The following is an excerpt from Mathias Iroro Orhero’s review of Where Beauty Survived that was published in the latest issue of Acadiensis. To read the full article please click here and subscribe.
GEORGE ELLIOTT CLARKE IS AN ACCOMPLISHED WRITER AND SCHOLAR. Through a four-decade career as a poet and writer, Clarke has contributed immensely to Black Atlantic writing and culture.[1] In his poetry and fictional narratives, he has succeeded in representing the hard facts of what it is to be “Africadian,” a term that he coined to describe the Black people in Nova Scotia and New Brunswick whose ancestry can be traced to the Black Loyalists who were resettled in Canada in 1783 by the British Crown.[2] His 2021 memoir, Where Beauty Survived, offers insights into Clarke’s early life in Halifax and foregrounds significant moments in his transformation into a scholar and a writer whose major interventions have been rooted in the politics of Black and Afro-Metis identity.[3] Clarke’s nine-chapter memoir begins with his birth in the town of Windsor, Nova Scotia, in 1960 and goes on to explore his early years in Halifax’s North End, his discovery of race and experiences of racism, family secrets and parental conflicts, and, most significantly, Clarke’s development of a Black consciousness that is both global and specifically Canadian. One approach that this book takes in foregrounding Clarke’s Black consciousness is its focus on the roles of Africadian women in his life and how their examples, experiences, influences, and pedagogy shaped Clarke’s discovery of self and his rootedness as a Black Nova Scotian (or Africadian). Specifically, I argue that Clarke’s critical, literary, and activistic bent, as narrated in this memoir, hinges on the example of his mother, aunts, female mentors, and Savannah, a former girlfriend.
Scholars such as Afua Cooper, Robyn Maynard, Katherine McKittrick, and Andrea Davis have emphasized the place of female subjectivity in the conceptualization of Blackness in Canada.[4] In their various submissions, key historical figures like Marie-Joseph Angelique exemplify female resistance in the context of slavery in Canada. More specifically, Maynard emphasizes the various types of violence experienced by enslaved Black women as well as the more recent forms of policing that Black women go through.[5] What is evident in these studies is that women have been at the center of resistance to statist violence and erasure even as they experience a “double marginality” that comes to the fore at the intersection of race, class, and gender. Clarke’s memoir continues this conversation on the precarity of women and their place in Africadian resistance and the Black Radical Tradition by locating their agential roles in the development of a Black intellectual.
Clarke’s rootedness in Black Maritime geography is the subject of the first chapter of the memoir. Here, he locates the Black body in Nova Scotia by highlighting the facts of Africadian identity:
Africadian – or Scotian – identity is partly rooted in the space of one’s ‘homestead’ (as opposed to the African-American slang term “crib”). So, I’m from Three Mile Plains, but someone else is from Weymouth Falls, and another is from North Preston (the largest all-Black community in Canada), and still another is from Gibson Woods or New Glasgow. . . . How powerful is this sense of rootedness, of landholding, for an otherwise economically marginalized and socially maligned community!… This fact gives Scotians – Africadians – a firm cultural sensibility and sense of home and belonging.[6]
This fundamental notion of identity is significant in the context of Clarke’s and other Black Canadian writers’ projects of contesting dominant narratives of Canada that erase Black bodies. Clarke goes further to assert his Indigenous matrilineal ancestry through his point that “because the colonial authorities placed Africadians alongside Mi’kmaq reserves (because we were both refuse peoples as far as Yankee-and-Dixie-descended slaveholders’ government was concerned), there was lots of exchange, of skills and goods and cultural practices (including drumming and basket-weaving), and, naturally, of DNA.” [7] By grounding himself in the geography of the region through his ancestry, Clarke sets the stage for the formation of personal identity and a Black consciousness that responds to contested notions of place.
His first experience as a racialized person comes shortly after his description of Black rootedness in Nova Scotia. He describes an incident involving schoolboys who attacked him and his brothers while yelling the n-word.[8] He learns from this experience that he is a Black person, and, although his father attempts to educate him about the facts of Blackness in Canada, he is struck more by his aunt, Joan, and his mom’s active resistance to a shop clerk who policed them and their Black children at a shopping mall. The duo’s response is described thus: “Joan-and-Gerry became a sisterly tag team that politely, but firmly, urged the clerk to wonder why she should have been born to meet two Black women who would not accept being stereotyped as criminals.”[9] This active resistance, more than his father’s slow education approach, leaves an indelible mark on young Clarke’s mind so much so that he prayed, for years, that God should make him more like his aunt Joan, who was able to resist racism. This marks the beginning of Clarke’s formation of a Black consciousness that is rooted in both his mother’s and aunt’s active resistance to the policing of Black bodies.
The second chapter’s focus on Clarke’s early years in Halifax’s North End foregrounds how race and class produce the geography of Halifax. In this part of the city, crime, racism, violence, and neglect come together to inscribe the image of dangerous poverty and the accompanying government neglect. Africadian women are particularly more vulnerable in this marginal space: “A black woman sex-worker would be stabbed – umpteen times – by her white john and left to perish like a dog in the streets. . . . Or some black husband would level a black shotgun at the belly of his black wife and pull the trigger.”[10] The fact that women are the victims of different forms of violence here confirms their double marginality: they receive blows from racists even as they bear the burden of toxic Black masculinity. To demonstrate the precarity of Blackness in Halifax’s North End, Clarke recalls instances of policing and racism like floorwalkers or managers who would chase Black kids with the pretext that they were “sneakered thieves.”[11] However, it is also in this space that Clarke begins to discover Blackness on a more personal level. Here he focuses on his father’s achievements as a Black man in Nova Scotia and Black masculinity in general, even as he romanticizes whiteness by following “Caucasian heroes and reading manuals and novels.”[12] It is his admiration of his great aunt Portia White, however, that informs the development of his nascent Black consciousness the most. She was a famous contralto singer who had international success and who was known throughout the Americas, despite the hard facts of being Black in Nova Scotia, and her life bolstered Clarke’s developing mind and challenged racist assumptions about Africadians: “Whatever slights, insults, or barriers that we confronted as black boys, as Negroes, as Coloured squirts, all were somehow lessened because we could say ‘My great-aunt sang before the Queen’.”[13] This sense of pride, of Black excellence embodied, contributed significantly to Clarke’s development of a sense of Black identity and consciousness. However, the ascription of royalty to his great aunt through her performance for the Queen, still suggests, at this point, a desire to authenticate Black excellence by white standards.
MATHIAS IRORO ORHERO
[1] I use “Black Atlantic” to not only refer to Black Atlantic diasporic culture, following Paul Gilroy (3), but also to refer specifically to Blackness in the Atlantic region of Canada; see Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (London: Verso, 1993).
[2] George Elliott Clarke, Directions Home: Approaches to African-Canadian Literature (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2012).
[3] The term “Afro-Metis” is contentious, like Clarke’s other coinage “Africadia.” Some scholars, such as Rinao Walcott, challenge the term and accuse Clarke of trying too much to be rooted within Canada; see, for example, ???? I use it here mainly because there is the need to anchor Clarke’s personal claim to Indigenous ancestry even while acknowledging his Black identity.
[4] See Afua Cooper, The Hanging of Angelique: The Untold Story of Canadian Slavery and the Burning of Old Montreal (Toronto: Harper Collins, 2006); Robyn Maynard, Policing Black Lives: State Violence in Canada from Slavery to the Present (Halifax: Fernwood Publishing, 2017); Katherine McKittrick, Demonic Grounds: Black Women and the Cartographies of Struggle (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006); and Andrea Davis, “Black Canadian Literature as Diaspora Transgression: The Second Life of Samuel Tyne,” TOPIA: Canadian Journal of Cultural Studies 17 (Spring 2007): 31-49.
[5] Maynard, Policing Black Lives, 63-73.
[6] George Elliott Clarke, Where Beauty Survived: An Africadian Memoir (Toronto: Knopf, 2021), 9.
[7] Clarke, Where Beauty Survived, 14-15. See also Zainab Amadahy and Bonita Lawrence, “Indigenous Peoples and Black People in Canada: Settlers or Allies?” Breaching the Colonial Contract: Anti-Colonialism in the US and Canada, ed. Arlo Kempf (Dordrecht: Springer Netherlands, 2009), 105–36. Clarke also makes it clear on p. 301 that his family, from his mother’s side, has Indigenous ancestry.
[8] Clarke, Where Beauty Survived, 16.
[9] Clarke, Where Beauty Survived, 19.
[10] Clarke, Where Beauty Survived, 43.
[11] Clarke, Where Beauty Survived, 47.
[12] Clarke, Where Beauty Survived, 55
[13] Clarke, Where Beauty Survived, 69.
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