Odysseys Home: Mapping African-Canadian Literature.(Book Review)

Publication: The Modern Language Review

Publication Date: 01-APR-04

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COPYRIGHT 2004 Modern Humanities Research Association

Odysseys Home: Mapping African-Canadian Literature. By GEORGE ELLIOTT CLARKE. Toronto, Buffalo, NY, and London: University of Toronto Press. 2002. xii+ 491 pp. $85; 60 [pounds sterling] (pbk $35.95; 22.50 [pounds sterling]). ISBN 0-8020-4376-3 (pbk 0-8020-8191-6).

George Elliott Clarke's poetry and plays are formally traditional but lyrical and searching. They appeal to a wide range of readers, including the 'I-may-not-know-much-about-poetry-but-I-know-what-I-like' crowd. Still, their content is never similarly comfortable, as they explore many aspects of race in Canada, including historical. Canadians tend to see racism as an American problem, something that never happens here. Clarke makes it clear that it did happen here and it continues to happen here.

This might seem like a radical agenda. Yet Clarke is an admitted conservative. He refuses to dismiss the past, especially the Black Loyalists of the late eighteenth century, those persons of African descent who chose to avoid the American revolution by moving to what would become Canada. Then there was...

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