BOOKS
FALL ARTS PREVIEW
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All your must-read fall books await online at thecoast.ca, along with the only book club guide you'll ever need.
One of Canada’s most lauded authors releases his most vulnerable work yet. BY MORGAN MULLIN hen he answers a phone call from The Coast days before his latest book is about to hit shelves, George Elliott Clarke isn’t afraid to admit his nerves. “I don’t have protection of fiction,” the Order of Canadaappointed poet and author says. While writers “are always revealing ourselves,” Clarke adds, his new memoir means “much more exposure of who I am, whatever that is; whoever my fundamental identity is. "Drive and desires and wishes and fears: It’s all there. Any armchair psychologist or psychiatrist can sit down with this book, and probably do a better job of figuring out who I am than I’ve ever been able to do myself.” He laughs. To have such stage fright now, over 30 published books in, is at once surprising and endearing of the writer, easily one of Canada’s most lauded. But really, considering the work at hand—a 337-page tome whose title, Where Beauty Survived, feels like a one-line poem— it sort of fits. Clarke has long arranged the branches of his family tree in vases of books for others to read and relish (like his African Nova Scotian answer to Steinbeck’s East of Eden, 2005’s George and Rue or its sibling work, 2001’s Execution Poems). But, he’s never quite turned
the mirror back on himself as plainly as he does here. Where Beauty Survived weaves memories of his childhood in Africadia (a historical, geographical term Clarke coined: “I believe that the historical Black Nova Scotian community created an independent, separate, North Atlantic, African diasporic culture—and it should have a name,” he explains) into a tight tapestry that shows how he was shaped into the poet and author he is today. Clarke is quick to promise that the story delivers laughter and lightness alongside loss and grief, his signature alchemy. Time is charted from his early childhood to teen years through the culture and music around him, “from the Beethoven of my father and the James Brown of my mother to Miles Davis,” he adds. His relationship with his father, the womanizing maverick who inspired his 2016 novel The Motorcyclist, is the book’s beating heart (the diary his dad left him as an inheritance provides inspiration for both works). “Everywhere you look, in Nova Scotia, there are incredible stories involving Black people: Historically, as well as right down to the present,” he adds. Clarke should count his own story amongst them. a
It started from a place of: Who else carries a type of wisdom or lessons that can be passed on?” “Any armchair psychologist or psychiatrist can sit down with this book and probably do a better job of figuring out who I am than I’ve ever been able to do myself.” SUBMITTED
The livestream launch of Jesse Wente’s Unreconciled
HEAR
Jesse Wente in conversation via livestream with Matt Galloway Thursday October 14 at 9pm. Attendee info available at Bookmark Halifax (5686 Spring Garden Road) with purchase of Unreconciled.
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hances are you don’t know arts journalist and Canada Council for the Arts chairperson Jesse Wente, but you certainly know the cultural riches Turtle Island gets to boast about, thanks to his hard work: A 20-year stint covering pop culture and film on CBC’s Metro Morning, combined with being the first director of Canada's Indigenous Screen Office, he’s the type to not stop until everyone’s as hyped on the project he knows is head-and-shoulders above the rest. Now, though, he’s trading advocating others’ art for sharing his own with the hotly anticipated memoir Unreconciled: Family, Truth and Indigenious Resistance. Billed as “uncovering the lies and myths that affect relations between white and Indigenous peoples,” the book—printed by Penguin Random House Canada—highlights ”the power of narrative to emphasize truth over comfort.” Now, an online book launch celebration sees Wente chatting with Matt Galloway, host of CBC’s The Current. You can tune into the livestream by purchasing a copy of Unreconciled at participating independent bookstores—namely, Bookmark Halifax. —MM
18 • OCTOBER 14,2021 •
The Coast
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n the soil that feeds Abena Beloved Green’s family tree, a place of nutrients and knowledge that helps grow chlorophyll-packed leaves, inspiration was waiting to be dug up like treasure. “I always had a reverence for grandmothers and always envied classmates who were close to their grandmothers and would talk to them,” the lauded slam poet and author says. But when her own grandmother (who lived in Ghana) passed away, it was a door closing—and a seed of an idea erupting to fill the loss’ space. “It started from a place of : who else knows her? Who else carries a type of wisdom or lessons that can be passed on?” Green, who grew up in Antigonish, explains, speaking by phone with The Coast. “I just wanted to gather from elders, because I knew that they knew things that I would find important but I didn’t know what it was... Anything from having lived in a colonized country to how to plant seeds according to the
George Elliott Clarke knows Where Beauty Survived W
A journey of rediscovery
Abena Green Author of the Ode to The Unpraised season, to how they solve conflict to relationships: Just things that they knew, that I knew I would never know, I would never read about, there would be no way of knowing unless I asked.” The result of that digging and asking? Ode To The Unpraised: Stories and Lessons from Women I Know, an ambitious mix of prose and poetry that feels equal parts soul-salving succour and handy life hack. With a writing voice influenced by Nikky Finney and Jericho Brown, Green cut her creative teeth in the world of slam poetry, where she was a finalist in 2017’s Canadian Individual Poetry Slam and winner of the Writer’s Federation of Nova Scotia Atlantic Writing Competition in 2016. She has since become the first writer-in-residence for YWCA Halifax. Her first book was a collection of poems, called The Way We Hold On—but Ode sees her moving more towards words that “have not lived off of the page as much.” Since its mid-pandemic release and official launch last month, Ode has landed on Bookmark Halifax’s bestseller list (a fact Green learns in our interview), proof that while these are words that haven’t lived much off the page, they do have residence in many a reader’s mind. “Stretch out your hands and see who you can touch in your life. And looking at those people in a new way: That was how it happened for me,” Green adds. Looking anew at people you see every day “makes much more fascination into your life, like: Oh, like I didn’t know that that’s who this person was.” —MM
