DIONNE BRAND, AUSTIN CLARKE, AND TESSA MCWATT: BLACKENING CANADA by Paul Barrett A thesis submitted to the Department of English In conformity with the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Queen’s University Kingston, Ontario, Canada May, 2011 COPYRIGHT © PAUL BARRETT 2011 Abstract This project analyzes contemporary black diasporic writing in Canada, arguing that Dionne Brand, Austin Clarke and Tessa McWatt evince a unique form of double-consciousness in their writings. Their work transforms African-American double-consciousness by locating it simultaneously within both the black diaspora and the practice of Canadian multiculturalism. The objective of this project is to offer a critical framework for situating these writers within the legacy of both Black Atlantic and Canadian cultural production. These writers do not aim to resolve their double-consciousness but rather dwell within that contradictory doubleness and hyphenation, forcing nation and diaspora to contend with one another in a discomfiting and unsettling dialogue. These authors employ the absences of the black diaspora to imagine new forms of black cultural production, multicultural citizenship and national identity. Their works produce a grammar of diasporic double-consciousness that locates the absented origins of diaspora within Canada. Brand’s depiction of temporality and Clarke’s tracing of movement explore the continuities between nation and diaspora while re-membering neglected aspects of the history of black Canada, such as the life and death of Albert Johnson. McWatt extends this blackening of nation by depicting coalitions between diasporic, indigenous, raced and sexed subjects. These authors transform hegemonic Canadian narratives of nation by dwelling in the hyphen, while their evocation of memory, absence, trauma, and desire gives blackness new meaning and legitimacy. ii Acknowledgements I would like acknowledge the support of the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council in funding this project. Reluctant acknowledgments also to the Toronto Maple Leafs for not making me choose between research and playoff hockey. You may now resume playing like a real team. Thanks to Katherine McKittrick for her diligent reading and criticism of this project in its many forms. Special thanks to my supervisor, Asha Varadharajan, for her support, encouragement and pragmatic optimism as she patiently helped transform this project from a series of disconnected observations into a sustained whole. She never lost hope when I was at my most hopeless so thank you! I would also like to acknowledge the help of my friends and family. They have given me the necessary support, comfort, distraction and encouragement to see me through this project. To everyone in Heart Lake, Brampton, Toronto, Kingston, and lots of other places, who have helped me in some capacity – thank you! Special thanks to Aimée, Alexis, Allan, Andrew P, Andrew S, Breanne, Dana, Drew, Guybrush, Matt, Peter, Ryan, and Tim.Similarly, my family – Barretts and Keenans –in Canada and overseas, have been a huge source of support for me before and throughout this project. Special thanks to my Mom, Lynda, Dad, Gavin, Kirsten, Jason, and Emily for their love and patience. Finally, thanks to Susan for all her support throughout this entire process. I couldn’t have asked for a better friend, troublemaker and interlocutor and I definitely could not have persevered without her continuous support and friendship. Thank you! iii Table of Contents Abstract......................................................................................................................................ii Acknowledgements....................................................................................................................iii List of Figures……………………………………………………………………………………..v Chapter 1 : Introduction ..............................................................................................................1 Chapter 2 : Temporalities of Becomingin Dionne Brand’s thirsty .............................................. 34 Chapter 3 : “I’m Running For My Life”: Mobility in Austin Clarke’s Recent Fiction................. 93 Chapter 4 : Writing Life-Worlds: Canadian History and the Representation of Albert Johnson 143 Chapter 5 : Race, Heritage and Recognition in Tessa McWatt’s Out of My Skin ....................... 201 Chapter 6 : Concluding ........................................................................................................... 246 Appendix A : Works Cited...................................................................................................... 267 iv List of Figures Figure 1: “Seen the typical Canadian?”…………………………………………………………221 v Chapter 1:Introduction As part of its official re-launch, complete with a new post-national slogan, “Time to Lead,” and post-attention-span layout, The Globe And Mail began a special series on Multiculturalism with an editorial entitled “Strike multiculturalism from the national vocabulary” (Oct 8 2010). The editorial argues that “The tired, flawed debate over the benefits of multiculturalism … has been on a continuous loop since the 1970s” and that “the debate has become more fraught, while the terminology has ceased to have any real meaning.” As a result, “Multiculturalism should be struck from the national vocabulary” (“Strike Multiculturalism”). Orwellian in its call to strike multiculturalism from the “national vocabulary,” the editorial attempts to put to rest not just the “tired, flawed debate,” but also the language of multiculturalism itself. This editorial reflects a broader multicultural malaise: Smaro Kamboureli identified this over ten years ago as a form of “multicultural fatigue” that views “multiculturalism as a fait accompli and displays impatience with anything related to racialization and ethnicity” ( Scandalous Bodies 83). If Canada suffered from multicultural fatigue over ten years ago, then certainly by now the multiculturalism debate is dead. In the new post-national (Davey 1993) and trans-national (Dobson 2009) Canada of Russell Peters and Michaëlle Jean these questions of race and multiculturalism are surely tired holdovers of the 1970s and are of little interest to Canadians. Yet, like haircuts and television programs, the politics of the 1970s finds longevity in the multiculturalism debate. Questions of race, the rights and responsibilities of immigrants, the shifting nature of citizenship, all vaguely lumped together under the banner of multiculturalism, remain vital concerns in contemporary Canada. Indeed, if multiculturalism is such a tired and 1 exhausted issue, why does The Globe remain so fascinated with the multiculturalism debate? 1 How does one explain The Globe ’s contradictory and somewhat pathological fascination with resurrecting the multiculturalism debate only to insist that it be laid to rest? I believe, contrary to The Globe , that questions of race and multiculturalism continue to torment Canadian conscience and haunt public consciousness. Public discourse seems to thrive on the contradictory notions that, while “For many Canadians, multiculturalism represents Canadian progressiveness” (Coleman, White Civility 7), its apparent prevalence produces a perception of Canadian identity “as crisis-ridden, as a fragile and weak entity constantly under attack and in need of vigilant defence” (Mackey 9). While the contours and “flashpoints” (“Strike Multiculturalism”) of the Canadian multicultural debate may have shifted, this chronic ambivalence characterizes Canadian public discourse on multiculturalism. I contend that the “fraught” nature of the debate on multiculturalism is precisely what renders it meaningful and demands that it be revisited with ever more at stake in its rearticulation. This project focuses exclusively on black diasporic writing in Canada in order to differentiate between race and ethnicity in the formation of multicultural identities and to insist on the significance of the history of The Middle Passage in the constitution of the singularity of blackness within Canadian discourses of nation, multiculturalism, and diaspora. It must be asked again, for whom is multiculturalism bereft of meaning and from whose perspective does it become the means to erode rather than inflect and enrich national unity? For the black writers whose provocative and sobering corpus I examine, citizenship and community have been tenuous accomplishments at best and unfulfilled aspirations at worst for those forced into a hyphenated and interstitial relationship with Canada. The popular fatigue that The Globe expresses is shared 1 Indeed, Kamboureli’s analysis of multiculturalism fatigue focuses on Gina Mallet’s 1997 article in The Globe and Mail entitled “Multiculturalism: Has diversity gone too far?” 2 by Canada’s black population, but with completely different connotations and implications. Their ambivalence is born of struggle and alienation, of desire and hope, in a national landscape corroded by systematic racism and deprivation. The writers who inhabit this study lay claim to the space of the multicultural nation in a bid to unsettle the Canadian imaginary that excludes them. An exemplary moment of this ambivalence occurs in Tessa McWatt’s Out of My Skin (1998), when the main character, Daphne, meets her biological Aunt Sheila for the first time. Sheila wonders how Daphne responds when people ask her what was your hyphenation? I have a friend, a lady from home – she makes me laugh. She says, ‘In dis country