'Membering Austin Clarke

A Writer, A Life

Paul Barrett

• Publisher: Wilfrid Laurier University Press
• Year: 2020
• eBook ISBN: 9781771124799
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Latin American & Caribbean Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

'Membering Austin Clarke reflects on the life and writing of Austin Clarke, whose depictions of Black life in Canada enlarged our understanding of what Canadian literature looks like.

Despite being one of Canada's most widely published, and most richly awarded writers, Austin Clarke (1934–2016) is not a household name. This collection addresses Clarke's marginalization in Canadian literature by demonstrating that his writing on Black diasporic life and the immigrant experience is a foundational, if untold, part of the story of CanLit.

Novelist, short-story writer, poet, and essayist, Clarke was born in Barbados, moved to Canada in 1955 and went on to establish Black Studies programs at a number of universities in America. He returned to Canada and became one of Canadian literature's most prolific authors and a public voice for Black people in Canada. Among his best-known works are the Giller Award–winning The Polished Hoe (2002) and his memoir 'Membering (2015).

This collection of essays from colleagues, scholars, friends, and fellow writers addresses Clarke's work in all its richness and complexity in order to understand how Clarke's legacy continues to transform Canadian writing. It includes previously unpublished poems and short stories from Clarke's archives as well as personal reflections from friends, histories of the publication of his works, essays, interviews, and short stories and poems inspired by Clarke.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• 1 The Trouble of Intimacy
• 2 On Austin Clarke’s Style
• 3 Dear Austin: Why Teaching Your Work Is Difficult
• 4 “There Were No Elders. Only Old Men”: Aging and Misogyny in Austin Clarke’s Later Fiction
• 5 That Man, That Man—Stories and Confabulations
• 6 Burrowing Into the Craft: Editing Austin Clarke
• 7 Editorial Notes for “When He Was Free and Young and He Used to Wear Silks”
• 8 Sometimes, A Motherless Child: A Double Take
• 9 “These Virtues o’ the Cullinerry Harts”: Talking Food and Politics in the Letters of Austin Clarke, Sam Selvon, and Andrew Salkey
• 10 Let Me Stand Up
• 11 Austin A.C. Clarke Is the Most
• 12 The Rogue in Me
• 13 Spatiality in the Poetry of Austin A.C. Clarke
• 14 The Lessons of Austin Clarke
• 15 “The Wordshop of the Kitchen”: Impressions of Austin Clarke and Paule Marshall
• 16 Of Kin and Kind
• 17 The Robber
• 18 Austin Clarke: Defying the Silence, a Life in Letters
• 19 Austin Clarke Love Poem
• 20 Do Not Let Them Choose the Fragrance
• 21 There Will Never Be Another Austin Clarke
• 22 Still the British Empire
• 23 I Can Say I Read It
• 24 Austin Clarke’s Books
• 25 Hyphen (for Austin “Tom” Clarke, 1934–2016)
• 26 “Myth Grounded in Truth”: Sound, Light, and the Vertical Imagination in Austin Clarke’s ’Membering
• 27 À St. Matthias
• 28 Clarke on Clarke
• 29 All He Wanted to Do Was Type
• 30 Recognition
• Works Cited
• Index