The Past Names Nothing Anyplace: Wayde Compton, C.S. Giscombe, and the Poetics of Black British Columbia

© Canadian Review of American Studies/Revue canadienne d’études américaines 30, no. 2, 2000 The Past Names Nothing Anyplace: Wayde Compton, C.S. Giscombe, and the Poetics of Black British Columbia Peter Hudson Wayde Compton. 49th Parallel Psalm. Vancouver: Arsenal Pulp Press, 1999. C.S. Giscombe. Giscome Road. Normal, IL: Dalkey Archive, 1998. While the uninhabited landscape, with its role in legitimating the colonial order that gave rise to the contemporary Canadian nation state, has persisted as Canada ’s favourite national romance, it has also become, in the work of a range of visual artists and writers, the metaphorical site for the contestation of the terms of that same order. For instance, in “Cadboro Bay: Index to an Incomplete History,” Melinda Mollineaux uses photographs of the geography of south-western British Columbia to draw attention to the politics of race in the consolidation of a Canadian national identity and to the exclusion of African Canadians from the archive of Canadian history. Cadboro Bay was the site of Emancipation Day picnics held by the small community of African Americans that emigrated to Victoria in the mid-nineteenth century. While the settlers were encouraged to come to British Columbia by then-Governor James Douglas, himself part black, who assured them that life in Victoria would be free of the racial discrimination that they faced in California, they ended up facing similar problems. After the Civil War, many of them returned to the United States, and, since then, the descendants of those who remained have, for the most part, assimilated into the wider community. It is fitting that Mollineaux’s images contain no visible trace of these settlers and barely a sign of any form of human habitation. Instead, we see a series of deceptively simple West Coast landscapes: a listless bay; haphazardly stacked driftwood ; charcoal mud exposed by low tide and littered with stones and autumn leaves; close-ups of sea grass, vine maple, wild flowers, salal, echinacea, ivy, and other temperate foliage. Mollineaux uses this pastoral space as a corrective to the archival neglect and narrative exclusion of the forgotten histories of black Canadian Canadian Review of American Studies 30 (2000) 230 settlers and their kin. In this sense, Mollineaux locates herself within a tradition of black cultural nationalism. Typically, as part of the cultural nationalist project, evidence of the black past is unearthed as a vindicationist means of justifying claims for black citizenship in the present. However, by representing the past through such an elusive, absented sign (the uninhabited landscape), Mollineaux suggests an epistemological break from cultural nationalism. She appears to remember without recourse to the past, arguing that the recovery and representation of black history will always be deferred, always be partial, always be incomplete. “Cadboro Bay” does not represent the geography of nothingness that V.S. Naipaul infamously charged was the unfortunate condition of the Caribbean —to which Derek Walcott, describing the Adamic passion that fuelled a generation of West Indian artists and writers, responded, “If there was nothing, there was everything to be made. With this prodigious ambition one began.” Certainly, for black people in BC, everything is still to be made. One hundred and fifty years after the arrival of the province’s first black settlers, black faces remain as scarce as black history . How then does one begin to speak of the creation of a culture when one is stymied by demographics? And what is the use of tradition if there is no one to carry it? I do not pose these questions to argue for the inherent limitations of creation in a space such as the Black Pacific. On the contrary , it seems to me that such a space, as Mollineaux has evoked it in “Cadboro Bay,” could be remarkably generative. Unencumbered by the burden of tradition, free from the pathological aesthetic conservatism of a black middle class, and just outside the totalizing crush of market forces, black artists on the West Coast would appear to have the kind of edgy freedom that marginalization brings and the potential to create a radical, experimental black art.1 Two recent books of poetry, Wayde Compton’s 49th Parallel Psalm and C.S. Giscombe’s Giscome...