George and Ruth: An Interview with George Elliott Clarke about Writing and Ethics

KK: In your 2002 book Odysseys Home you describe yourself as the type of academic who 'wears placards, leads protests, shouts through bullhorns' and enters the public square 'with a dash of menace – like sugar – in my speech' ('Embarkation,' 6). Later in the collection you also express wariness about the 'awful intoxication' of literary theory, which offers up the possibility 'that one can do socio-political good, dispelling illiberal forces of malice and ignorance, delivering into the illumination of academic discourse entire canons – or communities – which have been consigned to the limbo of marginality' ('Harris,' 253). Can you discuss how you see the ethical role of the literary critic in light of both your personal convictions and your warning about avoiding this 'missionary position'?

GEC: I'm not sure it's possible to avoid the pitfalls of positivist humanism, or of materialist progressivism: the lust to enforce (good) change in the public sphere, especially in terms of engineering the uplift of marginalized communities, may spur on great, strategic feats of criticism – a Panama Canal–sized bibliography here, a Civil War–combative anthology there. One may very well want to feel the missionary zeal to enlighten dark continents of ivory towers, so as to have the energy to blast through barricades, logjams, and to blaze proverbial new paths of thought. Yet, a measure of caution – I mean, humility – is also necessary, so that, in the flush of 'discovery,' one does not go about trampling down the local exotica, or uprooting flowers because they resemble weeds. I think an ethical critical methodology is exemplified by the magnificent anthropological study Black Culture and Black Consciousness: Afro-American Folk Thought from Slavery to Freedom (1977), by Lawrence W. Levine. A European-American scholar and, thus, half-divorced from the lived experience of African America, Dr Levine manages, in this brilliant book, to excavate the consciousness of a people. It is a spellbinding accomplishment. It seems to me that Dr Levine acts, in his text, with wholesome, holy humility: he listens to Black Americans; he holds up a stethoscope, so to speak, to their paper archives and their vinyl records, and he records, objectively, what he hears – or what is sounded. The soundscape reproduced is neither minstrelsy nor the bourgeoisie, but the teeth-sucking, foot-stomping, hand-clapping, and piano-tickling reality of church, brothel, bar, and worksite. By doing the people the favour of letting them speak (through many forms of text), Dr Levine lays bare what other analysts have missed: the scintillating sophistication – political, theological, musical, culinary, etc – of Afro-America. In short, he discovers a civilization where others (W.E.B. Du Bois and Zora Neale Hurston notably excepted) suspected only underclass deviancy and dysfunction.

Another exemplary ethical approach is encapsulated in bell hooks's 1991 proverb that 'Intellectual work only estranges us from Black communities when we do not relate or share in myriad ways our concerns' (Breaking Bread, 162). Here again one hears humility: the scholar is not an outsider, but someone whose work reconstructs a community of shared interest and concern; he or she is someone who orients his or her scholarship around a dialogue with his or her ostensible subjects. One must not conduct oneself as a missionary-explorer, but as a guerilla-patriot. ...

KK: You have mentioned (in Odysseys Home and elsewhere) your sense of affinity with the Canadian cultural nationalists – particularly George Grant – who sought in the 1960s and 1970s to locate and defend Canadian culture against that of the United States. Despite your interest in cultural particularity, however, you also express impatience with critics who choose to read writers purely as representatives of their cultural groups. Can you discuss the fine balance that you face as a critic who seeks to focus on the work of African-Canadian writers without reducing these writers to sociological examples?

GEC: Your gutsy question is unnerving. You touch on the most sensitive problem of our era: how strong must the link be between nation (people/citizens) and 'culture'? Must there be any connection at all between a state and the...