Even though we Canadians have always constituted a mosaic, English Canadian poets have appeared to dominate our Canadian poetic canon. In the 20th century, our multiculturalism has become more articulated, and this development is reflected in the increased ethnic diversity of poets whose work is published, anthologized, read and studied. We have already met some of the poets of the diversity in the pages of the digital history: Klein, Layton, Wah, Marlatt, Suknaski, Ondaatje, and di Michele. But the battle for all voices to be heard is not yet won. Indeed, in the canon there remain some profound silences.
find Nurjehan Aziz's forward to his anthology Floating the Borders useful in rethinking the issue of the Canadian canon. He poses the perennial question: what is a Canadian identity? Can it be contained in sensibilities found, for example, in Atwood's Survival? Although he admires its "bold comprehensiveness and panache," he found "that Survival's formulation seemed to apply to others, not to me or to any group of people I knew intimately"; theirs was not the "sensibility or psyche described overwhelmingly by the anxiety of survival." In fact, he argues, immigrants must have the opposite psyche because immigration involves not only hardship and obstacles, but also "a positive energy, a regenerative and creative outlook." He suggests that those who "yearn for a core Canadian identity, some immutable stuff to display proudly to the world" are out of step with what is happening in Canada. We no longer have a core Canadian identity as no overarching sensibility can contain the diversity. Except, one might say, the mosaic itself.
Take one group, African Canadian literature, for example. We find, even here, an umbrella encompassing a wide and diverse group of Afro-Canadian writers. Ayanna Black begins her anthology, Voices: Canadian Writers of African Descent, by stating, "We come from Jamaica, Trinidad, Barbados, Ghana, Haiti, Guyana, Nigeria, Canada, the United States, and South Africa. As writers we push the limits of literature and redefine images of representation. In the process we create our realities." Reading through the table of contents of Black's anthologies is instructive, not only of this diversity of voices, but of how few of them are being heard in the mainstream.
The search for a voice by a poet, especially a second generation poet who has been raised in two or more cultures and is trying to find his or her place of belonging, is a complex journey. As George Elliot Clarke states in Eyeing the North Star on discovering the poems of Gloria Wesley-Dayes, a voice that was Black and Canadian, "I soon realized that African Canadian literature is a hybridity. The King James scriptures, melded with East Coast spirituals, New Orleans jazz, Bajan calypso and Nigerian jit-jive. Steel drums and steel guitars harmonized. A discourse diced with Motown slang, Caribbean Creole, approximated Queen's English, gilt Haitian French, Canuck neologisms, and African patois" (xii). This hybridity, as Clarke's own poems attest, is a rich source for the poet.
Then we have the challenge of Canadian poets writing in languages other than English. We have, of course, some translations of Quebec poets and occasionally poets of other linguistic communities, like Laszlo Kemenes Gefin. But what about the others—for example, those whose work is published in Hungarian (Agnes Simandi, Brigitta Bali, Kasza Marton Lajos)? Since the latter part of the 20th century, with the increase in immigration and the blossoming of poetic voices, the questions of accessibility and representation have become acute.
In selecting four poets for this section, I may well only be compounding the insufficiency of the canon that I have noted. The four poets discussed below are representative of their communities, but they are already known, read, discussed. Nor do they encompass all the ethnic groups who are writing in Canada today. We clearly need to become more creative in addressing the problem of inclusion in Canadian literature. The world wide web may be a positive tool in this endeavour.
George Jonás (b. 1935)
George Jonás is a Hungarian-Canadian poet—born and raised in Budapest and educated at the Hungarian Liberal Arts Faculty—who immigrated to Canada in 1956, settling in Toronto. Poet, novelist, playwright, director of TV drama, producer, editor and journalist, his poetic voice has been heard since the 60s. His interests include the law (he authored numerous biographies including By Persons Unknown, coauthored with Barbara Amiel), opera (he wrote two librettos for the operas of Tibor Polgá) and motorcycles (he won the International World of Motorcycling "Max Award" (twice) for motorsport journalism and for A Passion Observed). He was a producer and chief story editor for the CBC from 1971-1985.
Jonás has four poetry collections to his credit, three written between 1967 and 1973 out of The House of Anansi, and a recent collection of selected and new poems, The East Wind Blows West (1993). John Moore of the Vancouver Sun writes, in a review of the book, "Jonas is ... the closest thing to Alexander Pope we have."
In Columbo's anthology, Rhyme and Reason, Jonas describes his subject in the poem "Hotel Royal, Budapest". He states, "Budapest is the city where I was born, and I was trying to register in this poem how strange my city seemed to me after an absence of a decade or so, and how the truth of her reality was like what used to be called a lady of easy virtue, giving herself to whomever offered more for her services" (38). The poem opens with the narrator speaking to a friend, a film director who tells the narrator that he is free, creative, and "happy in a happy country." The poem concludes:
The April wind is gentle. The socialist sky is blue. Our limousine waits patiently. A shabby woman steps into the frame, Informs me that she has not eaten in three days And asks me for five forints. I wave at my friend and smile, And give the woman three forints, And get into my limousine. They are probably both lying And I've become too old to chase after The whore of truth in strange cities.
The poets from ethnic minorities who write in English have had more success in the mainstream of Canadian poetry. Although Jonas is probably better known for his prose and journalism, his poetry has been highlighted in anthologies, for instance, in Colombo's Rhyme and Reason. Jonas' collections have been praised by respected critics such as Hugh MacCallum, in the University of Toronto Quarterly. MacCallum states, in a review of Cities, "Jonas effectively catches the paradoxes of love, neatly mocks the fragmentation of modern life, and is particularly telling in his evocation of the sense of alienation."
Unfortunately, not all Hungarian Canadian poets have enjoyed the same illumination as Jonás. The work of János (John) Miska, in his numerous publications such as The Sound of Time (1974) and Literature of Hungarian Canadians (1991) has done much to promote the poetry of Hungarian-Canadian poets. The Sound of Time gave us one of our first English translations of Hungarian-speaking poets. In his 1991 forward, Miska states that Hungarian literature in Canada, particularly poetry, is enjoying a renaissance. He argues that "poetry is more sensitive, by its very personal nature, in responding to the reverberations of the soul that is undergoing the trauma of uprooting and relocations. Furthermore, Hungarian Canadian poets appear to be courageous at taking risks in experimentation with form and exploration of theme." (9)
Selected Titles: The East Wind Blows West (1993)
Joy Kogawa (b. 1935)
hree productive books for the investigation of contemporary Asian-Canadian poetry are Lien Chao's Beyond Silence (1997), a discussion of Chinese Canadian Literature in English, Many Mouthed Birds edited by Bennett Lee & Jim Wong-Chu, and Another Way to Dance (1996), an anthology of contemporary Asian poetry edited by Cyril Dabydeen. Chao's thesis reveals how institutional racism, neglect, and confinement of Chinese immigrants in Chinatowns resulted in decades of collective silence. She argues that it was not until the 1970s that "community activists started to break through the wall of alienation and isolation (ix). She lists three main reasons for the new development: the success of Aboriginal Canadian activism, a change in immigration cultural patterns, and official multicultural policies (123). Still, she warns that change will be slow in greater inclusion of the voices of difference because "barriers are everywhere: the overall biases of Canadian history towards these communities, the linguistic barriers for some of them, and the psychological challenge for members of the historically marginalized groups who have never had a voice in Canadian culture" (124).
Included in the poets that Chao addresses in her chapter on poetry are Jim Wong Chu, Sean Gunn, Paul Yee, Laiwan, Jam. Ismail, Fred Wah, Lucy Ng, and Evelyn Lau. The chapter is an insightful examination of the way dialogue is used as a poetic and political strategy among Chinese-Canadian poets. Jim Wong Chu, for example, uses dialogue in Chinatown Ghosts to "recover the silenced lives of the Chinese labourer generation" (126).
Bennett Lee & Jim Wong Chu's anthology Many Mouthed Birds: Contemporary Writing by Chinese Canadians begins with a note from the editors: "the title of this collection...comes from a Chinese expression used to describe someone who disturbs the peace, who talks out of turn, who is indiscreet. The writers here are "many mouthed birds" because they are speaking up, breaking a long and often self-imposed silence. They offer songs straight from the heart." The Collection includes an excerpt from Lucy Ng's poem "The Sullen Shapes of Poems":
Chinese cafe, grocery, laundry—skipping rope rhymes—you want something different for me. Poet? you say. What's that? You recall Li Po drunk under the white moon, chasing her cold reflection in the river. His body skimming and sinking, the blue and white robes twisting brushstroke of calligraphy on water. You gave me these: a river, a boat, a bridge. The sullen shapes of poems.
Dabydeen's anthology, Another Way to Dance, is broader in scope. He includes poets who have a loose association with the countries of Southeast and Southern Asia. This is meant to reflect "sensibilities based on ancestral homelands...depicting a shifting, kaleidoscope landscape of cultural and spiritual heterogeneity and individual interpretations." We find Joy Kogawa here.
Although Joy Kogawa is better known for her novels, Obasan and Itsuka, and more recently, The Rain Descends, she was first known as a poet. She had five collections of poetry published between 1967 and 1985. Her most recent poetry work, a book length poem, A Song of Lilith (2001) is a collaborative work on the mythical figure of Adam's first wife.
Kogawa was born in Vancouver in 1935, a second-generation Japanese-Canadian or "Nisei". During the Second World War, her family was evacuated to Slocan, British Columbia, and later to Coaldale, Alberta, where she was raised. She has been an activist working with the National Association of Japanese Canadians, seeking redress from the Canadian government for the internment of twenty thousand Japanese Canadians during World War II. Her novels reflect her work as an activist. Both Obasan and Itsuka are moving portrayals of the Japanese Canadian experience during and after World War II, and the redress movement. These themes are also present in her poetry, as in the poem "The Day After":
The day after Sato-sensei received the Order Of Canada he told some of us Nisei the honor he received was our honor, our glory our achievement. And one Nisei remembered the time Sensei went to Japan met the emperor and was given a rice cake how Sensei brought it back to Vancouver took the cake to a baker and had it crushed into powder so that each pupil might receive a tiny bit. And someone suggested he take the Order of Canada metal and grind it to bits to share with us.
After studying education at the University of Alberta, Kogawa taught elementary school in Coaldale for a year, and then studied music at the University of Toronto followed by studies at the Anglican Women's Training College and the University of Saskatchewan. She was awarded the Books in Canada First Novel Award and the Canadian Authors' Association Book of the Year Award for Obasan. She is a member of the Order of Canada.
Selected Titles: A Choice of Dreams (1974); Woman in the Wood (1985); A Song of Lilith (2001)
George Elliot Clarke (b. 1960)
George Elliott Clarke is a huge personality, a source of immense kinetic energy, passionate about the poetry of language. At his readings, in his collections and his lectures, he draws us into his joyous but dangerous and provocative playing field of language, leading us to laugh, weep, and dance.
Poet, playwright, screenwriter, lyricist and essayist, Clarke is the youngest poet in this digital history. He was born in 1960 in Windsor Plains, Nova Scotia, the descendant of black Loyalists who settled in Canada more than two centuries ago. He has already achieved an illustrious career. He graduated with a BA in English literature from Waterloo, received a MA from Dalhousie and a PhD from Queens. He taught at Duke University in the U.S. and at McGill before accepting a position at the University of Toronto where he currently teaches Canadian and African diasporic literature. Before turning his energy to the university, Clarke was employed in a variety of jobs including that of parliamentary aide, newspaper editor (in Halifax and then Waterloo), social worker, and legislative researcher. He currently writes a critical weekly column on Atlantic poetry for the Chronicle Herald.
Among his other awards, Clarke has won the Writers' Federation of Nova Scotia Award for Poetry (1981), was runner-up for the Bliss Carman Award for Poetry (1983), and winner of the Archibald Lampman Award (1991). In 1998, he won the Portia White Prize for Excellence in the Arts, and the Bellagio Centre Fellowship (Italy). And in 2001, he was awarded the Governor General's Award for Execution Poems. His latest accolade comes from the University of Toronto where he was recently named the inaugural E.J. Pratt Professor in Canadian Literature.
Clarke has been one of the driving forces in African-Canadian writing and culture in Canada. His influence is felt not only as an inspiring role model and teacher but also as editor of anthologies of African-Canadian writers, such as Eyeing the North Star and his two-volume anthology of local Africadian writing, Fire on the Water. His work is diverse and often collaborative. He has written lyrics for the folk-gospel quartet Four the Moment. Whylah Falls: The Play was produced as a CBC Radio Drama Series and as an acclaimed stage play. Beatrice Chancy, a powerful opera about slavery in the Nova Scotia of the early 1800s, was produced in four stage productions and broadcast on CBC. His latest work, Québecité, a three-act multicultural romance set in modern-day Quebec, is an expanded, poetic rendering of a libretto Clarke wrote for the Guelph Jazz Festival with pianist D.D. Jackson.
His form is engaging with subjects that are complex,. Both his Execution Poems—written about two of Clarke's cousins, George and Rufus Hamilton, who were hanged in 1949 for murdering a taxi driver with a hammer—and Blue have powerful, provocative subjects grounded in gritty, sensual, suffering lives. In a review of Blue, Michael Bryson captures its subject as "many things: the blues, sensuality, the high sky overhead. It is also a bruise - and a reaction" (Danforth Review). Clarke's style is lush, and, as he states in the introduction of Blue, "black, profane, surly, American."
One does not read George Elliot Clarke's poetry passively. It is a song of rebellion, liberation, fury, love. But even Blue, his "Pentecostal fire—pell mell, scorching, bright, loud... poetics of arson" is a search for beauty and uncompromising truths. "Negation" begins the collection:
Le nègre negated, meager, c'est moi: Denigrated, negated, a local Caliban, unlikable and disliked (Slick, black bastard—cannibal—sucking back Licorice-lusty fifty-proof whiskey), A rusty pallor provincial, uncouth Mouth spitting lies, vomit-lyrics, musty Masticated scripture. Her majesty's Nasty, Nofaskoshan Negro, I mean To go out shining, instead of tarnished, To take apart Poetry like a heart. So my black face must preface your finish Deface your religion—unerringly Niggardly, like some film noir blackguard's.
In this, Afro Canadian readers are greeted with familiar stereotypes recognized and named; white readers are immediately faced with their own prejudices. Clarke then injects himself into the western vein of poetry (this I read as Marianne Moore's rendering of the difference between Poetry and poetry in "You Can Study it if You Want") as a positive 'negation', a new, uncompromising, voice.
Selected Titles: Execution Poems (GG 2001); Blue (2001)
Dionne Brand (b.1953)
Dionne Brand, an Afro-Caribbean Canadian writer, burst onto the Canadian poetry scene in 1978. Since then she has become one of Canada's most accomplished writers. She is a poet, author, non-fiction writer, essayist and anthologist. But first of all, she is a poet. Born in Guayguayare, Trinidad in 1953, she immigrated to Toronto in 1970. She entered a world of social activism in the 1970s, the world of the Black Liberation Movement, of Martin Luther King and the Black Panthers. Brand claims that it was at the University of Toronto that her activism was ignited and her desire to write realized. She received her BA in English and Philosophy from the University of Toronto and her Masters in Education from the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education. She has taught at Guelph, York, Simon Fraser, and the University of Toronto. She has been writer in residence at the Halifax City Regional Library, the University of Toronto, and the University of Guelph.
Brand is also admired for her social activism, particularly in the Afro-Canadian and feminist communities, and her documentaries for the National Film Board of Canada. She has worked at community centres such as the Immigrant Women's Centre, the Black Youth Hotline, the Black Education Project in Toronto, and the Ontario Federation of Labour. She was a founding member and editor of Our Lives, Canada's first Afro-Canadian women's newspaper. Her activism is continued in her films such as Sisters in the Struggle about Afro-Canadian women activists fighting racism and sexism and Long Time Comin' about two Afro-Canadian women artists.
One of the most sophisticated Canadian poets in her use of language, Brand's last two poetry collections have won national acclaim. Land to Light On (1997) won both the Trillium Award for Literature and the Governor General's Award for Poetry. thirsty (2002) won the Pat Lowther Award from the League of Canadian Poets and was nominated for both the Griffin Prize and the Trillium Award. Her collections are exquisitely crafted. She favours a coherent form: No Language is Neutral (1990), for example, consists of prose poems, while Land to Light On, consists of fifteen sections of prose poems with a conclusion in fifteen sections, each of eight couplets. It is a form that is unobtrusive but that enhances her powerful metaphors and musicality. Land to Light On is a startling honest look at Black suffering in America. She begins with her own experience, as an outsider, alienated by the unfamiliar land and people:
I ii If you come out and see nothing recognizable, if the stars stark and brazen like glass, already done, decide you cannot read them. If the trees don't flower and the colour refuse to limn when a white man in a red truck on a rural road jumps out at you, screaming his exact hatred of the world, his faith extravagant and earnest and he threatens, something about your cunt, you do not recover, you think of Malcolm on this snow drifted road, you think, "Is really so evil they is then That one of them in a red truck can split your heart Open, crush a day in fog?"
Brand is interested in widening the Canadian literary perspective, in inclusion for the other solitudes. Like Clarke, she is a voice that can no longer be marginalized, a voice that breaks silence.
Selected Titles: No Language is Neutral (1990); Land to Light On (1997) GG; thirsty (2002)
Copyright © Heather Pyrcz 2004. All rights reserved.