Canadian Cultural Exchange / Échanges culturels au Canada: Translation and Transculturation / traduction et transculturation

Transculturation in George Elliott Clarke’s Whylah Falls: or, When Is It Appropriate to Appropriate?

laurence steven Transculturation in George Elliott Clarke’s Whylah Falls: or, When Is It Appropriate to Appropriate? The individual is the rhythm of his styles. (Ian Robinson) We must, more of us, learn to write like this. (Travis Lane) Either I am Canadian,or the word means nothing.(George Elliott Clarke, Odysseys Home) In his magisterial 2002 volume Odysseys Home: Mapping African-Canadian Literature, George Elliott Clarke at one point erects a “here be dragons” sign to warn foolish missionary/explorers either to turn back or tread lightly: There is something of the missionary position inherent in the posture [of the literary theorist hoping to do socio-political good by overcoming marginality and dispelling illiberal ignorance], especially when an exuberant idealism leads one to champion communities to which one is merely an observer, or a guest, or, perhaps, an interloper, or even, charitably, a missionary . The risk of this seductive address is that one’s own thrusting of theory , of notions of interpretation, upon the Other (that obscure object of desire), may render mute the screams, laughter, and shouts of that supposedly beloved other, that darling community with which the critic-as-missionary conducts intercourse. (253) As a white Canadian academic drawing the African-Canadian Clarke’s work heuristically into a confluence of hermeneutical, rhetorical, and stylistic inquiry, I expect I run the risk Clarke warns of above. While I of course 99 06_cheadle_steven.qxd 2007/06/21 13:30 PM Page 99 believe my work helps Clarke’s text to speak, or helps position us appropriately to hear it, which amounts to the same thing, I see no alternative to taking the risk of failure. In fact, though, I am reassured in my critical deliberateness by Clarke himself, who both as poet and literary/cultural critic, despite his caveat against the missionary position, engages in brazen appropriations , territorial claims, and canon formation and reclamation—making rhetorical gestures and flourishes that buck the trend of the postmodern and/or cultural materialist and/or new historicist critiques of identity, ideology , narrative, and representation.As a poet Clarke unabashedly seeks Beauty with a capital B,like a“magnet hounding iron”(Whylah Falls 75) or a“bee hunting nectar” (Whylah Falls 50). Doing so “he uses the full range of the cultural resources available to him as a Canadian, a Maritimer, a descendant of the Black Refugees of 1812. The art, music, literature, religion, and history of Europe, North America, and Africa are native to him” (Lane 47). In Whylah Falls specifically: Both the Renaissance lyric sequence and the pastoral traditions … provide Clarke with themes, formal structures, and sources of imagery which he translates, transforms, and transplants into a Nova Scotia setting, evoking a celebratory attitude toward the natural world and toward the rural lifestyle of Nova Scotian Blacks in the nineteen-thirties. (Wells 72) But some questions arise. How does Clarke’s willingness to range over the cultural traditions of half the world (or more), appropriating, claiming, and using these resources to body forth his world jive with the contemporary cultural theory so chary of such moves? Is it enough for Lane to say Clarke is “native”to all these traditions? How can that word retain or make sense when used thus? We find a hint to Clarke’s culturally polyglot nativeness in his“viewing ‘Canadianité’as an identity of identities”(Clarke, page 134 in this volume). Tim Wynne-Jones once observed that as “an immigrant nation … Canada, itself, is a threshold. Having crossed a threshold is an integral part of our collective consciousness”(55). Such a Janus-faced national characteristic offers us insight into the appropriateness to/of Canada of/to Clarke’s distinctive style. Though his family’s roots in Nova Scotia—largely as refugees from slavery, but with a strand of Mi’kmaq—predate Canada itself, they have not been recognized as Canadian by the dominant Anglo-Saxon and Francophone cultures , which in their turn have suffered the identity-angst of colonies gaining (or losing) independence.While Margaret Atwood diagnosed Canada’s identity issue most famously in her wry 1970 observation that“if the national mental illness of the United States is megalomania, that of Canada is paranoid schizophrenia” (62), when we read Whylah Falls we might be forgiven for 100 Cultural Appropriation Revisited / L’Appropriation culturelle reconsidérée 06_cheadle_steven.qxd 2007/06/21 13:30 PM Page 100 thinking we aren’t in Atwood’s...