George Elliott Clarke - Writing Career

Writing Career

Clarke was recognized for collecting and promoting stories of African writers and poets. Clarke lives in Toronto and began teaching Canadian and African diasporic literature in 1999 at University of Toronto where he is currently completing a second volume of essays on African-Canadian literature.

He views “Africadian” literature as “literal and liberal—I canonize songs and sonnets, histories and homilies.” Clarke has stated that he found further writing inspiration in the 1970s and his “individualist poetic scored with implicit social commentary” came from the ‘Gang of Seven’ intellectuals, “poet-politicos: jazz trumpeter Miles Davis, troubadour-bard Bob Dylan, libertine lyricist Irving Layton, guerrilla leader and poet Mao Zedong, reactionary modernist Ezra Pound, Black Power orator Malcolm X and the Right Honourable Pierre Elliott Trudeau.” Though flawed, Clarke found “as a whole, the group’s blunt talk, suave styles, acerbic independence, raunchy macho, feisty lyricism, singing heroic and a scarf-and-beret chivalry quite, well, liberating.”

Clarke’s literary emphasis is on the perspectives of the African descendents in Canada and Nova Scotia, focusing on the African American slaves’ descendents who settled in the East coast of Nova Scotia, whom he calls “Africadian.” He writes that it is a word that he “minted from “Africa” and “Acadia” (the old name for Nova Scotia and New Brunswick), to denote the Black populations of the Maritimes and especially of Nova Scotia”.

Clarke maintains that Africadians originated in 1783 and 1815, when Black Loyalists and refugees arrived in Nova Scotia.

Clarke continues to address and challenge the historic encounters with racism, segregated areas, discrimination, hatred, forced relocation and a loss of a sense of identity and a sense of belonging experienced by the Black descendents though they had settled in Canada for hundreds of years. Black immigrations to and within Canada have been compared to a biblical journey beginning with Lamentations and ending with Exodus.

Similarly, Clarke explores specific beliefs, longings and experience of oppression and resistance, the desire for safety, freedom, equality and other basic human rights, shared among the immigrants, historically and contemporaneously. In his anthology Fire On The Water Clarke uses biblical timeline, Genesis, Psalms and Proverbs and Revelation to present Black writings and authors born within a specific period. These names reflect the Africadians’ and other Black peoples’ forebears and the first singers' own preferences for singing “the Lord’s song in this strange land.”

Clarke is known for his lyrical style, and his other intellectual contributions involve both his ability to combine literary criticism and theatrical forte and his continuance of the themes of cultural inclusiveness and Canadian iconic symbolism. In his 2007 play Trudeau: Long March, Shining Path, Clarke features his Liberal hero Trudeau (1919–2000) describing him as “the Shakespearean character: … He’s a figure about whom it is almost impossible to say anything definitive, because he is encompassed by so many contradictions but that’s what makes him interesting.” In presenting a multicultural Trudeau on the international stage, Clarke seeks to capture the human dimensions, the personality of Trudeau rather than his politics so as to emphasize the dialogues among key characters to “show the people as people not just exponents of ideas”.