“Even the stars are temporal”: The Historical Motion of George Elliott Clarke’s Saltwater Spirituals and Deeper Blues1
George Elliott Clarke’s collection of poems, Saltwater Spirituals and Deeper Blues, is a poetic chronicle of the black population of Nova Scotia. The black Nova Scotian (Africadian) community traces its roots back to the first wave of Loyalist immigrants who arrived in 1782 after the British loss in the American Revolution. In 1792 many of the black Loyalists of Nova Scotia “repatriated” to Sierra Leone, this “decolonization” being similar in spirit to the later American establishment of Liberia by abolitionists and free blacks. These “repatriations” served equivocally voiced purposes: on one hand to free blacks from colonialism; on the other hand to empty North America of its “race problem.” A second wave of black immigration to Nova Scotia came after the War of 1812, known as the Black Refugees. Clarke is a descendant of these migrants who put down roots in Nova Scotia, and Saltwater Spirituals and Deeper Blues sings their genealogy.
Clarke’s poetics derives from a distinct engagement of history (time) and geography (space). Saltwater Spirituals and Deeper Blues was written in 1983 and selfconsciously walks in a tradition of black Nova Scotian music, literature, orature, arts, and preaching—all modes of indigenous black expression. Clarke’s self-conscious placement produces a definitive text that spiritually “maps” his community-subject. The Nova Scotian geography is touched and held and turned over in Clarke’s hands, tilled, and used to divine ancestral moods, aspirations, and senses. As part of the larger black tradition, the Africadian knows the arbitrariness of geography for the diasporic black; tensions between migration, settlement, flight, and foundation permeate Saltwater Spirituals and Deeper Blues. Similarly, history and time take particular places for the diasporic black who lives out a fragmented and displaced lineage nationally, racially, within the kinship patterns of former slave societies, within oral culture, and within a culture destabilized by racism. Historical discourse is at once self-reflection and self-creation for such a community. The sense of time itself is expressed in a distinct style that originates in the diasporic circumstance. Clarke surfaces from his community as the conduit of invocation, as both historian and seer, looking back in both directions. Saltwater Spirituals and Deeper Blues is comfortably both documentation (like footprints) and art (like dance).
In his essay “Repetition as a figure of black culture,” James A. Snead assesses the particular value placed on perpetual immanence in black expression. Defined against the Western interpretation of repetition as valuable only if it is innovative (what is known as “progress,” or as Snead calls it, the “not yet there” model), Snead suggests a black cultural paradigm he calls the “always already there” model, or simply a model that embraces repetition (63–64). He notes that black culture’s emphasis on repetition stems partly from the logic of an oral culture and partly from a culture which does not view the subjugation of nature as a desirable goal, but a culture which listens to nature for its understanding of temporality, rhythm, cycle.
Snead identifies what he calls the repetitive “cut”— that is the moment at which a cycle returns to its beginning and repeats, “an abrupt, seemingly unmotivated break (an accidental da capo) with a series already in progress and a willed return to a prior series” (67). Snead examines the philosophical production of a culture that centres the “cut” contrasted with Western notions of history being “played out” or reaching some sort of perceived goal. Black culture traditionally conflates history with the present, and is socially inclusive in that any event or change is easily integrated into the narrative at the next “cut.” Whereas Western culture’s “progress” weeds out the accidental and the tributary, black culture’s repetition integrates the accidental and the new into the repeating patterns. Snead contrasts European classical music with black musical forms such as African drumming, jazz, and blues. Classical European music distinctly starts towards a goal and finishes while black music subsumes its own creation into its form; Snead points to jazz improvisation and James Brown’s music in which Brown’s instructions to the band as to how many bars to play or where to insert the next bridge are themselves musical (68–69).2
Clarke’s Saltwater Spirituals and Deeper Blues presents history in the pattern of repetition identified by Snead. The first section of Clarke’s collection is “Soul Songs,” which consists of twelve—with apostolic significance—shorter lyrics (“songs”) ranging between eleven and twenty-two lines. Each song is titled after a church in Nova Scotia, mostly members of the African United Baptist Association, which was founded in 1854 and still serves as a focal point for the Africadian community. Clarke’s “Soul Songs” have titles such as “The Sermon on the Atlantic: Africville Seaview African Baptist Church,” “Amherst African Methodist Episcopal Church,” “Musquodoboit Road Church,” and “Cherrybrook African Baptist Church.” The repetition of the word “church” in each title is similarly reflected in the ordering of the songs; each song (each church) could be read in any order because each is a closed lyric, or cycle in Snead’s model of repetition. Keeping in mind Snead’s notion of the “cut,” reading the “Soul Songs” feels as if, once finished a song, we “return” to another version of the same; after finishing “Horton Church” we “cut” back to “Fall River Church”—the next cycle.
Repetition also exists in both form and theme in the “Soul Songs.” In “Guysborough Road Church” the phrase, “we are the” repeats like an invocation, successively singing an identity:
we are the black loyalists:
we think of the bleak fundamentalism
of a ragged scarf of light
twined and twisted and torn
in a briar patch of pines.
and then, of steel-wool water,
scouring the dull rocks of bonny
bonny nova scotia – the chaste, hard granite
coastline inviolate; the dark,
dreary mountains where sad Glooscap broods
over waters void […]
we are the world-poor.
we are the fatherless.
we are the coloured Christians
of the african united baptist association. (14)
The effect is indeed song-like. Repetition as a theme appears in the “Souls Songs” read in the natural imagery of “Hammonds Plains African Baptist Church”:
i dream of a dauntless dory
battling the blue, cruel combers
of a feral, runaway ocean –
a trotskyite ocean in permanent revolution
turning fluid ideas over and over
in its leviathan mind,
turning driftwood, drums, and conundrums
over and over … (24)
Here change and repetition are forced together; the very euphemism of progress—revolution—is itself “battled” by the human motion towards repetition. As Snead describes the black cultural urge to subsume the accidental, counter to the progressive “weeding out” of the arbitrary, Clarke’s “trotskyite ocean in permanent revolution” is grafted to the natural, the “conundrums” of doubt, and the “driftwood” of emotion, uncertainty, and the openness of nature. The poem is integrative but not dialectical; rather, it presents a unified moment, “fluid” in its waves of thought and reconsideration.
Clarke not only exposes the self-defeating linearity of progress, but also the rigidity of tradition. In “Fall River Church” Clarke again uses the ocean as a metaphor for change:
a steamer-tractor parts
a shifting sea, churning the thick,
dry earth near weary horses
that flounder in the dust,
gasp for grass,
drown.
soon, some saint will find them,
floating in the sargasso drought,
jettisoned from care like sick or
dead slaves,
and he will cast out a net,
like one who founds a church,
to rescue those flailing,
to bury deeper those sunken. (18)
Though it is again alienating and “battled,” the chaotic earth-ocean of this song has a solution: the establishment of the church (community, tradition). However, Clarke reveals the limits of such tradition, and the limits of the repetition model, for the individual who cannot or will not be subsumed, like the “sinner” in “Fall River Church,” but just as easily the non-conformist of any tendency. The poem’s metaphorical “net” which inclusively swallows targets accidental and intended can be seen at once as a tool of unifying power and a trap. Here Clarke shows a rare hint of malevolence in the communitarian approach he overall appears to advocate.
The tilling of unfamiliar, alienating soil in “Fall River Church” reflects the geographical and spatial burden of diasporic blackness. Similar again to Snead’s “cut” of temporal repetition, the migrations of black people to Nova Scotia are part of the larger condition which Kamau Brathwaite, with some irony, describes as:
‘the seemingly
endless
purgatorial
experience
of black
people’ (132).3
For the diasporic black, where history has given settlement it has also given unsettlement, migration, root-laying, uprooting, more migration, and so forth. The Africadian community, as a refugee population, contends with the landscape in a particular, disjunctive manner. In her essay “An Unimpoverished Style: the Poetry of George Elliott Clarke,” M. Travis Lane suggests that Clarke engages a familiar “Canadian” style which attempts to make sense of a perceived barrenness of the Canadian landscape and how to compose a culture from this barrenness. Lane writes:
Like [A.G. Bailey and Ralph Gustafson] Clarke possesses a sense of history as continuous and present in his own context. But, and here again he reminds me of A.G. Bailey, Clarke also possesses a rich sense of what the Canadian found in Canada—of Indian history, of nature—as well as what the Canadian brought. Not even the arctic tundra was barren. (47)
Lane tries to understand Clarke in a Canadian historical context of colonization and settlement, which inadequately describes the larger context of black diasporic migration and, specifically, the fact of the disempowered and racially objectified refugee. For Clarke’s Africadian community, Nova Scotia has never been part of a colonialist project to be written and claimed with confidence. Clarke’s description of the Canadian landscape is terrifying not because it is an untamable or chaotic expanse, but because it is yet another station removed from Africa, yet another level of alienation, yet another arbitrary repositioning that may or may not prove to be home. The material conditions of a slave-turned-cheap-labour community punctuate the Africadian—not Canadian— relationship to the land:
ah, national sea products limited
shackles the deeps to our eyes,
clamps the storm-winds to our ears,
fetters us to death by water (20)
In “North Atlantic” the ocean itself echoes slavery and the middle passage but also announces itself as unclaimable to the speaker:
white, bleached tombstones, mute,
overlook brackish, brawling, breaking
water that loudly lashes the lamenting land—
water, ivory with ice and violence,
striking implacable igneous rocks,
and insatiable sedimentary rocks,
and rolling up into thunderous,
mad, crashing, incomprehensible fury (45)
Apart from the fugitive disrepair as itself problematizing, the geography is marked with the signs of white power, the Canadian claim:
the classical wind blows at cross-purposes,
tactile in backwoods forest,
intangible on sun-fired tors,
becomes invisible bagpipe
to a ragged tartan of blue sky and green tree tops (17)
Perhaps the above imagery of Scottish signifiers appearing in the very landscape is what Lane refers to when she suggests that “[t]he sensuous vitality and multiculturalness of this verse is as Canadian as those sharply fragrant beach roses” (48) in “Musquodoboit Road Church”:
micmac windpoems sing
Spring’s resurrection,
foretold by the sharp, fused fragrances
of jubilee roses […]
….
knowing this sensual verse
we ensure fertility.
we prepare a path through the wilderness. (21)
Whereas Lane reads the imagery of classical wind, bagpipes, and tartan resident in the Canadian landscape as “multicultural,” a black diasporic reading suggests that what is signified is Scottish-Canadian ownership over the land, segregation, political relationships of race/power. Clarke does not celebrate these relationships; the above-quoted lines from “Musquodoboit Road Church” are Clarke’s celebration. Just as the geography has been used as a weapon against blacks, Clarke “prepare[s] a path through the wilderness” by knowing the disruption of migration, exile, geographical dissociation, and building from that foundation a black national consciousness. The “jubilee roses,” like the last section of Saltwater Spirituals and Deeper Blues, “The Book of Jubilee,” mark a beginning of a specifically cultural emancipation.
While I reject the term “multiculturalism” as a euphemism for white containment of rival cultures, Clarke’s poetry is syncretic. Another image of bagpipes appears in “East Coasting,” a poem from the collection’s middle section “Blues Notes”:
bagpipe jazz hymns sermonize
sunday air; oh amazing
grace of sounds, maritime
music; ocean voices
….
saxophone sea spirituals,
moaning blacks in clapboard churches,
bagpipe jazz hymns
testifying their atlantic geneology. (49)
Here Clarke truly “prepare[s] a path through the wilderness” of the diasporic black condition: if the land is white-owned and suffused with the signifiers of a dominant culture, those very tools of repression can be re-mythologized. In “Can’t Seem to Settle Down” Clarke composes the poetry of rootlessness:
motion is religion: a fast, non-stop,
irresistable faith.
i, its disciple, do not want roots, not yet
….
i long to marry atlases
and sire cosmopolitan, postcard children,
and never be chained
to clocks and calendars, but go on forever
and never
come to a conclusion. (43)
The word “roots” is used here with the individualistic meaning of the traveller or bachelor without a permanent home; the word is also a black signifier of unity, black nationalism, Africa. Clarke playfully subverts both meanings of “roots” in a traditional blues gambit. In order to deal with the rejection of the dominant society (you have no roots), the blues lyricist uses the mask of individuality (I can’t seem to settle down) to signify the national situation (they won’t let us have roots). Another black signifier which is turned on its head, encoded in the blues form, is the phrase “never be chained.” The obvious allusion is slavery but the metaphorical shackling is to the time of long-term plans, goals, and even history—again things which have been forcibly kept from black people. To embrace literally the land (“marry atlases”), Clarke must be transient. “Can’t Seem to Settle Down” works ironically against the “Souls Songs” section in which the churches of Africadia are very carefully mapped out in verse. In direct opposition to the line “motion is religion,” the whole first section carefully describes the setting down of a black national foundation, church by church and brick by brick. With its humour and irony, “Can’t Seem to Settle Down” is an example of the traditional method of cultural survival for black people in the diaspora. When the culture is extremely compromised by oppression, defining oneself with whatever means are left open, whether through new mythologies or even the knowing hyperbolization of stereotype, is the necessary act of making culture.
Clarke’s usages of time and space, history and geography, era and nation are foundational. In the sense that Saltwater Spirituals and Deeper Blues is historical in its appearance and somewhat documentary, it is aware of this potential impediment to the aesthetic. Beyond the invocation of traditional black artistic forms—blues, spirituals, preaching—Clarke suggests a “reading” of black history and migration itself. The roads of Africadia, the churches, and their people are carefully versified; the verse is then returned to them as Saltwater Spirituals and Deeper Blues. The pattern is a familiar one, Clarke’s text being merely another cycle of the rhythm, but only if one can understand the churches, the old photographs interspersed throughout the text, the roads, fields, Atlantic, all as textual. In this way, the people are sung.
Endnotes
1. “[E]ven the stars are temporal” is a quotation from M. Travis Lane’s explication of “The Emissaries” (54).
2. Snead also notes that post-structuralism and postmodernism are part of a Western re-evaluation of the progress model, and something of a “return” to the cyclical, repetition model.
3. Brathwaite borrows this description from an unnamed critic who was writing about his work.
Works Cited
Brathwaite, Kamau. “Dream Haiti.” Hambone 12 (1995): 123–185. Clarke, George Elliott. Saltwater Spirituals and Deeper Blues. Porters Lake, NS: Pottersfield Press, 1983.
Lane, M. Travis. “An Unimpoverished Style: the Poetry of George Elliott Clarke.” Canadian Poetry Studies 16 (1985): 47–54.
Snead, James A. “Repetition as a figure of black culture.” Black Literature and Literary Theory. Ed. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. New York: Routledge, 1990. 59–79.