An interview with George Elliott Clarke
by Christine McNair

(First published in the 2001 Gaspereau Press Omnibus Reader)

Christine McNair: What initially prompted you to write Execution Poems?

George Elliott Clarke: Well, seven years ago, my now-unfortunately late mom, mentioned that I had two cousins that had been executed. This was back in May 1994 and I was visiting Halifax for a conference. This came right out of the blue and I was completely surprised and shocked. But that very same weekend, I ran into a couple of relatives who said, "Yes, this is true, it did happen and these were their names, and this was roughly the time they died." And before that weekend was over, one of them even managed to give me a newspaper clipping about it, from the Halifax Chronicle Herald. And so, I went from complete, utter ignorance about the whole thing to having a basis of informed knowledge within 48 to 72 hours of first being told about it. A couple years went by, and I got to the national archives in Ottawa and looked up their records, the records of the trials for George and Rufus Hamilton. And after I read the transcripts, I decided I really had to write something about it. And, I’m not finished with the story yet because I’ve got to write a novel about it and I’m also trying to do a screenplay based on the same story.

CM: The people and landscape of the annapolis valley feature prominently in your writing and I’m just wondering – why do you think you keep returning to this place in your work?

GC: Well … and I’m not saying this to curry any favour with Annapolis Valley residents, but of course, I’ve always been very, very jealous of them. Mainly because I think it’s a beautiful place. I haven’t seen that much of the world honestly, but from what I have seen, this area strikes me as being particularly beautiful but also haunted by its history. History that most of us are completely ignorant of – including the expulsion of the Acadians, the Micmac who were pushed out of parts of the Annapolis Valley, and the history of slavery, since the Planters brought slaves with them from New England and Rhode Island and South Carolina and that needs to be thought through or remembered. So, there’s a lot there. That landscape, as beautiful as it may seem to the naked, untrained eye, is also a landscape which hides and shrouds an awful lot of, in some cases, very negative history. And in fact, I find that one of the most compelling aspects of the Valley, in that, here again is this great beautiful landscape, but behind it or beneath it, is this incredible history of sometimes great pain and tragedy. At my grandparents home in Three Miles Plains, there was always a great agricultural richness around and a whole different way of life and people speaking, in my imagination, a very colourful English and doing interesting things. So, I developed a fondness for the place, which may be now largely nostalgia and sentimentality but at the same time, is also informed by a degree of realism. Especially because I had the occasion to go back and work there as a social worker for the Black United Front, back in the mid-1980s. And that gave me a little greater understanding and it even further developed my affection for the Valley. And one of the great, I don’t know, ironies of my life, is that as much as I’ve written about it and as much as I like it, I’ve never really gotten to live there except for a patchwork of weekends from 1985 to 1986 [laughs].

CM: There was a story in the Halifax Sunday Herald about a woman you met on a train who told you that your poetry was good but that "it’s not Canadian." That must have been frustrating for you.

GC: Well, it was definitely a memorable experience, in terms of all the criticism I’ve received. In fact, maybe some of the criticism I receive does fall into a similar category of basically befuddlement, of saying "oh, this is good work" or recognizing some virtues in the poetry but then turning around and saying flatly at the same time, but "It’s not Canadian". There’s two different ways to interpret that. One might be simply that, okay, I confess my poetry tends to be boisterous, raucous, lush, and "colourful" and some people find that hard to take or some people don’t identify that as an aspect or as a potential aspect of Canadian poetry. A less charitable view to take of that criticism is that it’s simply saying, "We understand Canada and Canadian to refer to European or people of European heritage and descent or Caucasian heritage or descent and we don’t consider people who come from outside ‘whiteness’ or outside ‘white Canadian-ness’ to be truly part of this country." Now, I don’t know exactly what my interacter on the train had in mind when she said that, but it certainly did pull me up short, in terms of my understanding that there was not going to be a space completely available for my work in what we describe as Canadian literature, at least not as it stood circa 1990, and maybe not even as it stands circa 2001 – although I do think the space has expanded immeasurably and our understanding of what we can call Canadian literature has expanded. But I still think that for too many critics and too many people, Canadian is a synonym for white or European. And that just certainly cannot stand, that’s just not the case.

CM: Do you think that part of the role of the writer is to remember or collect history?

GC: Oh yes. I think it’s extremely important. Generally speaking, I’ve been more interested in the early twentieth century – the thirties and the fifties. I find history can be a kind of – Byron called it the devil’s scripture – and I think there’s a lot to that, to see history as a kind of record or chronicle could be a good thing but at the same time a warning, a potential warning to the present or the future about the "lessons" of the past, but of course we often argue about what exactly those lessons are. I do feel that it’s an important way of accessing human behaviour and understanding how people behave.

CM: Why do you think you’re attracted to that particular point in history?

GC: It is a hard question, because it wasn’t exactly pleasant. There are very few parts or places in history which one could describe as being pleasant, but in any event … I guess it’s because of the connection to my own family, my mother especially and her childhood, which was partly in the thirties (she was born in 1939), and her youth, which was in the fifties and early sixties. I just think of the photographs I have of that period of time – I don’t believe any part of history was necessarily innocent – but I will say that probably for a child growing up in the thirties, forties and fifties in Nova Scotia, you probably were not as aware or as exposed to certain things as people probably are now, because of mass media and pressures to conform and all the rest of it. To get away from all this bafflegab and just come directly to the point, what I find most compelling about that period of time is that what we describe as modernity, and particularly technological modernity, had not been completely triumphant, yet. People had their television, in some cases, they had the radio, they had the record player – they had hydroelectricity for crying out loud. But at the same time, they still had an outdoor toilet, they still had the vegetables and fruit that may come from the garden or small farm just outside their door. So there’s this kind of mixture of the rural and the pre-modern, co-existing with the modern that I find really compelling. I like the idea of somebody sitting down to a homemade meal produced from farm-gotten goods close at hand, while also enjoying a bottle of coca-cola or maybe even some rum, which has been distilled in Bridgetown, Nova Scotia. And then the folk ways, even though they’re being influenced by Hollywood and mass media to a certain extent, the folk ways and folk speech are still very much rooted in again, a pre-technological, pre-modern way of being. And I still feel that you could access those notions of the pre-modern, you know they may be romantic or romanticized, I think you could still access those pre-modern notions and ideas as late as the 1950s or even early 1960s, especially if we’re talking about rural Nova Scotia. Or the rural Maritimes in general, at that period of time.

CM: Life was centred inside the communities?

GC: Yes, and so that means as a poet, it’s still possible to write a kind of folk-song or folk-speech that’s not necessarily artificial or phony, because it’s still anchored in the ways that real people acted or behaved back then.

CM: Do you think that canadians have a tendency when they’re writing about history to downplay or ignore the less pleasant or negative parts of our history?

GC: Oh yeah, that’s one of the great national vices. All history is always very selective. I think that every country does that, and Canada’s no exception. In Canada, our particular chink in the armour has always been our record around race. We continuously to this day, tend to repress and deny our attitude toward others of all sorts, from before the creation of the Canadian nation right up until the present. We want to honour our peacekeepers but we forget about Somalia. We talk about how we’ve always been a better country than the United States in terms of treating runaway slaves, then we forget about the fact that we had slavery. So, human rights, racism and so forth have been a real blind spot for Canadians. I think a lot of people are ashamed and feel it’s not right to bring up national ‘dirty laundry’, in terms of our history; we try to convince ourselves that we are the good people in the world. And by and large, we are, in terms of the other nations. On the other hand, we do have problematic blotches on our records.

CM: Some of the language that is used in Execution Poems is uncomfortable, but do you think that the language is used to fight against this kind of passive acceptance of the text – that language is used to jolt the reader?

GC: I don’t know about trying to jolt anybody. For me as a poet, I’m a romantic. I’ve been accused of being such by many critics, some good, some bad, and I accept it. I’m a romantic and as such, the poetry I’ve written has tended to be identified as ornamental, flowery, baroque in different ways …. But on the other hand, it’s not that I’m interested in flowery imagery so much as human behaviour. It may be filthy flowery but in a really negative way. I was just trying to be more realistic and say, okay, it’s not all roses, there are bloodstains here too and language covering it up and denying it.

CM: One of the quotations at the beginning of Execution Poems says that beauty has the power to check aggression and that it forbids and immobilizes the aggressor. How do you think that your poetry fits in with that?

GC: [Laughs.]

CM: I know that’s a big, horrible question.

GC: It really is. First of all I don’t think the poetry’s beautiful. Eh, maybe some parts of it are, I don’t know. All of my books, from Whylah Falls onward, have always had these wonderful quotations on beauty. It’s my ‘romantic’ character. But in this case, that quotation doesn’t refer so much to the poetry as it does to the possibility for crime and justice. And it’s a very romantic idea. The source of the quotation was a Marxist, the quotation comes from the context of, ‘What does liberty really mean?’ and ‘What does freedom really mean?’ and for him, even though he was a Marxist, he felt that freedom was also about beauty, about having access to beauty and that in a truly free state, beauty as an abstract principle has the ability to render injustice impossible. And I like the idea. Again, highly romantic. But I like it. There’s something about the Medusa quality to it – except it’s not Medusa freezing everybody with snakes – but rather a kind of more positive reading, beauty freezes injustice and stops it in its tracks, because of the power of the adoration that she invokes. I like the idea and I sort of wonder, okay, if somehow this abstract principle had intervened in the lives of George and Rufus Hamilton, if they’d never committed the crime that they did, or on the other hand, if the idea of beauty could have influenced the minds of the judge and the jurors who sat in judgment on the trials, then maybe they would not have hanged.

CM: You recently went to teach in the United States at Duke University. How do you think working in the States affected your work?

GC: Well, it’s another cliché, but I think that American poetry, particularly African American poetry, tends to be more engaged, in your face, rich, aggressive, loud, than certainly English Canadian poetry tends to be. I think there is a connection between English Canadian poetry and African American poetry and also a connection between a kind of Quebecois and African American poetry but the U.S. culture encourages, to a certain extent, a kind of loud dissent. So, it was liberating to be there. And I’ve tried to import some of that into my own poetic sensibility or poetic stance and say that it’s okay to say this, it’s okay to use certain kinds of language, it all can be poetry. I don’t have to be as reticent as I had been and I can be free to just state certain ideas and tell certain stories.

CM: What was it like seeing your work composed in lead type and hand-printed on a letterpress?

GC: Well, I think every poet must have his or her work portrayed in that archetypal fashion. And I think every writer is at least in part a bibliophile, somewhere inside. You’ve got to be. There’s still something about the book. As a writer, I’ve always had that dream, that someday I’d have that special book, that special binding and that special lettering and everything about it was just gorgeous to behold, and that’s how I feel about Execution Poems. Teaching poetry, I try to emphasize the idea of the book as a made entity, as a constructed object, not just a collection of lyrics, but that the book itself is important. And it was really nice, that Execution Poems came out and I handed it around my class, and everyone had a chance to look at it and touch it and I wasn’t just teaching, I was practising what I preach [laughs].

CM: How do you think the letterpress process altered the final book?

GC: With the limited edition, you realize you’re dealing with a special market, with people who really care about books. It gives you a market that depends upon bibliophiles, people who really care about the well-being and who care about a particular writer’s work or would like to own something that’s done in this particular way. It’s a very gratifying accomplishment actually, to see one’s work given that kind of life, because it does bring together so many people who care about the work and who care about their own art. With a limited edition, everybody really cares and everybody is deeply invested in the project and that means everything gets lavish attention and gets a certain level of care.