New Maps for Old: George Elliott Clarke's Odysseys Home

Several years ago the Ghanaian poet Kwame Dawes published a book on Caribbean writing—Natural Mysticism—that turned out to be an extended puff for his own poetry. Nobody was quite sure whether to applaud it as a characteristically West Indian act of bravado or decry it as an unforgivable distortion of the literary landscape. In the end most critics decided to ignore it. Nova Scotian poet George Elliott Clarke's book on African-Canadian literature, Odysseys Home, suffers from the obverse problem. Clarke entirely omits his own work from his map of African Canada, and one is not sure whether to approve the omission as characteristically Canadian self-effacement or lament it as a real shortcoming of the book.

The difference between Natural Mysticism and Odysseys Home, of course, is that Clarke's book will not be ignored. Even without any discussion of Clarke's own poetry (Whylah Falls, Execution Poems and Blue) Odysseys Home is a substantial and valuable work of criticism.It comprises a dozen essays on Black Nova Scotian and West Indian-Canadian literature, reviews of African-Canadian history, poetry, and fiction, a bibliography and a primer of African-Canadian literature and even, as an appendix to one of the essays, a glossary of "Africadian English." The effect is encyclopedic, verging (as the title suggests) on the epic; Odysseys Home is a statement of national identity. The project is saved from crude nationalism, however, by Clarke's conviction that celebratory cultural nationalism is not incompatible with a commitment to hybridity and plurality. He argues that theorizations of hybridity which fail to give nationalism a place (Clarke takes particular aim at Paul Gilroy's Black Atlantic) actually risk re-inscribing the pan-Africanist essentialism they set out to displace. There is no homogenous African-Canadian identity, he cautions: "Either African Canadians are an assembly of miniature nations, or we are nowhere" (Odysseys 203). National enclaves within "Black Literature," he says, must be acknowledged.

Clarke himself is Black Nova Scotian by birth, or, to use his term, Africadian (a condensation of African-Acadian), and he is at particular pains to establish the differences between Africadian literature and its African American neighbor. To this end he engages in some miniature nation-building of his own. His discussion of Black Nova Scotian literature is peppered with coinages like "the Great Void" (to describe the literary silence of Africadia between 1800 and 1970), and "the Africadian Renaissance" (which followed "the Great Void"), designed to give his subject stature. The Great Void actually turns out to be something of a critical stalking-horse. Clarke invents it only to argue that it is, in fact, filled with the "supreme Africadian epic poem" of the African Baptist Association and the African United Baptist Association (Odysseys 115). He does not explore the mainly oral religious literature of this cultural epic in any detail here. Perhaps that is because he has written on the subject elsewhere, particularly in his excellent introduction to Fire on the Water, an Anthology of Black Nova Scotian Writing. Nevertheless the omission is regrettable because it obscures the ambivalent relationship between the educated, middle-class writers of the Africadian Renaissance and the folk culture from which they often find themselves distanced. Clarke has touched on this relationship elsewhere. In Whylah Falls, Shelley (beloved of the educated returnee poet Xavier) tells Xavier:

You come down, after
five winters, X,
bristlin' with roses
and words words words,
brazen as brass.
Like a late blizzard,
You bust in our door,
Talkin' April and snow and rain,
Litterin' the table
with poems—
as if we could trust them! ("Wisdom of Shelley" 28)

What "The Wisdom of Shelley" speaks of is the distrust that develops on both sides when the educated writer attempts to engage with the oral culture. But in Odysseys Home, the odyssey home is presented as relatively unproblematic; the connection between the literary elite and the...