'Membering the enduring legacy of Austin Clarke
Born on this day in 1934, Clarke went from CBC stagehand to one of Canada's most important writers
Against the Grain is a monthly column by Huda Hassan examining popular culture and the arts through a Black feminist lens.
Austin Clarke was living in a basement apartment north of Bloor Street and east of Sherbourne in Toronto in the late 1950s when he first worked for the CBC, as a stagehand. The neighbourhood, Rosedale, was affluent and white. He was poor, parenting two children, sneaking time in between work and caregiving to write into the late hours.
Despite some challenges — including living in a dark two-bedroom with damp ceiling pipes alongside his wife, Betty, and their babies, Janice and Loretta — he found his way to work on time. That was until November, as another bitter Toronto winter approached.
The restrictions and discrimination of city life were taking their toll. In a chapter titled "The CBC Stagehand" in his 2015 memoir, 'Membering, he writes of the snowy metropolis, commutes through a white city, his unfavourable apartment, the "sweating beads" on the pipes, the grind of supporting a family on a small income. Surviving in Toronto as a low-income immigrant has always been arduous.
Clarke started getting warnings from his employer about his tardiness: he was late to work two days in November, five times in December, and on at least seven more occasions before he was fired.
The day after he was let go, he walked into a CBC studio, script in hand. He was hired as an actor. These were some of the precarious first steps Clarke took on his journey to becoming a seminal literary figure in Canada.
'Canada's angriest Black man'
The Barbadian-born writer later became a reporter for the Timmins Daily Press and the Globe and Mail. As his profile grew, he worked as a freelance radio broadcaster for his former employer, the CBC; this was a role he never rose above at the organization. But Clarke went on to publish 11 novels, six short-story collections, two books of poetry, three memoirs and a cookbook, as well as articles for Canadian outlets. In one 1968 essay he wrote for Maclean's on racism in Canada, he was called "Canada's angriest Black man" in a headline for the piece he did not approve before it was published.
He wrote intricate and intimate stories illustrating the communities and geography of Toronto. Many of his poems, stories and essays expose and dissect the racism of his new home. For the CBC, he spent some time in Harlem hoping to secure an interview with author James Baldwin. Instead, he landed a one-hour interview with Malcolm X. He was one of the few journalists to interview the civil rights leader for a Canadian broadcaster.
Aside from writing, Clarke worked in academia and politics. As a visiting lecturer at several schools — including Yale, Duke and the University of Texas in the 1960s and '70s — he had a hand in developing their Black studies programs. He was a writer-in-residence at Concordia and Western University (then known as the University of Western Ontario). In 1977, he ran as a Progressive Conservative candidate in Ontario's general election but lost. This step away from the ideology inherent in his literary work showed some of his contradictions. One might say that for radicals, he was too Conservative, and for Conservatives, he was too radical.
But wherever he went, his infamous nickname followed. He wrote in his memoir about experiencing housing and other institutional racism he endured during his time in the country, which prevented him from accessing housing and work.
"The euphemism 'Canada's angriest Black man' did not faze any thinking person," Clarke wrote. "The hidden meaning was simply 'Canada's most anti-white Black man.'"
Caribbean arts movement
In a letter to Clarke, which he shared in 'Membering, his mother wrote, "You was such a blasted fool … choosing Canada over England, by yourself, to live in that damn cold place, Canada, as if you is a real foolbert." It came in a parcel with a bottle he'd requested — liquor, I assume — from Barbados. There was an emerging sense of Caribbean identity and community in London at the time — but Clarke had his own incentives for staying in Canada.
His writings about Black life in mid-20th century Canada were influenced by a global shift that began during his youth. The growth of the Black diaspora in London was fuelled by the British Nationality Act of 1948, an imperial move to keep the colonies and Commonwealth countries nationally tied to Britain after the Second World War. Shortly after, in 1955, Canada introduced the West Indian Domestic Scheme, increasing the country's Caribbean diaspora. As these global communities grew, a small collective of artists and activists in London established the Caribbean Artists Movement, in 1966. The organization, which lasted until 1972, celebrated Caribbean identity and crafted a new esthetic in arts and political organizing. Members and associates included Althea McNish, C.L.R. James, Kamau Brathwaite, Samuel Selvon and George Lamming — many of whom Clarke was in conversation with in his writings.
It was around this time that Toronto expanded with migrants from the Caribbean. Clarke examined this growing community in his Toronto Trilogy: The Meeting Point (1967), Storm of Fortune (1973) and The Bigger Light (1975). Through the fictional story of Bernice Leach — a domestic worker from Barbados — and her friends, employers, lovers and neighbours, Clarke dissects Black life, immigration and racial tensions. The feeling of being unsettled — through a lack of social mobility, citizenship status and shared community — swims through each book in the series.
Many writers from Canada's Black diaspora have cited Clarke as a major influence, including Rinaldo Walcott, David Chariandy, Katherine McKittrick and George Elliott Clarke.
'Membering Austin Clarke
Clarke's experience as a stagehand, he wrote, introduced him to people in the literary community he wouldn't have otherwise been exposed to — and, importantly, who wouldn't have been exposed to him. Working at the CBC was notable editor Robert Weaver, who later guided the beginnings of "something somebody called Canadian Literature or CanLit." The proximity to "the Czar of Literature" made possible a working relationship that lasted decades, and Weaver helped Clarke publish his first short stories. Clarke's role as a stagehand — using a hammer purchased at Canadian Tire on shows such as Country Hoedown — gave him the access he needed.
And with time, he left an everlasting mark.
Clarke is unequivocally an important writer in the Canadian literary canon. But despite finding some support, he was often discredited for his writing about whiteness, migration and nationhood. Institutional racism and the lack of a shared writing community during some stages of his career — "In those days of uncertainty, I was tormented by personal demons … with no one, no other writer with whom I could share these misapprehensions of writing that hugged me like a wet, cold shirt," he wrote in 'Membering — shaped his trajectory.
In spite of this, he persevered. CanLit's sometimes frosty response to his literary contributions in the history of CanLit had much to do with the Black artists and critics Clarke was in conversation with in his writing: Kamau Brathwaite, Richard Wright, Amiri Baraka, Édouard Glissant and John Coltrane. In Canada's incapacious literary climate, Clarke was rebellious and revolutionary, much like his peers in England and elsewhere in the diaspora.
But undeniably, Clarke is one of the most important postwar writers — and one of Canada's most important writers of the last 60 years, entering CanLit as a contemporary of Alice Munro and Margaret Atwood. He wrote in his memoir: "I have never held a Canadian writer as a model of my own work. I am alone, singular, peculiar and foreign to the establishment that governs and controls Canadian literature."
Austin Clarke's Toronto
What I return to most in Clarke's writings are his descriptions of Toronto's Moss Park, which he long called home. Even today, visitors to the neighbourhood can see the distinct green door that drew him to his row house on 150 Shuter St. (which should be a heritage site, in my opinion). It was a long way from his basement apartment in Rosedale. It is also where writers, like Walcott, frequented or lived.
"We were both Fanonians and loved Black people," Walcott wrote in a 2020 essay. "Clarke's life and work … demonstrates how in Canada, Blackness and Black people are called on, discarded and disremembered at will."
In 'Membering, Clarke wrote: "Moss Park park is where life stretches out itself on its back, prostrate in filthy, hopeless bouts of heroism and stardom, for these men who lie on the benches and the dying grass are heroes to themselves and to one another." It's where his character, Idora, a lonely domestic in More, worries frantically over her wayward son, whom she fears she's lost to a life of gangs. It explores the crime of poverty and the workings of violent city structures Clarke railed at for almost six decades.
I learned of Clarke's work far too late, as a writer on the edge of Toronto's literary community. I was never introduced to his work in Ontario's public education system. But I've wondered how his literary mapping of the city's class and racial structures might have provided affirmation for me and the other young immigrants, refugees and racialized kids around me, also excluded from Canadian history and identity. We read Harper Lee before we read our own. The local authors we did read wrote about Northern Canada, or voyeuristically, like Catherine Bush, about communities they treated as "other."
But as journalist and activist Desmond Cole said, studying Clarke's work is integral for any aspiring writer dissecting an urban climate that I would argue has seen little change since Clarke was a stagehand.
"The younger generations of Black writers, activists and thinkers should read and remember and learn from Austin Clarke," he said in a 2021 tribute for the Royal Ontario Museum. "I feel in this moment especially, Toronto should remember him, because we're in a moment where our city continues to perpetuate suffering against Black folks while calling it something else."
"Austin Clarke wrote with great lyricism, but also with great honesty — and we need that honesty and clarity now."
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