Miscellaneous Reviews

George Elliott Clarke

Peters & Madden

Watching Juanita Peters’ new documentary on Africville, the both piecemeal and wanton destruction of that century-plus-old African-Nova Scotian village, through the 1960s, and the ongoing struggle to resuscitate its church, I saw my own mortality.

Herself an African-Nova Scotian, or Africadian (my term), Peters films three Africville dislocatees, all brothers: Nelson Carvery, a successful entrepreneur; Irvin Carvery, the chair of the Halifax Regional School Board; and Eddie Carvery, who has staged serial, protest re-occupations of the Africville grounds—now Seaview (Memorial) Park.

The Carvery men, alongside others, have striven to redress the City of Halifax’s expulsion of Africville residents.

Yet, Peters’ film bears a potentially rueful title: Africville: Can’t Stop Now.

Through the Carvery brothers’ memories and debates, we witness 50 years of political victimization and unfulfilled yearnings for restitution.

The elder Africville ex-residents are gone, and despite all the symposia, poems, songs, plays, scholarly tomes, and films that have recorded and expressed their sorrows, another generation will soon begin to disappear, perhaps still with no church in sight.

I am not an Africviller. But the singing of the African Baptist choirs, the look of faces now aged or of those who have passed on, made me tearful and angry: Good people, why can’t the church be rebuilt?

In 2004, the United Nations declared that Africvillers deserve recompense. That body saw that the clearance of the community was an act of racism, and I will say, of cultural genocide….

Halifax must support the reconstruction of Seaview Church (at the very least). But I remember McKerrow’s History of the Colored Baptists of Nova Scotia (1895): When Seaview Church was raised—in 1849—Father Richard Preston didn’t depend on politicians, only the grace of his Saviour….

Order Africville: Can’t Stop Now from Africville Productions (wepeople@hotmail.com).

One more note: The City of Halifax and the Province of Nova Scotia have agreed, recently, to pay $3,000,000, in restitution for the demolition of Africville and to construct fresh structures on the site. Art—plus political struggle—helped to bring about this good turn of events.

Paula C. Madden’s African Nova Scotian-Mi’kmaw Relations (Fernwood, $15.95) argues that mourning Africville’s fate forestalls remembering “Eskikewa’kik and the history and blood of Kluscap’s people,” that is to say, the Mi’kmaw, and “their prior claim to land.” Africadian memorials enact, the scholar says, “a process of erasure” of Aboriginal presence.

Madden also holds that “In struggling for place and inclusion (in Nova Scotia), the descendants of African slaves, United Empire Loyalists and Refugees of the War of 1812, asserted an indigenous belonging to and within Mi’kma’ki. This assertion claims equal place with European presence in the nation while also establishing a hierarchy of black belonging.”

Madden recognizes that “the relationship between black and Mi’kmaw people in Nova Scotia is complex.” But it is more profound than her monograph recognizes, despite her discriminating prose.

True: Nova Scotia—New Scotland—is the erasure of Mi’kma’ki, not what I call Africadia (a word formed, incidentally, from ‘Africa’ and ‘cadie’—a Mi’kmaw term that means ‘abounding in’).

Too, if African-Nova Scotia is somehow to blame for the displacement of First Nations’ people, then what of Acadie (Acadia), New Germany, Nouvelle-France (which controlled Cape Breton Island), and, yes, New Scotland itself?

Intriguingly, Madden does not dispute these territorial claims and settler populations in Mi’kma’ki. Her issue is with Africadian identity and its basis in land and historical communities and how these bonds complicate any facile claim to pan-African ‘unity.’

But, here, she fails to understand class difference. For instance, in telling of five black doctoral students who experienced racism in 1959 Nova Scotia, she argues that, despite their misfortune, they, at least, had access to education unavailable to the Mi’kmaw.

If she checks her records though, she’ll likely find that this quintet were offshore-educated, migrant students, not locals. They had access to education that was still, in 1959, unimaginable for the vast majority of only recently desegregated Africadians.

The problem with Madden’s thesis is its base in a sly Garveyism, the idea that Mi’kmak’i is a territory of racial purity. Yet, countless Africadians are Black Mi’kmaq—or Metis. I’m one: But Madden does not know our history. No one does.

Two Classics

The New York Review of Books, apart from being a bi-weekly intellectual journal devoted to scholarly, yet accessible reviews of new books by leading authors or on vital subjects, is also a publisher, taking as its mission the reissuance of “classic” books that it believes should remain in print—or in print in English translation.

Two books issued under the NYRB Classics imprint include The Diary of a Rapist ($18.95), by US writer Evan S. Connell, and Memoirs of Montparnasse ($19.95), by the late Canadian author John Glassco (1909-1981).

Connell’s novel was first published in 1966, and richly merits its status as a contemporary classic. It’s the first-person account of a California Unemployment Office petty bureaucrat, an interviewer, who feeling disrespected by his colleagues and bosses and hateful toward his wife, Bianca, slowly loses civilized inhibitions: He begins to prowl his neighbourhood in the wee hours, slipping into the homes and apartments of sleeping innocents to exercise his impulses and fantasies of violation: Not only rape, but probably ejaculation and defecation and urination (though these latter disgusts are not spelled out).

Our hero, Earl Summerfield, soon stalks a Sunday School teacher. To him, she’s no better than a prostitute, simply because she aspires to parlay her beauty into Hollywood stardom.

The story is set in the 1960s, when it was written and published, but it’s also a kind of decade-late Beat novel, with its diary entry sentences unfolding like teletype messages from the original Alfred Hitchcock Presents TV series. There’s also the anger of Allen Ginsberg’s “Howl”—the scorn or excoriation of hypocrisy.

Here’s a sample entry: “See America white with maggots, red with blood, blue with hypocrisy. Greed, suspicion, hate, scum, treachery. Police at every corner wearing a holster with a big pistol in it—proof enough! The Savior hasn’t quite gotten around to us yet. Liberty? Abracadabra! Justice? When have you met it?”

Summerfield’s rants often constitute simple, superficially lunatic raving. He justifies his assaults on supposed decency by pointing out that there’s no virtue in a world where two superpowers are openly prepared to obliterate all human life in a nuclear holocaust. For Summerfield, Truth is that human beings pretend to be angels, when we are all lusty, greedy, fearful animals. The ideal human being is, then, a misanthrope with a strong sense of (black) humour.

I won’t give away the ending, save to say that, to me, it isn’t one. But Connell’s writing, characters, and absurdist argument make for excellent reading.

Glassco’s Memoirs of Montparnasse is as scintillating and witty as Connell’s novel is crazed and bitter. But, then, Glassco’s work is only semi-fictional.

The title suggests that it is factual: Glassco, nicknamed Buffy, did go to Montparnasse, in Paris, in 1928, to escape his parents’ plans (to see him take up law or join the clergy), and to write, and to enjoy his youth (i.e. seduce, be seduced, and party heartily), and he did do some writing and he had a lot of fun (with some dilemmas and pains to boot).

However, when Memoirs was first published, in 1970, Glassco wrote that he had started it in 1928 and then finished it in 1932-33. False! Though the book had its start in the Jazz Era, it was mainly penned in the Swinging 1960s, and, while Glassco admits to changing names here and there, other parts of the narrative are also invented.

But it doesn’t matter. This book is full of gaiety, champagne, moonlit kisses, and nude posing for risqué postcards—essentially, the Paris that is Paris for young artists and those who are either models or dream of being artists. (This Paris cannot be confused with that of Mavis Gallant, a Montreal native like Glassco. In her Paris, class and cultural differences depress everyone; it’s more a Gulag than it is a “City of Light.”)

Glassco’s recollections feature real people, some famous, that he knew, sometimes intimately, including the Jamaican poet Claude McKay, US novelist Ernest Hemingway, Canuck author Morley Callaghan, African-American nightclub hostess Bricktop, US writer Kay Boyle, Irish writer James Joyce, et al. The narrative is a feast; the setting is a fiesta.

Furthermore, Glassco’s prose is beautiful and succinct: “I had already made my choice: a jolly-looking brunette with bobbed hair who had shaved in every strategic place and wore a rhinestone choker.”

He loves food and drink as much as he does some women and some men, and these descriptions are sumptuous: “I had a fine spicy rabbit stew made with green peppers, celery, and lima beans.”

Moralists beware: Glassco embraces vice with gusto, and he does make it sound—in a most un-Canadian way, delicious.

Nin

“Écriture féminine”—the honest writing, by women, of women’s experiences—might be said to have begun with the first women scribes, answering back to male religious leaders who blamed women for the fact of human mortality and for prompting male desire or “lust.” (Surely Eve’s ‘take’ on the loss of Eden differs from that of Adam.)

But one can also cite French writer Violette Leduc’s La Batarde (1964), her memoir of her development as a writer, with her frank—and lyrical—account of her childhood rearing by an unwed mother, her attraction to other women, her infidelity to her husband, her aborted pregnancy, and her divorce, all once-taboo subjects, as the first important modern example of “écriture féminine.” (One could also make a strong case for black women’s slave narratives of the 19th century.)

One other writer who pioneered—championed—this form is Anais Nin (1903-1977), a French author of Cuban and Catalan heritage, who wrote her diaries in English, and who died in the U.S., more or less as an American. Though she published novels beginning in the 1930s, it was her edited diaries, which began to be issued in the 1960s, and her erotica, published in the 1970s, that brought her fame—or notoriety.

Her unexpurgated diaries deserve their status as works of art and as confessional honesty of the highest sort, if, in fact, they are true. Certainly, they are provocative, and, in the case of Incest: From a ‘Journal of Love’ (Harcourt, $22), disturbing.

Beginning on October 23, 1932, and ending on November 10, 1934, Incest offers Nin’s uncensored, first-person account of her extra-marital liaisons with American writer Henry Miller; his wife June; psychoanalysts Rene Allendy and Otto Rank; French author Antonin Artaud; Nin’s cousin Edouardo Sanchez; and her own father, Joaquin Nin Y Castellanos, a Cuban-born Spanish composer, pianist, and musicologist.

What makes this book interesting is not Nin’s litany of amours, but her reasons—rationales—for them. She realizes herself that it’s way too easy to cite her conservative, Spanish Catholic upbringing as the catalyst for her career—in her early 30s—as a serial seductress.

Rather, Nin seems to have viewed seduction as a vengeful means of disproving the sexist argument that men possess reason and women do not. In addition, as a “Muse” figure to Miller and Artaud—and even to Rank—she acts on her belief that “genius” is not based on “rationality,” but on acceptance of sexual imperatives of desire, not of procreation.

Strikingly, a constant contrast is drawn in these diaries between the “genius” and the “demon”: the former requires sexual support; the latter must be destroyed—even if “it” is, in fact, a fetus. (The most harrowing pages in this 400-page book are those describing Nin’s partial-birth abortion of Miller’s apparent child.)

Even so male “genius” must be countermanded: It must be reminded that it is not autonomous, not independent, of the flesh.

On November 8, 1933, Rank—acting as Nin’s professional psychoanalyst—tells her to relinquish her diary. Over the next few months, Nin praises Rank’s “intelligence rendered clairvoyant by feeling”—while disregarding or “cheating” on his prescriptions.

By June 1934, Nin has flouted Rank’s analysis of her by making him her lover: “I knelt before him (in his office) and offered my mouth. He held me tightly, tightly; we couldn’t speak.”

Soon, she writes, “I have found love…, love, equal love” with Rank, while saying, as Miller’s muse, “Only a woman in love ever sees the maximum of men’s greatness.”

Once she had succeeded with Rank (and has begun to disentangle herself from Miller), she announces her desire “to enslave (Rank’s associate, Dr. Harry) Bone completely, he who trembles when I approach him.”

Then, on November 10, 1934, Nin describes her plans to dress as a “voluptuous nun”—to seduce Abbe Alterman and so “deprive her brother Joaquin of his faith and keep him from becoming a monk.”

But her necessary conquest is, for Nin, her own father. By enthralling him, she proves to herself that no adult male can truly deny his sexual lusts or desires, and all the religious and intellectual arguments that say the opposite are oppressive lies.

This “liberation” is, for her, the fulfillment of her individuality, her own identity as an artist, no longer a captive to men. Or, one could say, exploitation of sexuality equals a lust for power.

2010 & 9/11

Although 2010 is well underway, do pick up and leaf through Alhambra Poetry Calendar 2010: Anthology, edited by Shafiq Naz (www.alhambrapublishing.com, $30US). The work features 365 poems by 320 poets, living or dead, contemporary or classical, from a miscellany of English speaking nations.

Perhaps because of all the problems we face, Naz underscores humour by choosing US poet Robert Bly’s “Starting a Poem” to represent January 1: A word comes to mind, but it “Has relatives. Soon / They turn up. None of them work…. / That’s what being married / Is like! You never receive your / Wife only, but the / Madness of her family.”

Robert Burns, statuesque poet of Halifax’s Spring Garden Road, is Naz’s pick for January 10 (or 10/1/10). The Scottish bard is represented by “Song—For a’ that and a’ that”: Gie fools their silks, and knaves their wine, / A Man’s a Man for a’ that.”

February 14 features Jewish Welsh poet Dannie Abse and his “St. Valentine’s Night”: “For me the first time. / The Cardiff moon was flirting with a cloud, its light discreet, / and I with a box of Black Magic chocolates / and she with such a healthy appetite.” The date ends with “Marzipan. Cherry Liqueur. Turkish Delight.”

International Women’s Day, March 8, boasts US poet Claudia Emerson’s lyric treating a black woman elevator operator who “ferried … almost all / women, all white” to various department store floors: “Only children saw her until / most learned not to, looking up instead to the dial // above the door, its face an eclipsed compass, / the ornate, brass needle of her voice // sweeping east to west to east / by the northern route—as though the south were never there.”

The second Canadian poet to appear (by chronological order) is Christian Bok, on April 17, whose offering declares, “Language / is a virus / from outer space” and ends, “Language / for us promises / a curative.”

June 22 gives us Vancouver’s George Bowering, whose verse points out, “Madmen / Praying people / Poets // speak when they / seem to be alone.” Thanks to their speaking to “their own consciousness,” which we overhear, “our aloneness // becomes liveable.”

As one must expect, Willy Shakespeare, Jack Milton, Billy Blake, “Gorgeous Georgie” Gordon (Lord Byron) are all here, along with Kit Marlowe, Alfie (Lord Tennyson), and even Queen Liz I. But so are a host of very fine poets, writing among us right now, who are a pleasure to discover.

See, for instance, US poet Kathleen Lynch’s “Why Do You Think About Death So Much,” chosen for July 31: “When anything unusual / pings or gurgles or goes numb in my body, I think about death. And when I am climbing / to the edge of the sexual cliff during love, I also / think about it… / and especially when I am alone, with / nobody to talk to. That vast / palpable nobody.”

All praise to the Muse, “shameless as an animal,” that siren of “intoxicating ardor” (April 8). So writes Nattt Moziah Shaka.

I turn now from 2010 to 2001 and that pernicious date, “9/11,” and a 2008 recitation of its consequences: After 9/11: America’s War on Terror (2001-), “a work of graphic journalism,” by Sid Jacobson and Ernie Colon (Hill and Wang, $21).

One peril in shifting from a society based on print to being one based on images is that knowledge of history disappears as news clip sues sound byte. True: In 2003, governments lied about Iraq possessing “weapons of mass destruction,” when all who remembered the end of the Persian Gulf War, in April 1991, knew that Saddam Hussein’s army had been liquidated, leaving him with a glorified, security-guard force.

The brilliance of Jacobson and Colon is that they use comic-book art, plus utterly neutral, documented facts, to remind readers of the exaggerations and plain lies used, first, to sell the Iraq invasion and then the occupation and then the murderous civil war plus Al Qaeda terrorism (and US Army torture) that the occupation provoked. The first duty of citizens is to never accept, at face value, government rationales for acts of war, violations of constitutional rights, and deregulation of industries (such as banking).

Now, if only someone would compose a graphic book reminding Canadians of RCMP interference in the 2005-06 Federal election campaign, the questionable suspensions of Parliament in December 2008 and January 2010, and also the Harper regime’s apparent interference in the US Democratic Party primaries in 2008…. In essence, Canadians need to be reminded that, in a parliamentary democracy, the prime minister is not—I repeat, is not—important, and can easily be dismissed and replaced by any other citizen of the country.

Folks, we gotta read, remember, and act. We need to win gold medals in active, thinking citizenship, not just in hockey.

Zieroth & Lever

David Zieroth was born in Neepawa, Manitoba, but taught at Douglas College in New Westminster, BC, for 25 years before retiring, and, it seems, returning full-force to poetry. He won British Columbia’s Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize in 1999.

If Zieroth does not register as a dominant voice in English-Canadian poetry, it’s because his verse is quiet, not quirky. It has the excellence of Bruce Meyer’s similar voice: disciplined, like a candle flame, not unruly like fireworks.

Zieroth’s eighth verse collection, The Fly in Autumn (Harbour, $18.95), also features a stern patience, that of resignation. It is a sincerely autumnal work: the poet is shedding his library, digesting news of acquaintances ill or dying or dead, and feeling decay creeping on and death approaching.

No wonder the tone is classical: This ain’t kid’s stuff.

His publicity says, Zieroth “risks the reader’s unease by going beyond the usual contemporary mode into language that is both penetrating and tender.” Yes, his lines are incisive and wry (or fey), but not perilous. Except for the implicit ‘threat’ that, say, a morbid drunk cries out at an orgy, reminding the mortified participants, “tomorrow we die.”

Zieroth isn’t bleak, but true: To sleep, in one’s 60s (as he is), is to “lie down into the hollering / blood and fluids that spill / scalding, and crying aloud / some word or name I lose / as close to me as even I can get.”

To forget a word or a name is to be reminded of how each one was once unknown to us. Thus, the existence of “purple fragrance” does not require the word “lilac”: The reality both precedes and outlasts our knowledge of the fragile, arbitrary word.

Zieroth’s poems are elegies, full of surprising grace, and the act of pondering. But they are not ponderous; they are as light and as tender as regret or ruefulness.

A few are fun. “Fuss Poem” is about another four-letter-word activity, one that gains in meaning as one matures toward seniority: “arms, throats, lips along the knees, / while hard and soft the spirit runs / between our tips and out beyond / our little bed, until we correspond // with sweetness all about us.”

“Heroic Measures” tells us “nothing beats romance / at halting death.” “The Lover Says ‘Whatever’” recognizes, “when you’ve got that look, clothes / tossed aside until each of us knows / words … might as well be flung and gone, / wherever, say Azerbaijan.”

Splendid, too, is Zieroth’s use of rhyme: “Practise speaking what needs to be said. / Let the old words go, let them fall away / like last years leaves, their last day / forgotten: let them be dead.”

Restraint, economy, respect for mortality: That’s the way to address eternity.

Another B.C. poet, Bernice Lever, the first honorary life member of the Canadian Poetry Association, now in her 70s, looks back on life, with much wry wisdom, in her Generation (Black Moss, $10). The mid-life curse of acid reflux disease is likened to shame: “Old simmering bile backs / up into scolding stomach, / searing the windpipe / until the tongue sprays acid // as if words aimed like branding irons / could burn blame on others.”

“Random” teaches, “Random acts are more common than deliberate ones. / Mostly life is all acting, puzzling over whether you / have the right script or not.”

Another aphorism: “Teenage boy’s wet dreams / can’t compete with the oceans / of old women’s fantasies.”

Such poems, even when witty, tend to be lectures or sermons. A poem on the heart’s mortality boasts, in contrast, delicious imagery: “who will want to eat / you … oh, my heart, / after you quit pumping? // who will be willing / to boil all your tough / muscle to mush / … to bake you to a dark maroon / all tasty and nourishing?”

“Transplant” features an about-to-be-transplanted heart complaining, “What is this transplant / misnomer, anyway? / You’re not planting anything / green and growing in my space // You’re just transferring your guilt / trying to remove evidence / from your mismanaged body….”

Lever drafts competent verse. Check out her work.

Now, let us remember Canadian poet P.K. Page (1916-2010): She is gone too soon, but her work goes on.

And, let us remember the amazing African-Canadian intellectual David Sealy, who died prematurely on December 26, 2009. His work was meaning breathed into words and laughter.

Prince & Robinson

Fiction author, essayist, and sociology prof Althea Prince is a vital, Af-Can voice. Antiguan by birth, Prince has not only made a home in Canada, she has sought to make Canada a welcoming locale for other black people—by helping us appreciate the dilemmas and triumphs of our being here.

In her fiction, Prince outlines problems of heterosexual romance, especially (male) infidelity, while also insisting that none forget the cultural contexts—first African, then colonial/slavery/Christian—in which black people have sought to love and be loved. See her Ladies of the Night and Other Stories (1993).

Her new essay set, The Politics of Black Women’s Hair (Insomniac Press, $19.95), is classic Prince: ‘Roots’-savvy, provocative, and written to be read by anyone who can read. It’s also feelingly personal.

Prince reminds us how white illustrators and writers have demonized Negro hair: Harriet Beecher Stowe’s character, Topsy, has “woolly” hair; Florence Kate Upton’s Golliwog doll has “shoe-polish-black skin; large red lips; and thick, unkempt, woolly hair”; Little Black Sambo symbolizes the grotesque and comic.

Although “Black girls come out of the womb with beautiful hair,” influential, social media, from music videos to magazines, reject that truth. No wonder, then, that multitudes of black females “iron,” or chemically “relax” their natural hair, to achieve a “straighter” and, frankly, “whiter” look.

This denial of natural hair is often won at the psychological cost of damaged self-esteem and at the physical cost of pain. Prince recalls that, as a girl, her “thick hair” was braided so tightly into “Congo, as cornrows were called in Antigua,” that “Smiling brought tears; laughing brought screams.”

Her wonder at the “torture” inflicted to “condition” black hair is what made Prince want to write this book—and to list the experiences of other black women and their attitudes toward their locks. She’s right—and right on time—as usual.

So, Dr. Janis Prince Inniss writes, “Who I am is in my hair,” and teaches that hairstyle shifts in accord with identity. She wed with her hair “braided—parted to one side and flowing with cornrows. I was beautiful!” In university, she cut her hair: “I was a studying machine. I wanted utilitarian hair.” Now, she enjoys “having long hair again,” thanks to a “flat iron.”

Several young, black Toronto women discuss image and dating issues, related to black men’s perceived preference for “straight” hair and the association of the Afro with radical politics or short hair with Lesbianism. Their comments prove that hair politics are—yes—hairy.

By the end of her essays, Prince tells us that she “maintained my locks,” while Inniss chose “re-straightening her hair.” The point is, “to make Black women’s hair a glorious celebration at the top of the head.”

Prince is Oprah with a Ph.D. No, she’s Af-Am cultural theorist bell hooks brought even further down-to-earth and out the Ivory Tower.

A piano teacher and writer, Stacey Marie Robinson crafts “urban tales” featuring black singles and couples in Toronto. Born in the T-Dot, Robinson scribes stories that “represent universal tales of relationships and the individual journey towards self-understanding.” Like Prince, she hopes her books “will be used as a means of facilitating discussion and critical thinking amongst Canadian youth about the choices they make everyday.”

Given that mission statement, ya gotta expect some didactic content in Video Light: An Urban Toronto Tale (KYA Publishing), and there is. Yet, the sermonizing—so to speak—is conducted around risqué nightclubs, one-night hook-ups, spliff puffing, “gang-banging” thugs, catfights, and nasty gossip: It’s Jane Austen meets Tupac.

Robinson writes well and the tale is absorbing: Delia Chinn—“a natural princess of the dancehall”—falls for Ryan Wright, a brother with a condo, a car, and a middle-class occupation (history teacher) and Christian childhood.

They’re opposites: She’s just broken up with a gangsta who’d been paying for her fine clothes and “crib”; he’s a loving, learned man who’s been in love (and lust) with Delia since a school track meet years ago.

Dreams come true: They marry. But Delia’s “ghetto” attitudes require—as Prime Minister Stephen Harper would say—“recalibration,” for the two lovers to succeed as man and wife.

A highly recommended work—especially for young adults. But there’s good reading here for anyone interested in the politics—and economics—of relationships.

Renegade

Richard Wolffe’s Renegade: The Making of a President (Crown $32) was published near the first-year anniversary of US President Barack Obama’s historic 2008 election that made him the first African American to occupy the White House and the most powerful—black— person on the planet.

The book’s subtitle reminds political junkies and journalists of the truly great, magisterial, presidential election tomes turned in by Theodore H. White, especially his The Making of the President: 1960, which, published in 1961, set the gold standard for political reportage, for chronicling history-in-the-making, and for analysis that is both gritty and cerebral.

Drama saturates White’s classic book: From the decision of John F. Kennedy to contest each of the half-dozen Democratic Party primaries then available to him—and his organization and outreach and success in each—to the arresting image of the nominee suddenly being able to contact any party official in the land, operating the levers of power, from a beach house in Massachusetts.

White is also able to render us the smell of spring in the South or the look of coal miners in West Virginia, or to give arresting bios and descriptions of the other contenders or would-be nominees in the first half of 1960. His journalism borders on poetry.

Wolffe has a hard act to follow in Renegade. Frankly, it is impossible for him to succeed in comparison with White.

But the 1960 US election moved at a slower pace than did that of 2008, and there was a lot more competition for news sources in the later election than there was in the earlier. White had luxuries of time and focus—and a dauntingly expansive literary background. Wolffe had less time, more distraction, and, apparently, less knowledge of humanist literature (or, at least, he puts much less of such to work).

Wolffe does use well his “exclusive interviews” with Obama. But it can’t be said that he is anymore revealing than Obama himself has been, especially in his poignant memoir, Dreams from My Father.

But there are nice, descriptive moments in this journalistic history, as well as down-to-earth insights. Those who think Obama still too ‘untested,’ should remember strategist David Axelrod’s remark, “This election is ridiculously long and there are many stupid things about it. But you really have to earn the presidency. And he’s been tested. You can’t hide it or fake it.”

Dubbed “Renegade” by the Secret Service, Obama succeeded in creating “from scratch the most formidable election machine in history,” enduring “twenty-one months of public examination and private stress.” And he beat the Clintons: No one else could have done that, folks.

At the centre of the book is the candidate himself: “cautious and pragmatic,” “cocky, grumpy, impatient, and withdrawn,” “inscrutable” and charismatic: “The mystery of Obama may seem simplistic but is nonetheless hard to unwrap.”

One key to the mystery is Obama’s memoir, where one word recurs with steady intensity: “power.” If Dreams from My Father has any underlying thesis it is that black folks’ dilemmas can be managed, if not resolved, if we seek to exercise citizen power: to bring our political talents into the main arenas, not marginalized or mystical ones.

Wolffe arrives at a similar analysis, noting that Obama borrows from Malcolm X (assassinated 45 years ago on February 21, 1965), the gifts of “reinvention, discipline, and willpower” as well as, as Obama has written, “the blunt poetry of his words.” (There’s even a physical resemblance to X.)

Certainly “discipline” was a hallmark of Obama’s campaign, the guerilla commitment necessary to survive what Axelrod called “a ghoulish, nasty gauntlet,” and to become, as Wolffe writes, the first “insurgent candidate” since Jimmy Carter in 1976 to win “a major party’s nomination.” That’s a coup.

Obama borrowed techniques of citizen—really, voter—organizing from Saul Alinsky, and proved, all over again, that an engaged citizen is an impassioned voter. In addition, his outreach and provocation were amplified by his oratory, yet another essential and long-demoted political resource.

(Compare Canadian politics today: None of the major parties, excluding the Bloc Québecois, cares to engage and organize the electorate: Indeed, I think the end of door-to-door enumeration began a decline in Canadian political participation.)

So Obama’s campaign became “a giant self-help group where the therapy was politics.” There are worse ways to be elected.

Conn & Hibbs

March 8 was International Women’s Day. In celebration, one read Jan Conn and Angela Hibbs.

Conn has the eclectic bio essential for a uniquely clairvoyant poet. Born in the raw-edged, mining town of Asbestos, Quebec, she now lives in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, where she is a professor of biomedical sciences, and researches mosquitoes.

Conn’s work has taken her throughout South America. Thus, her previous six books have drawn upon her varied, exotic experiences and innately exciting locales, but her seventh, Botero’s Beautiful Horses (Brick, $19), may be her best.

The temptation, though, in writing the ‘travel’ poem, the poem about beautifully different places, faces, flora, and fauna, is to just present the fascinating décor and omit the revealing, personal analysis. The result is a pretty picture, not the poet’s pierced heart.

That’s what happens, here and there, in Conn: “Women in white lace / in fields of marigolds and poppies. // A headless god behind glass. // The Angel of the Revolution / painted into a corner. // At Xochicalco a vermillion flycatcher flares among the trees, // the serpents exhale a last smoky breath, / curl at the foot of the temple.”

The images are an iridescent slideshow. Better are the moments where the poet confesses her need to merge with what she observes, to become local in doing, thinking, and feeling: “Graffiti on the fired bricks, hidden / beneath once-white stucco…. // And us on all fours, /licking each other tenderly / like jet black jaguars.”

Yes, when Conn moves inward, as in her arresting, complex elegy for (perhaps) her mother, she shows us pain, not a painting: “Do serve me corn flan in an egg cup. / Don’t get drunk on the cheek of a fish. / Say my mother never really left me. / Don’t say her soul spread everywhere like jam. // If I choose to inhabit the Tahitian batik / don’t tell me what the daughter of a suicide can’t do….”

Even so, “Lip-Reading Jean Cocteau,” is a fine blend of the poignant and the picturesque: “Let me crawl out the window and into the graveyard. // … My father has a green head, green eyes; my mother // is scarlet. Yes, I’ll sup on goat flambé and live white mice. // … When we reach Madrid, I will eliminate Hitler….”

Reading Conn, one learns much about science, nature, art, history, and the dizzying ways they intersect. But magic is more wondrous than study: “My gondola tilts. When I regain my footing // I’m inside a glass globe filled with white flakes. // The galaxy is shaking.”

Angela Hibbs is a Newfoundland native who now lives equally in Montreal (comme-ci) and Toronto (comme-ça). Wanton (Insomniac, $11.95) is her second verse collection.

Her exotica is the everyday: lust hidden in the kitchen, violence secreted in the livingroom. It’s a David Lynch vision.

Hibbs’ main poetic exercise is the verse-novella, Wanton, that occupies roughly 60% of the book. Rural angst and country mischief get turned into sometimes raunchy, sometimes rowdy verse: “Three-bucks Nancy’d … proven her work for Sayers, / recalling the exact number of pleats in his khakis, // the theatrical parting of his zipper / revealing … the fabric rustle like an audience’s hush….”

The narrative is oddball, the poetry compacted—and difficult to ‘unpack’, even with its vernacular freshness: “Stealing hearts marked time well. In June, the man from the big black ship, / the pink boxer briefs under rigid mothball trousers. // A floral smell. Chilled snot on his moustache. / The spalling eyes of one that rubbed her / and drained the sleepy purple / moons from her rhinestone Mary pill box into his breast pocket.”

Such lines are deliberately reminiscent of the alliteration (and sex-obsession) of Dylan Thomas’s Under Milk-Wood, which, for all its charm, is only readable in small doses, and comprehensible (at any one time) in even fewer. (I suspect that Under Milk-Wood is more admired than it is actually read.)

But clarity plus lyricism are necessities for good verse: “No sailor cared for her bawling, the letter wet with tears / wept while they fastened their pants. // Addressed to Fern Hill C/O THE / WHOREIBLE PIANO SHOW, Lyons, France. // Loose leaf, folded like a shooting star: / pain’s joyless distraction.”

Poet, be thou always wanton with light, rebellious with light, always. Yes.

Buzzati & Anderson

The graphic novel…. Excuse me, I mean a narrative told in comic-strip or comic-book format—illustrations that are themselves stories, plus plot-and-character-developing words that spell out what the pictures alone cannot—is a form of literature that is rightly popular and (now) university-respectable.

Art Spiegelman’s Maus (1986), a Pulitzer-prize winning memoir of the author’s parents’ survival of Nazi Europe, is often considered the first serious graphic narrative. But there was an earlier work: Dino Buzzati’s Poem Strip (NYRB, $18.95).

Published first in Italian in 1968, Poem Strip: Including an Explanation of the Afterlife, has been translated into English and reprinted in 2009. Thanks to Marina Harss’s translation, the late-1960s, drug-hallucinatory, rock-music background of the book is given believable and absorbing expression.

Buzzati’s text is a bizarre concoction. Essentially a rewrite of the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice, we see Orfi—a rock star—descend into the subterranean hell of Milan, in search of Eura, his beloved. They meet, but, just as the myth insists, they also part.

Before his rendezvous with Eura, Orfi encounters a bevy of nude, zaftig temptresses—who occasion some of Buzzati’s most compelling (read: sexiest) art—and he is also cajoled into giving a one-man-show rock concert for the occupants of this Milanese hell, who are fine, really, except for the boredom that defines eternity.

Poem Strip begins with a tour of a mysterious street, Via Saterna, where, at the discotheque, Polypus, the mini-skirted “kids go wild” every night, dancing to Orfi’s latest hit, “Witches in the City.” The song, which names a series of women, denizens of “smoky courtyards,” “blackened scaffolding,” “the murky bowels of tenements and dives” (19), etc., again permits Buzzati’s art to re-imagine pin-ups, movie posters, and even the surrealism of Salvador Dali.

After singing of these properly bewitching sirens, Orfi goes in search of Eura. Though living, he’s permitted to enter Hades, and, as hell goes, it’s not bad, just a bit decrepit: “The night. The wind. Lamps swinging, solitude, the Kirghiz steppes, the dance floor, an old ballroom, crumbling….” Too, Orfi’s guide is a luscious, black-stockinged, high-heeled, otherwise naked belle, and even Death is imagined as “The Lady who kills pleasure, The Lady who breaks up happy gatherings.”

Buzzati’s décor in Poem Strip is supreme 1960s art: zesty, pop-artistic, intelligent, engaged. It’s like The Beatles’ “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds”: weird, comic, fun. But Buzzati refers directly to European artists, Italian filmmakers, and one American girly-mag publisher. Yes, it’s the unkillable Sixties. Superb.

(A lot of the 1960s was stupid. But women have never looked more vivacious, seemed more carefree, had more fun, than then, or so this 1960-issued writer desires to imagine….)

Ho Che Anderson’s King: A Comic Biography, The Special Edition (Fantagraphics, $35 US), collects between hard covers the author-illustrator’s formerly, separately issued King I, II, & III, which appeared between 1993 and 2002. This 2010 edition features new material, including “an essay by the author on the making of the book, preliminary sketches, … deleted scenes,” and a new, comic-strip treatment of contemporary U.S. race relations.

Anderson is African-Canadian, raised in Toronto, and a child of (once again) the radical 1960s: He’s named for both Vietnamese Communist leader Ho Chi Minh and Cuban revolutionary Che Guevara.

At first, Anderson’s leftist politics prevented him from seeing Martin Luther King, Jr., Nobel Peace Prize Laureate and leader of the U.S. Civil Rights Movement, as a fittingly radical subject. But, as he learned more about King’s life and struggles, Anderson discovered that King (assassinated on April 4, 1968) was that most rare being—a successful revolutionary.

Now, with Barack Obama in the White House, Anderson believes the time is right for fresh consideration of King’s advocacy of equality as “one of the greatest … achievements toward social justice in the 20th century.” I agree. But I think Obama takes from King only the necessity of building a multi-racial, mass movement. I think he takes from Malcolm X the ability to articulate an accessible, political analysis.

In any event, vitally, Anderson draws an earthy King, one who likes soul food and soul sisters, but who is also capable of inspiring and challenging oratory, theological radicalism, and courageous leadership, even when faced with fists, firebombs, and F.B.I. persecution.

Anderson himself reminds me of US poet Walt Whitman: He keeps publishing the same book, in different, revised editions. But—holy smokes—what a book!