‘Get up offa that thing, and write!’: George Elliott Clarke is back
Those familiar with the fierce work ethic and signature funk grooves of James Brown are likely to detect similar traits in the oeuvre of author George Elliott Clarke.
Whiteout: How Canada Cancels Blackness marks, by my count, Clarke’s thirty-seventh publication in the past four decades; nearly a book annually since the release of Saltwater Spirituals and Deeper Blues (1983). “His style is unique, echoing his deep spirituality and feeling for the history of his people,” noted a reviewer about his debut offering.
The author has since delivered a waterfall of other poetry volumes, plays, novels, children’s books, edited anthologies, collections of criticism, a memoir, and a record album. Hence, I can easily imagine Clarke tendering, with his characteristic élan, a James Brown-inflected directive to floundering scribes of all stripes: “Get up offa that thing, and write ‘till you feel better.”
Readers ready for an unbridled exploration of race relations in Canada will rejoice in Whiteout, an engrossing collection of essays in which Clarke delineates the ways in which African-Canadians have been disenfranchised (at best) in a nation that “defines itself primarily in opposition to the United States.” Contrasting the status of African-Americans to that of Blacks in his native land, Clarke ventures that the latter have “no constitutional, pop, cultural, economic, legal, or political clout, especially when regarded nationally.”
About his impetus for now releasing what he termed “fugitive” texts, a jovial Clarke, 63, said, in an e-mail: “My mortality! I pray that the good Lord spares me for a few more years. …However, it is better to publish while I still have a say than when … I will have no say, being dead.”
In addition to the dearth of Blacks in Canada (three per cent of the population compared to nearly 14 per cent in the U.S.), Clarke, all jokes aside, attributes the country’s “Negrophobia” to its overall identity crisis. “It is difficult enough to figure out what it means to be Canadian, let alone African Canadian,” he asserts in Whiteout. “Left pretty much to its own devices, the white majority in Canada exudes a kind of ideal … immaculate, politic whiteness.”
Reared in North End Halifax, Clarke brings a profundity to his reflections on the enclave that once abutted the Bedford Basin. “It is a telling Canadian irony that the most famous Black community in the country is one that no longer exists,” he writes. “The perpetual, if now spectral, existence of Africville … underlines the phantasm that is race discourse in Canada.”
Offering a fresh perspective on the many Africville-related books that have been released since the community was bulldozed in the late 1960s, Clarke notes a glaring omission. “The literary imagination of Africville is no innocent endeavour but rather a quarrel over Lebensraum — I use the Nazi term conscientiously — that is to say, over whether an identifiably, verifiably Black community may exist in Canada, not on the basis of segregation but on the basis of choice,” Clarke writes.
As with his appraisal of Cry, the Beloved Country (1948), a novel by white South African author Alan Paton, Clarke decries the Africville-centred Reparations (2006) by Halifax writer Stephen Kimber as a “white-liberal ‘redemptive’ anti-racist” novel. Humour a hallmark of Clarke’s work; he also dismisses as “a gift to morticians,” Africville (2020), a novel by Black American writer Jeffrey Colvin, for its preponderance of dead and “Almost Gone” characters.
In short, Clarke asserts that most white Canadians and “borderline whites” (mixed-race folk with skin tones that can shield them from blatant bigotry) remain clueless about the complex contours of racism.
On that note, Clarke does not shy away from discussing Whiteout against the backdrop of the 2020 controversy that saw him publicly criticized for his professional liaison with a poet who’d been imprisoned for killing Pamela George, an Indigenous woman. “Having just been cancelled by the ignorant and the hateful, the yellow-journalistic and the blacklisters, I could fear my heyday was past,” Clarke said, in an e-mail. “When I reread the selected essays, [I thought] ‘There’s incisive stuff here. Them that have ears, let ‘em hear!’”
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