Towards a De-Racialized African-Canadian Literature Desi Valentine

ariel: a review of international english literature Vol. 45 No. 4 Pages 111–132 Copyright © 2014 The Johns Hopkins University Press and the University of Calgary Perspectives Contesting Clarke: Towards A De-Racialized African-Canadian Literature Desi Valentine Abstract: This article draws on personal narrative, literary criticism, and multicultural Canadian literature to interrogate George Elliott Clarke’s conceptualizations of a Black Canadian literature and a racialized African-Canadian literary canon in his 2002 essay collection Odysseys Home: Mapping African-Canadian Literatures. Clarke’s work is juxtaposed with my own experience as a bi-racial, multi-ethnic, Black, Negro, mulatto, half-caste, African-Canadian woman, and with those of non-Black scholars, to expose the shifting contours of ethnicity and the blurred and blurring boundaries of Canadian blackness in multi-, mixed-, and indeterminately racial Canada. Through these critical compari- sons, I suggest that a racialized African-Canadian literary canon excludes the multiple Canadian cultures in which our literatures are formed, and supports racial constructs that no longer fit the shapes of our multi-ethnic, diasporic, postcolonial skins. I con- clude that upon the fertile ground tended by Clarke’s Black literary activism, a de-racialized African-Canadian literature may grow. Keywords: African-Canadian literature, autoethnography, Cana- dian blackness, ethnic studies, postcolonial studies, race theory In Canada, some are born black, some acquire blackness, and others have blackness thrust upon them. George Elliott Clarke, Odysseys Home (16) When I was a child living in northeast Edmonton, the term used for people like me was “Negro.” This was in the early 1980s, when everyone 111 Desi Valentine had Michael Jackson’s Thriller album and Pierre Elliott Trudeau’s procla- mations about Canadian multiculturalism were being enacted through Canada’s new Charter of Rights and Freedoms and—most relevant to my seven-year-old self—through Alberta’s public education curricula. I was one of two Negroes in my elementary school, the other a boy named Harley who had darker skin and coarser hair. He had a dad who came out for Parent Day and who gave helicopter rides on his sky-high shoulders while we dug our hands in his thick afro and screamed pure joy. Harley was one grade up from me, but our parents’ and teachers’ expectations that we would play together was persistent and unavoid- able. I remember his theatrical sighs when I approached him on the playground, and my own cramping stomach. I remember hot shame in my face and the tickle of grass on my thighs when he pantsed me on the monkey bars and I ran past the mower line into the Off Limits part of our weedy school field. There were thistles as high as my hips, with dusty purple flowers and winter-bleached garbage hemming the fence. When my cousin Jeff came to get me, his knuckles were split because he had jumped up two times to smash Harley’s nose. The three of us had detention for a week. Our mothers received pamphlets about encourag- ing racial tolerance in young children. I hated Harley. My grade two teacher was convinced that the colour of my skin and the bend of my hair held cultural portent, and she was both obligated and anxious to celebrate that. I embodied difference in ways extending beyond my thick lips and wide nose, or the braids woven tight to my scalp. The stories of the Middle Passage, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, Jr., Rosa Parks’ bus ride and Billie Holiday’s “Strange Fruit,” dashi- kis and caftans, bone-piercings and cowrie shells, tribal drums, National Geographic photo spreads, and advertisements flaunting starved children with flies near their eyes whose fate could be eased for mere pennies a day and whose plight served as leverage against Brussels sprouts resist- ance and the last limp forkful of spinach: these were all symbols I bore on my skin, at that age unwittingly. They twisted in my hair, swelled in my lips, and spread their creamed coffee stain from the seams of my soles and my pink-white palms. Africa walked with me, my teacher was certain, in step with the captivating drama of its terrible colonial history 112 Contesting Clarke now edited for prime-time TV. Imagine her surprise when I showed up for Cultural Heritage Day with a Black Forest cake and an index card bearing my auntie’s handwritten spaetzle recipe. My father had taken Africa with him when he returned to Nigeria in 1979. I grew up Negro, mulatto, half-caste, half-bred, bi-racial, mixed, racialized, ethnic, and Black, alone in a vast and indisputably white European Canadian family, settled in almost completely white urban neighbourhoods, small towns, and smaller villages. What of me is African derives from partial genetics and externally imposed supposi- tions about brown skin and kinked hair and the shifting cultural margin into which they entrap me. I am Canadian in my passport, birthplace, and education. I was Canadian five summers ago when skinheads out- side an Edmonton Public Library threw handfuls of dime-sized swas- tikas at my chest, spit “nigger” at my face, and laughed at my fear. I was Canadian when I picked each crippled plastic cross up off of the sidewalk, on hands and knees, so no other woman’s child would have to walk in such filth. I was Canadian when I stood in a grocery near Discovery Bay, Jamaica, and felt the blessed comfort of finally blending in. I am a Canadian wearing the symbols of Africa’s pre-emancipation and postcolonial diasporas. It is a costume that does not fade, but dark- ens in the sun. I tell you this to make clear that, as for other Canadian children of temporary work permits, student visas, and trans-racial adoption so easily excluded from the academic gaze, blackness may not have been thrust upon me, but it certainly was not learned at home. What I am was constructed by others, by Black and non-Black Canadians’ ways of seeing me, by the same discourses of exclusion, marginalization, pov- erty, and victimization that Africadian literary scholar and writer George Elliott Clarke would have black Canadian writers overcome, and the competing discourses of race-based literary criticism, celebration, sol- idarity, and nationalism he would have us embrace (Clarke, Odysseys 11–17). Who I am is all of these things and none of them. Under this skin built of discourses of race-ness, I am in exile but also at home. In this essay I explore the panels of my racialized, ethnicized garb through Clarke’s works collected in Odysseys Home: Mapping African- 113 Desi Valentine Canadian Literature (2002). I tease out the embroidered edge of Clarke’s African-Canadian writer and compare its image with those of other mi- nority writers in Canada as well as my own. In particular, this essay seeks to trouble the perceptual boundaries through which performances of Canadian blackness are defined and constrained and consider the role of literary criticism in the social construction of those boundaries. We have, as Clarke and others argue, too few black voices in Canadian literature and Canadian literary criticism. These few are so easily taken to speak for many, or for all. Thus in order to problematize any assumption of a race-based artistic, cultural, or social homogeneity, it is productive to interrogate the racialized foundation on which Black Canadian literatures are defined. Racialization is, inherently, a mechanism of homogenization. It infers a fundamental sameness on those individuals and texts to which a given raceness—Blackness, Aboriginal-ness, Whiteness, Otherness—is as- cribed. A process of de-racialization is consequently one that encour- ages heterogeneity, difference within difference, and a movement toward what Michael Omi and Howard Winant eloquently describe as yet another view of race, in which the concept operates nei- ther as a signifier of comprehensive identity, nor a fundamental difference, both of which are patently absurd, but rather as a marker of the infinity of variations we humans hold as a common heritage and hope for the future. (370) This is race as a description, not an ascription, where the term “race” is no longer “good to think with” (Hall 1), but one for which we do not yet have a better word. I believe such a circumstance can be achieved—even in systemically racist, officially multicultural, (post)colonial Canada. But the effort requires a multiplicity of voices from diverse intersections of race, ethnicity, gender, and status. Clarke’s literary pedagogy of Canadian blackness represents one voice that continues to work at elevating many black voices within the confines of racialization and the strictures of literary production. My in- tention is not to challenge Clarke’s immeasurable value to Canadian literature, African-Canadian literature, and postcolonial criticism but 114 Contesting Clarke to interrogate the utility of those confines and strictures such that a de-racialized, heterogeneous space for the critique of Black Canadian cultural production may be cleared. To this process, I offer my African- Canadian, bi-racial, multi-ethnic, feminine, and fledgling academic voice in the intentional and self-conscious awareness that my narrative is only one of an unheard many. I entreat others to contribute their own voices toward a de-essentialized, de-racialized re-imagining of Clarke’s foundational work and a concurrent and ongoing (re)construction of what it means to be black in Canada. I. Canada in Black and White In the opening chapter of Why We Write: Conversations with African Canadian Poets and Novelists, H. Nigel Thomas outlines the overt and systemic racism facing black authors in Canada and defines the African Canadian literary aesthetic as follows: “No one with visibly African characteristics escapes the sullying such [racist] race theories deliberately or inadvertently produce.

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