Being Black: Essays by Althea Prince by Althea Prince (review)

HUMANITIES 375 and political borders in Walsh and Komagatu Maru; the tragic implications of maintaining them are, as she shows, just as destructively at work in Fair Liberty=s Call. Kathy Chung=s previously unpublished article on Fair Liberty=s Call furthers the discourse by arguing that the prominent issues of >inheritance= as a crippling force are resolved by Pollock=s conclusion, which suggests forging new alliances that disregard past loyalties. Nothof=s interview offers some fresh insights into where Pollock sees herself today. While the production history of her plays at home and abroad confirms that she is not narrowly regional or political, her recent plays, Moving Pictures on Nell Shipman, and Angel=s Trumpet on Zelda Fitzgerald, indicate that she remains interested in women=s, if not feminist, issues. Ultimately the Pollock who emerges is possibly more accomplished but not really very different from the earlier version of thirty years ago. (ROSALIND KERR) Althea Prince. Being Black: Essays by Althea Prince Insomniac Press. 162. $19.95 Althea Prince=s fine essay collection presents an analysis of >doing life in Canada= by examining >what it means to be human and African in the objective realities of Toronto, Canada, the world.= Throughout Being Black, Prince foregrounds her social reality as a black Antiguan-born woman who moved to Toronto in 1965, and she explores her role as a public intellectual helping to shape anti-racist agendas in institutional and non-institutional sites. Like bell hooks and Audre Lorde, whose work she cites, Prince=s personal experiences inform her knowledge and are vital to the politics and world-view that she articulates in this book. >Doing life= is a key concept in Prince=s thinking: it connotes action, participation, and agency, and, significantly, it=s a term she learns from her mother during a visit to Antigua, her birth-home. If the reader is to take Prince=s standpoint seriously , however, she must also listen to the >I and I= that Prince, adopting a Rastafari concept, articulates thorough her recollections of local activism in late 1960s and 1970s Toronto. As the title essay and Clifton Joseph=s introductory >seventees RAP= make clear, theirs was a generation with a political sensibility influenced by Marxist-inspired resistance in Cuba, by anti-imperialist writers such as Fanon and C.L.R. James, and by the United States civil rights movements. >Pan-Africanism was the wider, global context for the building of community,= Prince asserts, but that AfricanCanadian Toronto community was given immediate context, was nurtured, supported, and inspired by its elder members, and by native-born African Canadians. By recalling and honouring that support, Prince references histories that are too often eclipsed or erased in accounts of African Canadians in the big city. 376 LETTERS IN CANADA 2000 Althea Prince is, in fact, quick to remind readers how easily and endlessly the past is disregarded and repeated, particularly in her essays on institutions in part 2. Here, she reads the silences in a symposium on >Black Canadian Studies= held at York University in 1998, an event to which no African-Canadian faculty of her generation B the very people who had pushed for more black faculty, wider student access, and curricula that included the world-views of African peoples B were invited. Prince then turns her critical eye to >Black History Month= and >Toronto=s Caribana,= arguing against the ghettoization produced by cultural festivals and for a dialogue across generations of African Canadians that could review and transform these events. The impressive range of this collection B and of Althea Prince=s life/work B is indicated by the third section of essays, >Writing.= An incisive commentary on the events surrounding the >Writing Thru= Race= conference is followed by a literary critical article that applies >the Jamesian notion of authenticity to the work of three African Caribbean women writers,= one of whom is Prince herself. A better sense of Prince=s creative writing emerges in her >Envoi,= >Talking to a Six/Eight Drum,= where her earlier comments on the politics of language (>Stop Calling Us Slaves=) are actively, and often humorously, engaged. Code-switching, shifts in register of voice, and back-and-forth movies...