Austin Clarke’s legacy honoured with two-part celebration

This summer marked the 90th year since the birth of Austin Clarke, the distinguished Canadian author whose extensive works and papers are curated by McMaster University Library’s William Ready Division of Archives and Research Collections. To celebrate his significant contributions to literature and Black studies, two events were held in collaboration with McMaster, the British Library and Toronto Metropolitan University.

We spoke with Ronald Cummings, professor in English and Cultural Studies, to learn more about these events and Clarke’s legacy.

Can you tell us about the first event?

The first event took place on July 25, the eve of Austin Clarke’s birthday. We hosted a webinar that brought together archivists from McMaster Libraries and the British Library to focus on the correspondence between Austin Clarke and Andrew Salkey, a fellow writer.

They have an extensive correspondence with each other. The single largest correspondence in the Andrew Salkey Archive are letters from Austin Clarke, and the same is true the other way around. We hosted this event to bring together the archivists who were curating different sides of this correspondence to talk to each other.

How did the webinar collaboration with the British Library come about?

In many ways, this grew out of a course I have been teaching in the English and Cultural Studies department titled Windrush Writing/Writing Windrush: Empire, Race and Decolonization  (Windrush course) for the last couple of years. As part of that course the students visit the Austin Clarke archives and they also think about the letters as a key technology of diaspora that helps us to understand the story of Windrush. They look at the letters between Clarke and some of the writers that they study on the course including Andrew Salkey and Samuel Selvon. I do this because it also helps them to understand these writers as actual people.

Myron Groover who is an archivist at McMaster Library does this session with the students and in the past we have also had archivists from the British Library visit to talk to students about the papers of Salkey and Selvon that they also have at their institution – so I thought about making this space for these archivists to talk to each other!

The conversation between the archivists was so electric – because, you know, archivists get excited about the things they’re curating or have curated.

The webinar also launched a virtual exhibition which is now up on the McMaster Library website. When the two archival teams initially met, they each went and pulled different sides of the correspondence, and threaded together an interesting series of letters across 15 years, from the late 1960s to the 1980s. The exhibition is called One Love and Venceremos, which uses the sign-off phrase that Andrew Salkey often used in his letters to Austin Clarke.Myron Groover suggested that we use that title, which is perfect and he was also instrumental in mounting the exhibition.

How did Clarke and Salkey meet?

I don’t have an answer to that question. By the time they were corresponding they had already met. They were both part of Caribbean literary circles and that is the context that brought them and kept them together. Clarke was from Barbados, and Salkey grew up in Jamaica and was educated there before going to England. Clarke came to Canada. When you read the letters, you can see how they were each trying to forge community in meaningful ways in order to sustain their work as writers and cultural workers in diaspora.

One of the fascinating things about looking at those archives is that you have a sense of their mobility and you also see them trying to keep track of where people are. So they might ask in the letters, where is Jan Carew or where is so and so? And then in another letter someone might respond, oh, he’s off to Europe for the summer or they would comment on people who, after living in diaspora , made the decision to return to the Caribbean region.

They also corresponded as they moved to different places and addresses and it’s interesting to see them also tell, as part of these letters, where they are and what they are doing there. They also recommended books to each other and sent each other books as well as shared literary gossip and ephemera such as notices about conferences and books that have been published..

They did meet occasionally. In one of the reflections offered as part of the virtual exhibition, Jason Salkey (Andrew Salkey’s son) recalls meeting Clarke and remarks on how well dressed he was. But the fact that they were apart for so much of their corresponding years means we’re blessed with the long legacy of correspondence between them.

What are some of the themes that come up in that 15 years worth of correspondence? 

The underlying thing is friendship. It’s a very personal friendship. There’s this wonderful Christmas letter that Austin writes to Salkey expressing just appreciation for their friendship and solidarity. Darcy Ballantyne does a wonderful reading of that letter as part of the exhibition, which is why it’s foremost in my mind.

In addition to these intimate exchanges, they were also both witnesses to important moments in history. We see, for instance, Clarke writing to Salkey in the late 1960s when there are Black student protests at Yale while he’s there. He’s a witness to history and is telling his friend what happened, and really narrating it in thoughtful, political detail. Salkey writes back expressing his own concern about the political moment they were living in and thinking about political possibilities for Black folks at the end of the turbulent 1960s. There are deeply philosophical letters about the world, about world politics in these archives.

They are also bearing witness to significant moments of each other’s lives.When Clarke was appointed as the head of the Caribbean Broadcasting Corporation, Salkey wrote to him – “Give them radio like they’ve never heard radio before.” It really becomes a critical challenge about producing something that is relevant to the lives of people that moves beyond the inherited formats and structures of the British Broadcasting Corporation, which was the template for radio in the Caribbean at that time.

Hosting the exhibit digitally allowed for a different kind of engagement. We’ve shown the scripts of the letters, but we’ve also gotten writers and scholars, and family members to read the letters. It brings the letters to life and reanimates them.

How did the second event – the conference run in partnership with Toronto Metropolitan University – come together? 

Both the conference and the webinar were generously supported by the International Initiatives Microfund at Mac, and the conference was generously supported by the Office of the President.

Initially the idea was to run an in-person event at McMaster grounding it in the space and archives here. Somehow my initial thought that we should have an afternoon panel discussion grew into a two-day conference! A big part of that were conversations I had with Darcy Ballantyne, who was my colleague and collaborator at TMU. The first day was held at McMaster, focusing on the archives, and the second day of the conference was at TMU.

The conference was great not only because of the cross institutional collaborations but also the intergenerational exchanges. On the planning committee was myself and Darcy Ballantyne, but also Linzey Corridon, who’s a wonderful young scholar doing work on Caribbean literature at McMaster, and Suad Alad at TMU, who was previously a McMaster student and was in the very first Windrush course that I taught, and then went to do her master’s at TMU. Linzey and Suad worked with us as research assistants in staging the conference and were inspiring in terms of energy and ideas.

Another great thing about the conference was being able to bring together some of the leading scholars in Austin Clarke studies – people like Rinaldo Walcott (who was our keynote speaker),Michael Bucknor,  Camille Isaacs, Paul Barrett. And younger scholars – Matt Monrose, Linzey Corridon. It represented a great moment of established scholars and young scholars, reflecting on the impact of Austin Clarke.

What were some of the impacts that people talked about?

They were varied. One of the things that prompted us was recalling Austin’s work in helping to found Black studies in North America. He was at Yale University, Duke University and UT Austin in the sixties when their Black studies programs were being founded. We’re in this moment in Canada where we’re seeing the hiring of Black faculty to innovate Black studies programs at universities. So part of the question that we pose to folks is: What can we learn from the work that Austin did? Not just his writing, but the kind of institutional and community work that he did. What might be the lessons for thinking through how we work both within and outside the university?

There was also a wonderful panel with Matt Monrose and Huda Hassan on Austin Clarke’s work as a journalist, which is another facet of his work that folks don’t talk about often enough.The Canadian media had very infamously called him Canada’s angriest Black man. Clarke in his newspaper and public interventions took up the challenge of being a voice on racial issues in Canada at a time when Canada was not willing to confront its own racism.

Another panel, with Hyacinth Simpson, who teaches at TMU, and Aisha Wilks, who is a PhD student in English and Cultural Studies at McMaster, had a really rich conversation about Clarke’s representation of women in his novels. He was capturing a history of not just Black migration to Canada, but gendered Black migration to Canada. He wrote about Black women who came as part of the domestic labour scheme in the sixties.

What’s next after the conference?

We’re hoping that a publication comes out of it, because the papers were really rich and challenging. They open up new directions in Austin Clarke studies. He was a really complex figure who had many lives and careers.

Read selected letters between Austin Clarke and Andrew Salkey in this virtual exhibit, developed as a partnership between McMaster University Library, the British Library and the departments of English and cultural studies at McMaster and at Toronto Metropolitan University.