I & I
by George Elliott Clarke
Fredericton, NB: Goose Lane Editions, 2008.
237pp. $24, 95
The book is better read as a multifaceted collaboration between George Elliott Clarke – the much lauded forty-eight year-old Canadian poet, professor, editor, critic, and dramatist – and his earlier, less published and less famous teenage self. (Readers should note, however, that whatever teenage writing may be present in this volume is, of course, filtered through decisions and excisions made by the present-day Clarke.) Add to this collaboration the Montreal-based visual artist Lateef Martin, editor Kwame Dawes, as well as Goose Lane press-workers, and you have the volume I & I.
George Elliott Clarke ought to be a household name for any aficionado or student of Canadian literature and reader of contemporary poetry. He is the author of eight volumes of poetry, including Saltwater Spirituals and Deeper Blues (1983); Whylah Falls (1990); Execution Poems (2000), which won the Governor General’s Award for Poetry; and, more recently, Trudeau: Long March / Shining Path (2007). Clarke has edited the important two-volume collection, Fire on the Water: An Anthology of Black Nova Scotian Writing (1991, 1992) and, in addition to his many other accomplishments, is also a reviewer and contributing editor for Maple Tree Literary Supplement.
Those familiar with Clarke’s poetry will immediately recognize his setting of I & I in the first month of the ecclesiastical year, or “Nisan” – roughly equivalent to the month of April, the month during which virtually all of Clarke’s previous volumes begin. In so doing, Clarke further locates his work in the tradition of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales and T.S. Eliot’s The Wasteland, both of which also begin in April. Readers will recognize the mix of “high” and popular culture: references to Dante and Pound coexist with allusions to slasher films and Miles Davis in I & I’s highly alliterative couplets. Clarke’s reading “directions” allude to this tension between high and low, telling us that “the skeleton key (or monkey wrench) that unlocks this Star Chamber (or comic-book ballad) is, improbably, Latin: what fixes the Atlantic to the Pacific” (11). Given Clarke’s emphasis on nationalism in this volume and elsewhere in his poetry and criticism, it seems likely that the Latinate skeleton key or monkey wrench in question can only be Canada’s motto, a mari usque ad mare (“from sea to sea”), which is derived from Psalm 28: “Et dominabitur a mari usque ad mare, et a flumine usque ad terminos terrae,” or “He shall have dominion also from sea to sea, and from the river unto the ends of the earth.” Indeed, this skeleton-key-cum-monkey-wrench points toward two important elements we have come to expect in Clarke’s work: Christianity and nationalism.
I & I is the story of Betty Baker Browning and Malcolm Martin Miles, two teenage Africadians, (Clarke’s coinage for African-Nova Scotians) who fall in love and leave Halifax for Corpus Christi, Texas, so that Betty can pursue studies at a Bible college there. During her freshman year, however, Betty is raped by her lecherous professor, Lowell Beardsley. I & I then becomes a classic revenge tragedy: Malcolm, who has given up a successful boxing career back home, pursues the professor and hacks him to death in a scene that, like many others in the volume, feels like a gratuitous moment of graphic violence:
Malcolm is subsequently convicted of Lowell’s murder, but escapes and flees with Betty on a sea-to-sea renegade journey up to Vancouver and back home to Halifax. The symbolic trajectory of Betty and Malcolm’s cross-country flight is filled with references that locate Clarke within a national literary canon that includes Daphne Marlatt and Earle Birney (187), Alden Nowlan and John Thompson (206), David Chariandy (159), Anne Hébert, and Bliss Carman (211), among others.
Feminist critics of Clarke’s work will find the depiction of women in I & I troubling for reasons that include a graphic rape scene and conservative narrative possibilities for women’s lives. On the journey homeward, for instance, the idealized “saintly” Betty dreams of “Redemption by marriage, / Or salvation by church work in Sierra Leone” (190). She
This “normalcy,” the conventional female roles of saint, mother, and wife, are played off against Betty’s foil, the hyper-sexual Joyce, who is “garbed in… a busty, white cashmere sweater, / With birth control Pills banked in her purse” (61). Ultimately, how readers judge this book will depend on whether they find any irony embedded in the exaggerated, comic-book depictions of the characters and their narrative.
Karis Shearer is a SSHRC-postdoctoral fellow at McGill University, where her research examines the cultural work of Canadian poets who are also critics, editors, professors, and/or publishers.
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