SOURCE: Dabydeen, Cyril. “Places We Come From: Voices of Caribbean Canadian Writers (in English) and Multicultural Contexts.” World Literature Today 73, no. 2 (spring 1999): 231-37.

[In the following essay, Dabydeen comments on the works of several multiethnic Caribbean Canadian writers, analyzing how their unique cross-cultural perspectives are changing the body of Canadian literature.]

1.

The recent special “Canadian Caribbean Issue” of Descant (Summer 1998) suggests a journey and a maturing of Canadian literature in terms of the latter's flexibility and capacity to be all-embracing, without undermining Canada's identity; moreover, this attitude strengthens the nation's spirit and sense of continuing possibilities in a land which, since its inception, has been formed by immigration and continuing to grow on its “triangular foundation” (John Ralston Saul) of First Nations Peoples and English Canadian and French Canadian heritages. Caribbean links and correspondences with Canada, of course, have been manifold, varied, down through the ages and associated early with the Maroons and with the Atlantic trade and mercantilism. Salted cod from Newfoundland exported to the Caribbean is still special to the palate, for instance. And whenever I contribute material to the three main literary magazines in Canada's Maritime—The Fiddlehead, The Dalhousie Review, and The Antigonish Review—these contexts and influences often come into play in my psyche, all part of the polarities and simultaneous evolution of culture and cultural norms that occur in the numinous sense of the spirit of place. Naturally, paradox and irony are integrated in the ongoing flux, and ingrained in one's developing sense of poetics, living in a land becoming less strange or foreign in the widening context of the self, and as the dynamics associated with adaptation dictate.

The early interactions and connections, of course, inevitably resulted in art and literature, some of it oral, undocumented; at other times, as we have seen, much of it written and fully expressed, or in the process of being so, but now especially manifest in the esthetic energy of a range of writers, some relatively new like Andre Alexis and Shani Mootoo with recent first-novel publications, and others—like Austin Clarke—writing for two or three decades and more in Canada, sustaining their reputations as their sensibilities continue to define the Canadian identity. Interestingly, the seminal or inchoate point of reference in my own assessment and appreciation of Canadian Caribbean literature stems from an awareness of a process that goes back to the 1960 issue of Tamarack magazine embracing West Indian writers, edited by Robert Weaver—the first Canadian magazine's special issue on this subject, which I nostalgically reflected on while reading the recent Descant issue. At that time I was living in Guyana, and Tamarack, in a sense, contributed to my view of Canada as an intrinsic place to fashion dreams, all conceived despite the overwhelming, even forbidding, sense of the Great White North, far different from the tropical milieu I grew up in; and, increasingly, Canada became the place of possibilities, unlike the U.K. or the U.S. in my formative years toward acquiring experience akin to what W. H. New calls “a shaping of connections … setting dreams into motion” (154), albeit far from a mundane organizational context. Later, I would reflect on less numinous experience as I considered the impact of Liberal prime ministers Lester B. Pearson and, later, Pierre Elliot Trudeau in sustaining one's faith and vision while simultaneously contemplating Canada in the context of geography and climate as influencing destiny. Now, almost four decades later, with the aforementioned special Descant issue, Edward T. Chamberlin would write in the introduction about reconciling “attachments to place with allegiances to language, and how to accommodate different allegiances and attachments, different lands and languages, within a single community” (8). Could all this perhaps lead to formation of a world community of literature(s) without imposing artificial boundaries on the creative spirit?

The rubric “Canadian Literature” naturally becomes elastic and simultaneously dynamic as much as arguments in favor of multiculturalism when Caribbean Canadian writing is juxtaposed with, say, Jewish Canadian, Italian Canadian, Hispanic Canadian, South Asian Canadian, and other forms of nascent and/or maturing “ethnic” literatures—including regionally formed literatures—in a changing world of the arts and the humanities. As the scholar Joseph Pivato says in the Toronto Review of Contemporary Writing Abroad, in advocating recognition of multiculturalism as intrinsic to Canadian writing: “The work of Italian Canadian writers and other ethnic minority authors demonstrates that ‘there is setting into shape a nation’ of great diversity” (42). And does all this take away from Canadian identity or nativism (so-called), as some have argued? No less a commentator of the liberal imagination than Michael Ignatieff remarks: “Living with racial, religious, ethnic difference is a challenge, but conservative critics are simply wrong when they argue that immigration and the proliferation of multicultural identity threatens us with cultural and social fragmentation” (Ottawa Citizen, B7). It is interesting to posit this view against that of the novelist and short-story writer Neil Bissoondath (Trinidadian-born), in some quarters better known for his egregious “cult of multiculturalism” reflected in his Selling Illusions (1994) than for his belletristic work. Ironically, Bissoondath has sometimes referred to the philosophically astute Ignatieff to shore up his assertions in decrying identity politics and ethnicity—all part, no doubt, of the Yeatsian “quarrel with ourselves” and bordering on mundane discourse about nationhood in a Canada irrevocably evolving as an adaptive immigrant and multicultural society as the Caribbean-born writers' presence is manifested and formed by the spirit of the place.

Seminal voices such as that of the novelist Austin Clarke, sometimes viewed as “the dean of Caribbean writing in Canada,” have challenged, implicitly and explicitly, the sense of the Great White North as the overwhelming paradigm with all its attendant symbolism in asserting his indubitable Canadian literary presence. And in the flux of shaping connection, it is relevant to juxtapose other early Caribbean influences on Canada, such as that of the novelist George Lamming, who would reveal that in contributing to the 1960 Tamarack Review special issue, his writing of The Pleasures of Exile (an acknowledged postcolonial text) came about at this time, giving voice and nuance to migration and consciousness of the Caribbean while wrestling with the angst of colonialism through his imaginative prism. Significantly, when Lamming first came to Canada and interacted with Canadian writers, not least the novelist Margaret Laurence, it is reasonable to assume that his impact upon them (and vice versa) was immediate; Laurence, for one, would describe Lamming as “not only a talented writer, but the kind of personality that hits you like the spirit of God between the eyes” (King, 168). Of course, other Caribbean writers' voices have also been heard in Canada over the years, some as specially invited guests at conferences and to give readings, all adding to the ongoing influence and cross-fertilization of taste, style, and meaning in setting the stage for the more home-grown Canadian writers of Caribbean background to influence an evolving literature accommodating themes and argot often appearing unaccustomed to their Canadian readership only a few years ago but now gaining acceptance.

Interestingly, Austin Clarke, with his latest book, Origin of Waves (1997), has consolidated his particular vision, following on the uncompromising themes of his earlier works, including the classic trilogy (The Meeting Point, Storm of Fortune, and The Bigger Light) chronicling West Indian immigrants' lives in the 1960s, followed by other works such as Growing Up Stupid under the Union (1980). As the Barbadian-born Clarke recently stated in a “Black Writers” pamphlet: “The social and cultural landscape of Canada has changed fundamentally from the 1960's when I wrote the Toronto Trilogy. And even at that time, there was notice being given to the literary establishment, that we had in our midst, the traditional one—albeit an English sensibility—and that this non-traditional perspective could no longer be viewed as a ‘minority’ point of view.”

Clarke's influence on my own early work, for instance, I have acknowledged (cf. Stella Algoo-Baksh, Austin Clarke: A Biography, 1994), much as I have heard other writers such as Cecil Foster (Barbadian-born) and the anthologist Ayanna Black (Jamaican background) make similar acknowledgments, while simultaneously recognizing influences of other writers: those referred to as the “first generation” such as Lamming himself, V. S. Naipaul, Roger Mais, John Hearne, Jan Carew, Wilson Harris, Sylvia Winters, Sam Selvon, Kamau Brathwaite, and Derek Walcott—many of whom have lived in the U.K. or in the U.S. for decades at a time when “exile” was the norm, and who have contributed to the steadily shifting grounds and polarities of place with inherent paradoxes stemming from the sense of the hurts of history (slavery and indentured labor), colonialism, and immigrant marginality, while grappling with the politics of race, ethnicity, and class. Language formations as dialectal expression of authentic inner rhythms of voice and place expressed in individual ways, such as Sam Selvon's, continue to form part of the assertion of identity, even with the intent to subvert because of the underpinning or immanent sense of the “outsider” and the sense of alienation, albeit contiguous with the desire for adaptation. In Canada, the irony of the “other” responds to the challenge of citizenship in a country now being described by some as “the Caribbean of the North.”

The themes, motifs, and images already referred to are reflected in varying ways and styles by older and many newer Caribbean Canadian writers, each with his or her own unique and personal perspective, such as Dionne Brand, Foster, Bissoondath, Nigel Thomas, Marlene Nourbese Philip, Claire Harris, the dub poets Lillian Allen and Clifton Joseph, Dany Laferrière (writing in French but translated in English), by the late novelists Sam Selvon and Harold Sonny Ladoo, and others. Many of these writers live in Canada's major urban center of Toronto, the “meeting place,” once known as Hogtown and still associated with Governor Simcoe, yet with little of the writing, it has been said, reflecting the heartland by focusing on experience in the Prairies or the East and West Coast regions, though one suspects this is beginning to change. Albeit, the writers continue to make their presences felt, including relatively recent ones like Rabindranath Maharaj and Sasenarine Persaud (Trinidadian- and Guyanese-born respectively); and there are others, perhaps seen as singular but lonely voices, like Madeline Coopsammy's in Winnipeg, striving to achieve immediacy by reconciling the breadth of the Prairie and its Red and Assiniboine Rivers with the angst of small-state experiences (often Trinidad) by extension and criss-crossing metaphorical boundaries. Because inevitably all these writers are gifted with their particular visions informing their work, they necessarily call attention to the fluid stream of creativity in Canadian literature, invariably in their verbal reaction to the fluctuating sense of place, even with the dislocated self seen in the voice of someone like the writer Arnold Itwaru (Guyanese-born), or the dissembled presence of Horace Goddard (Barbadian-born) in Québec in view of the unique political and social dynamics in the latter province.

By focusing attention on an orientation of Canada in terms of binaries such as “outsider” and “insider” while mediating experience in a country that is “huge, frightening, beautiful” (as the late Irish-Canadian novelist Brian Moore, himself an immigrant, described it), this forms an integral part of the paradoxical nature of the creative act in bringing polarities, real and imagined, closer to a common yet universal meeting ground in Canada.

In my edition of A Shapely Fire: Changing the Literary Landscape, I brought together twenty relatively active Caribbean-born writers (of fiction, poetry, and drama) living in Canada, while considering the evolving literary canon toward a redefinition of the norm of what is considered “Canadian” and “Canadian literature”; in so doing, I was hoping for newer contexts while also attempting to go beyond the merely promising literature in English, including that of writers of French-speaking background (such as Gérard Etienne and Anthony Phelps, both Haitian in origin and both translated in this book), the aim being to help prepare the way for what was yet to come: the nascent or new human possibilities and movement to the literary foreground with the sense or belief in a country with rootedness embedded. Thus I wrote in the introduction: “For these latter-day newcomers, the frontier took a different meaning: like their European counterparts of an earlier period, they too were drawers of water and hewers of wood, roughing it as domestic servants, factory and farm-workers, security guards, railway conductors, and more recently as teachers and doctors—all the while expressing a vitality of spirit stemming from the active imagination that is the birthright of all” (9). I further suggested an interpretation beyond a conventional definition of nationhood, with the construct of the “landscape of the imagination,” arguing that Canada could be conceived as the imagined place—not viewed solely in phenomenological terms of physical space or geographic boundary associated singularly with the “idea of the north” (à la Margaret Atwood) in apprehending Canadian reality. Indeed, as I asserted, identity would be

… based on a concept associated with the landscape of the mind, wherein place and psyche become intertwined in nation-building terms through the creative outpouring and meshing of the spirit. In this context, a real shaping is constantly taking place: the collective Canadian spirit is enhanced and enriched by the varied cultural streams in the fusion of old and new traditions towards a vital celebration of the oneness of the evolving Canadian consciousness.

(Shapely Fire, 10)

Now in Canada's major urban center we are hearing voices continuing to express the palpability of the “the Caribbean of the North,” inspired no doubt by the critical mass of a Caribbean-born immigrant population seeking to validate their diverse heritage and black experiences—for instance, in festival extravaganzas like Caribana, which a writer like Cecil Foster strongly locates in his writings as the new sensibility gains momentum (reflected, for instance, in his 1996 book A Place Called Heaven). Moreover, rap music and dub poetry in Toronto have energized the local scene, which scholar Brenda Carr describes as “dub-aesthetics-in-the-diaspora and which necessitates a reconsideration of Western notions of the aesthetic, the literary, and the poetic” (12). Thus the impulses of urbanization invariably add to the unfolding destiny and esthetics circumscribing the immigrant and indigenous energies as the writers continue to cross numinous boundaries, sometimes seen in my own work as I would write about experiences of living close to Lake Superior in the Lakehead with a Great Spirit ambience, while evoking memory with present experience, all in a place Margaret Atwood, because of her own early years living close to the world's largest lake, viewed as “an excellent place to spend your formative years” (14).

Many other writers also re-create the Caribbean past, sometimes combined with the present, such as the Jamaican-born Rachel Manley, Olive Senior, and Louise Bennet, and the Trinidadian-born poet Ramabai Espinet in Nuclear Seasons (1991). This is sometimes inevitably contexted by a forceful African Canadian consciousness and presence, as seen in such writers as Marlene Nourbese Philip, Claire Harris, Makeda Silvera, and Althea Prince. In Mairuth Sarsfield, Montréal-born but with a Guyanese father, we see a first-novel appearance in No Crystal Stair (1997), which intersects the American Langston Hughes's poem of the same name and other U.S. reference points with other ethno-specific cultures and singular Afrocentric images associated with Montréal in the “Black pioneering days”: the forties, fifties, and onward. Worthy of note is George Elliot Clarke's warning that “African Canadians appear blithely acquiescent to the forces of a homogenizing African Americanism,” while admitting that this consciousness “is not simply dualistic” (Essays, 15, 16). Unique strains of womanhood, in pursuing individual truths, it should be added, are seen in many of the aforementioned writers, mainly Harris, Philip, and Brand, in asserting female identity with African presence in Canada—in the case of Philip, sometimes with blood and/or menstrual experience in fundamental association with Mother Earth as a driving force.

2.

The recognition and appreciation of many relatively newer Canadian writers—many Caribbean-born but many more from other parts of the developing world, like Rohinton Mistry (Indian-born) and M. G. Vassanji (Tanzanian-born), Denise Chong (Chinese background), and Joy Kogawa and Keri Sakamoto with their Japanese roots—are persuading scholars like David Staines to refer to it as the current “international phase” in Canadian writing; however, perhaps one could argue that Canadian literature has always been international, albeit influenced mainly by British and American sources from the time of the early pioneering period, with writers like Frances Brooke, Susanna Moodie, and others in the Confederation and post-Confederation periods. In the modern or contemporary period, one finds Earle Birney's poems “Bear on the Delhi Road” and “To George Lamming,” with their sense of visions afar. And indeed, Margaret Laurence wrote authentically about Africa when she lived there, and Atwood's novel Bodily Harm (1981) has a Caribbean setting. Further examples abound, all as part of the flux of ongoing shaping of connection in a seemingly globalized world. In fundamentally responding to the prevailing sense of the Great White North—the “twin bars” implying the sense of solitude and beauty of the vast landscape and inspiring awe while simultaneously evoking beauty, manifested in such classic twentieth-century Canadian poets as A. M. Klein and E. J. Pratt—all contemporary writers, like Irving Layton, have described it ad nauseam. Northrop Frye would add a new dimension, “satire and exuberance,” making for a more interesting if not complex critical context in the enrichment of Canadian literature and culture with other people coming to Canada's shores, all with minds, memories, and emotions from nontraditional immigrant sources eager to establish a niche in the seemingly overwhelming landscape. It is a context particularly significant for the Caribbean-born writers' contribution, leading to what Austin Clarke called giving voice “to the actual putting down of the ‘other’ side—though not always a vindictive sensibility—to the former ‘national’ prism. National in the sense, that before the landscape of these writers, the point of view was not intended to express, and did not in fact include a way of seeing that was different from the status quo” (“Black Writers”).

Essentially, the way of seeing is enhanced by the use of variations of mother-tongue language and the storyteller's sometimes unconventional technique of combining social consciousness and realism, as in Cecil Foster's latest novel, Slammin' Tar (1997), dramatizing Brer Anancy as trickster-cum-story-teller of Caribbean farm workers' experiences in Canada, a form of “putting down” that is very close to magic realism. As one critic observes of Slammin' Tar:

North American readers might feel justifiably guilty while reading this novel, but that's hardly Foster's project. The inequities of the farm labor programs don't need Foster's analysis; they're obvious enough. Instead, his narrator spider simply reports on lives, telling it like it is, or at least how he sees it. … A good portion of the book goes to the narrator's own ruminations about himself and his task, how the role of storyteller is changing in these modern times, how quality and experience are being shunted aside by youth and attitude, how one teller's hero is another's clown.

(Paragraph, 55)

It is significant to point out cross-references and juxtapositions of the trickster that permeate Native writing and the Native weltanschauung—one perhaps truly Canadian—as parallel with innate West Indian narrative and verbal structure. The Native writer Tomson Highway, in his novel Kiss of the Fur Queen (1998), contends that the trickster is Weesageeclak (Cree) and Nanabush (Ojibway), or Raven of other tribes, and that it is familiarly the coyote in North American Indian mythology and is sometimes consciousness of man, God, the Great Spirit, or the existence of the Earth itself. Narrative technique and use of language associated with origins and social history form part of the discourse of evolving identity within prevailing Great White North norms. And haven't I been told that I must write about the Franklin Expedition (finding a Northwest Passage) to be considered Canadian when I discussed Canadian Caribbean literature at the University of Miami not so long ago? The metaphysic of “the north” as a defining consideration continues as an underpinning despite changing times, within a metropolitan consciousness shaping sensibilities, compelling as concept for “outsiders” to sustain irony within multicultural landscapes. Thus, Brand, in her prizewinning poetry collection Land to Light On, begins: “Out here I am like someone without a street / without a branch but not even safe as the sea, / without the relief of the sky or good graces of a door” (3). Sections such as “Islands Vanish,” “I Have Been Losing Roads,” and “All That Has Happened Since” reflect the attitude of irony with language rhythms of protest that are Caribbean-based, while the voice is paradoxically concerned with here. Here-and-there juxtapositions and polarities are relevant as a kind of continuum in view of historical, social, and esthetic factors.

In a previous collection, Chronicles of the Hostile Sun, largely about reactions to the American invasion of Grenada, Brand (who has attested to the influences of African poets, the Chilean Pablo Neruda, and the American Adrienne Rich), both asserting and longing for “place,” writes in the poem “For Stuart”:

I am a refugee,
I have my papers,
I was born in the Caribbean,
practical in the sea,
fifteen degrees above the equator,
I have a Canadian passport,
I have lived here all my adult life,
I am stateless anyway.

(70)

An intersecting of the longing for place with memory is seen, for example, in Neil Bissoondath's recent novel, The Worlds within Her (1998), where the female character, Yasmin, travels from Canada to return her mother's ashes to the Caribbean, in the process meeting formerly unknown or unheard-of relatives who help her become aware of larger truths about herself while reclaiming her Indian background and thereby fulfilling her self and identity. In Bissoondath's very first book, Digging Up the Mountains (1985), especially in the often-anthologized story “Insecurity,” we see the symbolic escape from a less-than-proverbial Trinidad because of social and political events as leading to spiritual confinement and constraint; however, in this latest novel a reversal occurs, as Yasmin returns to the island and completes her self through a renewed awareness of kin and ethnicity. Austin Clarke, as critic, however, says of this novel: “All the characters seem to me to be irreconcilably and irredeemably negative. They all want to be somewhere else, something else, somebody else. … It is this dependency upon whiteness that expresses Bissoondath's bleating request for cultural acceptance, that drives his characters' unrelenting nihilism” (Ottawa Citizen, E3). Is this too political a reading of Bissoondath, without recognizing memory or the force of irony as a way of formalizing affirmation through authentic imaginative experience? Memory, as “mother of the Muse,” is seen at work also in Andre Alexis's Childhood (1997), the story of forty-year-old Thomas MacMillan's efforts to piece together the elements of his conflicted past and questionable parentage by sifting through layers of memory in a narrative that is self-reflexive almost to the point of being surrealistic; it is a book that “examines lives in ways so subtle that they defy analysis,” as Bissoondath himself acknowledges (Globe and Mail, A12). Interestingly, both of these two writers came to Canada at a relatively young age—in Alexis's case before he was ten, Bissoondath before he was twenty—which no doubt influenced their fictional mode and its tendency to veer away from conventional realism to explore different forms of self-reflexiveness, influenced no doubt by other trends in Canada and contemporary literature as a whole.

Shani Mootoo (Irish and Trinidadian background) in Cereus Blooms at Night (1996), a work viewed as her “multigenerational novel” depicting life in a small town in Lantanacamara (in the Caribbean), portrays the complex but tragic figure of Mala Ramchandin in the Paradise Alms House as narrator Tyler (her attendant) assists in exploring. Awareness of Indianness as palpably integral to Caribbean experience is seen in other writers, including myself, and notably in such as Sasenarine Persaud, Itwaru, Maharaj, Ladoo, and Selvon, adding multicultural vigor to Caribbean writers' contribution, one juxtaposed and fully expressed with Afrocentric experiences and angst, while voicing a range of feelings, expressions, and attitudes, as well as ways of viewing the world, including through Hinduist, Zen Buddhist, and Muslim prisms, sometimes in purely creolized situations—or, as Mootoo calls it, her “bastardized Indian” self.

The new esthetic energies being released are counterpointed with the singularly or homogenous larger community attitudes, generating the sense of possibilities, yet with an accompanying “identity crisis,” as described by Canadian nationalists (not least driven by threats of French Canadian separatism). But as Marshall McLuhan once lamented, “Canada is the only country in the world that knows how to live without an identity”; and, for stronger emotion, Robertson Davies would reputedly say to Mavis Gallant, “You never ask if you love Canada; you only question Canada” (Dabydeen, A17). This attitude also seems to grow from the “strong undercurrents of passion and emotion hidden beneath a thick crust of reticent puritanism,” which Henry Kreissel observed more than two decades ago in defining his own “double experience” as a European-immigrant Jewish writer. “To the man who comes from abroad, Canada is not an easy country to come to know and to write about,” he adds (Neuman, 139), with the “outsider” capitalizing on self-dramatizing moments in creating the new literature, often with the force of his or her unique language, I suggest.

The Caribbean-Canadian writer's use of language is generally conceived as a two-toned English striving to extract from subjective reality imaginative truths in order to maintain integrity, famously encapsulated in the phrase “No language is neutral” (Derek Walcott, later perhaps a not infrequent visitor to Canada). Undoubtedly, most Caribbean Canadian writers have in one form or another engaged in varying use of demotic or dialectal English as legitimate forms of self-expression stemming from an ongoing, even as yet unleavened oral tradition (in Brer Anancy and the trickster vision at work), or veering off in new directions in Dionne Brand's novel In Another Place, Not Here (1997), a book about Verlia and Elizete's lesbian relationship upon shifting grounds within Oliviere's sugar-plantation and island-upheaval ambience, with revolution and survival memories foregrounded in Canada.

Assumptions of the nature and function of immigrant and culture-based writers are often in respect to questions such as: Whom does the writer write for, the community or himself? Or should one label oneself simply as a “Canadian writer” or “Caribbean writer,” or as a hyphenated or hybridized one (perhaps as said of myself)? The newer writers (apologies to those not mentioned) are inclined to view radical issues relating to themes and social issues in evoking images and concepts tied to colonialism and the hurts of history (not least, slavery's legacy), plantation society experience to challenge European-based forms of knowledge and dispensation of this knowledge and esthetics in universalist contexts, to one now perhaps not exclusively African, Asian, or European, but perhaps genuinely Canadian, bearing in mind Native experiences of oppression. These resonances go beyond mere Derrida-like deconstruction, to “reconstruction” (as the poet Kamau Brathwaite and others describe it), perhaps in reaction to place of origin—a Caribbean region seen merely in exotic terms with a vision of ochered beachen, ubiquitous palm trees, and bright sunshine.

The new energies of the changing Canadian literature—gender, racial, sexual, and other social and personal factors—come into play, including the time of settlement in Canada, and associations with the baggage of the postcolonial in purely academic parameters. Binaries related to margin-hinterland, majority-minority, hybridity, multiplicity, creolization, cross-nationalism, diaspora, reflection of the Other, and notions of imagined societies are all integral to the discourse associated with the purportedly “international” in Canadian literature. This has also lent itself to reevaluation by some scholars and thinkers; as the critic Diana Brydon said at a Commonwealth Literature and Language Studies conference: “Deconstruction imperialism keeps us within imperialism's orbit. … As a white Canadian, I speak as heir to an invading culture and beleaguered citizens of a colonized one, to an audience whose own participation in these processes is far from simple” (8).

There have been a shaping of connections and an apprehending of correspondences since the Tamarack Review West Indian writers issue, and a recognizing of cross-national influences, not least beginning and ending with the image of pan-Caribbean merging with essentially a unique Canadian or Canadian-influenced writing. As Austin Clarke suggests, “This writing, emerging into a kind of literary renaissance, stands on its own legs, so to speak, and will be judged harshly when it is flawed: but processionally when it compares with the high standard of Canadian literature” (“Black Writers”).

If indeed, in the words of Michael Ondaatje, “we own the country we grow up in, or else we become aliens,” then as West Indian-born writers inhabiting Canada we will continue to fashion our own dreams in unique ways as we react to a complex Canadian social and cultural landscape in invoking memory and forming dreams, even as we wrestle with commitment in pursuing individual visions, sometimes in strident or uncompromising ways over issues such as discrimination while simultaneously striving to maintain integrity as artists above all else. I confess that when the writer Earl Lovelace suggested to me (at a University of Miami Caribbean writers' retreat) that Canada is “a mediocre place,” I bristled, because of the instinct informing me of the ongoing effort to shape drama, all in possessing and simultaneously learning “to love the land” as more than mere counterpoint—concerned as I am with exploring my own psyche and human fragility while trying to understand or apprehend truths in the particular and the “primordial”; for I believe strongly that art, above all else, as Carl Jung has said, is “nothing but a tremendous intuition striving for expression” (198).

This expression is also longing for perfection, concerned as I have been with finding a voice for my own sometimes amorphous, changing, and perhaps changeable ideas and feelings; all this while engaged in self-exploration and identification in the now ubiquitous or self-same Great White North with Guyanese-formed inner experiences. These experiences, while encompassing elements of metaphysics or mysticism tied to hinterland resonances of the “pool of origins” (Wilson Harris), I now see reflected in my first-ever written story, “Tide at Beachhead,” formed while living in Guyana and significantly included in the special Canadian Caribbean issue of Descant, as engaging in memory as the deepest possible creative experience toward defining literature, with Eldridge Cleaver, as the combining of the alphabet “with volatile elements of the soul” (97).

Works Cited

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Brand, Dionne. Chronicles of the Hostile Sun. Toronto. Williams-Wallace. 1984.

———. Land to Light On. Toronto. McClelland & Stewart. 1997.

Brydon, Diana. “New Approaches to the New Literatures in English: Are We in Danger of Incorporating Disparity?” A Shaping of Connections: Commonwealth Literature Studies—Then and Now. Hena-Maes Jelinek et al., eds. Denmark. Dangaroo. 1989.

Carr, Brenda. “‘Come Mek Wi Work Together’: Community Witness and Social Agency in Lillian Allen's Dub Poetry.” ARIEL: A Review of International English Literature, 29:3 (1998), pp. 7-40.

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Clarke, George Elliot. “Structures of African Canadiante.” Essays in Canadian Writing, No. 63 (Spring 1998), pp. 1-55.

Cleaver, Eldridge. Soul on Ice. New York. Dell. 1968.

Dabydeen, Cyril, ed. A Shapely Fire: Changing the Literary Landscape. Ontario. Mosaic. 1987.

———. “Multiculturalism Has Become One of Our Core Values.” Toronto Star, 28 March 1995, p. A17.

Degen, John. Review of Slammin' Tar by Cecil Foster. Paragraph, No. 25 (1998/99), pp. 55-56.

Ignatieff, Michael. “A Defence of the Liberal Imagination.” Ottawa Citizen, 17 January 1998, p. B7.

Jung, C. G. Psychological Reflections: A New Anthology of His Writings, 1905-1961. New ed. Princeton, N.J. Princeton University Press. 1973.

King, James. The Life of Margaret Laurence. Toronto. Knopf Canada. 1997.

Neuman, Shirley, ed. Another Country: Writings by and about Henry Kreissel. Edmonton. NeWest. 1985.

New, W. H. “A Shaping of Connections.” In A Shaping of Connections: Commonwealth Literature Studies—Then and Now.

Pivato, Joseph. “The Singing Never Stops: Languages of Italian Canadian Writers.” Toronto Review of Contemporary Writing Abroad, 16:3 (1998), pp. 35-43.