BY ITS very nature a memoir is a record of the author’s accomplished career, usually written long after the main player has left office and the events being covered are fading from memory.
Not so with Austin Chesterfield Clarke, the 81-year-old celebrated Barbadian author, poet, essayist and short story writer, who is, by any measure, one of Canada’s leading literary craftsmen. The Bajan has done it again, publishing his latest book Membering across Canada and watching with satisfaction the buzz it is creating.
A reviewer in Canada’s Globe & Mail daily newspaper said the book was “a magnificent account of a writer’s life.”
Clarke’s latest masterpiece is a 496-page account of his fascinating existence in his birthplace and North America.
“Membering is at turns admonishing, cajoling, and digressive, but always perceptive,” wrote Rabindranath Maharay, an award-winning novelist in Toronto.
The novelist admits to being delighted by the bright reception the book is receiving from readers and reviewers. He said he had set out to “leave a document” that would fill a literary gap and that would inspire black youth everywhere, including young people in Barbados and Canada to pursue their dreams of being outstanding writers.
“I was always confident that the book would do well, even before I completed it. I am going to die sometime, not soon, and I wanted to leave a document behind because there aren’t many biographies written by us,” he said a few days ago. “I wanted to give to the reader, a sense of the people I knew and work with as I was being trained to be a writer. I aimed this book at the young people growing up and at the elders from whom they learned lessons. I wanted to give (an account of) the environment in which the writer grew up and live.
“The audience then is West Indian, primarily Barbadian, the black West Indian immigrant, pointing him (or her to) the connection to their blackness and explain that they are not the only one, they aren’t alone. They have elders to show him (or her) the way, he added.”
In the novelist’s case, the “elder” at the top of his list was his late mother, Gladys Irene Clarke-Luke, who died about a decade ago in the United States.
“You know, I am very satisfied with my life in Barbados, particularly growing up and being trained by a Barbadian woman, the one and only, who formed me”.
Looking back on his life, which apart from the outstanding and memorable literature he created, also included stints as a newspaper reporter in Ontario, a freelance broadcaster for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, a columnist for the NATION newspaper, a university lecturer in the US and Canada, an agitator who took to the streets of Toronto in the 1960s demanding more economic and social opportunities for blacks in Canada, and a Barbados diplomat in Washington, Clarke, said “overall I am quite satisfied with my life and how it has turned out.”
That satisfaction can be traced to his accomplishments with the pen which range far and wide – more than a dozen novels, including The Polished Hoe that captured Canada’s and the Commonwealth’s top literary awards shortly after the turn of the 21st century; his extensive collections of short stories; the thought provoking poetry he fashioned; and his outstanding memoirs that captured his life Growing Up Stupid Under the Union Jack, the culinary arts of Barbados that were detailed in Pigtails n’ Breadfruit, the rituals of “slave food; and his Passage Back Home, a personal reminiscence of Samuel Selvon, a major contributor to the golden age of Caribbean literature that came out of England and gave the world V.S. Naipaul, Kamau Brathwaite, George Lamming and Wilson Harris.
Tony Best is the Nation’s North America correspondent. Bestra@aol.com