[In the review below, Bissoondath praises Clarke's skillful depiction of the complex relationship between West Immigrants and Canadian society in When Women Rule.]

In an interview in a recent issue of Magazine Littéraire, the Spanish writer Juan Goytisolo says of exiles: “There are people who remain mentally or effectively attached to their country of origin; they camp. There are others, on the other hand, who adapt, change language, become French or American. There is a third category, to which I undoubtedly belong. While growing distant from my country of origin, I never really integrate into my new, adopted society, into the society in which I am living. I am not French when I live in France, American when I go to the United States. I don't feel Moroccan when I am in Morocco.”

In Austin Clarke's new short-story collection, When Women Rule, we meet a lot of campers who have been in the field for too long. …

When Women Rule is a book about impotent men and victimized but strong women—women who, while remaining very much in the background, still rule the roost, all living together in the little hothouse of their ethnic camp. Here is Clarke on West Indian attitudes; it is Friday night at the Cancer Club:

They had all forgotten now, through the flavour of the calypso and the peas and rice, the fried chicken, the curry goat, that they were still living in a white man's country. Tonight none of them would tell you that they hated Canada; that they wanted to go back home; that they were going to “make a little money first”; that they were only waiting till then, that they were going to go back before the blasted Canadian “tourisses buy up the blasted Caribbean.” They wouldn't tell you tonight that they all suffered some form of racial discrimination in Canada. … Not tonight. Tonight, Friday night, was forgetting night. West Indian night. And they were at the Cancer Club to forget and drink and get drunk. … Tonight they would forget and drink, forget and dance, and dance to forget.

The description is from “Griff,” the most powerful story in the collection. At the end of the story, Griff, “a black man from Barbados who sometimes denied he was black,” apparently strangles his wife, and it is in a way surprising that this is the only murder in the book. In many of the stories men contemplate violence against women. They are men groping at ideas of masculinity, luckless gamblers—they spend much time at the horse races or the card table or dreaming up scams—with dreams too large for their abilities, dreams that do not so much feed the ambition as haunt the imagination.

As reflected in the stories, this ethnic camp has little contact with the larger society in which it is based. The police are always seen as a threat, social agencies as interfering busybodies. In “The Discipline” a father is arrested and jailed for assaulting his son, breaking his jaw and some ribs in the process. “I have the right,” he thinks at one point, “as my grandmother had the right, to chastise a child.” The charges are incomprehensible to him. “I disciplined him,” he says repeatedly to his lawyer, his mind slipping back to his island childhood and his stern but loving grandmother.

In “Doing Right,” a funny story about a “green hornet” with big dreams, Clarke points out another aspect of the camp mentality:

Wessindians accustom to parking in the middle o' the road or on the wrong side back home. And nobody don't trouble them, nor touch their cars. And since they come here, many o' these Wessindians haven't change their attitude in regards to who own the public road and who own the motto-cars.

The larger society, in this case Toronto, is brashly ignored, the rules violated. Clarke's characters do not form part of the society, live in a camp within it, have no long-term stake in it; and the society, largely unknown, is seen to be alien, hostile, racist, a constant threat to the camp itself rife with tensions.