 Rose, Tricia 69 Rosenfeld, Alvin H. 271n11 Ross, Diana 170 Ross-Frankson, Joan 250n13

Roth, Leon 225n39 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques 243n21 Rutherford, Anna 118 Saal, H. 193 Salkey, Andrew 133 Salvatore, Filippo 93, 97, 242n4 Sampson, Daniel P. 83 Sandiford, Keith A. 120, 249n7 Sandiford, Robert Edison 245n35, 248nn2–3, 252n25, 255n44 Saro-Wiwa, Ken 81 Sarsfield, Mairuth 14, 113–14, 246n45 Sartre, Jean-Paul 178–9, 241n2, 266n12 Saul, John Ralston 241n2, 242n5, 243n15 Saunders, Charles R. 222n8 Saunders, Patricia 181 Scantlebury, Michael G. 120 Schama, Simon 166 Schlesinger, Arthur, Jr. 96, 239n19 Scobie, Stephen 191–2, 267n16 Scott, Duncan Campbell 39 Scott, F.R. 39, 129 Scott, Walter 28–9, 106 Sealey, Donna Byard 33, 47, 50–2, 57, 222n4, 223n11, 224n26, 225n35 Sears, Djanet 7, 12, 109, 245n35, 248n3 Selassie I, Haile (Ras Tafari) 269n34 Selvon, Samuel 117–19, 250n14 Senghor, Léopold Sédar 6 Senior, Olive 118–19, 248n3, 249n8, 249n11 Shackelford, Theodore Henry 221n38 Shadd, Adrienne 37, 39–41, 44, 218n22, 220n31 Shadd, Mary Ann 84, 212n33, 216n26, 222n7, 228n2 Shadd-Evelyn, Karen 209n14 Shakespeare, Robbie 176 Shakespeare, William 28, 39, 94, 126, 129, 140, 176, 186, 228n3, 266n3, 269n30 Shakur, Sanyika [‘Monster’ Cody Scott] 79 Shange, Ntozake 192, 269n34 Shelley, Percy Bysshe 28, 94, 126, 164 Sheppard, Evie 122–3 Sherman, Joan 28–9, 214n5 Shih, Shu-mei 167, 265

name index

Shreve, Dorothy Shadd 50–2, 222n2, 222n4, 224n5, 224n25 Sieburth, Richard 266–7n13 Siegfried, André 103, 145, 261n36 Siemerling, Winfried 12 Silvera, Makeda 249n6, 250n13 Simmonds, Christie Cromwell 223–4n21, 224n24 Simmons-McDonald, Hazel 119 Simpson, O.J. 68–9, 76, 82–3, 89, 228n4 Sinclair, John 245n32 Sinclair, Lister 29 Skeir, Donald 224n27 Slemon, Stephen 119 Slim, Iceberg [Robert Beck] 71, 73, 79 Smallwood, Thomas 20, 22, 28–9 Smith, A.J.M. 39 Smith, Charles C. 157 Smith, G. 208n8 Smith, Tom 83 Sobol, John 192, 271nn6–7, 272n16, 272n20 Solway, David 213n36 Souster, Raymond 262n2 Southern, Eileen 195 Spencer, William David 267n15, 268n23 Spray, W.A. 33, 41, 219n29 Springer, Eintou Pearl 122–3, 250n16 Stanford, C. Lloyd 92 States, Wellington N. 33–4 Steeves, David 83 Stevens, Wallace 197–8 Steward, [Theophilus] Austin 22 Steyn, Mark 128 Still, William 22 Stone, Marjorie 165, 172, 264n4, 265n13 Stowe, Harriet Beecher 191 Strange, Carolyn 229n8, 232n6 Stringer, Arthur 39 Styron, William 212n36 Sumac, Yma 188 Surette, Leon 153, 208n10 Swinburne, Algernon Charles 29 Taiwo, Oluronke 211n30 Talbot, Carol 209n14 Tarik [Tarik ibn Zeyad] 113

319

Tatsumi, Takayumi 166 Taylor, Annie Edson 111–12 Taylor, Wanda 223n20 Tennyson, Alfred, Lord 28, 255n47 Tepper, Elliott L. 92 Terence 126 Thibault, Claude 84, 86 Thomas, Clarence 68, 228n4 Thomas, Dylan 44, 197 Thomas, H. Nigel 7, 12, 14, 131, 135–6, 138, 141–2, 256n5, 257nn17–18, 258n23, 258n25 Thomas, James 48–9, 52–5, 57, 226n43 Thomas, Jean-Baptiste 82 Thomson, Tom 106 Thompson, Andrea 190, 269n30 Thurston, John 21 To, Lillian 239n16 Tolson, Melvin B. 155, 246n43, 253n35 Toomer, Jean 198, 201, 212n36, 273n35 Toye, William 20 Troupe, Quincy 107 Troy, William 22 Trudeau, Pierre Elliott 5, 10, 91–2, 237n8 Trudel, Marcel 82, 84, 234nn18–19 Tubman, Harriet 80, 85 Tupper, Charles 32, 128 Turner, Nat 78–9, 83 Tynes, Maxine 15, 163–75, 264nn2–5, 264–5nn8– 11, 265n13, 265nn15–17, 265n19, 265 nn21-22 Tyson, Mike 68, 228n4 Underhill, Frank 103 Vaidhyanathan, Siva 194, 197 Valpy, Michael 228–9n6 Van Deburg, William L. 23 Vernon, Karina 7, 12 Victoria (queen) 21, 251n19 Virk, Reena 234–5n21 von Richthofen, Manfred [‘The Red Baron’] 104 Walcott, Derek 177, 247n50 Walcott, Rinaldo 4–5, 8 Walker, Abraham Beverley 13, 29–37, 40, 42, 44–5, 217nn5–9, 217n15, 218n19–20

320 name index Walker, Alice 212n36 Walker, David 22, 29, 215n9 Walker, James 47–8, 52 Walker, William 217n6 Wallace, Michele 165 Wallenstein, Barry 194, 196–7 Walser, Robert 193, 205, 271n13 Ward, Frederick 15, 189–206, 270nn3–4, 271n9, 271nn11–12, 272n17, 272n19, 272n21, 272n23–4, 272nn26–7, 273nn28–31, 273nn34–7, 273n39, 274nn41–2, 274nn44–7 Ward, Grace (Douglas) 198 Ward, Samuel 198 Ward, Samuel Ringgold 22 Warner, Ashton 21 Warner, Gary 249n10, 252n28, 253n31 Washington, Booker T. 32, 34, 218n17 Washington, George 232n2 Wasserman, Jerry 12, 228n20 Waters, Erika J. 119 Wayman, Tom 97 Webster, Daniel 28 Wells, H.G. 12 Welsh, Sarah Lawson 119 Wernli, Ralph 229n9 West, David 216n27 Wheatley, Phillis 37, 43–4, 106, 220n38 White, Armond 76 White, Dorcas 130 White, Hayden 226n44 White, Portia 49, 174 White, Theodore H. 12, 178, 237n7, 244n31 White, William Andrew 33–4 Whitfield, Harvey Amani 57

Whitman, Walt 164, 265n13 Whittier, John Greenleaf 28 Williams, Eric 134, 256n9 Williams, George 216n29 Williams, Patrick 11 Williams, Sherley Anne 195 Williams, William Carlos 172 Wilson, Betty 118 Wilson-Tagoe, Nana 118–19 Winks, Robin W. 21, 24, 30–2, 37, 42, 50–2, 57, 84, 221n38, 225n29, 234n20, 235n26, 253n38 Winslow, Mary Matilda 33 Wiwa, Ken 81 Wolfe, Sairi 230n20, 230n27 Woodcock, George 20 Woods, David 156, 165, 204 Wordsworth, William 28, 94, 126, 140, 255n47 Wormeny, Lavina 22, 214n3, 215n17 Wright, Richard 6, 63, 79, 107, 191, 212n36, 242n9, 246n46, 270–1n5 X, Malcolm 5, 9–11, 232n2 Yeats, William Butler 159 Yerby, Frank 191, 271n5 young, d’bi. [Debbie Young] 15, 175–6, 178–86, 189, 267nn14–15, 269n32, 269 nn34–5 Young, Edward 28 Young, Kevin 211n31 Zeleza, Paul Tiyambe 153 Zizis, Mike 93 Zola, Émile 218n21

This page intentionally left blank

colophon

The text of Directions Home: Approaches to African-Canadian Literature is set in 10 point Fournier on 12 point leading. Drafted by Pierre Simon Fournier in the mid-eighteenth century, this font combines Enlightenment elegance and Revolutionary clarity. The display type – in various point sizes – is Bill Clarke Caps. Drafted by the author’s father, William Lloyd ‘Bill’ Clarke, circa 1969, then digitized by Andrew Steeves of Gaspereau Press in 2011, this font gives a rough edge to classic letters. It mirrors, then, the author’s ‘vernacular’ scholarship.