racism and redemption in fredericton, nb

I am ashamed to say that I was not familiar with George Elliott Clarke before reading this poetry collection... but now I'm hooked! There is so much depth to this poetry that I'm excited to explore more of his writing, particularly his novel that explores the same story as this poetry does, called George and Rue. I love finding new writers to explore, and Clarke is a particularly awesome one because I've never read much from the Africadian literary movement. (Africadian being Canadians of black loyalist heritage whose original settlements were located in Nova Scotia and New Brunswick.)

It's a big day for literature, or course, with Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows launching at midnight. My guilty pleasure of the weekend will be reading and enjoying the last book of the series -- we can debate literary merit all day long, but there's no debating having a good time.

Execution Poems: The Black Acadian Tragedy of "George and Rue"
by George Elliott Clarke

Malignant English

Crown: I warrant you speak almost perfect English.

Rue: Should I utter pitted and cankered English?
Bad enough your laws are pitted and cankered.

Crown: Admit that, for a Negro, you speak our English well.

Rue: But, your alabaster, marble English isn't mine: I hurl
insolent daggers at it like an assassin assaulting a statue.

Crown: Your lordship, instruct this witness to speak civilly.

His Lordship: Accused, do your duty, as we must do ours.

Rue: My duty is to make narrative more telling,
Yours is to make malice more malicious.

Execution Poems by George Elliott Clarke tells the story of George and Rufus Hamilton, two Africadian men from Nova Scotia who were hanged in 1949 for the murder of a Fredericton taxi driver. The Hamilton brothers were cousins of Clarke, dead a decade before he was born, and in retelling their story through these poems Clarke weaves for us a story of family, cyclical violence, and racism. The art of this collection is Clarke's ability to create for the reader blurring lines between guilt and innocence, and right and wrong. For the most part, the reader wavers between being horrified by the crime and sympathetic to the perpetrator, shocked at the murder and sickened by the actions of law enforcement officials. As such, we are forced to confront ideas of socially constructed representations of innocence (white lawyers and judges) and guilt (black accused criminals). The effect is especially strong because Clarke acknowledges no awareness on the part of the system for the inherent racism it fosters. And in the end, blindness to this is Clarke's purpose. He never suggests that the crime doesn't occur, or that the Hamilton brothers are innocent, but he is careful to show the roots of violence, its motivations, and the assumptions of the court officials in the case.

An important issue in Clarke's retelling of the murder case and trial is language -- particularly the English language. As you can see in the excerpt above, the issue of "proper" English is a major one for the courts; how can a black man who commits crimes speak "white" English so effectively? In "Child Hood II," Rufus tells us about his desire to embrace the "secretly Negro authors" like Alexander Pushkin, who had Ethiopian heritage, and Alexandre Dumas, with Hatian origin; these authors who denied parts of their heritage to succeed in a white world are of particular interest to Rufus, and he is especially interested in the power of language for these men who have harnessed the dominant discourses of their times. He compares them with his own ability to express himself, referring to himself as "a poor-quality poet crafting hoodlum testimony, / my watery storytelling's cut with the dark rum of curses." He fears that he cannot fully defend himself or express his feelings about his actions because he lacks the proper words, but the book itself, written in the voice of him and his brother, shows that they have more power and aptitude in their English than the entire town of Fredericton. This comes across in the poem, "To Viscount Alexander of Tunis, Governor-General of Canada," where "A Citizen of the town of Fredricton NB," billing himself as "Anonamus," demands that the Governor General deny George's request for a stay of execution as "they is no different neggars & they both look a like in this cryme," and that "wee the peepul of Fredericton feel they must hang fore the bluddy homaside they did." Where it is amazing to the judge that two black men can speak "his" language, the good "white" residents of Fredericton, as they are represented by the writer of this letter.; The question Clarke asks us to consider is this: who owns and posesses the language? Does a white man with access to education and the birthright of the "mother tongue" automatically deserve to be seen as more capable than a black man, even when his ability is unquestionably superior? We are given two documents here: the letter, which represents the town, and the book of poetry itself, which represents the Hamilton brothers (because we are expressly told when their voices are being used). We question our own assumptions as a result of the juxtaposition and inversion of expectation.

Clarke also forces the reader to think critically about the roots of crime. We learn as we read the poems about the Hamilton brothers that they observed a lot of violence between their father and their mother; with their mother being partially Mi'kmaq, she becomes the target of racialized violence. "Pop" sees her as impure and worthy of his scorn, because "he thought her being mulatto / was mutilation." The boys are exposed to highly sexualized and disturbing violence as children, until one of the boys attacks his father and their mother dies of her injuries. They move from this life of violence into one of poverty, and Clarke seems to ask us: What did you expect them to do?

There's an interesting last note in the book, in a reproduction of the newspaper page announcing the completed execution of the Hamilton brothers:

In an article on dead poet W. B. Yeats in last week's Casket, we erroneously attributed to Mr. Yeats the book Cane, which was in fact written by the Negro American writer Jean Toomer. Yeats is, however, the author of the best-selling book The Autobiography of William Butler Yeats. We regret the error.

This is interesting because it is an example of appropriation of voice -- the writer of the article assumed the high modernist poetry he encountered was written by a white man, instead of by an important figure of the Harlem Renaissance. The black man's voice was papered over with a famous white poet. What do we make of this in relation to the issues of language and ability in the text? It's interesting that the paper was willing to deny poetic ability to a black writer, feeling more comfortable with assigning it to a famous white writer instead. Again, it's about the assumptions we make about ability based on someone's skin colour rather than our own experiences of ability. I wonder also if it's a gesture to retelling the story -- the Hamilton's have only ever been written about by white newspaper reporters and white historians, whereas Clarke is re-appropriating the story for the Africadian people.

viva la saint lawrence

I'm taking a break from the anthology today due to the fact that it is quickly doing my head in. In the meantime, I'm going to tackle some of the other works from the poetry section of the list. Today, I'm looking at Charles Sangster, who is not a poet I am familiar with, but who published in 1856 the first Spenserian sonnet sequence in Canadian literary history. He was also one of the first poets to use obviously and undeniably Canadian images and subject matter as the backbone of his poetry. As bad as I am at (a) long poems and (b) colonial literature, I enjoyed this, and I think I've found a few things to say about it... Hopefully things I can process relatively quickly because I have a birthday party to get to. Yee haw!

The St. Lawrence and the Saguenay
by Charles Sangster

Quebec -- how regally it crowns the height!
The Titan Strength has here set up his throne;
Unmindful of the sanguinary fight,
The roar of cannon mingling with the maon
Of mutilated soldiers years agone,
That gave the place a glory and a name
Among the nations. France was heard to groan,
England rejoiced, but checked the proud acclaim, --
A brave young chief had fallen to vindicate her fame.

Fallen in the prime of his ambitious years,
As falls the young oak when the mountain blast
Rings like a clarion, and the tempest jeers
To see its pride to earth untimely cast.
So fell brave Wolfe, heroic to the last,
Amid the tempest and grim scorn of war,
While leering Fate with look triumphant passed,
Pleased with the slaughter and the horrid jar
That lured him hence to see how paled a hero's star.

This poem recounts a journey of the imagination from Kingston, Ontario and the St. Lawrence Seaway to the mouth of the Saguenay and Cape Eternity. The narrator of the poem is on a spiritual quest to be reunited with the woman he loves, known in the poem only as the Maiden. He is also on a pilgrimage to show his devotion to God, and indeed the reunion with the Maiden is a reunion with God as well, as the three seek to "prove / How unutterably deep and strong is Human Love" (that love being both between humans and of humans for God). The poem is also about embracing the creations of God -- the journey from the St. Lawrence to the Saguenay represents an internal journey from being controlled by a world of business, commerce, and the drive to possess, to the victorious act of shaking off those bonds and emerging free from the world of the material and ready for the world of the spiritual. Finally, the poem is about art, and the realization that the greatest art of all is God's creations of the natural world and of man. The narrator, over the course of the poem, comes to realize that nothing else can compare with God's design.

As the first narrative poem in Spenserian stanzas in the history of Canadian literature, the poem gets big points for effort, and though there re patches where the verse is rocky or rhythmically problematic, the overall effect is quite something. The impact is even more noteworthy when one considers that Sangster had almost no formal education beyond elementary schooling, and as such his poem is one of the beauty of Canada written by a Canadian everyman. This is not an academic telling, but rather a story that struck a talented but ordinary Canadian who was struck by the majesty of his country. This is not to say Sangster was ignorant (indeed, his poetry is filled with invocations of mythology, biblical allusion, and so on), but that his story is one of a Canadian man with a Canadian education telling a story of Canada. Such things are certainly worth celebrating.

One way the poetry is uneven, however, is in Sangster's compulsive romanticization of the Canadian landscape, especially in his descriptions of the Canadian Shield and other rocky geographies. His use of classical allusions and pastoral diction blunts and pasteurizes the rugged beauty of the landscapes he is trying to describe. The river "bubbles silver" and is "isle-enwoven." Even storms are signs of God's strength rather than violent, frightening experiences. This is all to add to the effect of the poem as an homage to God's creation, and while it's exquisitely as a pastoral it rings false to anyone who has been to this area of country and seen nothing that could be remarked upon as pastoral.

And interesting feature is how much Sangster draws on the history, both aboriginal (though heavily one-sides) and white, of the area he writes about. As in the example above, with Wolfe and Montcalm, the effect is one of chronicling a history and myth-making about place. Sangster is self-consciously creating a story of Canada, and the effect is a powerful one. It reminds us of the importance of this kind of documentation in the early days of Canadian literature, because the tradition had to first be built in order for it to be built upon.

An ancillary theme in the poem is that love, and especially the love of God, supersede art, as he writes: "The lips of Love / Make mellower music than a thousand strings / Of harps." God's creation, too, is more beautiful than anything man can create artistically, and even the poem we are reading pales in comparison to God's work; as devout as it is, and as much of a celebration as it represents, it is in "puny contrast" to the creation of God. Art does not reach us closer to God, but it allows us an opportunity to offer devotion to him and show awe of his creation. This is by far the most devout, Christian piece I have read thus far, and if startling in its lack of cynicism and its innocent optimism. Overall, even for the aggressively agnostic like myself, it was a welcom break from the hopeless cynicism of much of our national literature.

irving layton, the bitterest middle-class professor to ever hate middle-class professors

Selected Poems from 15 Canadian Poets x3
by Irving Layton, edited by Gary Geddes

Look, the Lambs Are All Around Us!

Your figure, love,
curves itself
into a man's memory;
or to put it the way
a junior prof
at Mount Allison might,
Helen with her thick
absconding limbs
about the waist
of Paris
did no better.

Hell, my back's sunburnt
from so much love-making
in the open-air.
The Primate (somebody
made a monkey of him)
and the Sanhedrin
(long on the beard, short
on the brain)
send envoys to say
they don't approve.
You never see them, love.
You toss me in the air
with such abandon,
they take to their heels and run.
I tell you
each kiss of yours
is like a blow on the head!

What luck, what luck to be loved
by the one girl
in this Presbyterian
country
who knows how to give
a man pleasure.

Oh good. Irving Layton's here engaging in his most favourite pastime of academia-bashing. I basically hate Irving Layton on a level so deeply within my subconscious that the very mention of his name causes my gorge to rise. Okay, maybe nothing that bad, but I just find him so nauseatingly hypocritical that it's almost impossible for me to read his poetry. I'm at the point where I actually have to make a running start towards the book and hold on for dear life. Any excuse to be distracted away from Layton I take gladly. I've never admitted my hatred for him in a class as to dismiss Layton in an English classroom in a Canadian graduate school seems to be about the equivalent of walking up and down the bible belt yelling, "God loves gays! God is a woman! God is black! God approves of interracial marriages! God believes in evolution!"

The fact is, Layton was the world's most pompous hypocrite. He supposedly loathed academia and the middle classes, and resented the academization of Canadian poetry (in the above poem, note the image in the first stanza of the "junior prof / at Mount Allison" muddying a poetic image). Yet he was perfectly content to belly up to the trough at several Canadian universities, accepting comfortably middle class positions as a professor of English at York, Concordia, and other painfully bourgeois institutions. Oh dear, however did the poor flower survive? In "The Fertile Muck," he claims, "I have noticed / how my irregular footprint horrifies them," claiming for himself some kind of privileged outsider status, when really he was the beloved poet of academia and the popular public. He was about as much of an outsider as our other national hot-house orchid, David Adams Richards, in a Toronto cocktail party. Oh wait! Not an outsider at all.

He resented Canada and the puritanical roots of this country (see the last stanza in the above poem), yet never left here. I would have been okay with him bailing.

deja vu, Mr. Scott... deja vu

Selected Poems from 15 Canadian Poets x3
by F.R. Scott, edited by Gary Geddes

Charity

A code of laws
Lies written
On this beggar's hand.

My small coin
Lengthens
The harsh sentence.

I know we did F. R. Scott in the not-so-distant past, but thanks to the magic of anthologies we are revisiting him. Yay! Scott once wrote that poetry is "the making of something new and true" and "an exploring of the frontiers inside and outside the world of man [....] a kind of umbilical contemplation." The connections among things, hidden and otherwise, are of particular importance to Scott. In the poem above, for example, Scott suggests that poverty is created by our political system, and that when we do the very human act of attempting to help a person in need, we are in reality reifying the system itself -- we prove that we are willing to step in and take the reins and we remove the demand from the system itself. To Scott, this idea is the worst form of complacency because it allows the system to continue on unhalted, when really we need to dismantle social orders and rebuild a socialist state.

New times were coming, according to Scott, and such new times accordingly required new music. As he writes in "Overture," "This is an hour / Of new beginnings, concepts warring for power, / Decay of systems -- the tissue of art is torn / With overtures of an era being born." Social changes are tearing the world apart -- this is from 1936, where answers to the depression cycled between absolute socialism and absolute market control. There is a violent image here of the world battling between forces, and it is poetry that must begin anew to tell the stories of a troubled time. Old forms lose their relevancy, and new forms must emerge. We are on the cusp, in this poem, of a "world crescendo" -- the world is about to hit a fever pitch, and the results will be earth-shattering.

If this is the future, what of the past? In "Laurentian Shield," Scott ignores the reality of native populations on the land in order to create an empty landscape that he describes as "Inarticulate, arctic, / Not written on by history, empty as paper." It is only through human history, then, that we give meaning to nature. Scott's overarching view is a humanist one; that is, development that harnesses human ingenuity is progressive. As long as advancement is human-oriented and socially just, it is movement forward. As Scott believes, "The future of man is my heaven."

lady miriam, i presume

Selected Poems from 15 Canadian Poets x3
by Miriam Waddington, edited by Gary Geddes

Gossip

Professor Waddington will not be
joining the academic procession
she wrote a note to the Dean she
said that her gown was moth-eaten
and she had to stay home to tie up
the chrysanthemums or else they
would flop all over and kill the grass
and she would have to resod around
the flowerbeds a nuisance so she regrets
she will not be able to join the academic
procession if you ask me that woman has
a nerve she's not friendly and further-
more I hear she keeps late hours
looks at men what kind of example is that
for young girls all I can say is some
people are never satisfied

Miriam Waddington is concerned primarily with the interrogation of social norms. In the poem above, the nagging question we are left with is, who decides when a person should or should not be satisfied? Furthermore, the process of gossip is questioned. Who is the voice in the poem? It starts off in an official-sounding register, but by the fourth line of the poem the commentary is catty and back-biting in nature. And at the end of the poem, perhaps the voice shifts again -- who is determining Professor Waddington's level of satisfaction -- or is Waddington herself inserting that last line with a commentary on the gossips? Finally, of course, this poem is about gender roles. What are the challenges of being a woman maintaining a home and a career, and where is the breaking point? And the act of looking at students in a romantic, which especially for the period of this poem would have been perfectly acceptable (and the primary means of wife finding and wife swapping) for the male professors is fodder for critical gossip when engaged in by the female prof. The argument here is not that these actions are ever right, but why is it gossip for one and business as usual for another? Waddington's poetry is brilliant in its ability to force us to look differently at seemingly mundane situations.

Another such example is "My Lessons in the Jail," where Waddington asks us to think critically about the seemingly normal setting of an average prison. She writes that upon entering the jail one must "Salute their Christ to whom you cannot kneel." Waddington comments here upon compulsory faith and the flawed assumption that Canada is by definition a Christian nation. This national assumption marginalizes the other among the others -- that is, the non-Christians among the prison population. The poem is about Waddington's experiences as a social worker, and the "crown of thorns" she has chosen to wear in embarking upon a helping profession. As she leaves the prison, she writes: "Smile at the brute who runs the place / And memorize the banner, Christus Rex." With the focus on the "brutish" management of the jail, Waddington seems to ask if this is a Christian place at all -- without the banner, would you ever believe that God had touched this place?

She draws on her social work experience again in the poem "On My Birthday," where she questions her own ability to separate herself from her work. She refers to "the self I never was," commenting on the fact that her identity is embroiled in those she attempts to rescue. She suggests, considering her divorce, that "the woman from downward is never retrieved." That is, women are socially constructed to lose their identities in marriage, and in motherhood... and those who work outside the home, especially in a helping profession, lose themselves once again.

There is a fear of the future in Waddington's poetry. In "How I Spent the Year Listening to the Ten O'Clock News," she fears the violence and tragedy that seem forthcoming, but feels guilt at her choice not to have children, as she writes: "I have too much / to say thank / God I am too old / to bear children." For a woman of her generation to not desire children was akin to an admission of failure, and because she has the means she feels the obligation. But it's a scary obligation given the wars, tortures, and violence she documents through the poem. In "Ten Years and More," Waddington deals with the death of a spouse she had divorced, writing that she had written him a letter but "I was really saying / for the sake of our / youth and our love / I forgave him for / everything / and I was asking him / to forgive me too." How does one cope with a death and find closure when a divorce stands between the two people? There is a regret for the past here, for not having mended fences earlier, and Waddington seems to be trapped between regretting the past and fearing the future.

those poems are some purdy, ah'll reckon

Selected Poems from 15 Canadian Poets x3
by Al Purdy, edited by Gary Geddes

from A Handful of Earth, for Rene Levesque

Go back a little:
[...]
those origins
in which children were born
in which we loved and hated
in which we built a place to stand on
and now must tear it down?
-- and here I ask all the oldest questions
of myself
the reasons for being alive
the way to spend this gift and thank the giver
but there is no way

[...]
I say to him now: my place is here
whether Cote des Neiges Avenue Christophe Colomb
Yonge Street Toronto Halifax or Vancouver
this place is where I stand
where all my mistakes were made
when I grew awkwardly and knew what I was
and that is Canadian or Canadien
it doesn't matter which to me

[...]
I have no other place to go

If ever there was a poet who could be trusted to stand up for Canada, to paint images of Canada how she is and how her people truly talk, to not cloak Canadian vistas in classical imagery of ancient Greece and Rome and England -- if ever there was a Canadian Poet, capital-C capital-P, that poet would be Al Purdy. For Purdy, art is rooted deeply in place and people and voice, and those three things are meant to be represented as truthfully and as accurately as a poet's hand can render. In the poem above, Purdy begs for the country not to be dismantled by selfish whims, because for him there is no other place on earth where he is himself. He is rooted in the landscape of this country in such a way that without it, he would cease to exist.

The importance of place comes through in all of Purdy's poems, perhaps most notably in "The Country North of Belleville," which is Purdy's elegy for the land he grew up in. (One thing I've noted: in Canadian literature, it seems to me that only male writers are nostalgic for the colonial period. It's almost as though there is a cultural memory for the women that reminds them of the impediments to their own craft had they existed in that time period. Just an observation). For Purdy, this land is "country of defeat," a place that can be neither farmed nor mined successfully. People make a go of the land in fits and starts, but the successes and failures conflate one another so regularly that watching the cycle of the land it becomes difficult to tell when the good times are happening. The real tragedy, though, for Purdy, is that "this is a land where the young / leave quickly / unwilling to know what their fathers know / or to think the words their mothers do not say." There is not future here for the younger generation, and the land will be abandoned, or is in the process of being abandoned, over time. If we wish to return to this place, "we must enquire the way / of strangers" because the cultural memory is lost as the children step back from the land. We lose not only farmers, but the act of farming.

In "Cariboo Horses," Purdy tackles the idea that that which is Canadian is fundamentally inferior. Our horses, he points out, may seem like "only horses," of nondescript Canadian stock, but they are the "lost relatives" of the horses who dragged stone for the pyramids and traversed Africa and Asia. The foreign horses may seem more glamorous, but our horses share that line through htme memory of the species. Likewise, we may be "only Canadians," be we share the promise of ever race of humans to walk before us, and we need to work to create and shape a mythology of our own. Our history should move us more than the stories of foreign shores, because our history is all we have to fall back on.

the earle of CanLit

Selected Poems from 15 Canadian Poets x3
by Earle Birney, edited by Gary Geddes

from David

[...] And David taught me

How time on a knife-edge can pass with the guessing of fragments
Remembered from poets, the naming of strata beside one,
And matching stories from schooldays [...]

That day we chanced on the skull and the splayed white rib
Of a mountain goat underneath a cliff face, caught
On a rock. Around were the silken feathers of hawks.
And that was the first I knew that a goat could slip.

[...] Then grinning, he reached with his freckled wrist

And drew me up after. We set a new time for that climb.
That day returning we found a robin gyrating
In grass, wing-broken. I caught it to tame by David
Took it and killed it, and said, "Could you teach it to fly?"

In Earle Birney's poetry, a key theme is the imposition of man upon the natural world and the negative consequences of it. Birney claims to have felt like an outsider, observing the human condition from a privileged position within university halls and army barracks that made his insights on humans, and his empathy for the natural world, all the more poignant. In the example above, from "David," Birney has his narrator, Bob, learn an important lesson about will and desire. Bob wants the bird to live so that he might keep it as a pet -- it is his own selfish desire, and not the good of the animal, that is in question here. This lesson is tall the more important when David, critically wounded on the cliffside, asks Bob to push him over the edge so that he can die with dignity rather than live disfigured and in pain (should he be able to live at all). Bob wants David to hold on so that he doesn't have to make the life-or-death decision for his friend, but David forces Bob to face reality by reminding him of the robin with the broken wing. Is Bob trying to hold on to David for David's sake, or for his own? In the end, Bob pushes his friend over the edge, doing as David wanted, but knowing that he has killed David and his own youth in the process. A poignant poem, Birney asks us to question our motivations behind our actions, and also to remember that we are not individuals so importantly as we are members of a collectivity.

The idea of man and nature is revisited on "The Bear on the Delhi Road," where Birney watches two men trying to teach a bear to dance. The poem weaves together images of cruelty and beauty to create a very complicated image of the connection between man and nature. Though they do not wish the bear or the people around them any harm, by insisting on denying the bear's "wish forever to stay / only an ambling bear / four-footed in berries," the men are necessarily denying the bear's natural will and imposing a human desire upon him instead. The result in "no more joyous," but they have won a competition against nature.

Clear in both of these poems, as well as "Appeal to a Lady with a Diaper," is that Birney was troubled by contemporary society and misplaced values of decadence over substance. The bear and the robin have the potential to fall prey to the ever-changing will of man simply because they are of the natural world. Contemporary society devalues this for progress. Where progress is moral and socially just, Birney applauds it -- where it exists for its own sake, he cuts it to ribbons.