Austin Clarke: Essays on His Works ed. by Camille A. Isaacs (review)

For fifty years now Austin Clarke has been publishing in Canada. His first thirty years of work was addressed by Stella Algoo Baksh in her 1994 critical biography. This new book, the third on Clarke’s writings, collects critical essays right up to 2013. The twelve essays and one interview cover the varied kinds of material Clarke has produced, and are informed largely by post-colonial and feminist criticism. They are at times challenging and even merciless, in particular when they approach Clarke’s conflicted responses to Conservative politics and attitudes in a society he continues to ravage for its racist foundations. Most of the essays demonstrate new observations on the Caribbean immigrant literature that Clarke helped to make a place for in Canada back in the mid-1960s. Indeed, it would be difficult for anyone to write further on this author without working from this text, which goes far beyond Dr. Algoo Baksh’s preliminary findings. And, in any case, Clarke has been a very busy writer since 1994.

The book’s value is in its detailed literary analysis and comparative commentary, especially that by Daniel Coleman, George Elliott Clarke, and Victor J. Ramraj. Coleman’s simple point that most of the academic criticism of Clarke’s work has still come from those “who share the Caribbean background” is valid and yet unsettling, as Clarke’s readership clearly has gone far beyond that constituency. This collection repeats this paradigm but offers a base for travelling beyond it. George Elliott Clarke situates the half century of writing in the Caribbean/Canadian historical context, and he is meticulously clear in pointing out the conflicts and contradictions that lie as sand traps in such subject matter and that perhaps frighten the non-Caribbean scholar off the course. The essays by Smaro Kamboureli, Michael A. Bucknor, Marquita R. Smith, and Betia Boe Stolar situate Clarke’s books in place and time but also descriptively situate the criticism that has slowly grown in weight over that half century. This collection as a whole focuses productively on Clarke’s consistent concerns with justice and morality, and on the complexities of colour and class relationships he has addressed so dramatically and vividly.

Still, there are pieces missing. The editor opens with an interview and a biography. The latter is significantly weak and unhelpful. The interview is also a disappointment. In it one can see Clarke’s continuing guarded reticence to show anything more than the constructed authorial image he has cultivated publicly for so long. Next to nothing appears about his personal and social life, or about the varied communities he has moved in and drawn his characters from. The usual platitudes about his progress as an author offer nothing new. The various jobs he has held alone deserve more consideration, as they have informed his writing. The editor’s bibliography does not include the first critical study, Lloyd Brown’s El Dorado and Paradise (1989), even though it is mentioned in Coleman’s essay.

The key essays make this a more valuable collection than the editor’s work suggests, but it is an uneven collection. Yet the editor deserves credit for bringing it all together, and bringing the criticism of Clarke’s work up to date as he begins his eightieth year. Clarke was not the first Caribbean-Canadian writer, but he has been the most successful and long-lived, and such a book is certainly well deserved and needed.