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

“I am become Aaron”: George Elliott Clarke’s Execution Poems and William Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus

susan knutson “I am become Aaron”: George Elliott Clarke’s Execution Poems and William Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus Part I: The Black Acadian Tragedy of “George and Rue” Our children will be every colour eyes can know, and free. (George Elliott Clarke, Québécité 92) We live not in three worlds, but in one. (Aijaz Ahmad 80) In “Trial I,” nearing the close of George Elliott Clarke’s Execution Poems: The Black Acadian Tragedy of “George and Rue,”1 George Hamilton, the milder of the two brothers who are about to be condemned to hang for murder, hazards a balance sheet of his own and his people’s lives in Canada: Geo: This is a good apple country. Right so. I would like to get on the Dominion Atlantic Railway drivin an engine. If I could go to Africa, to a coloured country, or to Haiti, or even to Cuba, I would go. I would like to get away. On a no-moon night when the only eyes that got vision are God’s. Oh, if I could get away, I would do away with sickness and not get away with murder . Who can do more and more and more injustice? (36) George is a generous man, and he begins his enumeration with the positive: Nova Scotian orchards produce wonderful apples, the fruit of our earthly paradise , celebrated here and elsewhere in Clarke’s poetry. Also to be considered an asset is the hope that one might land a job working on the railway—an 29 03_cheadle_knutson.qxd 2007/06/21 13:29 PM Page 29 enterprise that in fact employed significant numbers of African Canadians in the early years of the 20th century, although more often as porters than as engineers. On the other hand, there is injustice and injustice and more injustice . George’s wish to “get away … [o]n a no-moon night when the only eyes that got vision are God’s” evokes the Underground Railroad, which (ironically , in this context) allowed many persecuted people to flee to Canada, seeking freedom in the darkest of nights.2 His words also recall the momentous decision of close to 1200 people, who represented nearly a third of the recently arrived Black Loyalist population and the great majority of its leadership and intellectual elite, to leave Nova Scotia for Sierra Leone in 1792, “in quest of a more genuine liberty,”as George Elliott Clarke puts it in Odysseys Home (110). Those who remained struggled with poverty, lack of human and material resources, and persistent discrimination. George Hamilton’s perception of injustice was accurate in the 1940s, when the historical events recounted in these poems unfolded, as it still would be today, when Black men, in particular, remain disadvantaged with respect to the rest of Canada, as was reported in the spring of 2004 by the Conference Board of Canada.3 A high human cost is paid for the racialized inequities embedded in our social fabric, and problems with official Canadian multiculturalism linked to this persistent racism have been articulated eloquently by Himani Banerjee, M. NourbeSe Philip, and others.Yet the work of scholars and artists such as John Reid, Tomson Highway, and George Elliott Clarke seems to suggest that both the past and the future construction of Canadian cultural identities relies upon cultural exchange between peoples in a process that is essentially creative. The dynamic portrait of Africadian cultural identity in Clarke’s Execution Poems, while hardly rose coloured, can serve as a case study for the construction of one such creative mix-up in the Canadian multicultural landscape. This paper explores Africadian cultural identity, represented by George and Rufus Hamilton, as the complex product of cultural exchange or transculturation , privileging as a key technology of this cultural exchange the process of literary textual transference, or intertextuality. The concept of transculturation comes from the work of Cuban ethnologist Fernando Ortiz, who, in Cuban Counterpoint, developed the term as a non-Eurocentric alternative term to acculturation, to express the complex processes of intercultural contact , conflict, loss, and acquisition without universalizing the acquisition of Western European culture as human evolution.4 The concept of intertextuality derives from the humanities, and specifically, from the post-structuralist discourses of the early 1980s, where it was developed in order to better under30 Transitive Canada (1) / Un Canada transitif (1) 03_cheadle_knutson.qxd 2007/06/21 13:29 PM Page 30 stand how...