WITHBSSIHG THE flVISfBILITY: &?RICADIAN MUSES OF GEORGE E~,~,IoTTCUlRKE

Colleen E. Pielechaty

Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts

Dalhousie University Halifax, Nova Scotia September, 1997

0 Copyright by Colleen E. Pielechaty, 1997 Acquisitions and Acquisitions et Bibliographie Services se wïces bibliographiques 395 Welfington Street 395. nie Wellington ûüawa ON K1A ON4 Ottawa ON K1A ON4 Canada Canada

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Table of Contents v

Abstract vi

Abbreviations and Symbols Used vii

Acknowledgements viii

Introduction 1

Chapter 1: Toward a Feminist Aesthetic(s) of 18 Beauty: Race, Gender, Ethics and the Early Muses of Clarke

Chapter 2: De/Reconstructing a Gendered Hierarchy of Beauty in the "New Edenw of Whyl ah Fa11 s

Chapter 3: 'Shouting in Tonguesw and Cutting Gazes: 89 The Staging of Feeminisms in Beatrice Chancy

Conclus ion

Notes

Bibliography Witnessinq the Invisibility: the Africadian Muses of George El1 iott Clarke

Merging the words Africa and Acadia, George Elliott Clarke has coined the term Afzicadia "to denote the Black populations of the Maritimes and especially of Nova Scotiam (Fire on the Water, Volume One 9 ) - populations which have flourished in Canada for more than two centuries. As a native poet and playwright of Black Nova Scotia, and as an editor of African-Canadian anthologies of poetry and fiction, Clarke seeks to give voice to the beauty of Africadia that has for too long been ignored by the '4monomanic musicw of Canada's %ational,/natural culturew (Lush Dreams, Blue Exile 77). This thesis investigates the relative status and authority of female muses in the liberating philosophy of beauty Clarke offers in Saltwater Spirituals and Deeper Blues (1983), Whylah Falls (1990), Lush Dreams, Blue Exile (1994) and Beatrice Chancy (1998). 1 argue that Clarke's poetics demonstrate the limitations of language and direct our attention to the impossibility of ever ethically representing the female sphere in its entirety. Through this demonstration, the poet/playwright considers the complexity of languaging a salvific philosophy of feminine beauty and, ironically, moves toward more ethical ways of representing feminist aesthetics . Tracing Clarke's visioning and revisioning of the female muse from his first book of poetry to he more recent verse play, 1 demonstrate how Clarke's poetics tell us something about how language may be used to enslave others as well as how it may be ethically recuperated to break the tyranny of such chains, to speak for those who have been disenfranchised. ABBREVIATI ONS AbfD SPMBOLS USED

Where deemed appropriate, 1 have abbreviated certain texts as follows :

Saltwater Spirituaïs and Deeper Blues - SSDB Whylah Falls - WF Lush Dreams, Blue Exile - LDBE Beatrice Chancy - BC

vii 1 am indebted to my colleagues of Tanadian Literature: Re/Writing History," and especially to the instructor, ~cythesis - supervisor, Dr. A. ~aineight. The many provocative discussions we have held about the ethics of aesthetics and the aesthetics of ethics have challenged me to investigate the complexity of languaging female beauty . 1 benef ited greatly from many verbal and nitten exchanges with Kim Solga, Brian Johnson and Melanie Morasutti, who al1 read parts of this work, and who sustained me through the multiple stages of writing this thesis. 1 also acknowledge my second reader, Dr. P. Monk, and my third reader, Dr. J. Baxter, for their insightful evaluations of my manuscript. 1 owe a considerable debt to Dr. Marilyn Rose and Dr. Elizabeth Sauer for their encouragement and for their support of my academic endeavours. Special thanks go to Jarret Hardie for his technical skills and for his energetic support in seeing this thesis go to Dalhousie Graduate Studies for binding. I would also like to thank the Dalhousie Department of English for providing me with a Graduate Scholarship and this opponunity to pursue my interests in Canadian literature. 1 would like to extend a very special thank-you to Dr. George Elliott Clarke for inspiring me as an academic and pet, for graciously providing me with copies of his forthcoming work, for aiding me in my research of African-Canadian literatures, and most of all, for his poetics that bear witness to such beauty.

viii Introduction

In the beginning was the word, and the word was the life force. African Philosophy

The prim;iry function of writing, as a means of communication,is to facilitate the enslavement of other human beings. Levi Strauss, Tristes Tropiques

1 know that this traitor language can turn One truth into another or even Against itself . Yet, it is al1 we have. George Elliott Clarke, Whylah Falls

Witnessing the Evolution of 'the word'

This thesis examines George Elliott Clarke's representations of female beauty in Saltwater Spirituals and Deeper Blues, Whylah Falls, Lush Dreams, Blues Exile and Beatrice chancyl within the contexts of African and Western traditions of representing the female muse, and the recent concern in the academy for an ethical criticism. In his poetics, Clarke utilizes the full range of cultural resources available and scholar English literature; Clarke interweaves a variety of genres, voices, and dramatic and discursive exchanges that resist the "cultural detacination" of the "Canadian landscape ." Through their critical visioning and revisioning of the female muse, Clarke's texts enter into a constructive "dialogic relationshipw (Henderson 162) with rivalling aesthetics of the beautiful, with the Genesis story and its received bibilical and literary traditions, as well as with historical accounts of the enslavement of Blacks in Canada. In witnessing the impossibility of our "traitor laquagew to fully represent the female muse outside of a complex matrix

of "intersubjective ~iolence,"~Clarke's meta-poetics direct our attention to the complexity of 'languaging' female beauty, and to our ethical responsibility as linguistic beings. Although Clarke's liberating philosophy of female beauty, at times, reinscribes certain totalizing concepts of women, its ceaseless revisioning also articulates a resistance to its own violence and demonstrates that there are "ethical" ways in which our "traitor language" can be used to bear witness to the beauty "that once existed in invisiblity . " In traditional belief , the muse was a goddess who possessed the male poet. One of the nine daughters of Zeus and Mnemosyne, she presided over poetry, Song, drama, dancing, and astronomy, and played an important role in the creative process. But it is a role that has been rather dangerously turned "against itselfwin the dominant visionings of the muse throughout the centuries. In the many patriarchal readings of the muse, the goddess had corne to be celebrated not so much for her agency or for her control over "the -rdw or the "life force,w6 but for her idyllic beauty,

for her "duty" to gratify male desire, or for her ability to be possessed by the male penning-pet. Such patriarchal readings of the muse often risk reducing the female goddess to an object of the male-pet's authoritarian linguistic gaze. Clarke ' s poetics reverse such oppressive visionings of the female muse in rather interestdg ways. Clarke is indebted to an African-American tradition that posits a muse-like quality in the female subject who is responsible for inspiring male-blues artists to Song and for uplifting the spirits of her race (Carby 74). The female muse for Clarke, then, is never solely the goddess who possesses the male-poet that we f ind in classical traditions, nor the beautified object which is possessed by the male-poet that we find in patriarchal readings, but a complex, multi-faceted female subject.

It is imperative to explore Clarke ' s texts for their critical visioning and revisioning of the female muse, as so much of the poet's "coming intoV7of the beauty of Africadia, of process, of language, and of exile is contingent upon a return to, or inhabiting of, a " female" space, a "ferninine" and "ethical" way of looking and becoming. The male-poetfs process of returning to a matriarchal sphere is emphasized in Mhylah Falls and Lush Dreams, Blue Exile. The failure of "Xavierw in Whylah Falls and of the pilgrim-poet in Lush Dreams, Blue Exile is associated with their inability to "think ethically" about the complexity of languaging fernale beauty and is represented as a fa11 from the materna1 sphere into the patriarchal symbolic order. In ontological and epistemological te-, Clarke, in these works , adopts the allegory of textualization to explain the limits of our fallen language and the existence of racial oppression in our world. The allegory also serves the purpose of proclaiming our ethical existance-that is, it conveys how we, as textual beings, can make choices to liberate ourselves from the tyranny of monolithic constructions of Truth," "Beauty," and "The Word." Furthemore, the allegory also directs our attention to a cornplex, multivocal, and ancient African matriarchal tradition that celebrates an ethical relationship to beauty and to language. What emerges from a black aesthetic is an understanding that the "beautifulw is always a personal, fluid category expressed through a language characterized by its "unlimited play," (8. Baker, Blues 10). A black aesthetic assumes that "no ob ject, process or single element possesses intrins ic aesthetic value. The "art abject" as well as its value are selective constructions of the critic ' s tropes and models " (H. Baker 10). Henry Louis Gates' recovery of the African myths of the "ever-punning, ever cajoling, signifying monkeyw would suggest that this Vmlimited playw is a subcomponent of ordinaty black speech (Black Theory 287). Houston Baker's investigation of Afro-American blues, however, suggests this "unlimited playw is a political and "cultural inventionw of Blacks in the New World (10). Black art was seen as intrinsically serving political and ethical functions; as bel1 hooks States:

Whatever African-Americans created in music, dance, poetry, painting etc., it was regarded as testimony, bearing witness, challenging racist thinking which suggested that black folks were not fully human, were uncivilized, and that the masure of this was our collective failure to create "greatW art.

Aesthetics then is more than a philosophy or theory of art and beauty; it is a way of inhabiting space, a particular location, a way of looking and becoming ." Yearning 104-5 whether we look to Gates' study of the "trickery" of Esu figures, or to Baker's research of a blues matrix, we find that a black theory of art is acutely aware of the problematic nature and politics of any discourse which professes the ability to represent a universal, transcendental, aesthetic quality of beauty. In the context of oppressive systems of domination, such an understanding is vety political; knowledge of what constitutes beaut y is power . In contrast to the African aesthetic which asserts that the the true, the good and the beautiful belong to the realm of the personal and the political, several Western "Traditions" emphasize their distinct origins and insist that they "belong to different domains of knowledgew (Gilroy 39). The many patriarchal "Traditions" we find in western aesthetics of the beautiful are rooted in the philosophical assumption that "pure" art or beauty possesses a universal aesthetic quality that enables it to transcend the "everydayness" of life. The artist of such an aesthetic tradition is, in Kantian terms, a "manw of "Geniusl'; I use the term "man" here deliberately because, as feminist critic Marilyn French argues, traditional aesthetics are often "designed to maintain and transmit power from spiritual father to spiritual son" (Hein 69). The ideal perceiver in such an aesthetic is the "disintexestedl' critic--the objective, ahistorical, apolitical, expert whose "enlightened" reasoning capacity enables him to discern the

"authenticity" of "masterpieces. " What the apparent wautonomous," "transcendentaln and "objective" nature of such philosophies of the beautiful translate into is a separation of culture from politics and ethics from aesthetics. In the past three decades, the academy has witnessed the burgeoning of feminist and cultural pedagogy that elucidates how western aesthetics of the beautiful have been inhical to blacks, to al1 women, and to members of other minorities. In her valuable study, On Blackness Without Blacks (1982), Sander Gilman evinces how aesthetics of Hegel, Schopenhauer, and Nietzsche (among others) have perpetuated racist ideology by using the black figure as "as a marker for moments of cultural relativism and to support the production of aesthetic judgements of a supposedly universal character to dif ferentiate, for example, between authentic music and, as

Hegel puts it, 'the most detestable noiserw (Gilroy 8). In Figures in Black, Gates illustrates how Kant, in his study of Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and the Sublime, elaborates upon David Hume ' s racist aesthetics in concluding that negroes are "naturally inferiorfl (Gates 18-19 ) . Recent feminist scholarship on the aesthetic elucidates how enlightenment philosophies of the beautiful and the sublime were also plagued with sexism. For example, in Aesthetics in Feminist Perspective (1993) Jane Kneller and Amy Newman demonstrate how the aesthetic theories of Kant and

Edmund Burke associate women with the "beautif ull1 in ways that render them as passive objects that must gratify, or submit to, the "sublime," "masculine" gaze. By using his reasoning capacity, the artist of "Genius" or the "disinterestedmcritic is able to discern the universal aesthetic qualities of the "Beautifiedw and thereby control the feminized "object" with his linguistic gaze. Although black aesthetics bear testimony to the beauty of ~fro-Americans and serve the political function of undetminhg the inherent racism of traditional philosophies of the beautiful, they often reflect a complicity with patriarchal noms of representing the beautiful. In "Reconstructing Black Masculinity, " bel1 hooks describes the way in which slavery "tormentedWthe pschye of black men by suggesting that they were incapable of fulfilling "the phallocentric masculine ideal as it has been articulated in white supremacist capitalist patriarchy" (Yearning 89). Most often it was easier, hooks claims, for Black men to reinscribe the patriarchy rather than to challenge it. Like miny black feminists, hooks calls for the need to hear from black men "who are interrogating sexisrn, " who are "break[ing] the life-threatening choke-hold patriarchal masculinity imposesw and "striving to create different and oppositional visions of masculinity" (113). Clarke's poetics, through the manner in which they interrogate patriarchal representations of beauty and make us conscious of our critical responsibility , answer to this ethical demand .

The Ethical ~urn~

The recent burgeoning of feminist and cultural criticism can be attributed to a theoretical shift in Western aesthetics from the enlightenment view of "manw as "the central organizing principle of the knowledge-centred discourses" to a focus on "language as the enabling condition

for these dis cours es^ (P. Baker 1). Both Gates' work on the "signifying monkey ," and Baker ' s research on a "blues matrix," would suggest that this "linguistic turn" was more noticeably felt in "whitew aesthetic traditions as a black theory of beauty was already rooted in a philosophy which drew attention to the "unlimited play" (Baker) or underlying structure of "significationw (Gates). The West's much slower process of "caming intow this intelligence is much indebted to the philosophy of deconstruction. Des pite resistance in the academy to deconstructive interpretive acts we can easily see how Jacques Derrida's popularization of the claim that al1 forms of "writingwlocan only exist within a "horizon of intersubjective violencew (127) opens up doors for feminist and cultural critiques of

"Enlightenment" conceptions of "Art," "Beauty" and the Vord." What Derrida's inevitable "violence" implies is not necessarily some nihilis tic approach to langauge , but rather a recognition that we exist in language, in a "traitor language" to use Clarke's term, and hence must always be critical of any clah to normalize women, beauky, or the 'other.? As such, deconstruction has fostered a more receptive understanding of a black aesthetic of "signification. " Although Derrida ' s concept of "writingw certainly needs to be critiqued for its own complicity in totalizing social formations, its assertion that we exist in a "horizon of intersubjective violencew opens up, at least for this reader, an awareness of the otherness that we always exclude and forces us to confront the network of power and domination that contains us. In terms of feminist theory, deconstruction's claim to an "otherness" of language has also opened the doors for Julia Kristeva's theorizing of "semiotic choral' or for Luce Irigary's notions of a distinct "ecriture fendnine." Although Kristeva and Irigary hold very different theoretical positions, both feminist critics attempt to search for "the otherw of language. But Derrida's claim to an "othernessWof language "is often (mis)interpreted in the English-laquage criticism

almost solely as an exercise in "free-playw " (P. Baker 6).11

Consequently, deconstruction has not only raised many queries as to whether or not it is an wethical'' practise but it has also stirred a demand for a criticism that is ethical. In the school of French feminism, deconstruction's attention to an otherness of language has lead Irigary, in her thinking of a distinct "parler femme,rTto ask such questions as: Can a male writerls "languagingl' of female experience ever be ethical? Can it adequately represent issues of "feminine"

identity and sexuality if to mite "femaleWis to write from

the biological specif icity of a woman ' s body? l2 The etymology of the word "ethicsw reveals that the term

derives from the Greek word "ethos" or "moral character. "13

When we hear the word "ethicsWwe usually think of moral

principles, values, or choices. And, when we demand that a feminist aesthetic of beauty be "ethical" we expect it to tell us something about the proper way in which one ought to

represent or think about female beauty. Yet, in addition, to Irigaryfs questionhg of whether any male writer can be "ethicaltf in representing female experience, other critics interrogate language itself by asking: If al1 forms of "languaging" experience are acts of "trickery," "riddling," and Vajoling, *' (Gates ) , or "unlimited playw (Baker), or "violencew (Derrida) then how is an "ethical" feminist aesthetic even posssible? With the recent surge of interest in an ethical criticism the canon of aesthetic theory has witnessed the scholarship of numerous critics who would argue that an "ethical feminist aestheticmis possible, and who would consider the term to be somewhat pleonastic. For example, Hilde Hein's "~efiningFeminist Theoq: Lessons from Aestheticsw (1993), asserts that aesthetic theory, since the time of Plato, has always been grounded in paradox, in the "shifting sands of personal experience" and, thus, has always been ethical (14). Hillis Miller's The Ethics of Reading

( 1987 ) suggests that al1 narratives are ethical because "ethics itself has a peculiar relation to that form of language" (3). To this list we can also add many other works such as: Sandra Gilbert's and Susan Gubar ' s No Man 's Land:

The War of the Words ( 1988) that argues that language can represent the gendered-specific experiences of men because language is itself ethical; Charles Alteri's Canons and Consequences (1990) that emphasizes a return to the idea of a stable ethical person as "the repository for values established through communal means" (P.Baker 91); and

Geoffrey Galt Harphamls Getting It Right that proclaims we are "ethical subjects in ethical worlds because we are linguistic subjects " (Haqham 5 ) . WhLle the very fact that Clarke sees himself as a writer who has the social responsibility to "bear witness to the beauty, history and life of [his] too often neglected,... too often vilified [Airicadian] commnityw (Kamboureli 491) would suggest that he has faith in our ethical existence as linguistic beings, the poet is quite distrustful of any aesthetic that advocates a return to the "universal reasonw of a stable person or to a stable representative language. "Being part of the population which has been at the receiving end of rather negative constructions," Clarke claimç, "it is legitimate to have a distrust of how language gets used, in particular, how it gets used by those in power to

disenfranchise others" (Moynagh 75). According to Clarke, language is a "defective devicew--a "two-edged sword that can be used to "defend and preserve" the marginalized on the one hand, and used against them on the other hand (Moynagh 75). For Clarke, it is not enough to point simply to our ethical existence as textual beings; an ethical feminist aesthetic must account for the oppression that exists in the world, as well as for the alienation marginal figures may feel from the idea of a language. It is of no surprise to find, then, in the corpus of Clarke's work an ethical demand for our critical responsibility as linguistic beings . In stating that Clarke moves toward an ethical feminist aesthetic I am suggesting that the pet "cornes intow an understanding of how his languaging of male/female relationships may subscribe to traditional patriarchal aesthetics. An ethical feminist aesthetic of the beautiful is an aesthetic theory that not only points to our ethical existence, but also elucidates the "violencew or "trickery" of our linguistic being. In other words, an ethical feminist aesthetic suggests that no matter how patient, attentive or respectful our reading, writing or thinking may be it is inevitably violent; there is always an other that we exclude, and thus, always a need, as Clarke states in "JOurney and Arrivai," for "still--/[more] vision and revision" (LDBE 92). Clarke's movement toward an ethical feminist aesthetic of beauty, then, is somewhat consciously ironic. While the pet searches for an ethical way to represent female beauty he mites in a manner that directs our attention to the violence of his actions, to an otherness of language, and even, at times, to the impossibility of ethically representing female beauty. In doing so, Clarke, as 1 will demonstrate, resists, as much as it is possible, the universalizing tendencies of "normative feministsw14 and, ironically, moves toward a more liberating philosophy of languaging female beauty.

Zhe Narrative structure Testifying to the bountiful "atlantic genealogyw of "saxophone sea spiritualsw and "bagpipe jazz hymns, (49) and vsound[ing] the Jubileew (85) of a "feminine" beauty of Africadia, Saltwater Spirituals and Deeper Blues demonstrates that since the onset of Clarke's publishing career the poet has been deeply inspired by the female muse. Focusing mostly on the "Blues Notes" poems of Clarke's first book and the -. .. wAxum-Saban poems of Lush Dreams, Blue Exile, Chapter One of this thesis examines the poet ' s early visioning and his later revisioning of the female muse and proposes that we can read the relationship between these two texts as one of "negative influencew--an influence formulated in part by a

reaction to a prior text.15 After identifying some of the problems of Clarke's representations of the female muse in his first book of poetry, 1 consider how the pilgrim-poet in the wAxum-Sabaw poems moves toward a more liberating ethical femininist aesthetic. In Lush Dreams, Blue Exile, Clarke offers the model of a reconstructed form of masculinity-a model that not only encourages the male-poet, and us, to think ethically about the complexity of languaging female beauty, but one that also needs to be interrogated further, as Chapter Three's discussion of the female muse will illustrate.

In Chapter Two, 1 explore how Clarke's epic-drama Wnylah Falls sevises bibilical and Miltonic accounts of the fa11 of language and humanity and offers an alternative genesis stoq that redeems the portrait of Eve. The first part of this chapter, "De/Reconstructing a Gendered Hierarchy of Beauty in the 'New Eden' of Whylati Falls, focuses on the interrelated discourses of linguistic anarchy, gender inversion and beauty as they are represented in X' s and Shelley's epic battle of

Book One. After exploring how X, in the first book, constmcts a gendered hierarchy of beauty that posits women as the passive object of the male-poet's linguistic gaze, I examine how Clarke "De/constructs" X's gendered hierarchy of beauty and imposes another one that priviliges the female voice. That is, in the second half of this chapter, 1 focus on how Clarke wRe/constructs" a gendered hierarchy that celebrates the feminine sphere as an edenic fom of beauty.

As it is probably already apparent, my choice to pluralize the word aesthetic (s) in this study is a deliberate attempt to articulate how Clarke conveys different feminist aesthetics or moves toward a "feminine" aesthetic of plurality-an aesthetic that, as my discussion of Beatrice Chancy in Chapter Three will reveal, interrogates the monolithic constructions of "woman." In this final chapter 1 first briefly examine how Clarke's verse-play deals with the complexity of languaging Black and White femininisms. Outlining what a ethical feminist theatre may look like, I investigate the politics of the theatrical gaze and argue that Clarke stages the female body in a manner that forces us, as an audience, to confront our own position of power in a patriarchal scopic regime. Thereafter, 1 trace the

transfomative image or prop of the steel-knife in the play and illustrate how Clarke effectively uses this motif to convey the sense of our "intersubjective violence" and hence, our ethical responsibilty as linguistic beings. In his visioning and revisioning of the female muse,

Clarke does not escape what 1 have outlined as the "violencef* (Derrida) , "trickery" ( Gates ) or "unlimited playfp (H . Baker) of language. There are moments in Clarke's poetics, as 1 will demonstrate in the chapters that follow, when the poet *s languaging of a feminine beauty needs to be questioned for its complicity with patriarchal noms. Nevertheless, 1 maintain throughout this study that Clarke writes in a manner that directs our attention to the limits of language and to the violence of his, and of our own, linguistic being. In examining Clarke's progression toward an ethical feminist aesthetic(s) we discover how our fall from the materna1 sphere accounts for the tyrannical enslavement to monolithic notions of "Truth," "Beauty," and "Art," and, in an extra-literary context, to the ten million and more who suffered at the hands of slaveowners. We become aware of how we must think critically and be ethically responsible as textual beings . This study of Clarke 's visioning and revisionhg of the female muse demonstrates how the poet/playwrightrs "witnessingw of the "invisible beautyw of Africadia not only interrogates patriarchal structures of belief, but also teaches us something about tolerance, teaches us how my may ethically live. Chapter 1

Toward a Feminist Aesthetic(s) of Beauty: Race, Gendet, Ethics and the Early Muses of Clarke

Language is .. .a place of struggle. We are wedded in language, have our being in words. Language is also a place of struggle. Dare 1 speak to oppressed and oppressor in the same voice? Dare I speak to you in a language that will move beyond the boundaries of domination--a language that will not bind you, fence you in, or hold you? Language is also a place of struggle. The oppressed struggle in language to recover ourselves, to reconcile, to reunite, to renew. Our words are not without meaning, they are an action, a resistance. Language is also a place of struggle. bel1 hooks, Yearning

The complex intersection of race and gender that lies at the heart of Clarke's liberating philosophy of beauty informs this chapter on the poetls progression toward ethical practises of reading, writing and thinking in Saltwater Spirituals and Deeper Blues and in the "Axum-Saba" poems of Lush Dreams, Blue Exile. Clarke, as 1 have suggested in my Introduction, adopts the allegory of textualization to explain the limits of our fallen language and to emphasize our critical responsiblity as ethical beings. Insofar as the allegory posits a salvific beauty in the act of freeing the materna1 (African) body from the chahs of the white, patriarchal, Law of the Father it can be argued that Clarke's efforts to "bear witnessw to the "invisiblewbeauty of Black Nova Scotia are always (already) discursively linked to the stniggles against erasure that women face. But many feminists reading Clarke's poetry, especially his earlier work, may be troubled at times by his representation of women and quite justifiably so. This chapter examines the "negative influence"16 that

Saltwater Spirituals and Deeper Blues has had on Clarke ' s visioning of the female figure in Lush Dreams, Blue Exile. 1 argue that it is in the self-reflexive, confessional, and reactive moments of the tgAxum-Sabawpoems , when Clarke ' s poetics interrogate the ability of our "traitor laquagew (MF 8) to represent female beauty, that the poet revises his own early visioning of the female muse and moves toward a more liberating feminist aesthetic(s). Yet, the poet's progression toward a feminist aesthetic(s) of beauty seems to be ironic since an "ethicalt'aesthetic, for Clarke, is predicated on the notion of its very impossibility. By this 1 do not mean to suggest that the poet advocates some form of nihilisrn, but rather that Clarke's liberating philosophy of beauty emphasizes the necessity of remaining in process and suggests that every ethical response always requires more choices, more rethinking; it demands self-recognition of the contexts out of which we speak and a critical awareness that language is always "a place of struggle." In "Blues Notes," the title of the second section of poems and photos in Saltwater Spirituals and Deeper Blues, Clarke pays tribute to important black female artists such as

Portia White (35), Ma Rainey and Bessie Smith (41). Many poems in this section deal with the pet's awakening to the beauty of Africadian women, to the "soft exactness/of brown limbs in a white dressw (35) the short lyric "passion and precision" speaks of. Several blues songs are even prefaced with dedications to various women suggesting a strong source of Clarke's artistic inspiration is rooted in a matriarchal lineage . Other poems of Sa1 twater Spirituals and Deeper Blues celebrate the beauty of a feminized Nova Scotian landscape. In "Crying the Beloved Countryw Clarke uses the image of a materna1 body--the %hale anas," "red clay lips," and "black baptist churchw "eyesW of "MotherH--to convey the sense of a deeply rooted and spiritually nourishing beauty Africadia has instilled in its descendants. In this poem, the son's difficulty of abandoning an ~tlantic"Mother" and the possibility of her death, or a life he would "fearwwithout her not only demonstrates how Clarke's poetics associate women with a valosized feminine landscape, but it also makes a claim for a distinct Africadian lineage. Although "Crying the Beloved Countryw does not directly address the ethics of languaging female beauty, the "fear" of separation from the "Mother" accounts for the alienation Africadians may feel from white culture and from the idea of a universal language

itself. As such, the poem opens up the possibility of witnessing an otherness. The image of the maternal body is also echoed in other poems such as "Autobiography." In this poem, the speaker's process of king reborn into the beauty of a "new heaven and new earth" is described in terms of a movement from the womb of the "mother" through a sexualized female body--"the brown breasts of fish-womenW--to another womb, "the amniotic annapolis-appled worldff (53). The title of this poem, and its

recontextualization17 h the "Africadiaw section of Lush

Dreams, Blue Exile, exemplif ies how Clarke envisions the process of "coming into" the beauty of blackness as a return to the womb, to the maternal body the pilgrim-poet of has been separated from. While "Autobiography," like "Crying the Beloved Country," does not deal with the problematic nature of representing female beauty, Clarke's use of the image of an "Atlantic" maternal body in both of these poems, leads us to think about the otherness of such totalizing concepts as the "great white north" and African-American. "love poem/song regarding Weymouth Falls" is another "fugitive piece" that idealizes a feminized landscape. In the first stanza of the poem, Weymouth Falls is described as a "new world Nile, %O elegant, evergreen, egalitarian--/

[and] richly female -mm [.It* (39). The alliteration of the adjectives "elegant," "evergreenfVand "egalitarian" convey a sense of female beauty which is then linked to womenfs creativity and life-affirmuig survival-the "evergreenw--and to the more subtle suggestion of the "natural" equality of humanity, nature's "so ...egalitarian" virtue. But despite its celebration of "richly female" values, "love poem/song regarding Weymouth Fallsw reinscribes the stereotypes that associate women with the natural world and with the role of the muse that inspires, and empowers, the male penning-pet. In its Lush Dreams, Blue Exile fom, "Love P~edSong Regarding Weymouth Fallsw is divided into three distinct stanzas which mark the different impressions Weymouth Falls has on the mind of the young poet/lover. In the opening stanza, the continuous motion of the falls first leads the speaker to associate himself with the earlier inhabitants of Acadia, the Micmac, and with a beauty of process or timelessness, the "million moons ago." This beauty, however, gives way to the speaker's recognition of the falls as a "new word Nile" and of himçelf as being both in the and out of the:

.. .this is where the world as we know it begins, al1 blue and beguiling, al1 because of her who homes with the pines, so elegant, evergreen, egalitarian- richly female. .. . At the homeless highway, where it waits and wails asphalt anthems of hit-and-run before plunging wildly into woods whispering Kejimkujik songs of she 1 love in blossom notes of the mst crimson and pleasant notes of the fattest calves of the land, there is built Weymouth Falls and its African Baptist church and its antique lumberyard and the dwelling of her 1 take thne to make the with.... (39).

Clarke's use of the adjective "homeless" in the opening lines of the second stanza, "At the homeless highway, where it waits/and wails asphalt anthems of hit-and-an," skilfully captures the speaker's paradoxical position. The use of word "homeless" to describe the "man-madew "asphaltWhighways calls into play the poetgs use of the verb "homes" in the first stanza. The adjective "homelessw leads us to think of the contrast between the "egalitarianw beauty of Weymouth Falls, the body of water, that "homes," and guides the speaker, and the "homeless" highway of Weymouth Falls, the tom, that disrupts nature and causes it to "wait," "wail" and "hitu randomly. Yet, the use of the word "homeless" also suggests that the beauty of Weymouth Falls, the constmcted tom, is also a beauty of process and a part of Nature's beauty of timelessness. The use of the adjective %omeless" then directs our attention to the beauty of continuous process, of timelessness, we find in stanza one, and to the necessity of the speaker to situate himself within th,within the beauty of Africadia that characterizes the second stanza. The persona1 wcosmos" of the speaker becomes the centre of the third stanza where he describes the female muse in terms of her ability to inspire him to Song: "she moves to apex of my cosmos; / and the old troubled world wheels around her,/song purs itself through my flesh." mile the speaker situates himself "in the," in Africadia, he does not articulate his situatedness withui language and within oppressive aesthetics of the beautiful that relegate women to the natural world and to the role of the muse that fulfils, that "mes," to gratify male desire.

In "An Unimpoverished Style: the Poetry of George

Elliott Clarke," M. Travis Lane notes how the poet's use of the short poem has a "limiting tendency: Too often it is a lyric of a single mood, and the expression of the single impulse does not, as a form, demand the structure-risking complexity of redefinition or developmentw (50). Such we find is often the case with Clarke's visioning of the female figure in the shorter lyrics of Saltwater Spirituals and Deeper Blues. For example, in "Lady Love" Clarke recounts the beauty of a "lady" in terms of a "treasure" washed in by the "revolving seawor as "a note in a bottle/That never reaches shore. " Although such images coiivey the f luidity of the female figure and, once again, reveal how Clarke associates women with a beauty of nature afid process, the poem does not cal1 into question the speaker's desire to "plunder" and "salvageN the female muse. Moreover, the "ladyw is described in terms of her ability to "touch" and "conformWto the "fleshWof the speaker. As we have seen with other lyrics such as "passion and precisionw and "love poem/song regarding Weymouth Falls," "Lady Lovew does not mve much beyond a poem about "the single impulse" or sexual desire of the male speaker. In "XVII--Shelley," a slightly longer lyric that finds its shelter in the long-poem sequence of "The Book of Jubilee," Clarke also conveys the beauty of the female muse in te= of her power to inspire the male speaker to Song:

she is al1 peat-mos s and f ire, welkin and ingle, raising my desire. i sing: "Avon creek and roaring river, There, my dear, we'll live forever. Let our love burn the gloom, Corn on, honey, jump the broom." (81)

While the female muse of Shelley in this poem plays an important role of directing the speaker's attention from the "latinate Coast" of "Lerici, " and dwelling of P.B. Shelley, to the beauty of Africadia, she remains an object of the male speaker's linguistic gaze. Chapter Two's discussion of the female muse of Shelley in the multivocal lyric-narrative-dramatic sequence of Whylah Falls will reveal how Clarke gives Shelley a voice in his later work and leads us to think ethically about our languaging of male/female relations. However, the tendency toward univocality that characterizes Clarke's use of the lyric and the long-poem sequence in Saltwater Spirituals and Deeper Blues limits the agency and voice of women. wXVII--Shelleyw like many other in this first book celebrates male desire and the beauty of a sexualized black female body without interrogating how such desire may be oppressive toward women. In "Cotton Clubw Clarke draws on the males-blues tradition of representing the black female body. The poem is one of many of Clarke's early works that demonstrates the pet's "good ear for consonance, assonance [and] alliteration" (Lane 48). The repetition of consonants "s,"

"d," and "b" and of vowels **ewand "O" in the poem's opening lines intimate the eloquence and harmony of blues music and contributes directly to the sensuality of our reading proces s : the saxophone-shiny sea sultrily, soulfully sound; elegant ellington waves dance dashingly on the silver sand ballroom-beach : ooooooh dignified (42). Notice here how the "stv alliteration and the repetition of thewoo" sounds in the words "saxophone," "sultrily," "soulfullyw and "soundU lengthens the flow of the rhythm of the lines and captures the deep moaning blues ambience. Yet despite the manner in which these stressed associations of sounds assist in conveying the nuances of a blues bar scene there is something absent from this poem when we consider its treatment of the female subject. As in the male blues tradition, "Cotton Clubw reveals the speaker's yearning for the "crimson mouth" and "bared

breasts" of his lover : why won ' t you be mine? /where are

you dear desired one...?". ut, the poem raerely reproduces male desire rather than commenting on the sexual politics of blues music or interrogating the difficulty of languaging female beauty. In a few poems of Saltwater Spirituals and Deeper Blues and in the "Axum-Saba" poems of Lush Dreams, Blue Exile Clarke goes beyond this somewhat limited vision of the absent "desired onet' and offers a possible answer as to "whyW the female muse will not be possessed by the male speaker. One such poem, "violets for Your FusN rewrites the male blues tradition and will be looked at in detail later in this chapter. In "Dominion Atlantic Railway" Clarke draws on the Afro-American tradition of railroad blues.18 The train motif in the blues tradition is a sign of freedom, of "change, motion, transience, [and] processw (Ho Baker 202). What is distinctive about Clarke's use of the train motif is not so much that it represents timelessness or placelessness, exactly, but rather that he uses the motif to convey the identity of a distinct location, to bear witness to a black presence in Canada. The poem's refrain "along the dominion atlantic railwayw and the reference to the "apple blossomsw of "the annapolis river" attest to its Maritime heritage. In the poem, the female subject is described not only in the

terms of being in a timeless realm of process, as we are told, she watches "birds come and gow but also very much in the, "in brand new blue-ribbon cornf ields. Aïthough t'Dominion Atlantic Railwayw testifies to an Africadian presence, the poem does not convey the critical awareness of the complexity of representing female experience that we find in Clarke's later work. In "It Jus Be's Dat Way S~metime,~'Helen Carby notes how the train was a contested symbol in the blues tradition. In male-blues the train represented a sign of freedom and mobility for men; for women it was originally regarded as a wmournful signal of imminent desertion and future loneliness" (Carby 751). In the roaring twenties the symbol of the train was reclaimed by blues artists such as, Clara Smith, Ma Rainey, and Bessie Smith. For these female artists the train represented "freedom" and agency "as women too were on the move nowv (752). In the

"Dominion Atlantic Railway" then we see how the poet presents the female in rather stereotypical terms: She is a passive and deserted "flowerwthat of iron and steel will come to pick." While the speaker's references to the female subject's act of dreaming of "stallion steam locomotives" and to her being acted upon by the "boys of ironw who "will.. . pick her" may hint at some underlying ambivalence toward the symbol of the train this complexity is not explored in the poem. In contrast to the speaker of the poem, the female subject is relegated to the realm of innocence and "unknowingW and cannot transcend the limited role that has ken cast for her. In his early visioning of the female figure Clarke seems most concerned with challenging the racism of Western and "white" aesthetic "Traditions" that teach black women that their "hotcombs and dented teapot and black woodstove are backward, backwoods , and unbecoming ." lg Women in Ça1twa ter Spirituals and Deeper Blues appear to be granted a type of superiority oves "boys of iron and steelw (44) because of their close identification with the "richly femalew (36) beauty of the natural world and with the poet's "irresistible faithWin a "religionwof Qtotionlt (43). In his first book of poetry, Clarke occupies more of a normative feminist position. By this 1 mean, the poet attempts to change the prevailing racist attitudes toward black women by testifying to theh beauty in a language that, for the most part, is not seen as being inevitably violent. In the wAxum-Sabaw poems Clarke interrogates his early visioning of the female figure by exploring in greater depth how language is a "two-edged sword, "--that is, how his own "witnessing" of female beauty may still need more revisioning.

***+ "Axum-Saba" follows Varahemla" and "Gehenna'' and is the third section of poems in Lush Dreams, Blue Exile, or, as

Clarke refers to it, the third "state of mind" (4) It

contains three photographs and twelve poems that concern themselves with the beauty of women, both black and white, and with the governing power of words. The pilgrim-poet, at this point in his voyage, has progressed from the wallowing

Ulyssean dreams of "Zarahemla's" "Salvation Amy Blues," through "Gehenna's" recognition of transcendental suffering and the problematic nature of representing the universal, to the present rejuvenating and "richly femaleM (39) beauty of "Axum-Saba."

Situated in the middle, or at the heart of Lush Dream, Blue Exile's five-part exegesis of sorts, wAxum-Saba" conveys the important role Clarke's liberating philosophy of beauty attri-butes to women. Clarke wishes for us to see that it is an "ethical" appreciation of female beauty and love that turns the pilgrim-poet's gaze from the self-absorbent narcissism of "Zarahemla," and from the outward, universalizing Gehenna poems, to a constructive self-analysis ("Axum-Saba"), and then homeward to the fourth "state of mind," "Africadia," and to the beauty of blue exile, the fifth state of "Sierra Leonia." For Clarke, the male poet's process of "coming into intelligencew not only involves the act of freeing Blacks from the chains of racist aesthetics, but it also demands a critique of how "masculinev aesthetics have ken, and are, inimical to women. In "Axum-Saba," the pilgrim-poet must learn to relinquish the sense of his words king able to control wwomanwor represent female experience in its entirety; he must resist, as much as it is possible, the temptations to universalize, or what 1 have referred to as a "normativew position on language itself . In this final section, 1 will attempt to demonstrate how Clarke moves toward an ethical feminist aesthetic. 1 will argue that it is in the manner by which the "Axum-Saba" poems point to the limitations of language, or to the male-pet's impossibility of ethically representing female experience, that Clarke ironically "thinks ethically" about the complexity of languaging male/female relationships and offers, as an alternative to patriarchal traditions, a reconstructed masculinity--a mode1 which, of course, still needs to be questioned. Clarke s interrogation of his early visioning of the female muse is illustrated by the manner in which poems such as "April in Paris" and "April 19,19--" confess to an oppressive tradition of "masculine" aesthetics. For example, in "April in Parisw Clarke parodies the idea of the pet as a male artist who is inspired to Song by female beauty. In the fashion of a Petrarchan lover, the speaker yearns for "A balconyw where he can drape his muse "in silks," bring her "wine and albescent honeyw and "name" her "with the most beautiful nouns: /Carnation, orchid, rose, iris, trillium, anemonew (42). That Clarke undermines the authority of this male tradition of representing female beauty is evident in the egotistical tone in which the speaker lists the metaphorical flowers. His particular choice of flowers such as "orchid," "iris," "anemonew is made with great care and with the underlying desire to satisfy the speaker's own ear and to celebrate the speaker's poetic power. Clarke's use of military language such as "vaulting over wallsw and "draping flagsw to convey the male-artist's poetic process also directs our attention to how writing can be an act of "violence." The image of a "loaded pen" in the poem's opening lines

I wander among the graves of poets, Stalk inspiration with a loaded pen And collect bunches of fresh, cold lilies (42) is, indeed, charged with multiple meanings. The use of the word "loadedN in the context of a poem imbued with military language also calls to mind the image of the pen as a gun. This metaphor leads us to think about writing as an act of "violence." The image of a "loaded pen/gunw not only reminds us that "language is a place of struggle," but it also directs attention to our ethical existence and ethical responsibility. A "loaded penw can go off in any direction, at any the. We must be critically responsible readers and writers because bullet-words can bring harm. Clarke ' s critique of traditional aesthetics of the beautiful in "A Poem With the Single Title of 'De~ire"~ demonstrates the complex interweaving of issues of race and gender that we find so often in the pet's work. In a tone reminiscent of X's desire for Shelley in book one of Whylah Falls, and in the style of pastoral and courtly love traditions, this meta-poem conveys the unrequited love of the speaker, a black male poet/lover who yearns to capture, with his mrose-embroidered/Canticles,w the beauty of a woman named

''S." Although the poem incorporates many pastoral and courtly love elements such as, poetry-as-song, the "rose," and the "greenW2lthe speaker attempts to distance himself from the "whiteness" of these literary traditions by distinguishing the "dark sheenw of [his] wordsw from "stark, crude, Anglo-Saxon stresses." The lovedpoet fears that if he cannot immortalize "S.'sm beauty in Song then the "eloquencen of his words "will fade slowly to blurs," wcorrode to white silence." The alienation the speaker expresses from the idea of "whitew langauge is not just a rhetorical strategy to win the heart of "S.": Clarke wishes for us to see that his fears are real. Like Clarke, the speaker is acutely aware of how "traditional" aesthetics of the beautiful fail to adequately represent black beauty. And, like Clarke, the lover/poet also seeks to develop a new laquage, a new strategy for recording black beauty :

1'11 wrench poems from branches, Scribble your name in the waterfall's noise, And make al1 Mature our rose-embroidered Canticles, to give this dark-complected love A hearing. Them that have ears, they will hear. (40)

When we consider how alienating, exclusive and artificial the ideas of "Culturerw "Truth," "Beauty," and "Artu have been for blacks it comes of no surprise to find here, and elsewhere in Clarke's work, a strategic neo-romantic, neo-primitivist thread. This new strategy of writing "Naturew the speaker offers advocates an embracement of a non-normative position on language. That is, it points to an "otherness" of language and demands the speaker to think about his ethical existence, to make the conscious choice to unearth a repressed "Desiretl for "Nature." The "Desire" of the lover/poet then, is not just a desire for "S. ," but it is also yeasning for a distinct black vernacular, for a language that will express more fully his lover's beauty, that will give "S. " "A Hearing. "

Yet, "In A Poem With the Single Title of 'Desire'" Clarke not only demonstrates how alienating the idea of a universal language can be for blacks, but he also ironizes the lover/poetls voice in ways that interrogate the speaker's masculine "Tradition" of representing female beauty. In contrast to the female muses of Saltwater Spirituals and Deeper Blues (and 1 think here of Shelley in wWII--Shelleyw whose "cunning beautyw is described only in terms of her duty

to raise the male-poet's desire (81)) "Sewin a "A Poem With the Single Title of "Desire""is subtly praised by Clarke for her critical thinking, for her legitimate distrust in the speaker's ability to represent her beauty.

"S. ' sl' suspicions of the lover/poet8s intentions to represent her beauty are expressed, by the speaker, in the opening lines of the pem:

You salt away my green, tender letters To cure--or decay-in forgetfulness. There, foxed by tears[.]

Clarke's use of the expression "salt away" poignantly captures what Mae Gwendolyn Henderson identifies as the complex "dialectic/dialogic " position of the black f emale s~bject.~~"To salt" or "to salt away" means: "to Save," "to

preserve, "to cure, " lTto store away ," to act with "reserve or allowancerWwith an attitude of skepticism. As a noun, "saltW implies "wit" or "pungency." Salting also confers an act of melting, decaying, or corroding hard substances such as ice or steel ( Websters 1263 ) . On one hand, the pasadoxical expression "salt awayw conveys how "S." enters into a "dialectic of identityw (Henderson 119) with the speaker. Sharing an appreciation for their common blackness,

"S." values the lover/poet's "Negro blush," and salts, preserves, or cures, the "dark sheenw of his words.

On the other hand, her relationship with the speaker is, at the same the, characterized by a "dialogic of differences" (119). As a black female subject doubly marginalized, "S." distrusts both the dominant white language and the subdominant black patriarchal language. wS1sw "salt[ing] away" of the "green tender letterswis, simultaneously, an act of "presesving" the "dark sheenw of the words and a "foxing" act of decaying, or critically interrogating, their apparent "tender[ness]," that is, their complicity with patriarchal noms. S. then conflates the distance between the speaker's "Negrow "eloquence" and the wstark, crude, Anglo-saxon stresses" intimating that language itself is not necessarily racist or sexist perse, but rather can be utilized by both blacks and whites in such oppressive ways. But the attention "SW draws to the similarities between the speaker's diction and that of "white silence" does not necessarily imply a return to a notion of a universal language. Instead, "S.'sw "salt[ing] awayv suggests a further "othernessWof language that needs to be witnessed, that needs to be explored.

In "A Poem With the Single Title of 'Desire'" Clarke explores this "othernessN by the manner in which he interrogates the speaker's authority to represent female beauty. What a feminist reading of this work elucidates is just how much it is also a poem about the male penning-pet's desire to represent his own beauty, or linguistic power, mch like what we have seen with the speaker in "April in Paris."

Rather than emphasizing how "S. 'sw resistance will "curew his words and raise themto new meanings, the speaker asserts that her failure to conform to his wishes will tarnish the black beauty of his own words. He is concerned ultimately with the gloq of his own words. In the context of the poem, we secognize the "double-voicedness" of the speaker's question:

S., how will your beauty appreciate If left unsung? (40)

While the lover/poet recognizes the vital necessity to hear, to witness, the beauty of a black aesthetic, he has also internalized the patriarchal desire to fix beauty to a certain form, to immortalize her, and moreover, his own "eloquenceWin song. What the speaker fails to acknowledge, or leave any room for, is any sense of female beauty independent of the power of his own linguistic gaze. The speaker emerges as a lover/poet who is somewhat deaf to his patriarchal trapping, who still has to learn how to think ethically about how his own mrose-embroidered/Canticlesw may already be corroded. The speaker's final words, "Them that have ears, they will hearw are ixonic because what we do hem is the gap between the speaker ' s narcissism and Clarke ' s ethical feminist voice . By directing our attention to the limits of the speaker's discourse Clarke moves toward a liberating philosophy of beauty. He teaches us that there is a rich resonating voice

,, ,,Smlsll "salt[ing]," in her "forgetfulness," and in her silence. And, he reminds us that we must be critically responsible pets and readers for there are always others excluded from our aesthetic. For those who have ears for an ethical feminist aesthetic, this is what we also hear. In ''Violets for Your Fursw Clarke revises the male blues tradition in ways that exemplify how the poet has "corne into" an understanding of the contradictions blues places on the

black female subject. As 1 have mentioned in my discussion of Sa1 twater Spirituals and Deeper Blues ' s "Cotton Club, '' the black female subject in blues tradition was frequently regarded as a heroic figure, politically responsible for uplifting the spirits of the black comxnunity. "Violets for Your Furs demons trates this " heroic" respons ibility or duty of black women. In a tone reminiscent of the "saxophone-shiny .../soulfully soundsw (42) of "Cotton Club'sM blues bar scene, the speaker of "Violets for Your Fursw laments the absence, the "sadness of lovingw a woman who has Vashed in [her] pretty Negritude and gonew (41). The first stanza expresses the speaker's desire to gaze at and control his female muse. The absence of the woman is presented as a "crisis" of lost opportunity for male-gratification: The woman is described by the speaker in terms of her "troubling breasts not quite spoken for" and her "spontaneous mouth unconsummated with kisses ." Here , Clarke explicitly addresses how a male blues tradition associates the "black beautyv of females with their desirability and sexual duty

within a patriarchal order. "Violets for ~ourFUS '* reminds us that the history of the blues tradition has also been a history of cultural and political struggle over sexual relations. But what is most striking about this poem is the manner in which it reflects a blues-speaker who is critically aware of the objectifying power of his linguistic gaze. A blues performance is after all, based on desire and absence (Blues 9): A "blues matrix," as Houston Baker notes, "is a negative symbol that generates (or obliges one to invent its own referents)" (9). As such, it can be argued that male blues performers, ironically, are "always alreadyw aware that they cannot contain or fix women with their linguistic gazes : "Even as they speak of paralysing absence and ineradicable desire, their instrumental rhythm suggest change, movement, action, continuance, unlimited and unending possibility" (8). The blues matrix of absence and desire then evinces our ethical existence. That is, blues speakers write out of a paradoxical position. On one hand, they desire to know, to control, to write, to sing, to give beauty shape and fom.

On the other hand, it is beauty, a Song, a poem, based on "absence," on one's obligation to invent multiple referents, and hence, on one's inability to fix beauty, at least, in any univocal sense. Stanza two of "Violets for Your Fursw illustrates how the speaker is conscious of the paradoxicality of his writing, the %ad sweetnessw of his blues:

Ah, you were a living S, al1 Coltrane or Picasso swerves, Your hair stranded splendid on the gold beach of your face, So sweet, 1 moaned black rum, black Sax, black moon, The black trace of your eyelash like lightening, The sonorous blackness of your skin after midnight- The sadness of loving you glimmering in Scotch. Now, this sheet darkens with the black snow of words; In my sheets, a glimpse of night falls,then loneliness.(41)

The self-reflexivity of the line "now this sheet darkens with a black snow of wordsw conveys that the speaker has confronted what writing poetry means: writing is an act of fixing fom, of darkening a blank page with flakes of black dots. The antinomy of "black snowt' also connotes that the speaker is aware of how his words are king used "to snow," "to persuade," "to deceive," or to seduce beautiful things.

At the same time, the image of writing as a "black snow of wordsw also suggests that the speaker is aware of how his blues cannot capture the beauty of his muse in any crystallised form. The yoking of the antonyms "black" and "snowWcancel out any notion of black dots on the page being able to fix meaning or beauty, as snow does melt, into the "steamed blackness .. . .of rain. " Both words and the f emale muse's beauty are, after all, alive; as the speaker States, she is a "living S''--a fluid, open-ended text that cannot be contained. The speaker's reference to the female muse as a "living S, al1 Coltrane or Picasso swervesw carries with it many ambivalences. First we envisualize the curvatures of a woman's body. In the context of the "Axum-Sabaw poems we may think of "S." in the antecedent poem "...with the Single Title of 'Desire'" or we may think of the cover-image of Lush

Dreaas, Blue Exile and another "living Sv which frames the collection. If we are fdliar with Coltrane ' s tune "Violets for Your Furw we may think of the woman in the song who is given "violets" and "springWin the heart of winter by her adoring lover. And, this may lead us to think of the elusiveness of the poem's title and to the following questions: 1s the speaker offering a violet, a "new poem, as

an exchange for his previous offensive lyrics? Or, 1s the violet-poem a decoration that can beautify the wonan ' s life? 1s it a decoration that adds to the "hurtful perfume" of his

lyrics she has been bathed in before? Or, is it both, as the plurality of the words "violets" and "fursw intimate? The reference to "Picasso swervesw also has multiple and paradoxical associations. In the context of this blues-poem we may think of Picasso's own indebtedness to African art forms or to the "negative symbols" of his own Blue Period.

We may also think of the ambiguity that surrounds Picasso's paintings of dismembered and distorted female figures. While these cubistic paintings reflect the artistes attempt to convey how the mind perceives in a fractured sense they still fix the object of the gaze and objectify the female body through the& distortion. The allusions to the female body

as a "living S" and as "Coltrane or Picasso swervesw works then, not only to convey the speaker's awareness of the danger of his objectifying linguistic gaze, but also of his inability to "fixtt her beauty outside a matrix of change and motion* The technical richness of the second stanza also directs our attention to the paradoxical nature of writing. In the second stanza how Clarke skilfully holds the lines together

through the use of the alliterative "S. " The repetition of the sound "sWin words such as "~tranded,~"splendid," "So

Sweet," "sax," "trace," "eyelash," wsonorous," "blackness," "skin, '' "sadness ," "glimpse, " "loneliness ," and so on, transfers our attention to the sight of the female body, the

living "S." On the one hand, the simple repetition of the phoneme /s/ conveys how words, even the smallest unit of sound, work to fix the female muse's beauty to a single form,

an "S." On the other hand, it is also repetition with a difference. By dreaming of oppositional referents for her absent beauty the speaker consciously, and, ironically, displaces any attempts to fix the muse's beauty to a single fonn. As the letter l'St' she is associated with "sweetnessn and with "sadnessWand "loneliness." The sinnerhaint dichotomy directs our attention to how the speaker fixes the muse's beauty, but always in terms of her fluidity, and with an awareness that what he does give shape to is only beauty in a incomplete fom, a "black trace of lightning," *'a glimpse of night. " One of the mst interesting ways in which Clarke moves toward an ethical feminist aesthetic of beauty in "Axum-Sabaw is through the self-reflexive and confessional moments of poems where speakers realize the "violencew of language and direct our attention to the* own impossibility of representing female experience. In "Violets for Your Fursw this reactive moment is best illustrated in the third stanza where the speaker confesses that he is "haunted by the sad/sweetness," by "the harmful perfume," of his blues notes. In this stanza, the speaker cornes into an understanding of how his words represent a "sadness, " how they attempt to fix her beauty in a way that can be "hurtful. " But, it is a "sad sweetnesst* for it is in recognizing their inevitable failure to capture the female muse's beauty that, ironically, the blues speaker of the poem, and Clarke too, opens up the possibility for a more liberating languaging of female beauty . Clarke's keenest insights into the complexity of representing female beauty in "Axum-Saba" emerge in poems such as, "April in Paris," "A Poem with the Single Title of Vesi~e,~~and "Violets for Your Fursw where the poet directs our attention to an otherness of language to the inability of male speakers to fix female beauty in a final form or to the "violence" and "struggle" that characterize our linguistic being. In opening up the idea of language in this way Clarke's poetics demonstrate that a male writer's discourse can ethically represent female beauty and that deconstructive practises themselves can be ethical. By writing poems that deliberately cal1 our attention to the limitations of language and to the impossibility of representing female beauty in single form, Clarke's poetics tell us something about the way we should live: They teach us that as that as

linguistic beings "wedded in language" we must always be critically responsible. In "Axum-Sabaw the pilgrim-pet moves toward an understanding of this "ethical" demand. Bis journey toward an ethical feminist aesthetic of beauty is conveyed in terms of his coming into an understanding of how to language the beauty of both black and white women. Several of the later poems in the "Axum-Saba" section deal with the mernories speakers have of white women, especially, white female

figures in a Quebec landscape. In "En Lutte, " for example, the male speaker is inspired by the "slenderness," "white face," and "Saint Joan of Arc" shape of his politically engaged lover: "1 dream of making poems from bread and roses,/ Holding her small white fists that pound tables (47). The female muse in this poem is a much more complex subject. She is celebrated not just for her physical desirability, that we witnessed so often in Saltwater Spirituals and Deeper Blues, but also for her intelligence and for being critically aware of the speaker's "lack of discipline." But much of what we cari infer about Clarke's visioning of the female figure in "En Luttew is based on its contextualization within the "Ax1111[~-Saba"section. "En Luttew follows such pieces as, "April in Paris" and "Violets for Your Furs." We read the poem with an understanding then that the pilgrim-poet, at this point in his voyage, has relinquished any sense of his words being able to control or fix female beauty.

"To Say, "1 love you,"" the concluding poem of nAxum-Saba,w also conveys the sense that the pilgrim-pet has "corne intow a new understanding of how to speak, of how to

language "lovel1 or beauty ethically:

To Say, "1 love you," "je t 'aimew-- your white thigh chafing my brown in our beautiful sleep and lovetoil, the taking and giving, your mouth on mine--

a O burnis hing, dull, usual words; French and English gleam with fresh meaning: leaf-sif ted light soleils, shados, our bared love. "To Say, "1 love you" reflects a pilgrim-poet who has reconstructed his masculinity, who has learnt that beauty is not an act of controlling or fixing a subject, but rather a "taking and giving," a process of "toilingwwith words of "sifting" patriarchal leanings from old aesthetic traditions and of "burnishingw "du11 usual words" into "fresh new nieanings ." Like "En Lutte" and other Quebec poems, "To Say, "1 love

youw'@ deals with the beauty of a white female muse. This movement toward the beauty of white female figures in the later poems of "Axum-Saba" has multiple effects. On one hand, it emphasizes the important role women play in blazing new directions toward the beauty of "Africadia," the fourth "state of mind," and the beauty of exile, "the fifth state of "sierra Leonia. " In particulas, it suggests that the process of coming into the beauty of blackness is foremost an issue of gender. For the male poet, the embracement of a black aesthetic involves an act of reconstructing masculinity, of inhabiting a "ferninine" way of looking and becoming. On the other hand, the forgrounding of "gender," rather than "race," in the "Axum-Sabaw poems risks reinscribing a monolithic category of what it means to be "~oman,~or to look in a feminine way. While the pilgrim-pet mes toward an understanding of how traditional aesthetics have placed oppressive restrictions on women, men, and blacks, he does not recognize how white f eminist aesthetics have also been inimical to black women. What the pilgrim-pet's languaging of female beauty conveys, and what Clarke's later work Beatrice Chancy bars witness to, is that there is still space in the "Axum-Sabaw "state of mindW for more visioning and revisioning of ethical feminist aesthetics of beautiful. What the pilgrim-pet's new understanding of how to represent beauty also suggests is that Clarke's journey toward ethical feminist aesthetics not only involves acts of deconstnicting racist and sexist aesthetics of the beautiful, but also acts of reconstructing feminist aesthetics. "Laquage," as Clarke States, and as his poetry demonstrates, is "a two-edged sword;" the hand that nounds, for Clarke, can also be a hand that heals. It is this healing, or the reconstructing of a gendered hierarchy of beauty, that is my primary concern of my next chapter on "X's" and "Shelley'sw epic-voyages to the "New Eden" of Whylah Falls. Chapter 2

De/Reconstructing a Gendered Hietarchy of Beauty in the "New Edenw of Whylah Falls

Nature. ..on her bestowed Too much of ornament, in outward show Elaborate, or inward less exact. For well 1 understand in the prime end Of nature her the inferior, in the mind And inward faculties, which most excel, In outward also her resembling less His image who made both, and less expressing The character of that dominion given O'er other creatures; yet when 1 approach Her loveliness, so absolute she seems And in herself complete, so well to know Her own, that what she wills to do or Say, Seems wisest, virtuousest, discreetest, best, Al1. higher . . knowledge. . . in .her . presence. . .f alls . . Authority and Reason on het wait As one intended first, not after made.... John Milton, Paradise Lost , Adam, 8.534-536

The portrait of Eve in genesis accounts is rather controversial and contradictory. Patriarchal readings of the creation story portray Eve in te- of female deficiency. She is associated with nature and with life-giving forces only insofar as it is her "materna1 dutyMor remuneration for originating the Fall of humanity and of language; she is also allied with beauty and perfection, but only as a 88beautiful evilw as it is her "deadly delights" that ensnare the righteous Adam (Phillips 36). In other, more humanitarian portraits, such as that we find in Milton's Paradise Lost, the mother of creation is represented as a complex character and celebrated, as Adam suggests, for her "higher knowledge" and "Authority and ReaSOn. '' Indebted to Milton, and to a matriarchal African essence, Clarke adds his voice to this more egalitarian or ethical tradition of visioning Eve by of fering an alternative creation account in Whylah Falls-an account that challenges oppressive representations of women

and demonstrates, as we have seen in Chapter One, just how closely issues of gender are linked to those of race in Clarke's poetics. Wnylaiz Falls is divided into seven books-replete with a prefacing Miltonic "Argument," as well as, lyrical verses, prose-poems, photographs, recipes, love letters, songs and newspaper clippings-which narrate the daily epic battles of racial, gender and class oppression Africadians face as they journey toward the "New Edenw (114) of Whylah Falls. The lyric-narrative-dramatic sequence of the epic form allows Clarke to explore the complexity of individuals in greater depth than we witnessed in some of his earlier lyrics from

Saltwater Spirituals and Deeper Blues. As well, the social

nature of the drama aids Clarke in his efforts to be "a sort of communal voice for the things that have happened in the [Africadian] coxnmunity" (Bortolotti 20). Moreover, the epic form also assists Clarke in uniting the beauty of ethics and aesthetics . For Clarke, like his predecessor Milton, multivocality, linguistic ambiguity, the interplay of voices and the vpangenericw23nature of the text, encourage active critical interpretation and political engagements and are designed to involve the reader in the poetic composition-that is, they are intended to make us conscious of our tlethicalwresponsibility. Though Clarke is not original in offering a "heteroglossicw25epic that gives a voice to Eve and incites critical and political readings in extra-literary contexts, his revised account of the creation story is unique in that it interweaves biblical and Miltonic intonations with the matriarchal African, Afro-American, and Africadian traditions. Clarke ' s narrative of the genesis story reconstructs a gendered hierarchy of beauty that privileges the female figurem2' In a Clarkean aesthetic of the beautiful, an "edenic" community is one that celebrates a Verninine" response to beauty, that is, a beauty of process over product: it is a beauty that the poet associates with a black essence, a beauty that calls attention to our linguistic being and demands a critical recognition not only of the "violencew of words, but also an understanding of how laquage can be redeemed. In Clarke's alternative genesis account, the fa11 of language and of humanity is equated with the male-poet

Xavier's (Adam's) attempts to "fixW the beautiful, female muse, Shelley (Eve), as a passive, "feminized" "object" of his authoritarian and "masculinizedm linguistic "gaze." In "New Eden" sin is prevented by ethical thinking, that is, by a self-awareness that language is a process and, thereby, can always withstand interrogation; edenic beauty, then, begins with self-consciousness of wresponsibility" which corresponds, for "X," with an awareness that "woman" as a category cannot be fixed. For the female pet Shelley, a self-awareness of the edenic beauty of process formulates into a critical understanding of how the disruptive dimensions of words can always subvert the patriarchal symbolic order; it also translates into a recognition that language, as bel1 hooks States, can also be a place "to recover ourselves, to reconcile, to reunite, [and] to renew" (Yearning 146). In the epic ' s concluding poem, "Envoy, " Shelley conveys this message of faith:

X and 1 ramble in the wet To return home, smelling of rain. We understand death and life now-- How Beauty honeys bitter pain. ( 153 )

Like the pilgrim-poet of Lush Dreams, Blue Exile, Shelley and

X voyage toward an understanding of their ethical responsibility as linguistic beings and toward a "secret strengthw (59) or knowledge of how language can hold a beauty that "honeys" its "bitter pain." Their similar, yet different, epic journeys to a "New Eden," serve the purpose of exemplifying how an ethical feminist aesthetic, for Clarke, demands a critical awareness of the double-edged nature of language . In Part One of this chapter 1 analyze the interrelated discourses of beauty, gender inversion, and linguistic

anarchy as they are represented by Shelley ' s and X ' s different States of fallenness in the fîrst book of "The Adoration of Shelley. " As we have seen in the previous chapter, Clarke's acute awareness of the complexities of offering a salvific philosophy of female beauty is evident in the manner by which he interrogates the traditional, lustful muse-quest of the male-poet. 1 begin my discussion by outlining how X constructs a gendered hierarchy of beauty that privileges the authority of his objectifying linguistic gaze; thereafter, 1 explore how Clarke, through the interplay of voices and through direct addresses to the reader, undermines X's Adamic voice in ways that liberate the matriarchal muse of Eve and in ways that draw attention to our own ethical responsibility as linguistic beings.

Like Milton's Paradise Lost, the narrative of Whylah

Falls opens in medias res. Book One presents X and Shelley in the middle of linguistic exchange, specifically, a debate over the "proper" poetic use of words. Without the critical-reading skills needed to engage in a productive self-examination of his ethical being, X "sinsW in Book One by constructing a gendered hierarchy of beauty that authorizes the wviolence" of his linguistic gaze. The male-poet's misguided quest for a liberating aesthetic is one that engenders beauty by positing a cure for his own exile in an objectified and disempowered feminized body /landscape . Engendering beauty as feminine, X, in "How Exile Melts to One Hundred Roses," suggests that the remedy for his pain lies with his ability to possess beauty itself, his "Sweets"

(23), Shelley. In this poem, as in many others, X uses of the metaphor of the "Sixhiboux riverw to describe the "erotic waysw (29) he dreams about Shelley's body. It is X 's "Hunger" and "thirstw to "shake [and] touch" her "house," which "slides down Mount Eulah," that "warms" or, as the title suggests, "MeltsWhis exile into something beautiful, into

"One Hundred Rosesw (10). X's conflation of the image of the female body with the Sixhiboux river not only reinscribes al1 of the gender stereotypes that associate women with nature, but it also does much more damage by implying that the female body is an object the male-poet can survey and possess.

X's philosophy that the beauty of the female body/ landscape holds the balm for his suifering is reinforced in "Each Moment is Magnificent." What is most striking about this prose-poem is the manner in which it draws our attention to the difference between Shelley's and the Sixhiboux' s beauty of process and X's selfish focus of beauty as a means to an "endm of his own pain (30):

I've thought of the Sixhiboux in those erotic ways, dreanrt it as midnight-thick, voluptuous , folding-like a million moths, furry with a dry raininess-over one. No matter where you are in Sunflower County, you can hear it pooling, milling in a rainstom, or thundering over a hapless tom. Even now, 1 can hear its shining roar pouring over Shelley's house, polishing the roses that nod, àrunken, or spring-petalled crude-from earth. (29

X 's use of the verbal adjectives "folding," wpooling,w

to describe the river conveys the sense of continuity-that is, they celebrate the notion of a tradition of process and change. Eowever, in contrast to this celebration of process, the fourth paragraph of this prose-poem illustrates how X constructs a hierarchy of beauty which valorizes the female body only in terms of how it can offer the male-poet an end to his own pain and, ixonically, release him from such continuity. With Shelley absent, X exclaims, "My pain will never end unless 1 can sleep beside my love" and "pluck the

ripe moon" (30). Here, as throughout book one, the Adamic voice of X attempts to dominate "womanW through its penetrating linguistic gaze and to reduce the female muse to an object of male desire.

In book one, X's metaphors of the female body as a text direct our attention to how language is a "defective devicew (Moynagh 75) which can be used against wornen. In "The River 55

Pilgrim: A Letter, " and in "Springtime and the Living," X employs metaphors such as "scrolls of deep water," (14) and "a gold leaf" or "illuminated scrolls" (19) to convey the

"lush, beautiful /MysteqV1 ( 14) of Shelley ' s body. These

images elucidate how X sees his female muse as a scroll, a blank text, he can insctibe with meaning. klthough, in each poem, X recognizes that Shelley remains a "mystery" he cannot "straightenw (14) or a silence (20) that leaves him

"Dumbfounded" ( 19 ) , he does not consider the ethics of his own languaging of Shelley's beauty. Instead, X persistently visions the female body as a text he can manage or control with his linguistic gaze.

That X's misguided philosophy of beauty also attempts to construct a hierarchy which privileges his own poetic voice over Shelley's is illustrated in "The River Pilgrim: A Letter," an "unabashed plagiarismm of Ezra Pound's "The River

Merchant's Wife: A Letter. n27 In this poem, X' s masculine authoritative voice ventriloquizes: it reconstitutes and at once disempowers the beauty and poetic voice of Shelley even as it attempts to represent the inspiring muse. In the letter-poem, X draws a distinct division between nature and culture, between Shelley's "crooked poems," her preference for some "milljerk's dumb, unlettered love," and her innocence, and his own "postcard odes," his preference for "pilfered" (13) lettered verse, and his experience of pain (14). In each case, X privileges his own position. Moreover,

X misinterprets Shelley's resistance to his apple-blossom poems and her "Mysteryw by iaplying that she is somehow ignorant of, or "innocent" to, his world of "sad tired feelings " ( 14) . Furthenuore, in considering the contextuality of the poem and the intertextuality of the epic, X's use of the word "crooked," in reference to

Shelley's poetry, becomes loaded with meaning. X's verbal gesture mimics the acts of Milton's fallen Satan and Adam who bath distort and objectify Eve by reducing her to "a

Rib/Crooked by nature. w28 l'The River Pilgrim: A Letter, " then,

illustrates just how easily X, in his fallen state, Van turn/One truth into another or even/Against itself." In the self-reflexive prose-poern, "Springtime and the Living, " X1s belief that his "lovint lyrics" (20) have the power to control his muse is evident in his clah that he must craft several "invisible prayers just to persuade

Shelley to come out of her door" (20-1). In this poem, X denies Shelley any agency of her own. Even her act of emerging from her room is seen by X to result directly from the power of his "invisible prayers." Moreover, by claiming, "1 fear that Shelley'll ... bar me as a lunatic when Itm just a Romantic fool in the wrong century for adorationw (20 ) X attempts to justify his own quest and, once again, risks misinterpreting Shelley's resistance. By not critically examinhg his own objectifying lyrics, X erases any responsibility he has for his own fall, or for his failure to dialogize with Shelley and, instead, implies that their absence of conversation results from Shelley's, and from society's, lack of appreciation for the "elegant verse" (12) he cherishes.

The extent to which X attempts to manage and control his female muse through his words is perhaps best illustrated by the rhetorical strategy he adopts in "The Lover's Argument with Shelley." Attempting to persuade Shelley to join him in catching "some troutw and "some sleepw at the "bright

Sixhiboux," X compares and contrasts himself to Rafael Rivers (15), the mil1 worker, whose "unlettered lovew (14) Shelley once preferred. In the second stanza, X concludes his narration of Rafael's fatal accident by stating:

,,.New love's lies. But, Shelley, My love is plain; 1 've stripped bark f rom pencils , And stoked your stove with pamphlets and old news. (25)

Here, X, rather cunningly, plays on the meanings of the word "liesw in order to suggest to Shelley that his love is different from any false promises of the Rafael who now

"lieswin the earth. X also attempts to assure Shelley of the truth of his love by adopting the metaphor of a papermill worker. In his affirmation, T've stripped bark from pencils" X suggests that his ornate love poems are, in fact, simple and "plain" because he is a millworker, like Rafael, "stripping bark" and processing paper in his acts of crafting

"lovîn ' iyrics ." "The Lover ' s Argument. .. " aptly illustrates, as X, himself, confesses in "Bee's Wings," that "there's nothing [this male-pet] will not force language/To dot' (18) in order to possess his female muse.

X's relationship to language in book one reveals just how much the pet has "fallen" into the symbolic order or has internalized patriarchal noms of representing the female

muse. In "Blank Sonnetw X lacks a critical awareness of what

Gates indentifies as the "trickeryWof "signifyin(g)" or what Derrida refers to as the "intersubjective violence" of "writing." Instead of being humble, and confronting how his acts of crafting mlovinwlyrics" are inevitably violent processes of giving shape and form (a sonnet) to female beauty, X, in a state of wallowing ungratified male-desire, yearns for "the slow, sure collapse of language/Washed out by alcohol" ( 27 ) . That is , rather than interrogating his own offerings of wapple-blossomwpoems or instead of saying "If 1 wun't read my own lyrics critically 1'11 fall," X asserts, "If you [Shelley] won't read" my "measured, cadenced verse" "1'11 fallwinto the oblivion of drunkenness or into "the white seatl of "this pagew -- "the white reverse/ That cancels the blackness of each imaget' (27). X's recognition that the beauty of his verse is dependent upon the reader who participates in the act of making meaning, of colouring the "blankW "page of snow," not only directs attention to our own ethical responsibility as readers, but it also elucidates how

X transfers his own accountability for the "fall" ont0 Eve.

Here, as in other poems of book one, X does not answer to the ethical demand of language; his quest for the female muse is ultimately a blind quest about gratifying his own desire, about immortalizing or saving his own beautiful lyrics from dissolution. Clarke's revision of the fa11 of language and of humanity challenges the patriarchal reading that charges Eve for the original sin by suggesting that it is the oppressive voyeurism of the gendered hierarchy of beauty X constructs, and not the apparent "Elabmate" and "outward showw of women, that is responsible for the fall. That Clarke's rendition of the genesis account inverts the conventional authority of

Adam and Eve and directs our attention away f rom women as the source of sin and toward the masculine sphere is evident in the short lyric "Solitude":

A gull drops to kiss its dark, watery double, soars again alone. (31)

This poem follows the many self-absorbent and narcissistic

"lovin' lyrics" of X in book one. Clearly, Clarke identifies

X as the "gull." By associating X (Adam) with narcissistic and vain acts traditionally allotted to wmen in patriarchal renditions of the genesis account, Clarke forces us to reconsider the "originw of the fa11 of language and of humanity. Instead of Milton's Eve gazing narcissisticly at

herself in the "watery gleam" (4.461) the "lovinl lyricsm X crafts in Book One suggest that he is a more likely candidate for any unhealthy inward-gazing. For Clarke, the demand to be "ethically responsible" is dependent upon the recognition of a distance separating the self from the other. By making ourselves conscious of this distance we become aware of the "violencew of our linguistic gaze, of the "otherWthat we always exclude. What we see in book one is how narcissism projects an image, a "double," that prevents X from thinking ethically about his linguistic being. Although the male poet recognizes the necessity to mite against racist aesthetics of the beautiful (24), he is not conscious of how his attempt to represent female beauty risks king a quest for the self--a quest which celebrates the male-poet's linguistic power, agency and desire. In his revision of the Genesis account Clarke, then, suggests the fa11 of humanity coincides with the fa11 of language and is depicted by the male-pet's inability to relinquish the sense that his wapple-blossom~poems can "fix" the category of "wornan." Moreover, Clarke's epic conveys the sense that we must be responsible readers and critics for the fa11 can occur over and over again each the we adopt a "masculine" response to language. Recasting the role of Eve, Clarke, in book one, offers a subversive reading of the traditional authority of the male-pet's linguistic gaze which he translates into an epic battle over whether language or any aesthetic of female beauty can ever be ethical or can ever represent the muse's beauty in non-objectifying and authoritarian manner. In "To

X, " of the first book, "The Student ' s Tale, and "The Wisdom of Shelleyw Clarke draws a portrait of Eve which is anything but the vain and narcissistic woman we find in other versions

of the genesis story. In contrast to X, Shelley has the ability to read flattering words and gestures critically. In fact, Shelley is so distrustful of language that in book one she risks advocating some form of linguistic anarchy. Although Clarke wants us to see that Shelley is also a "studentw in the garden learning how to find beauty and love

again, since death of Rafael, she speaks, as Richard Lemm

notes, with "a succinctness , focus, and self ~awarenessthat X

has yet to a~hieve."~~In the portrait of "New Eden" book one

offers, it is Shelley's voice of reason that censors X's "Deluded... quixotic romanticism" (17) and her wisdom that engages us as readers to think ethically about our linguistic being . "To X" clearly distinguishes between the linguistic rape X's poetry attempts by 'forcing language' to do what it will to make him and his female muse "one" (18) and Shelley's verse that resists such penetration. In the letter-poem, written in response to the news of X's return to Whylah

Falls, Shelley tells X that she places her faith in the "chastity of numbersw because "Numbers reveal truth. Words always have something to hide" (15). klthough it is true that Shelley also has something to hide, her play with multiples and products of multiples of nine that always miraculously add up to the same sum direct our attention to the difficulty of positing a similar correlation between word and meaning. By insisting that "Wosds have something to hide," Shelley leads us to think about the violence of our own linguistic being and encourages us to be critical readers . "The Student's Talew and "The Wisdom of Shelleyw also illustrates Shelley's and Clarke's legitimate concerns with how language "gets used by those in power to disenfranchise

~thers."~' In "The Student's Tale" Shelley calls X's offerings of roses and apple blossoms into question by implying that neither language nor love remain fixed. Shelley's reference to Uncle Cle ' s act of murdering his pregnant wife and her play on the assonance and consonance of the words "l'amourw and "la mort" (26) imply that the only truth of love, or of language, is its impermanence, its slipperiness. In "The Wisdom of Shelley" the female poet,

"Eve," undermines X's authority by sternly refusing the "appleW--his "words" and "roses." Asserting that tfRoses/got thorns/And words/do lie" (28) Shelley conveys an acute awareness of how we must read language and gestures critically . Shelley's mistrust of words is also echoed in the form of the "crooked poems" she writes. In contrast to the ornateness, excessiveness, and the emphasis of visual and sensory qualities that characterize X's "lovin' lyrics" Shelley's verse is marked by the sparsity of words, by its brevity, and its celebration of female reason and wisdom.

The inclusion of her poetic voice critiques any attempts by X to construct a gendered hierarchy of beauty that valorizes the female body/landscape as a passive, and powerless object of the male-poet's gaze. In book one, Clarke, then, does more than merely reproduce a classical patriarchal portrait of Eve or philosophy of beauty in his account of X's quest: he offers a subversive reading of the traditional authority of the male-poet's gaze by directing attention to our "traitor language" which can easily "turn/One truth into another ." As in the tradition of Afro-American railroad blues, what we find running throughout the epic's revision of Eden is the motif of a train which emphasizes the notion of characters king in process, of journeying both in the sense of a real physical geographical distance and in terms of an imagined space-a more soulful and interna1 epic voyage to their Af ricadian, Af ro-American, or African roots .31 In Wnylaf~Falls, it is only through such interna1 epic voyages that characters become truly the* own creators and discover a liberating eden within the& Africadian essence. Similarly, it is also through our voyages, through our own reading processes, that we discover how Africadia is edenic and engage in the poetic composition. Whylah Falls, 1 suggest, not only reflects the Africadian sense of communality, circularity, and collective telling, but it also creates such discursive practises and thereby enacts its own philosophy of beauty . That Clarke's epic is designed to involve the reader in the process of the voyage is evident in the self-reflexive poem "To the Reader." This short lyrical poem not only directly addresses us with its title, but it also conflates the distance between the author, the reader, and the text by suggesting al1 three are involved in the process of creation:

He sang al1 night under the moon For dreamers yet to love, who might Find his lyrics some star-dark night, And be themselves singer or sung. (32)

The readers of the poem are the "dreamersw who, finding the songwriter's "lyrics," may themselves become either the "singer," or the text--the "sung." By suggesting that they may become the "singers," the speaker directs attention to our own ethical responsibility as readers/creators. As well, the poem also suggests that we are engaged, as readers, in the continuity of a tradition of singing and thereby we also become the "sung." What "To The mader" intimates is the epic's resonating philosophy of an edenic beauty as a "beauty of process." In constructing Whylah Falls, Clarke, then, composed a self-conscious text that conveys the beauty of ethics-a sense of the word, of the pet, and of us, as readers, al1

being in process. Through the interplay of X's and Shelley's voices, and through the direct addresses to the readers, book one draws attention to our ethical responsibility as linguistic beings. The self-absorbed nature of X's "lovin' lyrics" testifies to the legitimate distrust disenfranchised peoples may feel from the idea of language. But, while the verbal exchange between X and Shelley deconstructs the authority of the male-poet's linguistic gaze and elucidates the violence of our textual being, Book One does not reveal that a union between X and Shelley is beyond hope.

In the first book of "The Adoration of Shelley," X is given many rich and sonorous lines which indicate that the male-poet has, as Clarke States, "the democratic ability to appreciate beauty and nurture a regard for it within [himlself' (Workman 10). For example, in "The River Pilgrim:

A Letter," the poet's use of the device of synaesthesia in reference to the garden flutes---the "E flats of lilacswand the "G sharps of liliesw(14)--attests to the rich sensuality of X's and of Clarke's verse. But what this mixing of sight, sound, and smell draws attention to is just how much X's philosophy of beauty often privileges visual and sensory qualities at the expense of rational ones. X's journey toward "New Eden," then, is characterized by the necessity to regard beauty not only in sensual terms, but also to think ethically about his aesthetics, about his languaging of female beauty.

In contrat to the rich sensuality of X's lines, the emphasis Shelley places on reason, and her distrust of words, suggests that the female-poet needs to learn how to feel and how to see beauty in things again. Unlike the linguistic anarchy Shelley advocates in Book One, Clarke does not regard the absence of "the Wordw or the recognition of the violence of our linguistic being as a form of nihilism. For Clarke, words do man: Laquage may be double-edged or inevitably fallen, but "it is al1 we have." Shelley's journey toward "New Edenw involves a "coming into" this understanding. "Rose Vinegar" is one prose-poem of book one that foreshadows how language, despite its violence, can also be a place "to recover ourselves, to reconcile, to reunite, [and] to renewN (Yearning 146). In "Rose-Vinegarw Shelley is able to challenge the authority of X's wmasculinewpoetry by distilling the ornate "Rosew--a symbol or superficial convention of the male-poetls desire and of beauty in X's learned courtly love traditions-into a more useful "Vinegar." In Lacanian terms, distilling is an act of disrupting the symbolic osder, of subverting the objectifying "rose-poems" or gaze of the male-pet. The rose vinegar recipe Shelley offers is a metaphor of Clarke's philosophy of edenic beauty. It is a means of reworking the oppressor's tools, of redeemîng language, and of celebrating a "feminine" response that gives the beautified "objectW of the gaze a chance to speak. Book One not only conveys that both X and Shelley have some work to do in Acadia before they can reclaim a "paradise ~ithîn")~, but it also suggests that a much more liberating feminist aesthetic of beauty is possible. It is this reconstruction of an ethical gendered hierarchy of beauty that informs the second part of this paper.

Book Two, The Trial of Saul, " deals with the physical and sexual abuse Cora, the mother of Shelley, Amarantha, Selah, Missy, Othello, and Pushkin, receives from the "Mean-minded Saul Clemencew and from her Uncle (42). As a silent observer voyaging toward "New Eden," X, in Book Two, bears witness to the darker side of human relationships. The testimony of Cora deflates some of X's romantic illusions of love and helps him to recognize the abuse the black female subject receives not only from the dominant white authority, but also from the subdominant, black, patriarchal order.

Book Three, "The Witness of Selah," testifies to X's wcoming intowan understanding of the "secret strengthw (59) of an African matriarchal essence and to the violence of his own languaging of female beauty . At the opening of "The Witness of Selah," X begins a dif ferent kind of yearning for the female muse, one that is "focused on sensual pleasurew (Wells 14) and one that also reflects the "double-voicedness" of his verse. In the absence of Shelley, X's new muse is her sister Selah, with whom he has an affair. Instead of trying to win the trust and love of the female muse with the authority and beauty of his

"letteredWlyrics, X, as he asserts in "King Bee Blues," is more preoccupied with gratifying his own sensual pleasure:

I'm an 01' king bee, honey, Buzzin' from flower to flower. I1rn an 01' king bee, sweets, Hummin' from f lower to flower. Women got good pollen; I get some every hour. There's Lily of the valley And sweet honeysuckle Rose too; There's Lily in the valley And sweet honeysuckle Rose too. And there's pretty black-eyed Susan, Perfect as the night is blue. You don't have to trust A single, black word 1 Say. You don't have to trust A single, black word I Say. But don't be surprised If 1 sting your flower today. On one hand, "King Bee Bluesw evinces how X is moving toward an appreciation of a black aesthetic. The male-poet's nurturing of a regard for black beauty is illustrated in the poem through the treatnaent of the symbolic rose. Kere, the

rose which was associated with the beauty of Xts "measured, cadenced versew (27) in Book One, becomes, in the third book, "merely a woman's name, one amng many flowers--'Lilyl and 'black-eyed Susang--that are available to the king bee" (Wells 15). The placement of the rose in a garden with other flowers of rural or "blackWassociations, reflects, 1

suggest, how X is nurturing a regard for black beauty, and is learning how to fuse elements of "high culturemand of Euro-American literary traditions with the wlocal" and the "everydaynessW and with Africadian culture. X's appreciation of a black aesthetic is also demonstrated in the form of the poem. As Dorothy Wells notes, in her discussion of the sonnet sequence of Whylah Falls, "Significantly there is no sonnet in this section. In its place is a blues lyric in which X sees himself as the ultimate sensual lover, using the metaphor of "king beew

(15)." ~hismale-blues Song conveys how X now thinks of himself as a blues singer. As well, in Book Three, we also bear witness to X's more frequent "drop[ping] [of] the final 'g"' in 'hg' and us[ing] the affirmative 'hem' (148) as in the words "Buzzin'" and "humin'" . That is, we f ind X, in "King Bee Blues," and in other poems, such as, "Bringing It Al1 Back Home," and "To Selah," incorporating the local idioms of blues, jazz, and niral Nova Scotian life to a much greater extent than he did in Book One.

On the other hand, "King Bee Bluesw also illustrates how

X has internalized Western patriarchal traditions that separate ethics from aesthetics. What we find in this blues poem and in other lyrics that appear in the first part of Book Three is the utopian vision of rural or pastoral life, or an emphasis on the sensual beauty of the black female body, without any consideration as to how such idealized representations may be blind and deaf to the concerns of oppressed peoples. As the "king beew we find X, once again, more concerned with fulfilling his own desires, with flying promiscuously from Ylower to flowerw than with thinking ethically about his treatment of the female muse. In a discussion of Saltwater Spirituals and Deeper

Blues, M. Travis Lane notes that, "one of the most interesting ways Clarke loads his forms with significance is through the use of colourw (53). This "loading" of poems with the motif of colour prevails throughout Clarke's work, especially in "The Witness of Selah." The third book of Whylah Falls resonates with the colour of yellow/gold. For example, in "To Selah," X describes his muse as a "butter monwwhose "gemw he can possess (57) and in "100 Proof" he refers to Selah as his wyellow-mouthed honeyw (65). In "Accumulated Wonder1* X refers to the "rural Venusw of Selah as rising "from the gold foliage of the Sixhiboux riverw and as diving again into the "sunflower of river" (62). The colour yellow/gold, as my discussion of "Orange Moonw in the final section of this chapter will help elucidate, is associated with Xts fallen role as the "king bec." It reflects the nature of a blues singer who has nurtured a regard for the beauty of the black female body and for Africadia, but has an appreciation that is highly romanticized and does not conslder the harshness of the landscape or the ethics of representing female beauty. Despite al1 of X's yearning for his "butter mon," Selah Clemence remains a "cornplex flower" (63) who cannot be contained by the male pet. Selah, exemplif ies the dangerous violence of our linguistic being; she is a woman who has been made barren by the fallen nature of "lovin* lyric," who has been %allowedW too many times by the wscalpelswof "Casanova cancert' (67). From his failed attempt to possess his muse in Book Three X moves toward an understanding of his sinful condition and of the fallen nature of his Adamic language. nEcclesiastes" conveys X's "coming intol* an understanding of the complexity of languaging male/female relationships. In this short lyric, X confesses: 1 am tired of gold sunflowers with jade leaves. The Sixhiboux River, almost fainting, Weeps through the dull, deaf hills. Behind al1 words Burns a desert of loneliness. Sunlight Dulls to vulgar gold. Once 1 had believed Selah1s passion would seed sunflowers and yield Skull honey-ineluctable beewsdreams But, al1 is gilt sorrow and gleaming pain; The heavy sunflowers droop, brightness brushes The earth; wisdom is late and death is swn. (66)

Here, Clarke uses the hard "d" alliteration in the stressed words "dull, "deaf, "desert, " "Dulls ," "droop, " and "deatht* to capture the sorrow X feels. Notice also how this poem marks a shift in Book Threels treatment of the colour yellow/gold. X now recognizes the vulgarity of golden light, or of the Golden Age of idealized pastoral In

"Ecclesiastesw X moves beyond the narcissism that characterizes his earlier quests for the female muses of Shelley and Selah. The poet interrogates the violence of his linguistic gaze and is finally beginning to think ethically about his linguistic existence. By this 1 mean X has relinquished the sense of his words being able to fix female beauty; he recognizes that there is an otherness of language, "a desert of loneliness" that burns "Behind al1 words," This

"wisdom is late" for X, but, nevertheless, well heeded.

"Love Letter to An African Womanw best illustrates the significant turn in x's journey toward an ethical aesthetic of female beauty. In this love-letter, X lists a catalogue of Black women from Sheba and the "Nefertiti[,] who brought glory to Egypt," to Portia White, "who enthraled the world with Song," and confesses his own sins to these African women :

1 use you, abuse you, but can't understand why 1 lose you. ...1 want you to obey me. Why won% you? 1 want you to be who 1 think you should be. Why are you so stubborn? To ask such questions is to confess that 1 have lost our history[.] ... African daughter, forgive me my several trespasses . 1 have been so weak, so scaredi...teach me the pride of our blackness, our Negritude; teach me that manhood is not the du& flexing of muscles but the impassioned sharing of love in fighting injustice. (58)

"Love Letter to an African Womanw demonstrates how X is wbreaking the chokehold of patriarchal masculinity" (Yearning

65). The poet's confession reveals that he is now taking responsibility for his fall--an act Clarke deems necessary if one is to inhabit a "New Eden." For Clarke, taking responsibility means answering to the ethical demand of our linguistic being; it involves a crucial understanding of the double-edged nature of language, of the "honey[ing] of bitter pain" that lies at the heart of a Black aesthetic of the beautiful. In "Love Letter to an African Woman," X not only recognizes the "trickeryfWor the "violence," of his own words, but he also realizes that there exists, in the African matriarchal essence, "a language that tells no lies" (59), a language that can be used "to teconcile, to renewt' (hooks) to " join" him with his "lost. ..history," (59). "Love Letter to an African Womanw then illustrates how x is beginning to reconstruct a gendered hierarchy of beauty; a hierarchy that still posits a cure for the male-pet's pain and guilt in the Black Madonna, in her "secret strength" or knowledge of an ethical "ferninine" language that is self-conscious of its process and thereby 'always already' self -articulating a resistance to its own violence. While

Book Three conveys how X makes a significant turn toward a

"New Eden1' the male-pet is by no means at the end of his

journey. As the remainder of this chapter will demonstrate,

X, like Shelley, has to take the responsibility to discover a "New Edenm within the Africadian community and within him-self .

Clarke's narrative of Adam and Ev~in "New Eden," or their voyage toward such an edenic state, is interrupted in the epic, by the inclusion of a whole network of people in similar processes. The effect is that while the epic may draw parallels between X, as Adam, and Shelley, as Eve, we discover that there are potentially numerous Adams and Eves

in the garden. Moreover, we see "New Edenw as an interconnected community where characters are always implicated in each other ' s lives and consequently always changing as they come in contact with others. X, for

example, reflects this sense of intersubjectivity. The epic demonstrates how his identity-formation is dependent on his knowledge of, or contact with other Africadians. whylah Falls provides numerous examples of people being beautiful, of people voyaging toward a "New Edenw of which 1 offer a few. The edenic beauty of process Clarke privileges

is evident in Shelley's act of distilling roses; Cora's cooking and distilling of dandelions into wine; Amarantha's quilting of a blanket to fight "against the world's cold crueltyn (85) and Reverend Langford's gospels of love (134): It is Pushkin's "liqueur literacy" that helps others "to live despite evil" (147) and his, as well as, Pablo's and

Mhello's acts of uncorking apple wine (146) and strumming songs (92-3). For Clarke, edenic beauty is having the fie-, orange spirit to beautify one's life in spite of everything.

To live in such a garden, as the epic demonstrates, requires an understanding of the ethical existence. By this 1 mean, an understanding of one's language and of one's self as Ming in a state of process and, consequently, because neither are fixed, an awareness of the responsibility for constructing a "paradise within." Cora represents the strong matriaschal muse that

Clarke's edenic gendered hierarchy of beauty celebrates. As the title of "How to Live in the Gardenw suggests, this is precisely what Cora does: She teaches her children, and others, how to beautify their lives, how to "spell water into winen (IO), "dust to diamonds [the*] destiny" (116) and "deblackness shinew (127). In "Howto Live in the Gardenw Clarke's rich use of metaphors to convey the wisdom of Cora results in an imagistic prose-poem that complements his philosophy of beauty. In the prose-poem, Clarke uses the metaphor of a gardener to describe Cora's cooking which, as we have seen with ShelleyVsdistilling of roses, is yet another metaphor of how to find edenic beauty by working from within an oppressive system of language and in everyday life. The huge pottage Cora churns is described in terms of opposing metaphors that convey the mixing of both the new and the old and emphasize the notion of process. The pottage is referred to as a "new," "bright" field or as a "rooted," "bonsai tree." The use of the word "rootedw conveys that Cora creates something new from the old, from a recipe, language, or tradition passed on. As well, the yoking of the metaphors of gardening and cooking imply that Cora grows her own nourishing ingredients-that is , she is " responsible for beauty . Moreover, her tastes which are "eccentric, exotic, eclecticw and the references to her "table" as a wconmiunity" and her apple pies which include the "leaves, blossoms, seeds, and barkm and her carrot cake which is made from the "whole carrot" suggests that, in addition to the beauty of process, Cora also embodies the values of collectivity and community we find in a black aesthetic and in Clarke's own philosophy of an edenic beauty. In "The Symposium" Cora preaches to Missy of the abuse woxnen receive at the hands of patriarchy. The advice she gives to her daughter, "life's nothin' but guts, muscle and nerve. Al1 you gotta do is stay black and diew (39) emphasizes the necessity of embracing one ' s Africanhfricadian mots--the fiery spirit that provides the strength to live and the artistry to beautify their lives. In "Selected Proverbs" Cora offers a series of maxims which emphasize process such as "Never mind death. Nothing never endsm and "The orange mn-born child will wanderw (140). Other proverbs such as, "The breast-nursed child howls at oppression," and The bean-fed child darkens early" point to the life and beauty that exist in the act of singing out against oppression. These proverbs suggest that a child who is nourished properly by the milk and protein of "woman's wisdom" will "darken earlier," or find an easier path to the "secret Beauty" (72) of Africadia. Clarke's portrait of Cora draws on the strength and wisdom of the African matriarchal muse and demonstrates that a liberating aesthetic of the beautiful is rooted not only in tradition but also in change. Another example of characters being in "New Eden," or people thinking ethically about bow to language female beauty, is illustrated in Asnarantha's and Pablots marriage of

"pure Beauty" (70). Like X, Pablo is an epic voyager who once sought "Beauty awarded final formw--that is, beauty in the female body of the "ex-Queen Annapolisa, the exotic Cherry

Dove" (73). What he discovers upon his return to Whylah Falls is a "secretw(72) and purer form of "Beauty" of people being in process, people living, gutting fish, sawing pine, picking apples and so forth. Pablo's privileging of a "feminine" response to beauty as process enables him to engage in a much more loving and equal exchange with Amarantha (81). Amarantha is another strong female muse in the epic who takes on the responsibility of beautifying her own life and those of others. In the short lyric, "To Pablo," Amarantha directs our attention to the limits of language by confessing how much she "hatedw "those skinny,/Malnourished poems" in school that professors love (79). In "Quilt" Amarantha not only thinks ethically about her linguistic existence by recognizing an "othernessw of language, a "falling away form words ," but she also of fers her quilting as a richer form of "writingW--a poetry that can subvert the tyranny of the "world ' s cold crueltyw and speak for the disenf ranchised

(85). While some critics may charge Clarke's philosophy of a feminized edenic beauty with reinscribing the stereotypes that associate women with earthy diction and men with

%ntellectualw and "elevated discour~e"~~to do so, 1 suggest, is to risk misreading the "New Eden" Clarke offers. In fact, in doing so, one assumes an essentialist position that privileges the conventional Western notion of "writing" as culture. Clarke certainly does not hold this opinion. Conflating the act of writing with the images of picking roses and apple-blossoms, with gardening, cooking, quilting, distilling wine and vinegar and with singing and strumming blues, Clarke suggests that al1 of these acts exist in wc~lture.wMoreover, as we have witnessed with Amarantha's quilting, al1 of these acts of "writing" have more authority in representing the beauty of Africadia and in subverting the tyranny of a monolithic or objective notion of the written "Word. " Associating edenic beauty with the act of thinking ethically about the otherness of language and with the values of collectivity and process, which are characteristic of the African/Africadian oral tradition and matriaschal culture, Clarke continues to regard the female muse as a source of

inspiration for X and others. But, in Clarke's revision of a feminized Eden, the female muse is "no longer [a] passive

icon, but [a] feminist mentor and partner. w36 1n dismantling

X's construction of a gendered hierarchy of beauty Clarke, then, reinscribes it new ways. The liberating philosophy of edenic beauty that Whylah Falls offers is hierarchical in that it privileges a beauty of process or process itself, and not beauty as a product, or beauty as an object. As such, Clarke's reconstructed hierarchy of beauty articulates a resistance to its own violence and undermines patriarchal readings of the Genesis story that attempt to fix the category of "woman. " By working out of the "whole of his inheritance," that

is, by drawing on the tradition of the Black Madonna and on biblical and Miltonic accounts of the genesis story Clarke

offers a fresh revision of Eve in his epic. X's voyage toward a more liberating way of representing female beauty demands the relinquishing of the narcissistic desire that characterizes the patriarchal symbolic order. This is how Clarke dif fers slightly from Milton. While Milton, as Dianne McColley argues in "Eve and the Arts of Eden," associates Eve with a great many of the creative acts that he participated in himself, other feminist critics maintain that his representation of the female character is rather limited. For example, Christina Froula and Janet Halley argue for an antifeminist reading of Eve's story by demonstrating how Evers actions are compelled by vain desire in which she is forced to suppress her own "indentityN to the dominating Miltonic voice (Froula 32 9, Halley 248 ) . Distinguishing between the "Heavenly Musew and the pagan female muses of Uranus and Calliope, Elizabeth Sauer claims that Milton constructs a hierarchy of discourse that privileges the

"divine paternal voicew over the female muses (104). As well, Eve's awareness of various perspectives and of her own subjectivity, Sauer maintains, corresponds with her entry into the symbolic order (Sauer 99). It is only upon being

called by the paternal voice of God and Adam that Eve acquires language and an understanding of her inferior position in the chah of being Milton essentializes (Sauer 99 ) . Indebted to an African, matriarchal, tradition, Clarke's alternative genesis story avoids much of the controversy that informs contemporary debates about Milton's treaant of the feminine principle in Paradise Lost. For Clarke, breaking free of the narcissistic lustful muse-quest,

or recognizing the othernesses of language, does not require being called by a paternal voice into the symbolic order. Instead, Clarke, more readily than his predecessor Milton, indentifies the epic voyage as an embarassement of a feminine way of looking and becoming as the exile's return to a materna1 sphere .

Book Seven, the second book in the collection titled, "The Adoration of Shelley," exemplifies how Clarke's movement toward an ethical feminist aesthetic involves both deconstructive and reconstructive interpretive acts . The sepetition of the title here not only directs our attention to how "X" is learning "to adore" his female muse in new ways, but it also testifies to how Shelley is learning "to adorem--that is, learning to see the beauty of the ethical nature of Our existence. "The Ar:gumentWof the last book places Shelley within a garden both literally and figurativeïy. Resembling Milton's "Eternal Spring," in Book Four of Paradise Lost, and Cora's copper pot/field of Book Two of Whylah Falls, the garden Shelley cultivates reflects the beauty of eternal process. What Clarke's depiction of the garden in "The Argument" directs our attention to is how much "Eden" is somthing we are responsible for constructing: Shelley must till the soil, masure the plot, and plant the trees and flowers. Clarke's application of an ecological metaphor is very effective. Gardening offers statements of unity in process, of "the new becoming the oldw and the "old becoming the newn ( 138 ) . Moreover, the gardening metaphor has been used in Clarke ' s work, and in literary traditions, to represent the interrelated acts of poetic creation, criticism, and interpretation." In the context of Book Seven and the epic, Shelley's gardening becomes a metaphor for her acts of poetic creation and for her growing awareness of her ethical tesponsibility. 'lAbsolutionw best illustrates how Shelley has "corne intom an understanding of how to think ethically about her linguistic being. Shelley's assertion that: "Every word, every word, /is a lie. But sometimes the lie/ tells the truthw (150) conveys Clarke's message that there is a tmth in fiction, in the recognition of our textual being and in the responsibilities that follow such a realization. For the female pet "thinking ethically" involves the understanding that "our words are not without meaning" (hooks 146) that there is an otherness to the patriarchal symbolic order--an otherness that can speak for the black female subject. Shelley's new trust in language is conveyed in "Absolutionw through the image of fruit. The female poet States that she is "dreaming of cherries, in July, plentiful and free to all" (150). In the context of the epic, which uses metaphors of orchard blossoms and fruit to describe the poetic process, we can read Shelley*~affirmation as an awareness that language is not a fixed patriarchal system, but a process which can be utilized or distilled into a finer wine or truth. Book Seven reveals that Shelley has certainly done some work in the garden. The female poet gains the knowledge of a beauty of process and thereby a recognition of her "responsibility"

(151) for constructing an Eden in which she can live.

Book Seven illustrates that X has also done some work in the garden. At the book's opening we find that the male-poet

is still in his home tom "States ~ounty."~~"The Argument" of Book Seven rather significantly notes that X is "self-exiledN--that is, he has taken on the responsibility of returning to the matriarcha1 essence of his Africadian heritage. "States County," as the later poem "In States County" suggests, does not just refer to a real physical place; it also implies an imagined community, "an intellectual constructw or "a green space where the free self can livew (Moynagh 77 ) . What the pem, "In States County, " elucidates is how Clarke's poetics rather strategically envision the journey toward an ethical feminist aesthetic of beauty as an act of freeing oneself from the chahs of the symbolic order and as a return to a "native," matriarchal sphere, to "Eden ' s lost, original tongue" ( 141 ) . As we have witnessed thus far, X's journey toward "New Edenw is predicated on the notion that he must recognize the "violence" of writing and relinquish any sense that his words can fix the female muse. Yet, as I have attempted to illustrate in the second part of this chapter, Clarke's and

X's voyage toward an ethical feminist aesthetic of beauty also involves the reconstructive act of finding new ways in which ethical nature of language can teach us something about 'how to live in the garden'. What is most striking about "In States Countyw is the marner in which it deals with the difficult task of representing this paradox, of capturing and fixing on the page the fluid beauty of language and of our ethical being.

"In States County" suggests that we can "redeem languagew if we think about it ethically, that is, if we see language as being a "two-edged sword." In the poem, "States Countyv is referred to as a place where children are "At liberty, with a native grammar, / Reading the black crow words in poems of fog," and where they speak "with the oratory of bees/And the cadence of jays." It is a place where " 'LoveF is spelled with plucked, twisted daffodils" and "'Death'.. with rough, wood xfs that sign/Its transcendence." The fluidity and edenic beauty of language is conveyed through the many metaphors that describe the act of speaking as a multivocal chorus of bees, jays, crows or crickets or which associate writing with processes of nature rather than the conventional construct of "culture." These metaphors of a natural, "native," "granimar" lead us to think of the ethical beauty of language, of how it can be a place "to reconcile" and "to renew." Yet these images are also presented to us in the form of a sonnet--a form which Clarke purposefully uses to remind us that the reconstruction of "Eden's lost, original tangue" is still a violent form of fixing words on the page.

"Orange Moon" conveys just how fax X has journeyed from his excessive, ornate, sexist, and narcissistic "lovinf lyricswof Books One and Three. The understanding the male-pet has grown into is conveyed in this poem through its "loadedw use of colour:

Under the orange moon of Whylah Falls, Missy strums her guitar as if she stirs a river. Shelley descends Mount Eulah and plucks some apple blossoms. Every act must reveal Beauty. Hence, under the orange moon of Whylah Falls, 1 am writing this poem.

Hidden in Coca's "Selected Proverbsw and in other letters and songs of Whylah Falls are references to the colour orange. This colour is a very significant in Clarke's poetic. As 1 mentioned in my discussion of Book Three, yellow is used by Clarke to represent the poetwsnaive idealization of pastoral life. In contrast, orange is used by the pet to represent the fiery spirit of an African essence. Orange signifies the fusion of a "messianic" view of the world as it ought to be, in al1 its "goldenw glory and beauty, and an "apocalyptic" view of the world as it is, with al1 its pain, its suffering or its "blo~d."~~For Clarke, orange is an ethical colour. It represents a beauty rooted in an understanding of the wviolencew of our textual being and a comprehension of how language can be redeemed, and, thus, how we are responsible

for beautifying our lives, for "honey[ing] bitter pain." X's claim that "Every act must reveal Beauty./Hence, under the orange moon of whylah Falls/I am writing this poem" (152) is an affirmation of his ethical responsibility. In his revision of the genesis story, Clarke moves toward the notion of "New Edenw not as the physical space of Whylah Falls, but as a state of being, as an ethical fdnist response to beauty, as an African/Africadian matriarcha1

essence, or as a "paradise within." "New Eden" is the pet's philosophy of edenic beauty as a beauty of process . Whylah Falls in its content, form, and style suggests that by embracing the "proper" "femin-inew response to laquage or the essence of one's blackness, an Africadian/poet has the power to resist oppression, to subvert the patriarchal symbolic order. The "New Edenw Clarke presents in the epic is politically charged. The voices he inscribes in the poems are of people "honeying bitter pain," people in the processes of subverting hegemony, people taking on the ethical responsibility of making themselves beautiful and thus constructing a "New Edenw for themselves. From this perspective, Whylah Falls ' s injunction to be "responsiblew for beauty is less of an aesthetic escape to an eden, or a retreat to a 9nessianict' view of the "world as it ought to bew as it is an embracement of both wrevolutionaryw and "revelationaryw visions. The female muse of Whylah Falls is celebrated for her understanding of "painw and for her ability to "honeyW its bittetness, to uplift the spirits of her race. But, for the most part, the female muse's agency is limited to positive acts. Rlthough it is a refined or "NewM eden, Whylah Falls still places Eve within the garden.

What we need to ask of Clarke's languaging of female beauty, as Henderson does in another context, and as my next chapter on Beatrice Chancy explores, is "What is the danger of a poetics that locates black women within a[n]. ...Edenic garden, a poetics that does not take account of the negative or aversive images? Chapter 3 'Shouting in Tongues'and Cutting Gazes: The Staging of Feminisms in Beatrice Chancy

Lay us dom under stars so thick, We breathe fresh grass and shout in tongues. Beatrice, Beatrice Chancy 4, iii You see, she cuts me with her eyes- Eyes as incinerating as teeth.

My eye slices women into coinmodities. Francis, Beatrice Chancy 3, ii ....I knew that the slaves had looked. That al1 attempts to repress oudblack peoples' right to gaze had produced in us an ovemhelming desire, an oppositional gaze. By courageously looking , we defiantly declared: "Not only will 1 stase. 1 want my look to change reality. " bel1 hooks, Black Looks

Critiquing the "Tradition" of writing by, or about, members of the Aftican diaspora that excludes or misrepresents black women, Mary Helen Washington, in her anthology Invented Lives , asks such vital questions as : "Why is the fugitive slave, the f iery orator , the political activist, the abolitionist always represented as a black man? How does the heroic voice and image of the black woman get euppressed in a culture that depended on her heroism for its survival? " (qtd. in Gates, Reading Black 5). While an examination of Clarke's journey toward an ethical feminist aesthetic of beauty in Chapter One and Chapter Two elucidates how the pet rewrites patriarchal "Traditions" of representing the female muse, black feminist readings of Lush Dreams, Blue Exile and Wwlah Falls may also evince how these texts, in some respects, are complicit in suppressing the complex specificity of the black female subject. Even though Clarke's liberating philosophy of beauty offered in Chapters One and Two is predicated on the recognition of the wviolence" of our textual king and on the " femininew responsibility of "honey [hg] bitter pain, " its tendency to valorize only the positive aspects of the female body/landscape (both white and black as in the case of the wAxum-Sabaw poems) risks misconstnicting the totality of female experience. Moreover, Clarke's feminist aesthetic of the beautiful that we have witnessed thus far can be critiqued for its tendency to reinforce the conventional imagery, albeit refined, that associates women with the single category of the saintly, beautified subject/object of the "male gaze. " With respect to Clarke's salvific philosophy of female beauty we need to ask very specific questions (some of which lie beyond the scope of this chapter): How do we respond to the ethics and aesthetics of Clarke's poetics? Do the technically rich lines and lush images of his texts work, at times, "to honey," to conceal, from the reader/critic the very real and bitter problems resulting from gender and racial disharmony? Although Clarke encourages us to be critical readers what happens, as Mae Gwendolyn Henderson asks in another context, "when the eye is averted from the wnonfelicitousw Do we succumb to the lure of

aesthetics and f orget about our ethical respons ibility as wviolentw linguistic beings? 1s Clarke's reconstruction of a gendered hierarchy of edenic, female, beauty tw easily limited in its dualistic thinking of black/white, fdnine/masculine, and positive/negative images? Does its ref ined ref ormulation of "womanW as the beautif ied subject/object of our "gazew constrict the complex fluidity of the black female subject who speaks in "multiple voicesH? And, as Henderson asks, what is the danger of idealizing the Yeminine princpleWin so dominant a patriarchal scopic regime? Interweaving echoes of "the true but often altered story of Beatrice Cenciw and traces of other Beatrice-figures in Western aesthetics with the poetic traditions and heritage of Africadia, Beatrice Chancy takes as its subject matter the story of the young martyr, a native of Paradise, Nova Scotia who is tragically executed for her crime of parricide against the white, Nova Scotian, slave-owner Francis Chancy. The verse-play provides a forceful confrontation with the complex issue we have seen preoccupying Clarke's poetics thus far, that of how to represent ethically the "secret strengthw of Africadian women--in the context of a social criticism which takes aim at a racist, patriarchal society that has failed to bear witness to their beauty-without further totalizing the concept of womanhood, and without gratifying patriarchal desire, or reinscribing the black female body as the beautif ied sitehight of the ob jectifying gaze. Beatrice Chancy, 1 will attempt to demonstrate, revises Clarke's earlier visionings of the female muse even further and answers to any critical charges that may suggest his "liberatingwphilosophy of feminine beauty ultimately confines women to the single role of the idealized "objectW or participates in silencing the black female subject who "shout[s] in [multiple] tonguesw (4.3). Rather than restricting the representation of women to "felicitious images, " or their resistance to "positive gazing, the verse-play, in its multiple incarnations of the female muses's identity, disrupts the pleasure of our looking at the beautified subject/object in ways that force us out of our customary and comfortable seats and encourage us to "think ethically" about the complexity of staging feminisms.

One of the more obvious ways in which Clarke's verse-play revises his earlier visioning of the female muse is through its casting of matrice as a complex and dynamic hybridized subject that defies any notion of a "purew identity. Born of a black slave and a white slave orner, and raised by her black surrogate mother Deal and by her white surrogate mother Lustra, Beatrice occupies what Homi Baba refers to as the hybridized "Third SpaceW--an "inbetween" space of ceaseless negotiation where "we may elude the politics of polarity and emerge as the others of our selves" (209). In Chapter One's discussion of the wAxum-Sabaw poems, 1 alluded to how Clarke's witnessing of "femalewbeauty risks essentializing the construct of womanhood. In his revisionhg of the female muse Clarke explores the complex dif ferences between white and black feminisms in a manner that enables us to hear the multiplicity of positions from which women "shout." In her essay "Speaking in Tangues," Mae Gwendolyn Henderson appropriates Baba's notion of the hybridized subject who engages with "the other in ourselvesw to articulate the complexity of black female subjectivity (119). Marginalized by race and gender, the black woman, Henderson suggests, is 'always already' a hybrid figure, an inhabitant of this unf ixable "Third Space. At once, she engages in bbth a "dialogic of differencesm and a "dialectic of identity" with those aspects of the self she shares and does not share with black men and white women. This multiple, fluid positionality of the black female subject is dramatized in Act One and Act Two by the uniting and sharp divisive conversations that Beatrice and Lustra share on the subjects of patriarchy and slavery. In scene one of "Violat~rs,~Beatrice engages in a

"dialogic /dialectic '' of "dif ference/identitym ( Henderson ) with Lustra that exemplifies the similarities and differences between womn of colour and white wornen. In a conversation on the sub ject of blackness Beatrice at one moment refutes Lustra's racist stereotyping of blacks as "beastsWwho wslump.. . rum-sick" in "pig stieswby pointing to the chains of slavery that have not "allowed these people any chancew (8). In the next moment, Beatrice empathizes with the oppressed Lustra by asking her about her the sad pains she suffers as a woman:

Bea t r ice :1 ' m one-quater your daughter . Tell me l Lustra:Often, 1 feel I'm no real wife, Just the queen slave of his harem. Beatrice :Father? Lustra: (Nodding) Civilization in wolf's shape. Bea t r i c e : Nobody is beyond redemption . ( 9 )

The rapid s hif ts in subject positions that characterizes Beatrice's dialogue with Lustra here, and throughout the verse-play, exemplifies how Clarke forces us to confront differing feminisms and challenges any aesthetic of female beauty that tends to universalize female experience. The "multiple tonguedw position from which the black female subject speaks is also illustrated in scene five of

"Victims. " Lustra reminds us, and her surrogate daughter, of the colour blindness of patriarchal oppression as she States: "Beatrice: My chahs are invisible, silent; /But they weight me, they press me domw (32). While Beatrice recognizes those aspects of the self she shares with Lustra, this scene also emphasizes their differences. Beatrice accuses Lustra of treating her like some "meth pet," of capitalizing on the pains of her mother whose work in the orchards contributed to the Chancy's wealth, and of being so "jealousw of her mother's role as Francis's sex slave that she bolted her out in the cold night and caused her death (31). Here, Clarke reminds us of the historical differences between black women and white womn in the New World. Lustra's white feminism, in its moments where it refuses to acknowledge the intersecting marginalities of race and class, is undercut by the voice of Beatrice in the play who speaks, who "shout[s] in tongues ." But Clarke 's staging of different feminisms in Beatrice Chancy is not limited simply to a recognition of the varying subject positions of white and black females. It also challenges the tendency we may have to totalize or fix black female experience by forcing us to confront the limitations of any salvific philosophy of female beauty that is foünded on the "~orlding"~~of the female muse as the idealized subject/object of "positive" or "ferninine" qualities. In the section which follows, 1 explore Claxkels staging of different feminisms with respect to the politics of the theatrical gaze. Although Clarke's movement from the more personal lyrical mode of his early poetry to the social mode of the drama in Whylah Falls, the epic, Whylah Falls: The

Play, 43 and in Beatrice Chancy provide the poet/playwright

with a viable medium for conveying the communal voices of Africadia and for expressing the conplex plurality from which the black female subject speaks, it also presents the artist with the difficult challenge of "cutting" the stronghold of the "masculinew gaze Western theatre has held.

Traditionally, the Western stage has ken a locus of women's exploitation and erasure. Since the eighteenth century the West has witnessed what Kristina Straub, in her

Sexual Suspects : Eighteenth Cen tury Players and Sexual Ideology, observes as a feminization and subordination of the

spectacle in relation to the structure of the look" or what Barbara Freedman's Trame-Up: Feminism, ~sychoanalysis, Theatre" refers to as the "taming of the gaze by the symbolic order" (60) . That is, even though the theatrical gaze has always been an intersubjective one--a "teciprocal construction," (Willis 87) "in which everyone is caught, those who exercise power just as much as those over whom it is exercisedw (Foucault 156)--the dominant patriarchal order has worked to suppress this sense of interdependency, to interpellate the spectator as the all-seeing voyeur, and to naturalize the audience ' s scopic mastery . This illusion of the Western stage is still predominant

today. We enter the "traditional" theatre 'always already' hailed into the role as the powerful viewer. In fact, the theatre remains "the stronghold of the gaze, Western culture's original source of sanctioned voyeurismt' (Solga 81). Sitting back comfoaably in our chairs, we wait for the curtain to fall, for our expectations to be fulfilled. We seldom go to the theatre with the assumption that the spectacle has corne to gaze at us, as an audience, or with the anticipation that the spotlight could be turned on us at any given moment to perform "resp~nsibly.~Consequently, the illusions of the theatre always demand, as Brecht understood, an inescapable objectification of everything on the stage.45

The reinforcement of this voyeur-exhibitionist dichotomy between spectator and the specularized female body is what has lead Helene Cixous to assert that a distinct "Wontan's stage," which affirms her "body presence" outside of the patriarchal gaze, is necessary; it has also incited Barbara Freedman to ask, "is a feminist deconstructive theatre even possible?" (60). Although some normative feminists would argue that the "traditional" theatre is always already an ambivalent, fluid site of negotiation and change, and thereby ethical, such a theoretical position does not account for the reservations women may have about the idea of staging their bodies in a

scopic economy, nor does it lead us to think about the wviolencew of our own spectorial gaze. What 1 suggest is needed, and what 1 propose Clarke offers in Beatrice Chancy, is an ethical feminist theatre. Instead of advocating a normative position which assumes that "traditional " theatre and the " reciprocal constructionw of the gaze are themselves ethical, or insisting on the return to an essential Vernalew theatre in which women can be truly "seen" on the stage outside of a system of objectifying representation (Cixous), the ethical feminist theatre Clarke offers in Beatrice Chancy directs attention to the limits of language, to the tyranny of gazes, and to the impossibility of ever fully representing the female subject outside of a complex system of intersubjective violence. In this next section, 1 consider the relationship between the different entrances Beatrice makes in Act One as sites that subvert any hierarchical relationship between spectator and spectacle and encourage us to think ethically about our own "cutting gazes." Thereafter, 1 explore the rape scene of Act Two and propose that Clarke stages, or leaves open the possibility of staging, the rape in ways that "under-display" the female body (Aston 95) and direct our attention instead to the violence of patriarchal gaz hg.

At the first curtain-rise of Beatrice Chancy we are presented with what appears to be a typical Clarkean dialogue between rivalling patriarchal and matriarchal traditions of representing the female muse. The opening scene of wViolatorswgathers Deal (a house slave), Fr. Richard Moses (an enslaved believer), Dumas (a seer), Lead (a field slave) and a chorus of other Slaves who sing or prophecize of the coming of spring, of freedom, and of their female muse, Beatrice, who will soon be returning from a three year exile in Halifax. For Deal, Dumas and Moses, the hybridized figure of Beatrice represents, on an abstract, "meta (as opposed to material) le~el,"~~the ancient African matriarchal aesthetic of process , collectivity and eclecticism. Beatrice is an embodiment of the African sense of the "life forcewof the word; she is, as Dumas describes, "that fleshed poem"

(4)--that is, the black "word" become flesh. Her f luidity, her ceaseless negotiation between cultures, is the "new language" (7) of the New World's ever-increasing intercultural fabric. Dumas sings of this female beauty offstage in a Song that initiates matrice's first entrance in the play:

eatrice is pure Song, So el egan tly spoken , A philosophy shaken Into a new language, Dsmanding new lips And a new heart, To speak her for who she is. (7)

That Clarke situates Dumas and the chorus of slaves offstage and has them sing of matrice's beauty is very significant. The use of song here, and throughout the drama, forces us to switch sensory modes from the visual to the auditory. Song, which has always been a site of resistance for Afro-Americans, has the potential to disrupt the objectifying power of our gaze; it challenges us to "lessen...our dependency on the visual" (Cixous 547) and encourages us to think about Beatrice at a "metalevel." What emerges in the opening scene is the not-unconnnon Clarkean portrait of the enduring, idealized, female muse whose " unf linching pride" (7) 'honeys the bitter pain' of slavery. In contrast to Dumas's song, scene three of "Violators" specularizes matrice's entrance in ways that direct our attention to the sharp contrast between an African matriarcha1 aesthetic of female beauty and a Western patriarchal visioning of the female muse. The scene is set in the dining hall of Chancy's estate. The white Rev. Ezra Love Peacock (an undertaker) and the Hangman (a pet) encourage Francis to deliver a "lush sermon" as they partake in wine and food like "Last Supper divinesw (16). The stage directions describe Beatrice's entrance into this scene of feasting patriarchs as follows :

Beatrice-a New World Oshun-descends the marble staircase. When she reaches the bottom step, she glances at the audience and lowers het eyes, closing them briefly, erotically. Pearls lace her neck. She arrives, proclaimed by perfume. (17)

Clarke's staging of the female muse in this scene is far from the passive, objectified spectacle we may find in traditional drama. In flirting and gazing at us "erotically, " Beatrice displays what Elin Diamond and Elaine Aston have termed a "looking-at-being-looked-at-ness " (Aston 94 ) . That is , Beatrice articulates an awareness of how "one's look is always already purloined by the Mherm (Freedman 73); she recognizes herself king looked at and her own power to stare back, to return an oppositional, or what I refer to as "positive gaze." "Even in the worse circumstances of domination," hooks claims, "the ability to manipulate one's gaze in the face of structures of domination that would contain it, opens up the possibility of agency" (116) : Such we find is the case here. Beatrice watches us watching herself in a manner that challenges us as an audience, as the vobjects" of her flirtatious glance. We have been caught in the act of looking and must confront the ethics of our position in a scopic economy. In the next moment we are called by Francis to look in another way. Francis responds to matrice's presence in the dining hall with al1 trappings of a spectacle. Be claps, calls for fiddles, drapes Beatrice in flowers and announces this "New World Oshun" beautiful in words that not only direct our attention to his objectifying gaze but also make us complicit in this male-gazing:

Spectators. 1 dispatched Beatrice to Halifax To shape her more like us--white, modern, beautif ul . .. .Shels chaste-like unstanched steel[. 1. .. .. ,Look how she denominates her mther- That rare, Demarara skin...... Her throat flutes delicious citronella. .. ( 18-9 )

These proclaimations reinforce the pleasure of the visual and interpellate not only the males onstage but also us into a scopic economy that fetishizes the female body. As mSpectatorswwe cannot help ourselves but to "Lookw at or participate in this act of gazing at the over-displayed female body. But, in Act One, Clarke does not allow us to "sit silently in the darkness and fulf il our sole as sanctioned voyeursw (Freedman 54 ) . Our gaze at the specularized female body of Beatrice is disrupted in this scene by the asides that Clarke affords Lustra. Asides are personal beams of communication with the audience in which characters are usually seen as telling the truth about their motives or desires. While Francis calls on us to look at the beautified ob ject in a manner that reinscribes the patriarchal gaze, Lustra's asides of "How can he so grossly, insultingly boast?" (17) and "1 feel a knife though my throatt' split our gaze and undemine Francis 's "slic[ing] of women into commodities" (18). The use of asides here, and elsewhere in the play, work to dismantle the artificiality of the fourth wall between the spectator and spectacle-the barries which, in the tradition of early twentieth-century Realist drama such as that of Ibsen and Strindberg, has been allotted for the exploitation of the female body. We are invited as Lustra's confidants to think about how dangerous Francis's act of gazing, and Our own, can be. The authority of Francis's cutting gaze is also displaced by the words of Beatrice who, like Lustra, is somewhat aware, in Act One, of the danger of a theory of beauty that idealizes women, and pleads with her father to pray to God, to worship the Divine body and not her own. In Violators," Clarke then invokes Francis's patriarchal aesthetic of beauty that regards the female as an object which must gratify male desire only to interrogate its authority and to make us, as an audience conscious of our ethical roles as "violators, bearers of the gaze. The violent, incestuous act of rape committed by Francis against his daughter in scene seven of "Victims" marks one of the voltas, or turning points, in te= of Matrice's understanding of her "responsibility. " Whereas P. B. Shelley in his version of The Cenci does not stage the rape of Beatrice (it occurs in between acts), Clarke takes on this difficult task. Feminist theatre which foregrounds male-authored violence against the female body always risks re-enacting, for the pleasure of the patriarchal gaze the victimization of -men. But, Clarke, 1 suggest, stages this rape in ways that make us think ethically about the violence of our own gaze. Scene seven is set in a "candle-wicked chapeln with paintings of "Jeanne d'Arc or of Queen Makedaw overlooking the scene. Answering her fatherls poetic summons of scene four--a verse letter that proclaims she is the only one who Van love [him back] to Godw--Beatrice kneels in prayer awaiting Francis's arrival. The lush, poetic details of the stage directions, those characteristic of what we find throughout the verse-play, describe Beatrice as "maring a sleeveless , French petticoat of albescent faille silk, with Chantilly lace flounces and embroidered scallops on a field of gold taffeta, and an opalescent bodice." "Gold," also Vop[es] her neck,lt as "Beatrice soaks in the available luscensew of the scene (36). The attention Clarke gives here to the detail of Beatrice's dress directs our gaze toward the beauty of the muse. Beatrice appears to be dressed in a wedding gown, or the like thereof. The focus on the radiant beauty of her dressed body emphasizes Beatrice's purity; its also calls to mind her idealized role as the beautiful hybridized muse or "bride of heaven" who is responsible for uniting Francis with God, for wedding both cultures. When we read these stage directions we cannot help but find ourselves hailed into the role as voyeurs, looking in at the luminating beauty of the salvific muse. Into this candle lit scene of "feminine beauty" enters Francis. Gazing at Beatrice praying, tiie patriarch is granted the first lines of the scene in what is also the longest aside of the play:

Beatricia, lovely Beatricia, As if in a Rubens, Your lips halved to sing, You pray moaning- Chaste voluptuousness . Your perfume on my face 1s like apples tumbled. In an autumn grove, A place where Poetry comes to die. 1'11 petition so lightly, My words'll waken you like dew- Brushing grass at dam Oh God, if you breathe.... If you do judgel Too late. All's resolved now. (38-7)

It is very significant, 1 suggest, that Clarke privileges Francis's voice by granting him the first lines and the only aside in this scene. The direct address, as 1 have mentioned, has the effect of interpellating us, of forcing us out of our comfortable seats and making us participate in the spectacle, We have been hailed to gaze at the beautiful muse through the radiance of the setting and through the dramatic movement of the play thus far that has "namedWher Beatrice (a symbol of brightness, and goodness), that has idealized

her in either a patriarchal or matriarchal form. As Francis begins to speak of the "lovely Beatricia" he may become for us the audience surrogate, the character with whom we

identify. At best, if we are critical readers and have tuned into the ominous "note of hmrality" (both the "F-minor" that plays as Francis enters and Lustra's and Beatrice's repudiation of his gaze thus far), then we will be suspicious of the patriarch's desire "to petition" Beatrice "so lightly" and "waken [her] with dew. " By granting Francis an aside what we are forced to confront is ourselves watching the patriarch look in a way that objectifies the female body. While he gazes at the female muse Francis mes toward an appreciation of Beatrice as an icon of pure "joy" (37), as an aesthetic object that is beyond linguistic or ethical being, beyond the temporality, the fluidity of the word, a place where "Poetry

cornes to die. If Beatrice dares to "breathe, " to voice a word, "to judge," then that would place her in the realm of the human, the realm of everything Francis hates in this world ( 37 ) . In critiquing Francis ' s gaze we become conscious of the structure of looking and begin to "think ethically"

about our own role in a scopic economy. At worst, if we have been drawn half-heartedly by the visual beauty of the scene or by the Francis's poetic words, that is, if we have divorced the sensory from the intellect, then we become complicit in Francis's gazing, complicit in the violence of the scene. The staged rape which ends Act Two is presented in ways that demonstrate how the playwright is thinking ethically about the complexity of representing violence against women in a patriarchal scopic economy. To avoid reinscribing the female body as the victim/object of our gaze, or titillating patriarchal desire, the writer must politicize a staged act of violence against women. By setting the rape in a church Clarke accomplishes this. Instead of gazing solely at a victimized female body, which is what we may do if the rape was staged in a bedroom, our look is "cutw or dismpted by

the ambience of a "candle-wicked chapel." We are forced into a position which requires us to confront the hypocrisy of the whollownessw(37) of the "white churches" (40), of Francis's false worshipping of an idealized muse, of Rev. Peacock's immorality, of the "Nuns" who tear "the Book of Exodusw from

Africadians bibles (97), of al1 those who "soi1 the bread,/Turn wine to piss" (46) and tear the "gospels" into something which can be used to oppress, to enslave, to rape, black peoples . Clarke's staging of the sape in a church also leaves open the possibility for adapting what Elaine Aston identifies as the "under-display" of the feule body (95). Rather than constructing the female body as a sitehight of "lookingne~s,~as we saw with the specularization of Beatrice in act one, the technique of under-display disrupts our gaze at the exhibited female by hiding, blocking, or fracturing the wollben's body in some way. In the rape scene this "under-display" is made possible by Francis's act of

thrusting Beatrice "dom on a pew" (38). One of the ways in which this scene could be staged is by hiding in whole, or in part, the female body by the back of the church pew. Instead of gazing at the victimized woman, what we would see is Francis's act of thnisting at a pew. What we would then be forced to confront is male violence, as well as, the sacrilegious nature of the act, Francis's rape of the church, the rape of God. This "under-display" or blocking of the female body would be vexy effective in "stresshg the auditory" and on "attuning our ears "to the silence and what lies beyond themW--what Cixous claims is necessary if one is to create an ethical "stage as womanw (547). The shift to a focus on auditory rather than visual in the rape scene would also be effective because Francis's act of violence is presented as a rape of Beatrice's poetic breath, a silencing of her voice. The final words or lack there of, in the scene are afforded to Beatrice who cries:

1 hurt [two words garbled] my throat [several words whited out] a knife. (39)

On a "meta-level, " Francis ' s silencing of Beatrice ' s voice and his acts of tearing the "frail," "Grosgrain lace," of slicing "one by one the forty eyes of Beatrice's corset1'

represents, like her hanging in Act Four, an annihilation of the laquage of the hybridized figure who is wedded to both cultures. In raping his daughter, Francis not only exposes the tyranny of his objectifying philosaphy of female beauty, but he also undresses for matrice and for us the idealized construct of the enduring "femininew muse who "honeys the bitter pain." The rape, is the catalyst that changes

Beatrice's understanding of her "responsibility." It is the catalyst that incites the female muse, as my next section

demonstrates, to pick up a "knife," to gaze back with "Eyes as incinerating as teethrw--eyes we customarily would not associate with the conventional "feminineWportrait of the female muse.

In her response to Houston Baker's "There is No More

Beautiful Way," Mae G. Henderson argues that any philosophy of "femininew beauty that would limit black women's lives and literatuse strictly to "felicitious imagesw or to a "positive-images approach" (161-3) fails to deal with the complex adversarial relationship that characterizes the black female subject position. Moreover, it also essentializes womanhood and reinforces the idealization of a "femininew woman--a move that can be quite dangerous in a patriarchal scopic economy. In the pages which follow I explore some of the limitations of Beatrice's role as an idealized muse and illustrate how the verse-play conveys the perils of a positive-images approach to languaging the beauty of the female muse. Examining the transfomative image/prop of the "steel-knife," 1 argue that Clarke's Beatrice Chancy enters into a "dialogic relationshipw (Henderson 162) with fivalling aesthetics of female beauty, and with his own early visionings of female muses, in ways that destabilize the idealization of women and force us to think ethically about the complexity of staging women as the beautified subject/object of the "male" gaze. To begin, 1 would first like to recount the dominant image of the female muse we have borne witness to in Clarke's petics thus far. In Chapter Two we saw how Clarke's lyrical-dramatic sequence dismantles the objectifying authoritarian gaze of the male poet and privileges, in its place, a much more liberating philosophy of beauty that honours the female figure for her black pride, for her strength, and for her ability to subvert the patriarchal order and uplift the spirits of her race. While the wpositivewacts of Shelley's distilling, Corals gardening, and Amarantha's quilting certainly provide these women with the means to "stare backtl at the oppressor, their "gaze" can be critiqued for its endorsement of "femaleness." That is, the dominant image of the female muse Whylah Falls celebrates is one that confines the agency of women to the "personal spherew and, for the mst part, to "positive images." Women are celebrated for their "honey[ing]," for their endurance, and patience-heroic qualities that are stereotypical of wmen. The ability of these female muses to effect change in

the "public" realm is rather limited. As well, any "negative actswwomen may commit to gain the* freedom, such as Missy's apparent poisoning of ~aul,~~are either overshadowed by the epic's romantic emphasizes on "honeying the bitter pain" or omitted altogether by the dominant idllyic view of the female muse Whylah Falls expounds . In my discussion of "ViolatorsWwe also witnessed how Clarke sets up Beatrice Chancy by introducing us to two opposing aesthetics that emphasize the beauty of the female muse. Act One and Two, as 1 have demonstrated, not only interrogate Francis's objectifying, patriarchal gaze, but they also hail us into a scopic regime that idealizes, on a meta-level, the female muse as "pure song," (9) as the pure poetry of a rnatriarchal tradition. Yet, even our sanctioned role as voyeurs of a "ferninine" matriarchal muse in the first two acts is complicated. In the pages which follow 1 will demonstrate how the poet/playwright's skillful use of the image or prop of the steel-knife works to destabilize our gaze at a " femininew muse. The etymology of the word "steelwconjures rather ambivalent associations. As a noun, "steelw is defined as a l'modified form of iron artificially produced" and as l'having qualities of hardness, elasticity, and strength." As a verb, "steelw means "to render insensible, inflexible, unyielding and determinedw ( Webster 's 1391 ) . We can regard the word "steelw then in terms of both positive and negative images; this ambivalence prevails in the first act. In scene one of "Violat~rs,~the negative connotations of "steelw as being "hard, " and "unyieldingWin an l'insensible" mannes are associated with the character of Lead "whose very name is metalw and who, we are told, "fractures the circlem50. At the first curtain-rise, Lead sports a "tuft speech" (2). Weighted dom by the lliron" chains (3) of slavery, Lead has given up on God (2), on words (3), on art, on beauty, and on love (4). In contrast to Deal, who as her name suggests, "deals withl* what she has "been dealt" (3), Lead, in the first scene, is associated with the insensible nature of steel, as Deal States: "Lead, you dull, jus like the metal. ..a fool pissin your spirit into spiritsl1 (3) . Like Francis and Peacock, Lead has internalized the patriarchal yearning for the pure, "chaste" muse. When he meets Beatrice, Lead does not miss the opportunity of asking if she has been a "goodl' girl to which she sharply replies, "Better than your need to askw ( 12 ) . Lead ' s preoccupation with Beatricels chastity and, his dullness, his failure to make

blackness shine cause him to "fracture the circle." The next reference to "steelw in the first act is a positive one. The unyielding strength of "steel," is used to

convey the salvific beauty of Beatrice. As 1 have already mentioned, the female muse is described as having "unflinching, "steel prideW--"a material hostile to slaveryw (7). Steel is associated with the manner in which Beatrice alchemizes the du11 metal of Lead into a "lush garden of manliness" (10). In her presence, Lead has a "smile like wann copper" (10). Rather negative associations of the word "steel" are also interspersed throughout the first scene. Lustra's use of the word "steeln to convey the

violence of Francis ' s acts of raping slave women:

he lunges after sin, pursues it. He sluices down to estuaries of lust, Seizes pleasure ( as he deems it ) ...... Constituencies of love haemorrhage in the dark Whenever he stains his steel in...[.] (9).

Francis also uses the word steel in a manner which associates it with his negative acts of sexualizing and objectifying the female body. Beatrice is described by Francis as a being

"chaste-like unstanched steelw (17). What the effect of this rapid succussion of conflicting associations of steel has is that it prevents us from holding steadfast to a single definition of the word. Any attempt we make to grab hold of a positive image of "steel" is undercut by the negative associations of the word and vice versa. The transformative image of "steel" forces us to confront the word "steelmin its totality, in te- of both negative and positive images. We are always reminded of the potentially lurking other. The multiple, conflicting references to steel also force us to confront the situatedness of speakers, to think about the ethical nature of words themselves.

In the second half of Act Two the multiple references to "steelw transmute into the dominant image of the knifehcythe. With respect to Beatrice, references to knives in Act One and in the first half of Act Two are kept to a minimum, and quite appropriately so, for the female muse's idyllic steel " pride has not yet been sharpened into a "cutting gaze." The first reference to the knifehcythe occurs at the end of scene two: Beatrice, standing alone on the stage, f king her looks with a "casual narcissus" "in the broken scythe of mirrorw she is described as being "casual narcissusfr itself ( 26) .51 In this scene the knif e, or the sharp object, is a mirror, or used as a mirror, to reflect the beauty of Deal and Beatrice. Bath women gaze at the mirror-knife, but in very dif ferent ways . Scene two opens with Deal "alone in her scullery" glan[cing] in a shard of mirrorw (25). What this constructive act of self-gazing reveals for Deal is her desire to "get [herself] freew (48) even if this freedom involves the "negativeWacts of "slay[ing] the eyes of her master" (25). And, Deal encourages Beatrice to do the same, to marry Lead, "to confiscate the law," to "cross [her] father," and to be wresponsible" for her own freedom. Embodying the conventional "femininew ideal of the beautified muse, at this point in Act Two, Beatrice cannot bring herself to such "negative gazingw: "Deal," Beatrice States, "your words strike like an axe cleaving pine, ... 1 can't just confiscate [the law] myself,...I seem solid, but I'm just thin ice, ...a flo~er~~~(26-7). The Vasual narcissusw she represents here calls to mind the flirtatious Beatrice of Act One who finds a means to disrupt the power of the gaze by acting within the construct of the conventional "ferninine" muse . The verse-play reveals that Beatrice's ability or need to pick up a knife or to stare back with a "negative gaze," that cuts the chains of patriarchy at this point in

Victims," is limited for two very important reasons. First, Clarke wishes us to see that the sharpening of Beatrice's "steelwpride into a "negative gaze" is a gradual, reactive process. Second, matrice has been hailed, in varying ways, by both the Western patriarchal and Africadian matriarchal aesthetics as an idyllic muse--a muse who is dangerously constricted by the symbol of brightness, and goodness she embodies, by the construct of "femineity" she has internalized. While Beatrice Chancy works to provide a context and justification for the violence of heroic Black Canadian women, such as Marie- Joseph ~ngeline~~--womenwho , as Matrice

proclaims to the liberated in Act Four, had to embrace violence in order to cut "fresh, blushing apple blossoms...and flowersW--the play itself does not advocate such offensive acts. An edenic community for Clarke is still a "feminine" conimunity where multiplicity and collectivity are expected and celebrated and considered to be the one true, or original, standard of rectitude. The violence of the enslaved in the play results from the oppressive acts committed against them, as the violated Beatrice exclaims in scene one of "Act Three: Revolt," "If this be lamb-slaying/Weather , allot me knives " ( 43) and as Lead, enraged by the news of Francis's raping expresses in scene nine of "Revoit," "1 feel myself becoming sharpened metal," becoming the knife (58). While this may seem like an obvious point it is a very important one that the transformative nature of the "steel-knife" in "Victi" elucidates.

As Act Two progresses the references to knives become much more frequent. Whereas Beatrice is unable to gaze "negativelyWin scene two, the verbal and physical abuse she receives in her confinement in scene four leads her to speak, to gaze, in new "negative" ways . Scene four ends with "a scream like knives mating" ( 30 ) . The sound, emblematic of the duel between Beatrice's "steelw pride and the "steel" of Francis ' s phallacentricism, foreshadows what we hear throughout the rest of the àrama as the female muse comes into the understanding that in order "to escape slavery, she mus t embrace tyranny ." * In scene five of "Victims" Beatrice is rebuked by Lustra and Rev. Peacock for the "negative" cutting gaze she now adopts:

Luatra: To hear a woman speak thusly-so close to shame. Beattice:Would my words stabl I'm molested By white men's words and black men's eyes, Pawed by white women, and condemned By my dark sisters' blunt talk, hard looks. They pick me apart.

0 Peacock: Beatrice, your words slash like bitter nietal. Beattice:No not metal: it's fire that's used agains t pus. (31-2)

Beatrice's recognition of the limitations of her role as the salvific muse and of her attempt to adopt words that do not "stabWas sharply as her "dark sisters' blunt talk" and "hard looks," suggests that the act of "becoming the knife" involves the process of "walk[ ing one ' s ] lonesome valley ,*' for oneself. 55 In other words , it involves experiencing the patriarchal violence that sharpens the negative gaze, that is "respon~ible,~as Beatrice States of Francis, for "craft[ing] a wotld where words must sound/ [as] Steel skirmishing with steel (45) . As the idealized muse, Beatrice has not had to labour and endure the pains of slavery to the extent of the other house and field slaves. Significantly, then, the female muse cannot "jus confiscate the laww in scene two.

Her looks are not as yet as "hard" as Deal 'S. Beatrice's gradua1 embracement of words that "slash like bitter metal" in "VictimsW--a process that, as we have witnessed, culminates in the last words of the act, her cry for "a knifew after she has been raped by her father,--demonstrates how the identity of the female muse cannot be represented by "positive imagesw alone. Like the destruction caused by heroic figures such as Angelique, Beatrice's negative acts must always be analyzed within a complex matrix of "inters&jective violence. " Lustra's and Peacock's acts of revoking Beatrice cited above are typical of the refutations they, and others such as Francis and Dice, make in response to Beatrice's negative gazing. Lustra has been one of Beatrice's greatest teachers of the conventional "ferninine" way of looking and becoming. Reinscribing the notion that "good" daughters do not gaze "negatively," nor do nice, beautified muses act "mannish[ly]"

(30) , Lustra chides Beatrice on numerous occasions for her "hard, pure and cold language" and reminds the muse that she must be 'poeticalw and "happy," as her name suggests (52), for it is "women's fate to endure/Dishonour, injury, [and] painw ( 32 ) , and the f emale muse ' s "duty" to embody only "felicitious images." Beatrice cannot "jus confiscate the laww in scene two of "Victims" because she has internalized this rather confining image of the female muse.

In '*Act Three: Revolt" Beatrice colries into a fuller understanding of how "Al1 theories of beauty heap up corpses"

( 57 ) --that is, she recognizes the dangerous limitations of both patriarchal and matriarchal aesthetics that confine women strictly to "positive" images. Beatrice confiscates the law in this act. In "RevolttWthe "steel-knife" transforms into the image of a crucifix that becomes for Beatrice and Lead the murder weapon they vow to worship. Beatrice takes this "knife-crossw into her own hands in this act in a mannes that disturbs us as an audience, that destabilizes our idealization of woxnen and forces us to confront the black female subject in al1 her complexity. Act Three open3 with the distraught and violated Beatrice calling for "atrocious knives," for a knife to hack off her hais that has been infested by Francis's fingers and for a "razor /To disinfect the real filth/[in her] skin (42-3). Unable to forget the way her father "pestled [her] gainst the pew,/[and] Raped [her] dress" (45) Beatrice in scene f ive confesses to us in an aside, "Gad that 1 were a man and had a knife, I'd gouge out his heart in the market,/Hack out his eyes ...A knife's the cross that'll work my salvation" (52). This metam>rphosis of the image of the steel-knife into a crucifix that wmeasure[s] out hatred (58) is echoed in scene nine when Beatrice declares to Lead that if he really loves her he would kill Francis:

Lead: 1 do, 1 swear, I*... tead stretches fotth his hand. Beatrice hands Lead a silver dagger. He holds it like a crucifix. Beatrice: 1 freed this relic from his churchly things . Lead: Xere be the one crucifix 1'11 worship. Beatrice: Tommorrow's moon, don't let him wake alive . Twist this key in his throat his breath will out. (58)

The transformation of the steel-hife into a lethal crucifix in "Revolt" unsettles us as an audience. On one hand, we certainly sympathize with Beatrice, with her inability to forget the trauma she is experiencing and with her desire to free herself from her role as a beautified object of Francis's patriarchal gaze. Moreover, we also recognize that it is only by seizing hold of the wmasculinewtool of the knife and transcending the boundaries of a conventional

"ferninine" muse that Beatrice is able to liberate her people and herself. As well, it is only by engaging in "neqative gazing" that Beatrice leads Francis to a brief moment of revelation where he, suddenly forced to confront the "decapitating look [of Beatrice],/The steel, sharp, of a hardness that won't bendw recognizes how his own eye %lices women into commodities " ( 50 ) . On the other hand, Beatrice also commits several acts in "RevoltWthat are quite troubling to Say the least. For example, in scene five Beatrice decries that she will wstand none of [lustra's] Bible talk herew and tosses "into the smouldering fireplace" (54) the very Bible she gave to Lustra as a gift when she returned home from her three year exile in Halifax. In scene nine, she professes to Lead that they must kill, that they "must hate before [lthey] can loveN and has a dream of stabbing Christ ' s "white corpse. .. again and again"

(58). Act Three exposes how much Clarke's visioning and revisionhg of the female figure in Beatrice Chancy interrogates the romanticized muse we often find in his earlier work . Beatrice is much dif ferent f rom the f emale muse of Cora in Whylah Falls who responds to the murder of her son by stammering "her pain in a white poem/Of rum more eloquent than speechw (102) and by holding steadfast to her

"final mm--that pale pocket Bible" (101). The sharpening and hardening of Beatrice's steel pride into an unyielding and insensible knife-crucif ix forces us to confront the female muse in terms of both negative and positive images. Clarke's staging of the "non-felicitiousw images or acts of Beatrice has is that it disrupts our objectifying gaze at the female muse by interrupting the very pleasure of the visual. The images of lethal "knives-crucif des, " of a bible burning, of stabbing the corpse of Christ activates our moral impulse. They direct our gaze away from the visual and force us, instead, to confront the ambivalence we feel toward Beatrice ' s actions. In other words, in staging the female muse in al1 her complexity Clarke encourages us to think ethically about the complex matrix of intersubjective violence that contains the female muse and us.

"Act Four: Responsibility" stages Lead's and Matrice's act of murdering Francis, the deaths of Dice and Lead in the fight that breaks out over the arrest of Lustra and Beatrice, the hanging of these women, and the resurrection of

Beatrice's unmarked body. Insofar as Act Four conveys the "capacityWBeatrice has "for cruelty" it works to destabilize any tendency to totalize the female muse in terms of "felicitous imagesw. Yet, "Responsibility" also returns to the idealization of the female muse as "pure songw as when Dumas States prior to Beatrice's hanging, "annihilate her and you end / Seven millennia of poetryw (77). Act Four's idealization of the female muse, however, differs from that we have witnessed in Act One. Both Beatrice and we have "corne intow an understanding of the danger of a strictly positive-images approach to languaging the female muse. The "new beautyw (74) Beatrice offers to al1 she liberates in Act Four is an aesthetic that emphasizes our ethical responsibility. By Act Four, Beatrice has corn into an understanding of the inescapable violence of al1 theories of beauty. Death, for Beatrice, and the entrance into the "New Jerusalem" (75) offers the only escape from the ethical demand Our linguistic king makes. As textual beings, we

"waste becoming wordsW(75); that is, we cannot breath "Outside of poetry", out- side of "the prison-house of breathw (75) or the matrix of intersubjective violence that contains us. In Act Four, Beatrice's references to her "whole life" as being "a prison", (73) "a broken sonnetw (74) that was "never free / Never safe from an invoice of shamew (72) direct our attention to how every human response is always an ethical response, "caught up in conflicting networks of power, violence and dominations" (P-Baker, 129), a response that always needs to be critiqued for "the other" that it always violently excludes. Such we find is the case with the revision of the female muse in Beatrice Chancy. Clarke's verse-play stages the female muse Beatrice in ways that disrupt the authority of the patriarchal gaze and open up a space for hearing "the other of the other", the black female voice who "shout[s]... in tongues." Conclusion

In this study of Saltwater Splrituals and Deeper Blues, lJnylah Falls, Lush Dreams, Blue Exile, and matrice Chancy, 1 have presented a narrative of Clarke's visioning and revisionhg of the female muse that resists any monolithic view of woman and elucidates the complexity of languaging female beauty. Examining the "double-voicednessw of Clarke's

texts (Gates, Figures 247), that is, how the poet works from "the whole of his inheritancer' (Lane 47) and negotiates between Western and African traditions, 1 have demonstrated how Clarke is able to rewrite patriarchal "Traditions" of representing the female muse with a f reshness of voice and vision. But, this study is rather limited. There is still much work that needs to be done in exploring the significant contributions Clarke 's poetics have made in redef ining the homogeneous image of Canada as the "great white north," and in bearing witness to distinct African-Canadian and Africadian voices. In fact, we need to regard the poetry and drama of Clarke as being at least "triply 'double voices."' By this 1 mean that Clarke's poetics not only mediate between Western and African traditions, as Gates claims al1 black texts do, but they also demarcate an African-American and African-Canadian divide, as well as a division between the center of Canada and the marginalized Maritimes. It is in al1 this cross-gazing that Clarke's poetics celebrate the diversity of the Canadian and African-Canadian experiences and testify to a rich cultural landscape. 1 have also examined Clarke's visioning and revisioning of the female muse within the context of an ethical criticisme In this study of Clarke's languaging of female beauty, 1 have noted how the pet moves towasd a liberating philosophy of beauty or what 1 have also referred to as an ethical feminist aesthetic(s) of plurality. But to suggest Clarke moves toward an aesthetic of pluralism does not fully account for the complexity of the poet/playwright ' s poetics . As Henderson asserts in another context, "to suggest a pluralist resolution is perhaps too simple; we must, however, promote rival critical paradigms which critique each other's theories and readings, for despite pretensions to wholeness, there will always and forever be inadequacy in models and paradigmsw (Baker, 163 ) . Clarke ' s poetics , as I have demonstrated, foster such a critical climate. In his visioning and revisioning of the female muse, Clarke forces us to see the inadequacy of his own models, the limits of language, and the violence of his, and of our own, linguistic being. The self-critical, reactive nature of Clarke% meta-poetics forces us to confront the responsibility of our ethical existence -- forces us, that is, to "think ethics ethically." In this study 1 have suggested that Clarke, in his visioning and revisionhg of the female muse, not only interrogates his own paradigms but also patriarchal traditions of languaging female beauty. In examinhg Clarkers movement toward an ethical feminist aesthetic of plurality, 1 cite a variety of African-American and Western "dec~nstructive'~practices and critics, as well as several feminist critics of Milton and of the theatre, in order to convey how Clarke is not only indebted to such literary predecessors and traditions, but also to suggest the ways in which he rewrites them. While this study may point in the direction away from a patriarchal languaging of female beauty, it does not entirely escape the hegemony of the dominant mode of literary criticism and must be critiqued for its own uviolence.N Throughout this thesis, 1 often risk reinscribing the very totalizing vocabulary 1 mean to critique by enforcing a rather strict binary relationship between the African matriarchal tradition and the patriarchal Western aesthetics.

1 identify the "great Traditionfr or Traditionsw in the West as the many schools of aesthetic theory, such as Kantian and Burkean, that separate the beautiful from the realm of the personal and political and perpetuate racist ideology. A black aesthetic, 1 suggest, is that which, on the contrary, works to unite culture and politics and ethics and aesthetics. My reference to Western "Traditionsw or to a "great Tradition" demands certain clarification. There are several Western "traditionsm -- aesthetics of the beautiful that also emphasize the importance of the individual, the social, and the political. But with that being said, we also need to keep in mind that these other, more liberating or ethical aesthetics, have not always held equal weight in the West. Instead, the "great Tradition," those aesthetics that attempt to divorce concepts of "Beauty," "Truth," and "ArtM from the persona1 and political, have often worked to subordinate women, and to naturalize the enslavement of blacks. Clarke, and many other writers of African descent, identify a distinct black aesthetic, an aesthetic rooted in the personal, the political, in the collectivity, circularity and eclecticism of an oral culture. An African aesthetic is the "radical beauty [such as] black" that X yearns for in

Whylah Falls ( 144) or the "pure Songm that Beatrice represents in Beatrice Chancy (7). While such distinctions between "AfricanWand "WesternM aesthetics may reinscribe a binary relationship, they also constitute a necessary form of strategic essentialism. 1 do not intend for my descriptions of African and of Western traditions to suppress the multiplicity of each aesthetic so as to identify the dominant philosophies of the beautiful that have given way to oppression, those against which Clarke's poetics write. In concluding, I would also like to clatify what 1 have identified as the ironic nature of Clarke's journey toward an ethical feminist aesthetic of beauty. Throughout this study 1 maintain that Clarke represents female beauty in ethical

ways by directing our attention to the "impossibilityWof ever representing the female muse outside of a complex matrix of intersubjective violence. While 1 recognize that such a position reinscribes an absolutist position, 1 argue that it is much more liberating than apparent impersonal, apolitical and "objective" aesthetics of beauty. The notion of being "always already" caught in a network of power and domination forces us to think about our responsibility as ethical beings. rt teaches us, as Clarke's poetics do, and as 1 demand al1 ethical feminist aesthetics should, that no matter how carefully or tentatively we may language female beauty, there is always room for still more vision and revision. Notes to Introduction

1 Beatrice Chancy is forthcoming from Polestar Press in Spring 1998. The copy 1 have cited is an earlier draft of the manuscript hence, the text and page nuxnbers may differ slightly from the published version of the verse-play.

2 Clarke was born in Windsor, Nova Scotia, in 1960, a seventh generation Africadian of African-American and Mi'kmaq orgins (on his materna1 side). For more biographical information on Clarke see Slyvia Hamilton's "Introductionw to Saltwater Spirituals and Deeper Blues.

3 See M. Travis Lane1s "An Unimpoverished Style: the Poetry of George Elliott Clarke, " in Canadian Poetry 16 (Spring/summer, 1985): 47-54. Lane States that many of our contemporary Canadian pets such as Atwood and Kroetsch have "adopted for their verse a deliberately plain style, whose lack of ornamentation, allusion, and musical grace is intended, in most cases, to portray a sense newness, of emptiness-what they perceive as the linguistic and cultural barreness of the Canadian 'landscape,' the Canadian experience. This style conveys a sense of cultural de-racination, but, sometimes, also a kind of cultural inhibition-as if a turn of speech natusal to an educated mind might be somehow un-Canadian[.]...The adoption of this plain style may have helped our poetry sever its colonial mots, and, as practised by its masters, it need never be rejected. But a mature literature needs to use the whole of its inheritance" (47 ) . Clarke ' s Sa1 twater Spirituals and Deeper Blues, Lane astutely observes, reflects such a "mature" literature and seems to make sense of our cultural impoverishment.

4 See Jacques Derrida ' s Of GL-ammatology. (Baltimore: The John Hopkins Up, 1976.), 95-192. See also Peter Baker's discussion of Derrida's use of the term "intersubjective violenceq1in Deconstruction and the Ethical Turn (Oralando: üP of Florida, 1995), 117-129. Derrida claims that "writingw (in the large sense he gives the term) can only be thought within the "horizon of intersubjective violencew (127). Baker elucidates how Derrida uses the tem "intersubjective violence" to convey how the personal is always intersubjective. That is, Derrida uses the tenu to describe how we, as linguistic beings, are inescapably caught within a system of "writing, a sytem of power and domination that always excludes an otherness and, hence , is inevitably violent. 5 In Fire on the Water: An Anthology of Black Nova Scotian Writing Volume One Clarke states that the collection of Africadian writing "was born of necessity: to witness words that once existed in invisibility. And it chastises those critics who lwked upon this garden and saw only a desert" (10). Fire on the Water is a monument to past and present Africadian writers and conveys how Clarke nites out of a long and rich poetic tradition. For other anthologies of African-Canadian writing edited by Clarke see Volume Two of Fire on the Water and Eyeing the North Star: Directions in African-Canadian Literarture.

6 See Ann Wallace's introduction to Daughters of the Sun, Women of the Muon for a matriarchal account of the origin of "the word." In the African tradition, "writing, as Wallace states, is considered to be "memory, the mother of the arts." According to the legends, "the word was called Noimno, which is water and heat - the life force itself. For it is said that the person who has power over the word, directs the life-forcef' (5-6).

7 My use of the phrase "coming into" here, and in the chapters that follow, is an allusion to Clarke ' s "Coming Into Intelligencew (13). This poem finds its "sheltert' in the "Gehe~a"section of Lush Qreams, Blue Exile and can be read as the signature piece of the section. It narrates the speaker's journey from a "wise child" who 9mderstood pain" to an adult who recognizes the problematic nature of universalizing human sufiering and oppres sion.

8 See also Paul Gilroy's discussion of Edmund Burke in The Black Atlantic (941).

9 In Deconstruction and the Ethical Turn Peter Baker uses the term "ethical turn" to denote the recent demand in the academy for an examination of the ethics of deconstruction. The term is a play on the major theoretical discourse of the past thirty years which is most often referred to as a "linguistic turnw (1).

10 In Of Grammatology Derrida uses the term "writing" in an expanded sense to refer to other social formations such as: law, education, politics, economics, religion, and so on.

11 Jacques Derrida's claim that there is "nothing outside the textw (wDeconstruction in Americaw 15) suggests that there is nothing outside of content rather than some of nihilist hermeneutics. As Derrida himself notes, his attempt to correct critics: "1 never cease to be surprised by critics who see my work as a declaration that there is nothing beyond language, that we ara imprisoned in language; it is, in fact, saying the opposite. The critique of logocentricism is above al else the search for the 'other ' and the 'other of language'" (Deconstruction and the Other" 123).

See Luce Irigary's Ce sexe qui n'en est pas un [CS]. Paris : miuit, 1977. [This Sex Which 1s Not One. Trans. Catherine Porter with Carolyn Burke. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985. ] and Ethique de la diff erence sexuelle [EDS 1 . Paris : Minuit, 1984. Tobin Seibers, The Ethics of Criticism (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1988), 5. In Deconstruction and the Ethical Turn, Peter Baker distinguishes between " normative" and "ethical" feminism. The distinction is based on one's relationship to language itself . For Baker, normative f eminists are critics, such as Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar, who maintain that "the language of literary expression used by women can and ought to represent their specific, gendered experience" (84). To this list, 1 suggest, we can also add other critics such Judith Butler who also argues that women need not feel any alienation from the idea of language. Baker cites Julia Kristeva's theory of the "semoitic choral1 as an example of ethical feminism. In contrast to normative feminists who return to a stable notion of language, ethical feminists point to an otherness of language itself . For Kristeva, this otherness is expressed in terms of pre-linguistic drives. By recognizing that there is always an otherness of language ethical feminism, Baker argues, self-articulates a resistance to the "violencew of writing and thereby resists "falling into the proscriptive trap of setting out normative goals and behaviours " ( 9 6 ) . Moreover , ethical feminism accounts for the textual oppression and alienation marginalized subjects may feel from the idea of langauge . While Clarke ' s feminism neither advocates a return to a pre-linguistic realm like Kristeva, nor fails to outline a new set of normative rules or validated behaviours, the pet writes in a manner which leads us to think of the otherness(es) of language. ln doing so, Clarke's feminist aesthetic, 1 will demonstrate, is more open to the "cal1 of the other" and exemplif ies how one mav "think ethics ethicallv" 1961. 15 For a discussion of the differences between negative influence, positive influence (an influence marked by its replications of a prior text) and inspiration see Thais E. Morgan, "1s There an InterteAt in this Text? Literaxy and Interdisciplinary Approaches to Intertextuality," American Journal of Sdotics 3 (1985) 3.

lotes to Chapter 1

16 See note number fifteen in the Introduction,

17 "AutobiographyWis one of the many "fugitive pieces" or "lyrical lieswof Saltwater Spirituals and Deeper Blues that finds what Clarke describes as "fresh shelterw in Lush Dreams, Blue Exile (4). In the later text, "Autobiographyw is placed within the "Africadia" section or the pilgrim-pet's fourth "state of mînd. " The revisions of many "fugitive pieces" are often minor and have more to do with style than content such as his choice to capitalize titles and sentences and to divide sentences into more pronounced stanzas. For a fuller discussion of the railroad blues tradition see Hazel Carby9s "It Jus Be's Dat Way Sometimew (751-2) and Houston A. Baker, Jr, 's Blues, Ideology, and Afro-American Literature (7-9, 202-3)

19 In "How Exile Melts to One Hundred Roses: Postscriptw of Whylah Falls, X States: "Al1 my miles have melted to this song of how the brown girl--/Shelley--squirrels away, in her bureau, a hundred postcards/ proclaiming her beautiful although she's ken schwled that her/ hotcombs and dented teapot and black woodstove are backward,/ backwoods , and unbecomingw ( 24 ) .

20 Lush Drem, Blue Exile is often considered by critics and by Clarke himself to be the most "personal" or autobiographical of his texts. Replete with photographs and poems, the text is divided into five sections that narrate the pilgrim-pet ' s self -exile and "responsible" return to the beauty of Africadia. The first section, wZarahemla,w conveys the wallowing dreams of the pilgrim-pet "who yearn[s] to be Ulyssean, to roam/foaming oceans" (9). The second section, "GehennaM reflects the poet's "coming intow an understanding of transcendental suffering and of the problematic nature of how to represent the universal. vAxum-Saba" the third state of mind, as 1 examine here in the last half of this chapter, conveys the important role Clarke's liberating philosophy of beauty attributes to women as well as the pilgrim-pet's growing awareness of the governing power of words. The fourth state of mind, "Africadia," reflects the prodigal son's return to the shores of Nova Scotia and his recognition of his social responsibility as a preacher, prophet and ' fisher of Africadians ' ( 7 4 ) . "Sierra Leonia," the fifth section, celebrates exile as the ideal, ethical state of mind. Ït is the significant role the female principle plays in the pilgrim-pet's journey toward Sierra Leonia that first inspired me to investigate Clarke's languaging of female beauty.

21 For a discussion of how Clarke transplants pastoral and courtly love traditions in his poetry see Dorothy Well's "A Rose Grows in Whylah Falls: Transplanted Traditions in George Elliott Clarke ' s 'Africadia. '

22 See Mae Gwendolyn Henderson's "Speaking in Tongues: Dialogics , Dialectics , and the Black Woman Writer' s Literary Tradition" in Reading Black, Reading Feminist.

Notes to Chaptet 2

23 See Elaine Savory's biography on "Mariene Nourbese Philipw in The Dictiondry of Literary Biography v. 157, 296-306. Savory uses the term "pangeneric" to describe the manner in which Marlene Nourbese Philip weaves together poetry and prose extracts.

24 For poststructuralist interpretations of the dialogic nature of authorial voice in Milton's Paradise Lost see Sauer's Barbarous Dissonance and Images of Voice in Milton 's Epics and Goldberg ' s Voice Terminal Echo: Postroodernism and the English Renaissance Texts.

2s For an application of Mikhail Bakhtin's notion of heteroglossia to ~fro-American literature see Mae Gwendolyn Benderson's "Speaking in Tongues: Dialogics, Dialectics, and the Black Woman Writer's Literary Tradition.

26 In arguing that Clarke rewrites Milton's visioning of the female muse 1 am aligning myself with the criticism of Mary Nyquist and Elizabeth Sauer more than that of Dianne McColley and Barbara Lewalski. Both McColley and Lewalski present a largely sympathetic portrait of Eve. For example, in Milton's Eve McColley argues that Eve is "a pattern and composition of active goodness and a speaking picture of the recreative power of poetry itselfw (4). In contrast, Sauer in Barbarous Dissonance and Images of Voice in Milton's Epics argues alongside of Nyquist and demonstrates how despite any sympathetic leanings Milton m;iv have for Eve he ultimately constructs a gendered hierarchy of discourse that presents the mateinal body as an illusion and misconception of the epic narrator and privileges the paternal voice of Adam and God over that of Eve (87-110).

27 In a "A Rose Grows in Whylah Falls: Transplanted Traditions in George Elliott Clarke's "Africadia1* Dorothy Wells notes that "Pound himself "pilferedWthis poem from a much earlier Chinese pet, Li Po" (7). Clarke use of this "pilferedWpiece is effective here for it emphasizes just how much X in book one privileges his own "lettered voice" over that of Shelley's.

20 For Satan's objectification of Eve see Book Nine of Paradise Lost. My seference to Adam's distortion of Eve here appears in book ten, 884-5.

30 See Maureen Moynagh ' s interview with George Elliott Clarke for a discussion of the power and limitations of language and the responsibility that places on the pet (75).

31 For a discussion of Africadia as an imagined geography see Maureen Moynagh's "Mapping Africadia's Imaginary geography; An interview with George Elliott Clarke," Ariel : A Review of International English Literature 27 :4 ûct. 1996: 77-78. See also chapter one for a discussion of the motif of the train in Afro-Anierican and Africadian literatures.

3 Here, 1 an referring to Michael's concluding speech in book twelve of Milton's Paradise Lost. In consoling the fallen Adam and Eve who must leave Eden, Michael outlines certain qualities that, if attained, would enable them to achieve a "paradise within" that is Yar" "happier" than the Paradise they are banished from (12.580-589). Clarke, 1 will demonstrate, off ers a sMlar form of an interna1 paradise as a balm for oppressed peoples. 33 For a discussion of Milton's use of the king bee metaphor in Paradise Lost see Sauer's "Barbarous Dissonancem and Multivocality in Paradise Lost," English Studies in Canada 19:3 Sept. 1993: 270-1. See Dorothy Wells' "A Rose Grows in Whylah Falls: Transplanted Traditions in George Elliott Clarke's ''Africadia"" for a discussion of how Clarke undermines the Golden Age of pastoral and sonnet modes as he invokes them. See Richard Lemm, 22. Lemm, 23.

See Books Four, Five and Nine of Paradise Lost. Adam's and Eve's conversations on gardening in these books complement the accounts of poetic creation described throughout Milton's epic. In Clarke's interview with Maureen Moynagh the pet responds to a question about the significance of "place" in his work by stating: "What 1 am trying to do in my own work, and what 1 try to encourage others to do as well, is to be really conscious about it. For instance, I'm interested in rewriting the map of Nova Scotia. 1 mean, why should 1 call Hants County "Hants County?" 1'11 call it "States County," after a black family surname. Same thing with Digby County; that's Jarvis County for me. In the same way that the Mi ' kmaq people have gone back to the original Mi'kmaq names for many of the places in this province in order to lay claim to it, we need to reclaim the province because we have been disenfranchised; we've been ignored, we've been erased in a sense from the map. In the case of Africville, we were literally bulldozed away" (75-6). In the intrcduction to Fire on the Water, Volume One, Clarke States that Africadian literature has two broad thexnes. One theme is the messianic (revolutionary) which stresses the saving grace of love, liberty, justice, faith, beauty and comunity. In other words it emphasizes al1 that is good or the appearance of the "world as it ought to be. " The other theme is the apocalyptic (revelationary) which denotes the "world as it isw--the pain, the denial or the destruction of identity (22). Clarke's deconstruction and reconstruction of a gendered hierarchy of beauty interweaves both revolutionary and revelationary visions.

Notes to Chapter 3

See Mae Gwendolyn Henderson's response to Houston A. Baker's essav "There is No More Beautiful Wav: Theorv and the Poetics of Af ro-American Women ' s Writingw in Chapter Five of Afro-American Literary Study in the 1990s 155-163, In this chapter my reference to the term "cutting gazesw has various def initions for me that multiplied as my investigation proceeded. 1 have, therefore, artificially though necessarily divided the def initions into three interrelated contexts: "masculine" or %ale-ga~ing,~"positive gazingw and "negative gazing." Although al1 types of gazing, like "writing" are "violent," male-gazing is that which does not articulate a resistance to its forms of power and domination, to its "slicing of women into commodities ." Positive gazing refers to those cutting gazes that subvert the symbolic order by working within the conventional construct of an idealized "fernale" muse. Negative gazing refers to those that disnipt the patriarchal gaze by deconstructing the veq notion of " femininity. " See note number 23.

Whylah Falls r The Play was performed by the Eastern Front Theatre Company, Halifax, Nova Scotia, January 1997. In her study Sexual Suspects Straub notes that mst of the scopic power has not always been in the hands of the spectator. Citing Stephen Orgel's Illusion of Power and other work done on the Renaissance stage Straub argues that the spectacle once occupied a position of paver. However, what occurred after the Restoration was a much stricter binary relation between the spectacle and spectator-a relations hip which rendered the stage inferior to the all-seeing eye of the spectator. For more information on Brecht's relationship to feminist theory see Elin Diamond's "Brechtian Theory/Feminist Theory : Toward a Gestic Feminist Criticism. " In the final section of this chapter 1 will discuss this issue of "intersubjective violence" in greater depth.

See Houston Baker's "There 1s No More Beautiful Way: Theory and the Poetics of Afro-American Women's Writing" in Afro-American literary Studies 15-163. Baker argues that a concern for "metalevels, rather than tangible products, is a founding condition of Afro-American intellectual history . "Africans uprooted from ancestral soil, stripped of material culture, and victimized by brutal contact with various European nations were comelled not onlv to maintain their cultural heritaae at a metalevel, but also to apprehend the operative metaphysics of various alien cultures.

4 Francis's desire to capture Beatrice in some aesthetic moment outside of "breatheMand Voetryl'--as a *'fixedW object of his visual gaze--is echoed in a later scene of the third act , "Revoit .'' The short scene two of Act Three, places Francis alone on stage, in a bedroom that "mirrors that in "Titian's Venus d'Urbino [1538Jn (44). Plucking an "unfinished lyre" of Beatrice's "black hair," Francis announces that Tonight, [they will] duplicate incarnate/ Titian ' s heart-arresting Venus d ' Urbino. '* His use of this famous painting of what is considered to be the first reclining nude, or one of the first, (see Horst De La Crois's Art Through The Ages) as a metaphor of his lustful, incestuous raping exemplifies how Francis regards female beauty as an aesthetic ob ject.

49 See "The Poisoning" of Book Two of Whylah Falls, "The Trial of Saul ."

50 In scene one, Clarke effectively uses the chorus of slaves to convey the matriarchal aspects of collectivity and circularity, everything that stands against the linearity and rigid fixedness of a patriarchal tradition. The chorus of slaves "gather and circle counter-clocbise, leapshouting" a song at the plays opening. At a later point in scene one, when Beatrice is conversing with Lustra, the stage directions describe the chorus of slaves as "entering, encircling Beatrice and gathering her home. '' This is the Af rican, matriarchal circle that Lead in his dulled-metallic state is described as "fracturing" (2).

51 Here 1 imagine the transfomative image of the steel-knife could be captured on stage by using the same prop-a broken tip of a field slave's scythe-to represent a mirror in Deal's scullery in this scene or the knife she matches (see scenes one and five) for Beatrice to use as a weapun in "Act Three: Revolt."

52 Beatrice's recognition of the constructed nature and limitations of her role as the beautified muse is also echoed in a Song she sings near the opening of the next scene: Two butterflies duet about my head,/Mistaking me for a flower./Yet 1 am a flowerm (27).

53 In scene three of Act Four, as the imprisoned Beatrice awaits her hanging she States: "Dawn and Death will unlock this cell./Like Mariedoseph AngeliqueW(73). Marie Joseph Angelique was the slave of a wealthy Montreal merchant, de Francheville, who carried out one of the most ciramatic acts of resistance on April 11, 1734. After hearing that she was going to be sold, Angelique set fire to her owner's house in order to cover her escape. The fire engulfed her residence and forty-s ix other buildings including the HoteleDieu. In June of 1734 she was captured, tortured, paraded throughout the streets, then hanged and her body burned. Beatrice Chancy is dedicated to Marie-Joseph Angelique. For more information on her story see Alexander's and Glaze * s Toward Freedoni 3 9-4 0.

54 The preface to "Act Three:Revoltl' is a quote by Carter that states: "She learns her lesson at once; to escape slavery , she must embrace tyranny ."

55 The prefacing spiritual to "Act Two: Victimsw states: "1 must walk mry lonesome valley,/I got to walk it for myself. /Nobody else can walk it for me: 1 got to walk it for myselfm (22). Bibliographp

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