SOURCE: “Clarke vs. Clarke: Tory Elitism in Austin Clarke's Short Fiction,” in West Coast Lines, Vol. 22, Spring/Summer, 1997, pp. 110–28.

[In the essay below, Clarke analyzes the representation of class in Austin C. Clarke's short stories and argues that Clarke ironically upholds bourgeois Canadian nationalism despite his critical stance towards it in his non-fiction writing.]

Perusing Austin Chesterfield Clarke's short stories, one catches, at times, the distinctive odour of the late British writer Ian Fleming's sorry James Bond spy adventures. Certainly, both authors stud their pages with references to pricey autos and shapely women. (Or should that be shapely automobiles and pricey women?) Then there is their mutual attentiveness to high-stakes card games and horse races. (Clarke works both species of gambling into his short story, “Give It a Shot.”) Conceivably, if Fleming were still alive, he would make an apt partner for Clarke in one of those racially two-toned, “buddy” films that Hollywood insists we must have. Think of Fleming, with his tux, Roosevelt-style cigarette holder, and priceless presidential endorsement (from suave J.F.K.), then think of Clarke, with his (occasional) pinstripes, pipe, and Errol Barrow-style, prime ministerial poise. Perhaps the resemblance has something to do with both writers having a fondness for splendor—and fascinante women. Assuredly, Fleming's Bond is constantly sizing up the ‘merchandise’ in Moonraker:

As she bent over the table her black skirt brushed Bond's arm and he looked up into two pert, sparkling eyes, under a soft fringe of hair … then she whisked away. Bond's eyes followed the white bow at her waist and the starched collar and cuffs of her uniform as she went down the long room. … He recalled a pre-war establishment in Paris where the girls were dressed with the same exciting severity.

(38–39)

In Clarke's “How He Does It,” the ogling is explicitly commercial:

… when the door open, Jesus Christ! the most prettiest, the most best-dress, the most sexiest, the most beautiful Jewish woman from outta Israel and Judea … was standing up, full in the door, full in the breasts, full in the hips, solid as the best securities in the stock market down Bay Street, and on the loveliest pairs o' legs these two eyes o' mine have ever had the pleasant pleasure tainted with lust to rest on.

(217)

Fine loving requires, irreducibly, fine living. Fleming provides, obligingly enough, this gourmet detail:

Bond helped himself to another slice of smoked salmon from the silver dish beside him. It had the delicate glutinous texture only achieved by Highland curers—very different from the dessicated products of Scandinavia. He rolled a wafer-thin slice of brown bread-and-butter into a cylinder and contemplated it thoroughly. … He stirred the champagne with a scrap of toast. …

(39–41)

And Clarke models this sartorial moment in “A Man”:

He was dressed as if he was going to a wedding … tall in a long black woollen winter coat, three-piece-suit usually of dark brown and worsted, and made with a hint of London's fashion and cut … and he would climb into the long, expensive luxury car after flipping back the tails of his winter coat to avoid sitting on them on the seat.

(120)

A mail-order catalogue of the wares retailed in Clarke's récits would include, for starters, a subscription to the Globe & Mail (the haute couture Toronto daily), meerschaum pipes, black leather attaché cases, Bally shoes and slippers (also black), Dom Perignon champagne (Bond sips it too), pinstripe suits (dark blue), Chanel Number 17, Oxford shoes, Turkish tobacco, dry martinis (another Bond favourite), Mario Palomino Jamaican cigars, Martini & Rossi vermouth secco, Bombay Gin, and lubricated condoms. These are the rewards of Clarke's bourgeois heaven. Fleming's Bond can purchase such items readily (given his government salary, his consummate skill at cards, and his white male privilege), but Clarke's black immigrant characters are either would-be or used-to-be aristocrats. Their access to the status symbols of the Canadian Establishment is frustrated by a polite, tight, white-iste caste system. Occasionally, they earn their way to the good life (at high personal cost); usually, they lie or cheat to advance; frequently, they fail, becoming addicts or suicides. In spite of such social(ist) realism, Clarke launches few polemical assaults on racism. His writings are not anti-white (though white women attract some venom). Rather, like Fleming, Clarke nudges us toward accepting conservative notions of social class implicit in the admiration of state spectacle and market commodities. Hence, Clarke's protagonists pursue fine liquors, luxurious habilements, prized tobaccoes, and envy-spurring accessories (including mates and lovers). Although their failures (or compromised successes) suggest a critique of racism, their narratives preserve the main determinant of social stratification, namely, class. It is as if Clarke has read his Marx and Fanon (and Fleming?) only as a means of finding a fresh route into Burke's Peerage.

1

Born in Barbados in 1934, Clarke has lived, since 1955, in Canada, where his first novel, Survivors of the Crossing, appeared in 1964. Despite ignorant claims to the contrary, he was neither the first nor the second African-Canadian novelist, but the fifth, though he was the first to publish a novel in Canada.¹ Known principally for his novels, Clarke has, nevertheless, published five collections of short stories, from his first—and best—collection, When He Was Free and Young and Used to Wear Silks (1971), to his latest, There Are No Elders (1993).² The nouvelles articulate, against Caribbean and metropolitan Toronto backdrops, yearnings for independence, cultural assertion, masculine agency, and élite acceptance. Though Clarke's black protagonists produce stolid broadsides against empire, nostalgic paeans to lost Island paradises, romantic poems of cultural pride, and even wry deconstructions of icy Canadian racism, they are, for all that, defrocked gentry, anxious to assume classy places in Canada's ruling class. Impeccably educated, often of Brahmin backgrounds, they do not emigrate to Canada to become peons or to serve as slaves. Problematically though, as Clarke posits in his Introduction to Nine Men Who Laughed, “immigrant life” is tantamount to “slavery” (7). Tragedy—or Juvenalian satire—in Clarke's oeuvre requires, then, not the mere event of racism, but rather the bracing plunge into a lower standard of living. This fact explains the curious repetition of a striking ur-moment in two of Clarke's texts. In “If Only: Only If …,” a 1986 story set in mid-50s Toronto, the narrator lists the range of stereotypical jobs then-open to black men: railway porter, “a janitor somewhere,” or “a man who does handout towels in washrooms down Yonge Stree [sic], in bars and clubs that don't let-in no black or coloured or Negro men” (100). Six years later, Clarke opened his essay, Public Enemies: Police Violence and Black Youth, with a like remembrance of Original, Socio-Economic Sin:

How should I react to the man … dressed in a white butler's jacket and black trousers … and in the shine of whose shoes I could see, if I had been so disposed, my disappointment and embarrassment? This man, in this sparkling men's room, its four walls of polished white, squared tiles, dwarfed by two white porcelain urinals. In his silent blackness, this man, with a skin polished high as the marble, standing with an ironic dignity handing out white towels to me …

(1)

Clarke is moved to confession: “I disappeared before he could extend his hand. I disappeared in order to obliterate the man, his status and his memory from touching and tainting my status” (1, my italics). Clarke feels such disdain that, though he shares the same colour as the washroom attendant, the latter's abjection renders him an Untouchable. Though Clarke tried to “obliterate” the man, his spectre haunts characters and narrators who are, with their champagne tastes and beer budgets, the most pronouncedly class conscious of any in Canadian fiction (save for Mordecai Richler's Duddy Kravitz and Dany Laferrière's Vieux). Clarke's comédiens are Lears. Though Clarke later embraces the totem of the washroom attendant as his link to the indigenous African-Canadian past, this too-visible man personifies Failure.

Essentially, Clarke's short fiction delineates a Neo-Darwinian struggle in which the geographically-displaced become class-misplaced, regardless of their ability, their training, their morality, their pedigree. Whatever their current shabby, shoddy, even shitty positions, though, his protagonists, at home, enjoyed “aristocratic status” (Introduction 1).³ In “They Heard A-Ringing of Bells” for instance, Sagaboy, stricken with tuberculosis, remembers that, at home, he had dreamt of being “the governor o' the whole blasted West Indies” (29). In “If the Bough Breaks,” Caribbean women in a Toronto beauty parlour exclaim, “Back home, we'd be ruling the roost. We'd be women with men and husbands that make decisions and run things” (22). Enid, the heroine of “Waiting for the Postman to Knock,” relates the degradation that immigration wroughts:

I came into this country as a decent middle-class person in Barbados … [I]t is only in Canada that I am known as a labourer, or a working woman … because back home I never lifted a straw in the way of work, for my parents were rich people. We had servants back home.

(32)

Now in Canada, Enid awaits eviction from her barren apartment, her hydro and telephone service have been disconnected, her landlord and creditors harry her mercilessly. Even Enid's mother declares that, had Enid remained in Barbados, she would be “a high school mistress, or a doctor or a lawyer, anything but being in that cold, ungodly place, Canada, working for white people and servanting after people who don't know how to treat you as a human being” (37). This theme returns in a Lord Chesterfield-like, advice-to-my-son-abroad, epistolary fiction, “Letter of the Law of Black,” in which a father, Anthony Barrington St. Omer Edgehill, advises his son, now resident in Canada, that “The colonial is the fact that transcends blackness” (59). His son's colonial roots will permit him to evade the racism of Canadian life. For one thing, he comes from superior stock—and a proven culture.

According to Clarke, it is immigration, that is to say, a precipitous, economic decline, that creates a negativized blackness. The apartheid of immigration, its relegation of entire classes of people to poor-paying jobs or no jobs, fosters the postlapsarian “slave.” Clarke states explicitly, then, that “The men [in Nine Men Who Laughed] are black only because they live in Toronto, in a society which has officially branded them ‘immigrants’ from the West Indies” (Introduction 7). Clearly, Clarke has studied his Fanon, perhaps Black Skin, White Masks, where Fanon theorizes that “the black man … must be black in relation to the white man” (110) and that “the Negro, having been made inferior, proceeds from humiliating insecurity through strongly-voiced self-accusation to despair” (60). The effect of the Manichean division between black and white is to rigidify class categories. Thus, “One is white as one is rich, as one is beautiful, as one is intelligent” (51–52); blackness is the infernal inverse. One is not born ‘black,’ then, blackness is a socio-economic construct into which one is thrust. Hence, the “I” in Clarke's polemical cri de coeur, Public Enemies, is, simultaneously, “slave, Negro, coloured, black, colonized” (15). Asking rhetorically, “How long are we to remain immigrants?” (Public 19), Clarke demands, in effect, how long are we to remain black, to remain slaves? In “Black Man in a White Land,”⁴ an astonishingly frank, even reckless, pamphlet, Clarke, using the pseudonym, Ali Kamal Al Kadir Sudan, proposes that “the black man in a white society is a minority—subhuman” (4–5). Likewise, in “Letter,” Edgehill instructs his son in how to subvert negative constructs of blackness:

But if you are seen … reading Pushkin … they will say you are an intellectual. Even if they call you a colonial intellectual, as they have a habit of doing, such as black writer, a black artist, or black doctor, it would be different. You would, by this intelligence, be more dangerous to them, and they would not be able to despise, or worse still, ignore your presence, and call you a visible minority.

(60)

Thus, blackness is fluid, and can be applied—like paint—to anyone who lapses in class and morality. Clarke affirms the unreality of constructed blackness when he reveals his desire “to discover something which a former black student at Yale University called a ‘black aesthetic’, a black way of seeing black things, a blackening of the consciousness” (Introduction 6). This blackening denotes a sardonic trope. Any group can be or become black—that is to say, low-class or no-class. Hence, the father in “Letter” warns his son, “Beware of the lower classes of all races. They spit on you because they grew up spitting on the ground” (61). Likewise, in “If the Bough Breaks,” one of the women emphasizes the class jealousy that white Canadians project towards their immigrant equals and superiors. When she and her husband buy a new car, she reports, the neighbours stare “from behind their curtains. We shouldn't have those things. We shouldn't live the way they live. We shouldn't” (20). In the same story, a woman remembers calling an uppity, white security guard a “‘nigger-man’” (13). Whiteness is, then, an unstable sign. Clarke—as Ali—comments, for instance, that “The black West Indian has been educated by colonialism to think of himself as a white man; in more fortunate cases as a black Englishman, or a black Frenchman, or a black Dutchman” (Black 8, my italics). White racists presume, wrongly, that skin colour predicts excellence, but, as Clarke insists, class and heritage determine that quality: “cultural ancestry is a greater force than … colour or the branded status of ‘immigrant’” (Introduction 7). With this thesis, Clarke is equipped to defend class privilege, even as he indicts the operations of racism. Nevertheless, his apology for classism necessitates a repetition of caste-supporting, sexist, white-fostered images of beauty and success.

2

Jean Baudrillard theorizes in Seduction that “the strength of the feminine is that of seduction” (7) and that the secret of this irresistible power is its presentation of an alluring absence, or blankness, whose indeterminacy annihilates masculine attempts at definition. Seduction, “by producing only illusions, obtains all powers” (70). Crucially, Baudrillard aligns this alluring absence with a cinematic whiteness, “the spectral whiteness of the heavenly stars, after which they [film stars] are so appropriately named” (96). In his short fiction, Clarke agrees, tacitly, with Baudrillard that women, whiteness, and, hence, white women symbolize attractive, glistening surfaces that can entrap and destroy the unwary,⁵ meaning, for Clarke, black male immigrants. Thus, Clarke considers the psychological threat posed to self-conscious blackness by the omnipresence of white-supremacist imagery in North American society. Speaking as Ali in 1967, he asserts, “Because of the contemporary idiosyncrasy of white advertising media, I do not think the white man understands the dignity of the human body as an object of love” (Black 6). The pervasiveness of this spectacular whiteness ensures that “the black man's future in a white society will always be in terms of white society's schizophrenia about blacks” (4). Pursuing this argument, Clarke creates protagonists who view white women as symbols of Canada—that is to say, of a vamp who entices “her” thralls with phoney promises of bourgeois comfort. Whore-like, the Canadian “system” encourages “laughter and seduces the ‘immigrant’” (Introduction 5). This sexed perception is accented by Clarke's metonymization of Canada as “this fucking system” (Introduction 5, my italics) and by his autobiographical recollection of a female exemplum of white racism. Damnably, she is “the person who confronted me with her prepossessiveness, the woman, the system … now a microcosm of all the words, bad conclusions and faulty definitions of ‘immigrant’ and … a metaphor for arrogance” (Introduction 3). He upholds his conflation of woman and system in the next paragraph: “She, the attitude, the system, knew my meaning” (Introduction 3).

The Canada-as-white-whore metaphor recurs, then, throughout Clarke's oeuvre. For instance, in “Canadian Experience,” the anonymous (“unchristened” [Introduction 2]), unemployed protagonist, a high-school-educated Barbadian immigrant, about to be dislodged from his abysmal room for non-payment of rent, is succoured by a white sometime actress who shares the same shoddy building. Hearing the woman take her shower, the protagonist imagines “the red-faced ugly blackheads painted red at the bottom of the spine” (38), an obvious red-and-white symbol of Canada (especially given that the blemishes are scarlet cold sores). Suitably then, she is, de temps en temps, a prostitute, for following her shower, she states that she has washed herself “clean” to attend “an audition in an hour”: “You never know what directors're going to ask you to do” (39). This cheerless passage concludes with the actress, wrapping a towel about herself, but leaving “the two small nipples of her dropped breasts” bare to “his undesiring eyes” (40). He resists this temptation, but there is no escape from predatory whiteness. Hence, in contemplating applying for a job in a ritzy bank, he is frightened away by the “blue eyes … like ice-water” of a female employee (43). Ashamed of his failure to find work, haunted by his alienation from paradisal Barbados (“where he was born in a smiling field of comfortable pasture land” [47]), the immigrant commits suicide by leaping in front of a subway train. Naturally, the train's “ugly red” colour recalls the actress's “red-corpuscle sores” (50–51).

In “The Motor Car,” Calvin, the protagonist, objectifies the requisite white woman as “this Canadian thing” (102). She is “this blasted white woman humbugging him about sex” (103). As Calvin scrimps and saves to buy a Ford Galaxie automobile, so does he plan to acquire the “Canadian thing” as the perfect accessory for the vehicle. Eventually, he succeeds, but, during his triumphant spin, the woman continues, though he has commanded her to stop, to sing along with a calypso playing over the car radio. Thinking angrily to himself, “Well, who tell she she could talk back to Bajan man like Calvin?” (109), Calvin brakes abruptly, thereby pitching, fatally, the seatbelt-less woman against the windshield. Notably, this killing results after the folksy, omniscient narrator discusses Canadian economic imperialism in Barbados, stating “they was more Air Canada planes all bout Seawell Airport in Barbados in them days that you would have think that Barbados did own Air Canada” (95). In truth, it is “the other way round” (95). Calvin's assault on “this Canadian thing” is metaphorical revenge for Canada's raping and pillaging of Barbados.

In “Not So Old, But Oh So Professional,” Max, a bachelor and Caribbean immigrant, who spends his nights shyly ogling a young prostitute, Linda Pearl Mason, accepts her proposal that she visit his downtown Toronto home. As her middle name suggests, Linda's skin exudes “a porcelain white sheen” (82). After spending a lyrical evening conversing and drinking, in a kind of casual symposium, Max becomes aroused when Linda passes her fingers through her hair:

She was not caressing herself the way I have seen some women pass their hands over their breasts, squeezing the nipples a little to stimulate them and the eyes of the man watching; or how I have seen some women pass their hands over their thighs, slowly, slowly, rubbing faster and then faster still, and slapping them; or even as I have seen some women pass their fingers through their pubic hair to their vaginas, even opening the lips, and doing little stimulating, destroying things to a man's balance. … She was just drawing her hands through her hair, a natural function, and that naturalness made it more enticing and betraying and seducing.

(97)

Max's voyeuristic, pornographic pleasure (or self-seduction) in watching Linda and his resultant, destabilizing aporia mirrors the vertigo that a too-prolonged gazing upon a provocative Canada also induces. (After all, the “system” also does “little stimulating, destroying things” to Black Caribbean immigrants.) Max climaxes under the ministrations of the “pearly” white Linda while nostalgic dreams of his Island past fill his mind. But, this is callous, tough Toronto. And Linda's cash-driven response to his orgasm returns Max sharply to the mean, capitalist world: “Now you owe me, motherfucker!” (101) Linda is as cold as the glass-sheathed skyscrapers of Bay Street. Clarke's tale allegorizes the Caribbean male's morbid mating dance with the “albino” widow spider of Canada. For this reason, Linda's siren-like whiteness receives photographerly attention:

She was wearing white tonight. I have no defense against that color. … For better and for worse: white dominates me. … Her breasts were half-covered in white lace, worked into the top of her outfit, and that too was made of white, soft cotton. It was oppressive, irredeemably seductive. …

(88–89)

Linda is “overpowering” (89), just as the white coldness of Toronto's business district, Bay Street, overwhelms the protagonist of “Canadian Experience.” Too, disillusioningly, given her French Canadian roots (her true surname is Maisoneuve), Linda is an archetype of Canada's ‘two founding peoples.’ This fact suggests that no real rapprochement is possible between them and recent claimants of Canadian citizenship. (Another white woman, Susan Cole, the protagonist of “In an Elevator,” voices, eloquently, the essential white supremacist Canadian attitude:

… I was here first, and I work here, and no goddamn immigrant or cleaning woman or black sonofabitch, nobody's gonna make me feel threatened and live like a victim in my own fucking country, province, in my city.

(60)

Cole offers her frank revelation after recalling that she had consistently been bested, at an elite private school in Ontario, by the black daughter of a Barbadian prime minister.)

The seductive, white female/system/nation tricks, turns tricks on, and fucks black male slaves/colonials/immigrants. “Her” “prepossessiveness” (Introduction 3),⁶ her ownership of and first claim to commodities that she does not want, ever, to share, engenders in her black vassals a degree of desperation (sometimes violent), self-hatred (sometimes suicidal), and, in the best of them, a passionate cunning. Nevertheless, Clarke's imagery revivifies sorry, nasty, stodgy, and flat-out reactionary notions about the damning consequences of female sexuality. Khalid Kishtainy writes that the teachings of St. Cyprian of Carthage included the influential precept that “if a woman invited the eyes of men, called forth their sighs and offered them matter for their lust and fuel for the flames of passion, she must be held guilty of their ruin” (21). It is impossible to differentiate Clarke's figurative language from this ayatollah-like vision. The “seductiveness” of the Canadian “system” thus dooms its “tricked” immigrants. But the dilemma posed by Clarke's sexist imagery is complicated when one recalls that, for Marx, “prostitution is the most logical career for the capitalist way of life” (Kishtainy, 46).⁷ If one accepts this insight, then Clarke's moralistic condemnation of whorish (white) women makes no sense. However, Clarke's real target is the seductive nature of capitalism itself, a “system” that must be regulated by a meritocracy based, scrupulously, on heritage and talent.⁸

If some of Clarke's white female characters are purveyors of dangerous allure, of treacherous—if radiant—promises, black women inspire an alternative constellation of metaphors, mainly involving notions of nurture. A perpetual contest between “mothers”—the Canadian “Whore of Babylon” and the more-or-less Anglican “Mary of Barbados”—occurs in Clarke. The white harlot offers faux enticements; but the poorer, saintlier, black mother calls on her children to preserve their dignity, to strive for advancement (without giving way to rank materialism), and to honour their heritage. Clarke's employment of the Messalina/mater trope highlights his conservatism, for a primal division in his work is the split between the love of the Mother Country—a nearly incestuous desire for that country—versus lust for the stepmother, the new country, a passion expressed in terms of desire for material gain at any price. This essentialist difference is exemplified by the black Barbadian mother in “An Easter Carol.” She is an idealized, earthbound goddess, a neo-Marian figure. Preparing her son to accompany her to church, she declares, “Christ! boy, you look real good! You look just like a little doctor. Now, I want you to grow up fast, and be a doctor, hear?” (9). The injunction contrasts starkly with the desires expressed and solicited by the gallery of white female characters surveyed above. Instead, in a kind of neonatal nationalism, the mother incarnates the voice of Barbados—the “motherland” itself—instructing the boy to succeed. If her words do not suffice to spur the boy to achievement, there is her physicality, her seductiveness:

I looked up at her, so large, so beautiful, so lovely, and so black—a mysterious queen or something, from Africa, with her hair braided neatly and long; with her old white dress which she washed three times a week, clutching to the feminine twists and turns of her full body. She looked at me, and she looked at my thoughts; and she smiled. She drew me close close to her breasts and her rolling soft stomach, where I could feel the love and blood pumping through her body.

(10)

Not only does the mother's body bear the usual romanticized, black nationalist inscriptions of Africa, it is also associated with the topography of Barbados: “I listened to the beautiful mountains and valleys of her surging voice …” (1). Whiteness, in this story, is redemptive, unthreatening: “… I could see women dressed in the white of angels, white hats, white shoes, as if they were proud to be part of this great resurrection morning, as if they had remained new brides, new virgins, all their lives” (13). Despite such conceptualizations, the figure of the black mother still shades into that of the white whore, for both are obscure objets de désir; both pose the threat of psychological castration. In fact, the mother foreshadows the white prostitute, Linda, in a crypto-sexual detail: she uses “Evening-in-Paris perfume” (9), while Linda is “the scent of Evening in Paris, which is just a way of saying that she is overpowering me” (“Not” 89). Even in the paradisal setting of Barbados, then, a woman can menace masculinity, just as Linda imperils Torontonian Max's sense of maleness: “… I was sitting in a house with a woman whose presence in the house was the consequence of the myth that I was a man. Am a man” (“Not” 98). Vertiginously then, the white whore and the black mother both endanger self-conscious black manhood.

To avoid this Scylla-Charybdis trap, Clarke's protagonists—like Max in “Not”—quest for true masculinity.⁹ However, this search is fraught with difficulty. For instance, in “Black Man in a White Land,” Clarke, as Ali, argues, “it is a bit naive to suggest … that the black man in North American society can ever have a future as a MAN” (3). Clarke's 1973 essay, “Some Speculations As to the Absence of Racialistic Vindictiveness in West Indian Literature,” notes the “emasculating psychological effects of slavery” (169) and suggests that the dream of a redeemed masculinity is now implicated with a regressive macho posture:

It seems that the West Indian writer, a man from a society free of the worst pathologies of racialism, a man from a society into which Black nationalism had to be imported from American Blacks …, could do nothing more than couch his literary expression in the pathology of self-identity and crisis, personal crisis, and the concept machismo (related to the conquest of women) within the social framework of the island in which he lived.

(180)

His frustrated aristocrats are, then, tinder for the Revolution, but they also represent a tired, effete, black macho nationalism. They are men who “have forgotten, at that most critical point in their lives, the moment of their contact with hostility [discrimination]”; each “has forgotten who he is” (Introduction 2). Later, Clarke returns to this theme, asking whether his fellow and sister African Canadians “see themselves as victims, and behave as victims of this racism, without remembering and acknowledging that they are men and women” (Public 8). Memory, particularly that anchored in the “Motherland,” is a guarantor of the ‘national’ soul, a conservative nostrum that George Grant articulates in Lament for a Nation: The Defeat of Canadian Nationalism (1965). Therein, he claims, chasteningly, that “Memory is never enough to guarantee that a nation can articulate itself in the present” (12).¹⁰ This assertion proves devastatingly true for the male protagonist of “Canadian Experience.” His memories of his privileged life in Barbados—“eight, healthy, well-fed Barbadians, squinting because the sun is in their eyes, standing like proprietors in front of a well-preserved plantation house made of coral stone, covered in vines so thick that their spongy greenness strangles the windows and the doors” (“Canadian” 47)—do not preserve him from suicide. Nor do the get-rich-quick schemes of Pat in “Give It a Shot” or the playerism of the protagonist of “A Man” yield viable supports for a progressive masculinity.

But Clarke is not bereft of such images. For this reason, the masculinist scopophilia that influences Clarke's descriptions of female characters also determines his accounts of spectacles and the accoutrements of wealth and power. For instance, in “An Easter Carol,” the boy-narrator records, nearly without irony, the majestic images of “The Lord Bishop, with his robes fluttering like the Union Jack in the breeze … the Prime Minister of the island … and the lords and ladies of the island, all untitled, but all rich and white” (“Easter” 14). This admiration of pomp and circumstance is not a unique, narrative perversity. Clarke exalts the image of then-Ontario Lieutenant Governor Lincoln Alexander “adorned in vice-regal raiment, plumed and epauletted in Elizabethan finery to resemble a Lord of the Fleet” (Public 5). Clarke even bemoans the supposed truth that African Canadians disparage ostentation, “particularly as that prominence is bestowed by the media and the establishment”: “It is as if we want to remain, each and every one of us, oppressed …” (Public 5). Oppression is best countered, in this scheme, by honouring and rewarding the meritorious, especially those who have demonstrably overcome oppression: “He who is now being lauded and recompensed, and made a chancellor of York University, Oscar Peterson, was [once] barred from entering the Towne Tavern, because on his arm was a white woman” (Public 13). Derek Walcott is celebrated as being “one of our heroes from another discipline, equal in importance to being a first black Mayor, or a first black Lieutenant-Governor: a poet” (Public 6). (This is, it must be said, a rather curious way to toast a Nobel laureate.) In any case, Clarke's admiration for acceptable public figures is akin to his ease with comfortable—and comforting—commodities. Ownership has its privileges. Thus, Clarke distinguishes little between recording the tastes of gourmet food or the aroma of an exquisite cigar or inscribing a woman's body: “She puts the dress on and runs her hands over her hips, and she smoothes the rich material which covers her luscious body for a moment from my eyes” (“Beggars” 68). Such images figure the pleasure-import of Tory voyeurism, of seeing one's way clear to what one desires.

3

Clarke drafts a political vision riven by contradiction. His critique of racism is blasted by his defence of privilege. One cannot very well exult “aristocratic status” (Introduction 1) to ward off racism, then have a character praise a white mistress because “her movement was aristocratic” (“Man” 144). Sexism compromises Clarke's criticism of Canadian “prepossessiveness”: the depiction of a sluttish society reproduces the hoariest (whoriest?) gender cliches. Worse, Clarke's anti-racist utterances occasion a hint of rebarbative anti-Semitism. In his Ali persona, he proffers this analysis of the state of the Civil Rights Movement, circa 1967:

The Jew is a Jew because WASP (whites in general) say he's a Jew. The same thing is true for the black man, but with greater visciousness [sic]. In the civil rights struggle, the Jew is not doing anything to ease the pressure on the Negro: if there were no Negro, there would be a Jew! The bad publicity that the black man gets today can be ascribed to the Jews because they control the communications.

(Black 4)

There is, here, a fundamentalist ascription to essences, yet, simultaneously a realization that no true, “pure” blackness can ever be recovered. To whit: “the Canadian black man is obsessed with an irrational Negritude: he hates the white man partly because it is fashionable to hate him” (3). When one is free from such faddish irrationalities, one can, if necessary, support one's local police:

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. [T]his city is still north of the border of America and of racism.

(Public 18)

Ingeniously, perhaps even with opportunistic élan, Clarke has always coupled assaults on Canadian racism with a strong endorsement of Canadian anti-Americanism. Speaking as Ali, in 1967, he bemoans the fact that “Canada is an American satellite” (Black 5) and that “the CANADIAN BLACK ATTITUDE [is] derived from the Black-White clashes in America” (2). Twenty-five years later, Clarke was still able to allege that one reason for the riot of May 4, 1992, in Toronto, was that “American racism had taken root in Canada in the minds of black Canadians” (Public 3). This same argument recurs in “Initiation,” a satire of Sixties black radicalism, in which Clarke's nom de guerre, Ali Kamal Al Kadir Sudan, is recycled, as the nom de guerre of a character whose “real” name is “Terrence Washington Jefferson Lincoln Lucas, the Third” (43). Ironically, then, Clarke lampoons a character bearing his excognomen for doing what he had once done, namely, play at US-style radicalism in a setting where it could not apply. Toronto, for better or worse, is not Harlem (29).

Positioning himself, in his short fiction, as a sane, reasonable, good, Tory writer, Clarke upholds bourgeois Canadian nationalism; stands by the police, enforces age-old angst and Neo-Puritan attitudes regarding women; regards racism as an American phenomenon (exercising a hazardous influence only on black Canadians); exalts the virtues of good breeding, good living, and good gin; and even subscribes, shamefully, to the tenets of a conspiracy theory. This version of a “Common Sense Revolution” could be subscribed to, one imagines, by many conservatives, from Fleming to Diefenbaker.

For all Clarke's dexterous writing in support of his ideology, though, one must question the efficacy of a literary politics which holds, in stentorian tones, that Utopia is a location where professionals—and other deserving members of the elect, indigenous or immigrant, black or white, can join hands and drink Johnny Walker (black), tack “QC” suffixes or “Hon.” prefixes to their names, and debate the merits of Combermere School versus those of Bishop Strachan. (While police club the envious rabble in the streets?) The ideal is not, however, a convincing prescription of societal happiness. Given his status as social satirist, pomp-loving politico, conservative idealist, pissed-off but loyal subject of Elizabeth II, and mild foe of capitalism, perhaps Clarke must be classed as Canada's answer to V. S. Naipaul (if Naipaul even merits an answer). Yet, despite the blind spots in Clarke's social vision, there is much that is salvageable, even commendable, in his largely sympathetic overview of the (black) immigrant's plight and in his principled, though limited, attacks on the de facto caste system which impedes their upward mobility. One can read Clarke's fiction with some relish (or perhaps Grey Poupon mustard), but its underlying elitism remains difficult to digest.

Notes

1. In his thoughtful review of Stella Algoo-Baksh's Austin C. Clarke: A Biography (1994), “Survivor of the Crossing,” Brian John Busby, relying on a mistaken claim by Lorris Elliott in Literary Writing by Blacks in Canada (1988), writes that a novel by one Brian Gypsin, namely, To Master, a Long Goodnight, published in New York in 1946, “is very likely the first black Canadian novel” (11). But “Brian Gypsin” was a misprint for Brion Gysin, a white American writer, whose purported novel is really a biography. The first African-Canadian novel was African-American writer Martin Robinson Delany's Blake, inked in Chatham, Ontario, and serialized in two magazines, between 1859 and 1862. Next in line was William Haslip Stowers, born in Canada West (now Ontario) in 1859, who co-authored Appointed: An American Novel, with William H. Anderson, and published it under the pseudonym, Sanda, in Detroit in 1894. The third novelist, John Hearne, was born in Montréal in 1926, grew up in Jamaica, and published his first novel in London in 1955. The fourth novelist was, arguably, Jan Carew, a Guyanese native, who published his first novel in London in 1958 and later acquired Canadian citizenship.

   Busby's point that Clarke's “literary career stretches back farther than [that of] any other black Canadian” (11) also requires amendment. When Clarke's Survivors of the Crossing appeared in 1964, Gérard Étienne had already published, in his native Haiti, six books of poetry and prose; after arriving in Canada, he published another book of poetry in Montréal in 1966. Similarly, Anthony Phelps had published three books of poetry in Haiti by 1964, and issued other poetry and drama in Montréal in 1966 and 1968. With three Haitian-published texts to his credit by 1964, Franck Fouché published his drama, Bouki non paradi, in Montréal in 1964, thus becoming the first, published African-Canadian playwright. Another playwright, the Trinidad-born Lennox Brown, began to publish his prize-winning dramas with the Ottawa Little Theatre in 1965. New Brunswick poet Anna Minerva Henderson released her book of poems, Citadel, in 1967; while the Jamaican-born Gershom Williams self-published a novel in Toronto in 1968. Though Clarke was a fairly isolated figure, qua novelist, in African-Canadian literature in the mid-1960s, he was not the only publishing writer, or the only pioneer, and his relative loneliness was short-lived. See my “Primer of African-Canadian Literature,” Books in Canada 25.2 (March 1996): 5–7. See also my “Africana Canadiana: A Bibliography of African-Canadian Authors, 1785–1996, in English, French, and Translation,” forthcoming in Canadian Ethnic Studies.

2. The others are, in chronological order, When Women Rule (1985), Nine Men Who Laughed (1986), and In This City (1992).

3. Clarke's black male “aristocrats” would fit splendidly into this passage in Fleming's Moonraker:

   There were perhaps fifty men in the room, the majority in dinner jackets, all at ease with themselves and their surroundings, all stimulated by the peerless food and drink, all animated by a common interest—the prospect of high gambling, the grand slam, the ace pot, the key-throw in a 64 game at backgammon. There might be cheats or possible cheats amongst them, men who beat their wives, men with perverse instincts, greedy men, cowardly men, lying men; but the elegance of the room invested each one with a kind of aristocracy.

   (43)

   Think, for instance, of J.M.G.M.-C. in “A Man,” or Mr. Joshua Miller-Corbaine in “How He Does It,” or the Jamaican in “Give It a Shot,” or Anthony Barrington St. Omer Edgehill in “Letter of the Law of Black.” These gentlemen have their flaws, oui, but their commitment to elegance mitigates their sins.

4. Stella Algoo-Baksh does not include this pamphlet, an interview with Ali (Clarke) conducted by Nazzam Al Sudan (Marvin X), in the bibliography she compiled for her monograph, Austin C. Clarke: A Biography.

5. Here is yet another point where Clarke attains a strange, accidental entente with Fleming, who regularly pimps, in his tales, beautiful—and drop-dead deadly—(white and “exotic”) women.

6. Note Clarke's utilization of a quasi-economic term as a synonym for “racism.” His critique of Canadian “prepossessiveness”—not racism—accents his class concerns.

7. An interesting irony pertains to Clarke's Canada-as-harlot paradigm. Kishtainy points out that “prostitutes over the centuries were inwardly religious and conservative and were rightly represented in literature with a royalist mentality” (49). This description of the political orientations of prostitutes squares nicely with accounts of Canada that accent its religious, Tory, and monarchical predilections.

8. In this reading, Clarke's characters resemble black knights (or Bond figures?) endangered by Canadian ‘belles dames san merci.’ In their existentialist, noble failings, they uphold masculinist and conservative ideals of chivalry. Thus, in “An Easter Carol,” the Bajan Easter churchgoers consist of women wearing “the white of angels,” while the men sport “suits of long ago black, which fitted them like coats of armour” (14).

9. This theme has always been vital for Clarke. Indeed, his collection Nine Men Who Laughed, which focusses on black masculinity, is likely based on Richard Wright's Eight Men, “a diverse collection of short pieces connected only by a tentative exploration of black masculinity” (Gilroy 155).

10. Clarke's disdain for greed aligns him with Canadian Red Toryism, as defined by Grant, who maintains that, in traditional, Canadian conservative thought, “the good life [makes] strict demands on self-restraint” (70). Hence, in “The Motor Car,” then, Calvin's greed is viewed as a kind of displacement of nature: “But the bank account was mounting and climbing like a woman belly when she in the familyway” (98).

Works Cited

Algoo-Baksh, Stella. Austin C. Clarke: A Biography. Toronto: ECW Press; Barbados, Jamaica, Trinidad and Tobago: The Press of the University of the West Indies, 1994.

Baudrillard, Jean. Seduction. Trans. Brian Singer. Montréal: New World Perspectives, 1990. Trans. of De la séduction. Paris: Éditions Galilée, 1979.

Busby, Brian John. “Survivor of the Crossing.” The Literary Review of Canada. 4.6 (June 1995): 11–12.

Clarke, Austin. “Beggars.” There Are No Elders. Toronto: Exile Editions, 1993. 63–80.

———. [as Ali Kamal Al Kadir Sudan, pseud.] Ali Kamal Al Kadir Sudan: “Black Man in a White Land.” Interviewed by Nazzam Al Sudan [pseud. of Marvin X]. Burlington ON: Al Kitab Sudan, 1967. [interview transcript]

———. “Canadian Experience.” Nine Men Who Laughed. Toronto: Penguin, 1986. 31–51.

———. “An Easter Carol.” When He Was Free and Young and He Used to Wear Silks. Toronto: House of Anansi, 1971. 1–15.

———. “Give It a Shot.” A Shapely Fire: Changing the Literary Landscape. Ed. Cyril Dabydeen. Oakville, ON: Mosaic, 1987. 37–59.

———. “How He Does It.” Nine Men Who Laughed. Toronto: Penguin, 1986. 205–225.

———. “If the Bough Breaks.” There Are No Elders. Toronto: Exile Editions, 1993. 9–28.

———. “In an Elevator.” There Are No Elders. Toronto: Exile Editions, 1993. 46–62.

———. “Initiation.” In This City. Toronto: Exile Editions, 1992. 25–54.

———. Introduction. Nine Men Who Laughed. Toronto: Penguin, 1986. 1–7.

———. “Letter of the Law of Black.” In This City. Toronto: Exile Editions, 1992. 55–74.

———. “A Man.” Nine Men Who Laughed. Toronto: Penguin, 1986. 117–152.

———. “The Motor Car.” When He Was Free and Young and He Used to Wear Silks. Toronto: House of Anansi Press, 1971. 90–111.

———. “Not So Old, But Oh So Professional.” There Are No Elders. Toronto: Exile Editions, 1993. 81–101.

———. Public Enemies: Police Violence and Black Youth. Toronto: HarperCollins, 1992.

———. “Some Speculations As to the Absence of Racialistic Vindictiveness in West Indian Literature.” The Black Writer in Africa and the Americas. Ed. Lloyd W. Brown. Los Angeles: Hennessey & Ingalls, 1973. 165–194.

———. “They Heard A-Ringing of Bells.” When He Was Free and Young and He Used to Wear Silks. Toronto: House of Anansi, 1971. 16–29.

———. “Waiting for the Postman to Knock.” When He Was Free and Young and He Used to Wear Silks. Toronto: House of Anansi, 1971. 30–50.

Clarke, George Elliott. “A Primer of African-Canadian Literature.” Books in Canada 25.2 (March 1996): 5–7.

Fanon, Frantz. Black Skin, White Masks. Trans. Charles Lam Markmann. New York: Grove, 1967. Trans. of Peau Noire, Masques Blancs. Paris: Éditions de Seuil, 1952.

Fleming, Ian. Moonraker. 1955. London: Pan Books, 1964.

Gilroy, Paul. The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness. Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1993.

Grant, George. Lament for a Nation: The Defeat of Canadian Nationalism. Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1965.

Kishtainy, Khalid. The Prostitute in Progressive Literature. London: Alison & Busby, 1982.