"Stubborn Beauty": Africadian Women and Black Consciousness in George Elliott Clarke's Where Beauty Survived

"Stubborn Beauty":Africadian Women and Black Consciousness in George Elliott Clarke's Where Beauty Survived Mathias Iroro Orhero (bio) GEORGE ELLIOTT CLARKE IS AN ACCOMPLISHED writer and scholar. Through a four-decade career as a poet and writer, Clarke has contributed immensely to Black Atlantic writing and culture.1 In his poetry and fictional narratives, he has succeeded in representing the hard facts of what it is to be "Africadian," a term that he coined to describe the Black people in Nova Scotia and New Brunswick whose ancestry can be traced to the Black Loyalists who were resettled in Canada in 1783 by the British Crown.2 His 2021 memoir, Where Beauty Survived, offers insights into Clarke's early life in Halifax and foregrounds significant moments in his transformation into a scholar and a writer whose major interventions have been rooted in the politics of Black and Afro-Metis identity.3 Clarke's nine-chapter memoir begins with his birth in the town of Windsor, Nova Scotia, in 1960 and goes on to explore his early years in Halifax's North End; his discovery of race and experiences of racism, family secrets, and parental conflicts; and, most significantly, Clarke's development of a Black consciousness that is both global a nd specifically Canadian. One approach that this book takes in foregrounding Clarke's Black consciousness is its focus on the roles of Africadian women in his life and how their examples, [End Page 96] his rootedness as a Black Nova Scotian (or Africadian). Specifically, I argue that Clarke's critical, literary, and activistic bent, as narrated in this memoir, hinges on the example of his mother, aunts, female mentors, and Savannah (a former girlfriend). Scholars such as Afua Cooper, Robyn Maynard, Katherine McKittrick, and Andrea Davis have emphasized the place of female subjectivity in the conceptualization of Blackness in Canada.4 In their various contributions, key historical figures like Marie-Joseph Angelique exemplify female resistance in the context of slavery in Canada. More specifically, Maynard emphasizes the various types of violence experienced by enslaved Black women as well as the more recent forms of policing that Black women go through.5 What is evident in these studies is that women have been at the center of resistance to statist violence and erasure even as they experience a "double marginality" that comes to the fore at the intersection of race, class, and gender. Clarke's memoir continues this conversation on the precarity of women and their place in Africadian resistance and the Black Radical Tradition by locating their agential roles in the development of a Black intellectual. Clarke's rootedness in Black Maritime geography is the subject of the first chapter of the memoir. Here, he locates the Black body in Nova Scotia by highlighting the facts of Africadian identity: Africadian – or Scotian – identity is partly rooted in the space of one's "homestead" (as opposed to the African-American slang term "crib"). So, I'm from Three Mile Plains, but someone else is from Weymouth Falls, and another is from North Preston (the largest all-Black community in Canada), and still another is from Gibson Woods or New Glasgow. … How powerful is this sense of rootedness, of landholding, for an otherwise economically marginalized and socially maligned community! … This fact gives [End Page 97] Scotians – Africadians – a firm cultural sensibility and sense of home and belonging.6 This fundamental notion of identity is significant in the context of Clarke's and other Black Canadian writers' projects of contesting dominant narratives of Canada that erase Black bodies. Clarke goes further to assert his Indigenous matrilineal ancestry through his point that "because the colonial authorities placed Africadians alongside Mi'kmaq reserves (because we were both refuse peoples as far as Yankee-and-Dixie-descended slaveholders' government was concerned), there was lots of exchange, of skills and goods and cultural practices (including drumming and basket-weaving), and, naturally, of DNA."7 By grounding himself in the geography of the region through his ancestry, Clarke sets the stage for the formation of personal identity and a Black consciousness that responds to contested notions of place. His first experience as a racialized person comes shortly after...

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