André Forget
On September 29, 1955—a full decade before Northrop Frye likened the experience of entering Canada by ship to being swallowed whole by a vast continent—Austin Clarke flew into Montreal’s Dorval Airport from Bridgetown, Barbados. Though he was carrying a letter of acceptance from McGill University, he was so unnerved by the treatment he received at the hands of the French-Canadian immigration personnel that he decided to keep going. By a stroke of luck, the clerk who had written out his ticket back in Barbados had accidentally extended his flight’s terminus to Toronto.
At the time, it must have seemed like it didn’t much matter: he had also received an acceptance letter from the University of Toronto. But writing in an old brick house on Shuter Street across from Moss Park fifty years later, Clarke remembered this day as one that “marked the change in my life which cannot be altered now; and in some cases, be redeemed” (’Membering 17).
This incident may have marked a change that would set the course of Clarke’s sixty years in Canada, but it remains unmarked and unremarked upon in the literary history of this country. French philosopher Ernest Renan argues that “Forgetting . . . is an essential factor in the creation of a nation” because national “unity is always brutally established” (3). Just as the French-Canadian immigration official forgets the long history of Black presences in Canada, Clarke’s work is routinely and willfully forgotten in Canadian literature.
This legacy of forgetting is most recently enacted in Nick Mount’s Arrival: The Story of CanLit (2017), a study of Canadian literature during its boom years in the 1960s and ’70s. Based on years of research and interviews with some of the period’s most important figures, Mount’s book purports to be the first full-length study of this remarkable and formative moment in Canadian letters. And yet the arrival of Clarke, who later came to be considered “Canada’s first multicultural writer,” is barely mentioned at all (National Post 2016). Mount’s neglect of Clarke (he is cited only thrice in Mount’s text) is not only exemplary of the larger problems with Mount’s book, it is also illustrative of the literary establishment’s ongoing failure to grant Black writers their place, and as such illuminates the paradoxes that underlie the construction of CanLit. Clarke was a fixture of Toronto’s literary and cultural scene throughout the period chronicled in the pages of Arrival. When the CanLit boom was taking off, Austin Clarke wasn’t just the most prominent Black writer in Canada: he was one of Canada’s most prominent men of letters, period.
But Clarke was never only a Canadian, and the trajectory of his long and peripatetic career, moving from the West Indies to Canada and later to Britain, America, and Europe, challenges the very idea of a national literature. While Toronto might have been where he spent most of his life, his imagination was never constrained by national borders. As he wrote toward the end of his life, “I think of the most foreign and unusual cities, as home. Havana. Toronto. Venice. Manchester. Bordeaux. Toulouse. Amsterdam. Paris” (’Membering 257). The novel that won him the Giller Prize in 2002, The Polished Hoe, is set almost entirely in Barbados, and treats the complex and gothic colonial history of that nation at length; his virtuosic 2015 memoir ’Membering devotes hundreds of pages to his years in the United States and Bridgetown; and his Toronto books are always meticulous about detailing the city’s dazzling array of cultural and ethnic diversity, a diversity that he often explicitly ties to its imperial past, and neo-colonial present.
In doing so, Clarke played a foundational role in setting the terms for many of the debates about Blackness, marginalization, and migration that challenge received notions of Canadian literature. But his novels, essays, short stories, poems, and memoirs—some of which stand among the most innovative, challenging, and stylistically rich works of literature ever produced in this country—remind his readers that, however isolated and inward-looking it may be at times, Canada and the colonial governments that preceded it have always been an intimate participants in the violent movements of people, goods, capital, and ideas that produced and were produced by empire.
In his attention to particular experiences of Blackness, Clarke accesses a deep imperial history that predates the Commonwealth, Confederation, and even the American Revolution. In doing so, he celebrates the myriad ways Black people have resisted and continue to resist imperialism and colonialism. Clarke’s engagement with the long history of Black life in the Caribbean, Europe, and North America illuminates the way that Black experiences have given rise to new political and aesthetic philosophies—philosophies that do not simply respond to imperialism and colonialism, but create new possibilities for imagining Blackness. His books conjure a morally complicated cosmopolitanism that serves as a corrective to the shallow liberal nationalism underpinning much popular thinking about Canada, a country constantly working to forget its own violent past.
As he recalled in his acerbically titled Growing Up Stupid Under the Union Jack, Clarke’s education had indoctrinated him in the belief that as a subject of Her Majesty, he and his fellow Barbadians had a proud place in the family of imperial possessions: “We were English. We were the English of Little England. Little Black Englishmen” (56). Through his education, he was “trained to be a snob, coached to be discriminating” (56). With his private school education, strong academic record, and deep immersion in the classics, the scriptures, and the English canon, Clarke was sure he would be able to succeed. He was a son of the British Empire, after all, and Canada was a branch in the family tree. Upon arriving in Canada, however, he would learn all too well how double-edged his colonial education had been.
After enrolling in the University of Toronto’s Trinity College, Clarke became increasingly aware of how his Blackness intersected with racial, class, and gender hierarchies. The more Clarke saw of life in Toronto, the more it became apparent to him that for many white Canadians, his racial difference was far more significant than the education, literary tastes, and religious background he shared with them. And while he would become famous for his nuanced and sensitive portraits of the particularities of West Indian life in Toronto, his novels and stories always demonstrated a deep awareness that Canadians and West Indians were, in complicated, violent, and unequal ways, products of a shared history.
We see this very clearly in “An Easter Carol” and “They Heard a Ringing of Bells,” the two pieces that open Clarke’s first collection of stories, When He Was Free and Young and He Used to Wear Silks (1971). In and of itself, “An Easter Carol” is moving for its depiction of a simple matter that is not nearly as simple as it looks: the boy’s short walk to the cathedral in uncomfortable shoes is, in the great tradition of Joycean realism, a window onto a whole way of life. Like Joyce, Clarke builds toward an epiphany that is also a disillusionment: the boy must wear shoes that do not fit because he must look his best, for his mother is proud of his role in the service. We understand that her desire for her son to succeed in the world of the cathedral is a desire for him to have a life that will distance him from her own emotional world. As he struggles in vain to put his shoes on even as his choral rival takes his place for the solo and the story reaches its crescendo, we are left with a certain ambiguity: in letting his mother down, has he been symbolically locked out of paradise, denied a chance at a better life? Or does he share in her reluctance to embrace the restrictions that come with the aspirational world of the cathedral?
That this is also a story about music is in no way incidental. The narrator, arriving at the cathedral, describes it as “facing me like my mother, unapproving” (Clarke is exceptionally good at this kind of angular word choice: the cathedral does not disapprove of him, it is indifferent), but when the bells start ringing they “filled my heart with joy” (13). The cathedral is not straightforwardly a good or bad place: it is a place where beautiful music is made, but where the congregation is left “dumb and washed-out by the sermon” (13). Clarke’s attentiveness to the way buildings, objects, and brand names are both sources of everyday comfort and belonging and also visible signs of world-historical power is one of the most underappreciated elements of his fiction; cathedrals reoccur throughout as importantly ambivalent spaces. What building in Toronto is more symbolically loaded for More’s Idora Morrison than St. James Cathedral, a building that is made present most powerfully through the music of its bells?
Turning to the second story, we are immersed in music again. At the beginning of “They Heard a Ringing of Bells,” West Indian expatriates Estelle, Ironhorse Henry, and Sagaboy are sitting on a campus lawn thousands of kilometres from the Islands, listening to what at first seems to be a very different set of bells. Estelle, who is from Barbados and has learned that she will be deported in a week, describes her tenuous new home as being “a different, but a more better, more advance place than where I come from” (17). But as the music continues, Estelle realizes that the hymn being played is “The Day Thou Gavest Lord Is Ending,” the same hymn played at her drowned father’s funeral. The music transports her, leading her to tell the story of the funeral, and how she believes her father had tried to speak to her as he was being buried. “Ain’t it wondrous strange how a person remembers things that happen so long ago? And ain’t it strange too, how a simple thing like a bell in a tower could cause that same person to travel miles and miles in memory?” (23).
Clarke’s master stroke is to heighten the feeling of alienation central to these characters lives by emphasizing familiarity rather than difference. “You know something? I just realize that Sunday evening is the same all over the blasted world.” Ironhorse Henry reminds his friends later on in the story. “We sitting down here in Canada, pon the grass, and it is the same thing as when we was little boys back home, sitting down in a place we used to call The Hill” (27). This colonial link is made explicitly in a bitter outburst from Sagaboy:
I laugh hard hard as hell, hee-hee-hee! at all them people who say we shouldn’t make Great Britain more blacker than she is or was, in the first Elizabethan era. And all the time I does be laughing, I does be thinking of long long ago when the Queen o’ Britain send all them convicts and whores and swivilitic men and women overseas, to fluck-up and populate the islands! Well, darling, now the tables turn round, because this is the second Elizabethan era! And it is the islands who sending black people, all kinds, the good and the bad, the godly and the ungodly, and we intend to fuck-up the good old Mother Country. (19)
The relationship between the West Indians and Toronto is precisely not a relationship of difference or otherness: they are less strangers in a strange land than visiting relatives from a distant branch of the family, one that is maligned and distrusted for having been, for so long, mistreated.
From the very start of his writing career, Clarke was alive to this distinction. Born in a colony, he was sensitive to the fact that independent nations are never formed from whole cloth. When Canadians were forging a new literary identity for themselves in the 1960s and ’70s by celebrating the pioneering past and enshrining the false myth of an empty continent, Clarke, the resident without citizenship, was busily outlining a new map of the world using the threads of Black experience. At the very moment when Canadian literary nationalism was reaching its apogee, Clarke’s stories were laying the groundwork for a more skeptical, more cosmopolitan, and more formally inventive tradition of writing in Canada.
Clarke’s journey toward becoming a novelist began in earnest in 1959, when he took a job as a feature writer for the Timmins Daily News in Northern Ontario. His work at the Daily News (and later at the Globe and Mail, after he returned to Toronto the next year) gave him an acute sense for the ordinary lives of Canadians along with some of the practical tools of the writer’s trade. When he was fired from the Globe for writing a feature essay that was critical of the British high commissioner to Canada, Clarke dove headlong into fiction, turning out a remarkable five stories in just two weeks.
From his base at 46 Asquith Avenue he completed a manuscript for a novel, The Love and the Circumstance, and began work on what would become The Meeting Point. Despite his gruelling self-discipline and the stacks of pages flying out of his typewriter, concrete success eluded Clarke. In 1962, when he submitted a third manuscript, The Trumpet at His Lips, for consideration by McClelland and Stewart, it was turned down. By the end of that year, he had become convinced that if he were just to take a year to focus purely on his writing, he would have his breakthrough. This proved to be a fateful decision.
He spent 1963 writing what would become his first novel, The Survivors of the Crossing, published to positive reviews in 1964. A tragicomic account of a Barbadian plantation worker named Rufus who suffers emasculation, violence, and imprisonment for his attempts to organize a strike, Survivors explores the experiences of colonialism and dispossession in Barbados, borrowing from Clarke’s own experience and—as he acknowledged in his memoir—from the literature of Black America he found so inspiring. From the very beginning, Clarke’s novels laid claim to a kind of cosmopolitan Blackness, internationally inflected, honest to his roots, and completely at odds with mainstream Canadian writing.
As 1964 stretched into 1965, 1966, 1967, his interest in diasporic culture and politics only deepened, and he continued to involve himself in anti-racist activism in Toronto (much of it alongside his Jewish ally, Rabbi Feinberg). His writing in this period is remarkable for its vivid, even febrile language, and for its uncompromising indictment of systemic anti-Black prejudice. He was also constantly travelling throughout these years: interviewing Malcolm X and Stokely Carmichael in New York, interviewing Derek Walcott back home in Barbados, visiting London for a piece on West Indian migrants and Halifax’s Africville to interview Black Canadians, and publishing other in-depth interviews with Roy Innis, Chinua Achebe, and LeRoi Jones. He also, somehow, found time to found the Ebo Society, a West Indian cultural and advocacy group, and its (short-lived) print organ the Ebo Voice, which would garner him the attention of Robin Winks, a Yale historian working on a history of Black people in Canada.
Winks invited Clarke to Yale as a guest lecturer and then as a visiting professor in the Department of African-American Studies for the 1968–9 academic year. Clarke then spent the next three years in a variety of different visiting lectureships and professorships at several American colleges and universities. Indeed, Clarke’s role in establishing Black studies programs across the United States (and giving Henry Louis Gates his only B+) is another under-studied dimension of his career. These experiences placed him in the cauldron of American political debate at precisely the moment when the Black Power movement was at its height, and, perhaps ironically, it left him with a grudging appreciation for Canada. Despite his immersion in African-American culture and life, he always felt like an outsider to Black American culture, which left him with a lasting distaste for a country where he felt he could “only be a spectator . . . even among my own people!” (Algoo-Baksh 94).
Meanwhile, in Canada, prominent Canadian writers like Graeme Gibson, Al Purdy, Gwendolyn MacEwen, Milton Acorn, Dave Godfrey, and Dennis Lee were vociferously protesting the slightest whiff of American cultural imperialism (Mount 190). A writer like Clarke, who had spent the decade studying Black history and uncovering the ties of migration, suffering, and rebellion that tied Black people to each other in England and Guyana, Bridgetown and Toronto, Halifax and New York, was distinctly out of step with the inward-looking, parochial, and overwhelmingly white concerns of the writers who were self-consciously building what would become CanLit. Certainly, Clarke’s insistence on drawing attention to the connections between racism in Canada, the West Indies, and America to the great original sin of the transatlantic slave trade did little to endear him to white Canada.
But while there can be no doubt that this attempt to silence Clarke and downplay his prolific contributions to Canadian letters in the 1960s and ’70s was racist, the particular quality of this racism is worth exploring: Clarke was not only rejected for being the “Angriest Black Man in Canada.”1 He was also rejected because his intellectual project, a cataloguing of Black experiences across the Caribbean and the wider Atlantic world, was an existential threat to a country that was trying to launder its colonial past and present itself to the world as a new kind of nation, free of Europe’s historical sins and the institutionalized racial prejudices of the United States.
Clarke’s attention to Canada’s place in what Paul Gilroy calls “the black Atlantic” found its fullest expression in his literary style. In the introduction to this collection, Paul Barrett notes that Clarke’s style is “both a reflection of his own particular artistic vision as well as a response to the erasure and absence of spaces for Blackness in Canada.” He notes that Clarke uses style “to provoke, anger, baffle, annoy, and entertain.” It is also, he argues, a “rebuke” to a Canadian literary establishment that so frequently “misread his work, treating it as a realist or sociological account of Black life in Canada.”
This strategic use of style is present even in Clarke’s earliest stories: by capturing the rhythm, syntax, and lexicon of nation language, on the page, Clarke did more than simply provide a realistic representation of how people spoke. But Clarke’s use of nation language is only one aspect of the innovative quality of his early style. Even when Clarke is hewing closely to the traditions of descriptive realism, his sentences contain a digressive energy, an elliptical quality that allows them to blur time and space. Clauses beget clauses, subjects and objects pile up, perspective is lost and regained, and as the sentences unspool across the page, they thicken reality. The effect is sometimes frustrating, sometimes utterly disarming: after pages of frenetic stream of consciousness, the prose will snap suddenly into place. In many cases, meaning doesn’t so much emerge as emanate, to the extent that it would be difficult to say what, exactly, a Clarke story is about. If someone were to ask me what happens in, say, “Four Stations in His Circle,” from Clarke’s 1971 collection, the only answer I could responsibly give would be to read the story in its entirety. Every word and comma builds toward its total signification; the only way to understand Clarke’s best prose is to experience it.
These questions are not simply aesthetic. In order to appreciate the extent to which Clarke’s oeuvre represents a fifty-year engagement with questions of nationalism, diaspora, empire, Blackness, and belonging, one must understand the way Clarke’s style imprints meaning on the raw material of his narratives. Clarke’s style flies in the face of the critics and academics who have frequently sought to reduce him to the role of a glorified journalist, a chronicler of Black experience who wrote what he saw, as if he had never really stopped writing for the Timmins Daily News. But it is precisely the aspects of Clarke’s writing that are most often passed off as difficult (the circularity, the digressiveness) that impart the most meaning. Nowhere is this more apparent than in his late-career novels The Polished Hoe and More, and his astonishing final memoir ’Membering.
Clarke’s final books masterfully revisit the great obsessions that animated his early and mid-career work. The Polished Hoe, set in 1950s Barbados, follows the protagonist Mary-Mathilda over the course of a single night as she slowly, and in circular fashion, gives a deposition to Sargeant Percy Stuart explaining why she killed her father and former lover, Mr. Bellfeels. More follows Idora Morrison over the course of four purgatorial days while she waits for her son BJ to return home. ’Membering builds out from Clarke’s first memoir, Growing Up Stupid Under the Union Jack, to cover his school days in Barbados, his years of struggle in Toronto, his sojourns in America and Barbados, his adventures in politics, and his meditations on race, slavery, colonialism, and Canadian culture. Different in content, the books are united by a sensuality of language, a denseness of allusion, a keenness of insight, and a baroque, circular style of narration that, formally, lies between the improvisational flair of bebop and the mathematical discipline of the fugue.
Consider this long passage from one of ’Membering’s most remarkable chapters, “The Green Door House,” which sees Clarke’s fascination with a particular Toronto house morph and intensify as he travels to Cuba, Venice, France, and Holland:
It takes me five minutes to walk from my house to the St. Lawrence Hall, which I have to pass to get to the St. Lawrence Market, which is my destination. Years ago, before 1873, when the house was built and after 1492, my future and my present disposition were discussed and quarrelled about in this St. Lawrence Hall. I walk past the St. Lawrence Hall now, to buy pigs’ feet, ham hocks, plantains, okras, and pigtails in the market itself. And nowadays, I go to the St. Lawrence Hall to receive the Trillium Prize for Literature, and to drink wine and eat thick slices of cheese at other functions—weddings, book launches, and dances. When I pass the post office, midway to the hall, reputedly the first post office in Toronto, and I pick up snippets of history from the neighbourhood newspaper, I add to the “facts” of that history, the real truth, the “narrative” coached by the spirits and the myths, and I conclude that the man who lived in this green-door house, in 1876, three years after it was built, was a slave—whether in chains still, or “freed,” or manumitted, or spared the hangman’s knot thrown round a branch of a magnolia tree—if there are no magnolia trees in Canada, then I still say magnolia tree, to denote the symbolism, for it doesn’t matter. (261)
Clarke entwines memory and imagination, history and myth to create a dense network of signification. A short walk to the market brings to mind the history of abolition in Toronto, Columbus’s fateful arrival in the Caribbean, Clarke’s own literary celebrity, the West Indian food that signifies his immigrant origins and also, for readers familiar with Toronto’s St. Lawrence Market, suggests a particular kind of arrival of West Indian culture in Canada in general. In many ways a fine example of Clarke’s mastery of stream-of-consciousness narration, the apparently random nature of the musings is belied by the insistent return to the dissonant, omnipresent theme of slavery and colonization. The appearance of chaos masks an underlying focus and obsessiveness, one that imparts to the reader a sense both of limitless consciousness and profound historical claustrophobia.
In Clarke’s late style, repetitive digression is turned to philosophical ends. Characters circle back to the same words, phrases, stories, and ideas, and the plot is constantly doubling back on itself before moving forward before doubling back again. It is often hard to tell when a scene is taking place, or who is speaking, or whether what they are describing is real or imagined. In the virtuosic sentence that opens More, Idora Morrison, lying in bed in her basement apartment, hears the bells of the cathedral, mentally traverses the streets of Toronto, remembers arriving in Canada as a domestic worker, and starts worrying about her son BJ, and that man, his father. In The Polished Hoe, Mary-Mathilda’s deposition becomes the story of her entire life, the story of her mother’s life, the story of the island of Barbados, and eventually, in a way, the story of the entire Caribbean. The chronotope embodied in Clarke’s style is one in which the Middle Passage and the trauma of slavery are consistently made present through the characters’ imaginations and memories, and through the material conditions of the world around them.
For Clarke, the light playing across a green door late one afternoon is remembered in the sunlight along Havana’s Malecón, and the doors of houses in Bordeaux built from money made on the slave trade. But the connections made in the minds of Clarke and his characters are not, in fact, random: they arise from the historical truth that few places on earth were left materially unaffected by slavery and the Triangle Trade. Toronto and Bridgetown are bound together by history, as both cities are connected through London, Paris, New York, and the slave castles of the Gold Coast. The shared history of colonialism has created deep connections between disparate cultures, and the profound inequality and violence intrinsic to the structures of colonialism is manifested in ways both material and immaterial. Clarke’s style reflects the way Black diasporic people’s relationship to familial, national, and institutional structures in the West is haunted by their brutal experiences of empire—what Christina Sharpe has called “monstrous intimacies.” By returning again and again to these deep and long-standing spatial relationships, Clarke’s style both affirms his characters right to exist and build lives in Toronto while also subverting the paternalistic liberal notion that by “welcoming” West Indians Canada is playing the role of the generous multicultural state. If peoples from every corner of the earth can be found in Toronto, perhaps that is because no part of the world has been free from the destructive meddling of the British Empire.
One of Clarke’s more brilliant and enigmatic flourishes in More is to have Idora repeatedly claim that she was born in Canada when asked about her origins. Elsewhere, of course, she proudly declares herself to be “pure Barbadian,” and we know from other passages in the novel that she came to Canada as a young woman (118). On the level of narrative, Idora seems to be challenging the common racist assumption that a Black person could not actually be “from” Canada; but she is also, perhaps, making a more significant political claim: being born “here” and being from Barbados are not mutually exclusive. After all, to invert an old CanLit cliché, here is where? Idora is, in one sense, an immigrant, but she is also “from” the same place Canada is from: the British Empire. This is underlined playfully in a passage from The Polished Hoe: Mary-Mathilda and Sargeant Percy Stuart are having a conversation about English goods and brands, and when Mary-Mathilda tells Sargeant that Red Rose Tea isn’t English, but Canadian, he responds with sardonic confidence that Canada is “Still the British Empire!”
Ignored for much of his career, Clarke is in the process of being vindicated by a new generation—one he had helped mentor and raise up—who are using his writing as a jumping-off point for their own novels about Black Canadian experiences and their own blistering indictments of anti-Blackness in Canada. This is due to the fact that, in many ways, CanLit has changed significantly since the 1960s: writers like Esi Edugyan, Rawi Hage, Madeleine Thien, Dionne Brand, David Chariandy, Rohinton Mistry, and André Alexis receive national recognition for their work, and Canadian publishers are publishing more work by writers of colour.
But some things are still depressingly similar. Anti-Blackness remains a salient issue in publishing, and for every writer of colour who wins the Giller, there are dozens who labour in obscurity. Given all this, the desire to anoint Clarke a full-blooded Canadian deserving of a place in the pantheon alongside Atwood and Birney and Richler is more than understandable. Clarke left a deep and lasting mark on this country’s literary scene, and it would be impossible to understand the evolution of Canadian letters without taking account of his presence. Who could possibly argue that his career doesn’t mark a central achievement of Canadian literature?
I confess, however, that the impulse to wrap Clarke in the flag and fold his legacy into the story of CanLit leaves me a little uneasy. Protectionism and parochialism were the most lasting legacy of Canadian literary publishing in the 1960s and ’70s, and being a Canadian all too frequently seems to foreclose the possibility of being anything else. Clarke understood perhaps better than any other Canadian writer of his generation that the nationalism espoused by Commonwealth countries in the post-colonial period was shallow soil for a serious writer, and the depth of his writing is a feature of his cosmopolitanism, both as a man and as a thinker. Perhaps his most enduring contribution to world literature is his exploration of what cosmopolitanism means for the colonized, whose ancestors were stolen from Africa and who were in turn forced to migrate to the North because of economic pressures brought on by the no less perfidious machinery of globalization.
This cosmopolitanism is neither rootless nor utopian; it is not programmatic, and it does not deal in solutions. Instead, it is a process of uncovering, through hard experience, the profound connections that exist between disparate places and peoples, a critical awareness that the world we live in is the product of history, and that understanding that history, meditating on it, making it present in our lives, is necessary if we are to live honestly. Clarke’s characters are often deluded (usually by themselves), and when their stories end tragically it is usually because of their inability or refusal to see what was in front of their eyes. If his books contain a moral, it is that the only way to see through the structures and ideologies that rule over us is by paying close attention to the world around us, to the architecture of our cities, the food on our plates, the language in our mouths, the cut of our clothes, and the thoughts in our heads. If his work offers hope, it is the difficult hope of great literature: that being less deceived about the powers that animate the world and distort our lives may not make us happier or better, but it will make us wiser, and wisdom is its own reward.
For those who write in Canada today, perhaps the most precious lesson Clarke offers is that we can be at home in Canada without believing in Canada, that the moral fate of this country is irreducibly bound to the fate of the modern world, that political acuity and ethical judgment do not need to come at the cost of style, beauty, and grace. Clarke has earned his place as a foundational figure in the literary history of this country. But I believe it would be a shame if this man, this raconteur, this lexical demolition artist who contained and gave birth to so many worlds were to have his significance finally reduced to having been, for better or for worse, the angriest Black man in Canada.