IF YOU HAD wandered into an elegant café on Manhattan’s east side that catered to New York’s literati more than a decade ago, you would have seen three men enjoying cocktails.
One would have been Austin Clarke, a celebrated, prize-winning novelist, storyteller, poet and man of letters with a martini in one hand while gesticulating vigorously with the other. The topic: the need to write about one’s experiences.
“You must write a book about those marvellous experiences I know you have had as a scribe in North America,” Clarke told his fellow Bajan. “It would be a service to you and Barbados.”
What his Bajan counterpart didn’t realise was that Clarke, who had written more than a dozen books, scores of poems and short stories, a memoir or two, including Growing Up Stupid Under The Union Jack, Pigtails & Breadfruit, and Membering, had secretly “conspired” with the American book publishing executive around the table to encourage the other Bajan to write a book.
“I’ve taken it as far as I can. The rest is up to you,” Clarke said later.
That episode didn’t surprise anyone who knew Clarke’s passion: encouraging others to write.
As Dr Rinaldo Walcott, a University of Toronto professor; Dr Cecil Foster, an academic at the State University of New York at Buffalo and an established novelist and journalist in his own right in Canada; and Austin Yearwood, a Bajan-New Yorker, who at Clarke’s urging has written at least two books, would tell you, one of “Tom” Clarke’s great strengths was helping aspiring writers.
Greatest passion
“Austin helped so many of us by encouraging us to put pen to paper,” said Foster. “I certainly benefited from his experience, skill and passion.”
Walcott, a neighbour and close Bajan friend of the literary icon who captured the Commonwealth’s top literary prize in 2002, for his novel, The Polished Hoe; the prestigious Giller, Canada’s equivalent of America’s Pulitzer Prize; the Trillium Book Award in 2003; the 1997 Writers Trust Fiction Prize for the novel The Origin of Waves; and was nominated for the Canadian Governor General’s Award in 1999, told the Toronto Star newspaper about Clarke’s great passions.
“His great passions were food, for drink, but much more than that for young writers across race and class and gender, whom he would have to his home and mentor [unselfishly], reading manuscripts and offering his feedback,” said Walcott.
When he died a week ago in a Toronto Hospice at the age of 81, Clarke, who was born in Barbados in 1934 and went to Canada in 1955 to study at the University of Toronto, was described by many of North America’s major publications, including the Washington Post and the New York Times as a brilliant author who wrote eloquently about the immigrant experience and about being black in Canada.
The Rt. Rev. Peter Fenty, Canada’s first black Anglican bishop, was equally laudatory.
“Austin ‘Tom’ Clarke is one of Barbados’ and Canada’s celebrated poets and literary giants,” was the way Fenty put it. “He will also be remembered for his stint at CBC Barbados where he tried to move broadcasting towards embracing what it meant to be an independent nation and claiming a Caribbean identity. He was certainly ahead of his time. We celebrate his life and contribution to Barbados and Canada as a Christian, journalist, poet and loyal citizen of his native land and country of adoption.”
Clearly, despite Clarke’s absence from Barbados and his presence among Canada’s literary and intellectual elite, he remained firmly grounded in his Bajan reality. Like Rihanna, the Grammy-award winning singer, you didn’t paint a picture of Clarke without sketching it against his Bajan background.
That was because he never allowed you to forget his origins.
Mia Mottley, Barbados’ Opposition Leader, put it well in a tribute: “You did not just read a Tom Clarke book, you lived it.”
A funeral service will be held on Saturday at Toronto’s St James Cathedral. His survivors include four daughters, Janice, Loretta and Jordan Clarke and Darcy Ballantyne, and a son, Michael.
Tony Best is the NATION’s North American correspondent. Email: [email protected]
