<\/p>\n
The Testament of Mary
\n<\/i>by Colm T\u00f3ib\u00edn
\nToronto, ON: McClelland & Stewart, 2012
\n112 pp. $25<\/p>\n
Vox Humana <\/i>
\nby E. Alex Pierce
\nLondon, ON: Brick, 2011
\n76 pp. $19<\/p>\n
The Testament of Mary<\/i>, a novella-size novel by Irish, New York-based author Colm T\u00f3ib\u00edn, was released just in time for Xmas 2012, and not likely International Woman\u2019s Day. Yet, Toibin tries to imagine Jesus\u2019s mother at the moment of her son’s crucifixion and its aftermath, and so he depicts an archetypal mother, whose anguish opposes the tortures that she associates with patriarchal faiths and politics. Mary\u2019s Testament is a woman’s gospel, one that departs defiantly from Christian belief.<\/p>\n
T\u00f3ib\u00edn presents us with a very human Mary, who sees her son, not as the Son of God, but as the victim of conspiratorial fanatics who want to launch a new religion, complete with a martyr and miracles, so as to challenge the cruel rulers of Rome and of Jerusalem. Mary\u2019s proto-feminist viewpoint is given early: \u201call my life when I have seen more than two men together I have seen foolishness and I have seen cruelty….\u201d In her eyes, Jesus\u2019s disciples are \u201cmisfits\u201d \u2013 mere \u201cchildren, or men without fathers, or men who could not look a woman in the eye.\u201d<\/p>\n
Mary even complains, \u201cIt takes me weeks to eradicate the stench of men from [my] rooms so that I can breathe air again that is not fouled by them.\u201d She is not referring only to disciples or apostles here, but to all men. T\u00f3ib\u00edn continues his attack on patriarchal Christianity by having his Mary question the most famous miracles and wonder, over and over, whether her son is the pawn of \u201cspies and observers,\u201d \u201cinformers, middlemen,\u201d and is just spawning \u201ccommotion\u201d and \u201cwhipping up hysteria among the crowds.\u201d<\/p>\n
So, the transformation of water into wine at the wedding party at Cana is explained as a matter of Jesus discovering and making available \u201cgood wine,\u201d amid \u201cshouting and confusion,\u201d including the guess that the host had saved the best stuff for last. Was Lazarus risen up from the dead? T\u00f3ib\u00edn\u2019s Mary is uncertain. But even if he has been raised up from the dead, she wagers that he will die again soon, and that his current new life is such a great disturbance of the peacefulness of death, that he is more like a zombie than a true human being.<\/p>\n
T\u00f3ib\u00edn\u2019s descriptive powers are put to effective use in musing on the resurrection of Lazarus: \u201cSlowly the figure dirtied with clay and covered in grave clothes wound around him began with great uncertainty to move…. It was as though the earth beneath him was pushing him and then letting him be still in his great forgetfulness and nudging him again like some strange new creature jerking and wriggling towards life.\u201d<\/p>\n
Not only does Mary doubt the miracles and distrust her son\u2019s mission, in her elder years, seeking comfort, she prays to Artemis, \u201cthe great goddess…, bountiful with her arms outstretched and her many breasts waiting to nurture those who come towards her.\u201d<\/p>\n
T\u00f3ib\u00edn\u2019s feminist emphasis is clear. Unflinching, too, is his rendition of the crucifixion. Reading the scene is like watching Mel Gibson\u2019s movie, The Passion of the Christ<\/i> (2004). However, T\u00f3ib\u00edn\u2019s avoidance of the story of Jesus\u2019s birth is a fatal flaw in his portrait of his fictitious Mary.<\/p>\n
E. Alex Pierce is a Nova Scotian poet who published her first verse collection, Vox Humana<\/i>, in 2011. She is devoted to the arts \u2013 music, theatre, and photography. In her writing, she likes to revise canonical texts, according them a feminist edge. Thus, her Ophelia keeps a journal, and writes of Amleth (Hamlet): “Black, he was so black. And I \/ could not stop near him. He \/ took, cut up my dress…. \/ Wasps \/ undressed me, laid me \/ down. It was a bramble thorn \/ that punctured every wound.”<\/p>\n
Pierce\u2019s approach recalls that of the late British author, Angela Carter, and her rewrites of fairy tales and adult literature to revivify their heroines, to give them their own authentic voices. Thus, Pierce\u2019s version of Puccini\u2019s Cio-Cio San is no simple suicide. Instead, \u201cHer sword has come for you.\u201d<\/p>\n
One of the strongest poems in this fine debut is \u201cMy Jerusalem,\u201d a love poem with all the ferocity of Eros. But the tender lyrics are welcome too: \u201cWhen I said I, I lost him. He \u2013 \/ offering the halved, tinged pear \/ against my mouth.\u201d<\/p>\n
Love Cake
\n<\/i>by Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha
\nToronto, ON: TSAR Publications, 2011
\n112 pp. $18<\/p>\n
Poems for the Advisory Committee on Antarctic Names<\/i>
\nby Soraya Peerbaye
\nFredericton, NB: Goose Lane, 2009
\n108 pp. $19<\/p>\n
March is International Women\u2019s Month \u2013 or should be. Let us read Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha and Soraya Peerbaye: two South Asian-Canadian poets who are fine in nicely different ways. Piepzna-Samarasinha is part-Sri Lankan, part-Irish, Lesbian, and totally lyrically political \u2013 or politically lyrical \u2013 which is a way of saying that, like U.S. poet Walt Whitman, she sings the body \u2013 her own \u2013 electric, shocking, enlightening.<\/p>\n
Love Cake<\/i> marks her debut as a poet, but Piepzna-Samarasinha has long been a writer, contributing to numerous anthologies interested in \u201cqueer and trans people of colour\u201d as well as \u201cqueer people with disabilities and chronic illnesses.\u201d Furthermore, Piepzna-Samarasinha has toured her one-woman show, \u201cGrown Woman Show,\u201d throughout North America, and also co-founded and co-directed a touring cabaret, \u201cMangos with Chili,\u201d featuring performing artists who are queer (or trans) and coloured.<\/p>\n
Clearly, her art worries identity issues\u2014powerfully. The opening poem reads war as inflicting bodily harm \u2013 not only in terms of maiming victims, but also in terms of causing long-term trauma: \u201csomeday, our bodies are gonna tell everybody \/ just what it was like \/ to live through this \/\/ how the news ripped us open \/ \u2026 crashed our sound barrier \/ shuddered our bodies \/ with bombs\u2026.\u201d<\/p>\n
Massachusetts-raised, \u201cToronto-matured,\u201d and now California-based, Piepzna-Samarasinha names no Canadians as influences. But there\u2019s a touch of Sri Lankan-born Michael Ondaatje in her sensuality, and also of Trinidad-born Dionne Brand in her direct treatment of \u201cissues.\u201d<\/p>\n
She does name African-American and Native American women poets as significant models, and one can see their traditions of open-mouthed kissing and open-mouthed crying (in protest). There\u2019s also a Whitman or Allen Ginsberg sensibility present in her use of lists: \u201crelatives who know how to drive drunk around all the army checkpoints\u201d; \u201ccreaky hipped aunties\u201d; \u201cMission Impossible<\/i> badly dubbed in Sinhalese\u201d; \u201ca sea that is a ghost \/ cupping 100,000 tsunami bodies\u2026.\u201d<\/p>\n
Piepzna-Samarasinha understands memory, history, and reality as a constant condensing or coalescence of essences, things: \u201cSunlight, hot lavender flowers \/ sweet and musk, deep plum centres\u201d; \u201cYour new face circled in flames\u2026 \/ that brings me here to windows, \/ hot pink and plum musk flowers \/\/ thirsty, unbroken by my history \/ walking in a new city\u2026.\u201d Yes, there are plain love(making) poems and confessions of angst. But also valuable are Piepzna-Samarasinha\u2019s poems that speak to our shared moment of liquidity crisis and financial corruption: \u201cI tell myself that Merrill Lynch can\u2019t pay their bills either \/ so why \u2026 should I worry about Mastercard, VISA, and the $16,000 line of credit\u201d? When her persona says, \u201cI\u2019m a 33-year-old woman with four jobs \/ $37 in my chequing account,\u201d she identifies a global epidemic of debt and joblessness. Disabled in body but strong in voice, Piepzna-Samarasinha resembles the late Nova Scotian poet Maxine Tynes.<\/p>\n
Piepzna-Samarasinha\u2019s name is long and her book title short. Soraya Peerbaye\u2019s name is short and her book title long: Poems for the Advisory Committee on Antarctic Names<\/i>. I was a reader of the original manuscript, so I will not write at length about Peerbaye\u2019s book, except to say that it is also a significant debut by a South Asian-Canadian writer whose family home is Mauritius, an Indian Ocean and African nation about 1,000 kilometres east of South Africa. Peerbaye was partially raised in Ottawa, and now lives in Toronto, but her first collection is not just about family and her ancestral nation; it is also about her travels to one of the most remote parts of the world, i.e., Antarctica.<\/p>\n
Fluently bilingual in Canadian French and English, Peerbaye also utilizes the Creole tongue of Mauritius. The result is that she is deliberate in diction and delicate in nuance. Every word is careful; every line is sculpted: \u201cPyjamaed intellectual, pillow-propped; woody giggle (of Scrabble) and chatter of tiles, in their crushed \/ velvet Crown Royal pouch; \/\/ dictionary\u2019s fluttered lisp.\u201d That compositional care \u2013 and balance \u2013 reminds one of the strong art of Elizabeth Bishop. Not one word sounds wrong.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
The Lease <\/i>
\nby Matthew Henderson
\nToronto, ON: Coach House Books, 2012
\n72 pp. $18<\/p>\n
Here for the Music
\n<\/i>by Laurie Brinklow
\nCharlottetown, PEI: Acorn Press, 2012
\n74 pp. $18<\/p>\n
Mathew Henderson and Laurie Brinklow share Prince Edward Island roots, he by birth and she by relocation, and their respective books share an editor, namely, the fine poet, Richard Lemm. Henderson\u2019s The Lease<\/i> is the Toronto teacher\u2019s debonair debut. A graduate of the University of Guelph\u2019s Creative Writing program, Henderson takes, for a subject, not P.E.I., but the Prairies \u2013 Alberta, but mainly Saskatchewan, where his persona labours to drill up oil or dodge sour, acidic gases.<\/p>\n
Along the way, Henderson\u2019s tender-hearted hardhat falls in love, often unrequited, or wants to make love, but is too drunk or clumsy. These poems should be prefaced by Edward Burtynsky\u2019s photos of industrialized landscapes that only the blues can humanize and chased by country-n-western ballads about after-work bar hopping. Henderson\u2019s tone is honky-tonk-plain or Tonka-truck-tough. Yet, these lyrics demonstrate an unusual discipline. Many maintain a loose, ten-syllable (gruffly iambic) line, use startling verbs, and honour everyday speech (without studding every phrase with four-letter words). A good example of Henderson\u2019s poetic is a \u201cblank\u201d (unrhymed), curtal sonnet: \u201cThe lease is meaningless: a square paced \/ first by seismic workers, and then your father, \/ and then by every other man you know. \/ But you\u2019ve always pulled meaning from nothing, \/ and when he leads you to an empty field you \/ tear grass in fistfuls, read the roots like a will.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cMigrant,\u201d a ten-poem sequence, seems indebted to works by Dionne Brand (a Guelph university professor), and features imagery as visceral as hers (and also echoes her use of second-person address): \u201cYou broke branches, kicked old trunks until they bled \/ dead matter, spilled their secrets to ground in larval letters.\u201d In the same poem, one reads, \u201cThe spotlights show moths, \/ a billion beating wings that make the air so thick and dark \/ you can\u2019t even make a fist without crushing dusty bodies.\u201d Also fine are instances of homespun, nothing-fancy imagery (or insight): \u201che can feel \/ the prairie wind beating his chest like the skinny fists \/ of a woman who almost wants him to let her go.\u201d Intriguingly, Henderson writes often of Caucasians \u201ccoloured\u201d by sun, oil, or gas, but seldom about \u201cthe Natives,\u201d whose land is being looted of its resources. \u201cColour\u201d is pronounced, but it\u2019s class that\u2019s privileged.<\/p>\n
The last P.E.I. poet to ponder labouring was John MacKenzie (see Sledgehammer<\/i> [2000]), and the most famous one to fetishize a trade was Milton Acorn (1923-86). Henderson rivals Acorn and succeeds MacKenzie. He has made his work art.<\/p>\n
Laurie Brinklow founded Acorn Press in 1993, and sold it in 2010 to pursue a doctorate on \u201cislandness\u201d at a university on the \u201cIsland Continent.\u201d A British Columbia native, she followed her construction-worker dad (shades of Acorn, shades of Henderson) to sites about and between B.C. and Ontario, before settling, ultimately, in P.E.I. Here for the Music<\/i> is her first collection of poetry. Brinklow\u2019s cover and back-cover feature the drawing of a dancing woman in a red dress, but this female figure first appears as a toddler, then a girl, and next a young woman. The art suits the poems, which resemble journal entries \u2013 or, in fact, as prose passages, read like diary pages. The book is a memoir merging free verse and prose.<\/p>\n
Brinklow considers the odyssey from girlhood to motherhood, and from heterosexual coupledom to \u201cex\u201d-hood. Dedicating her poems to her mother and her two daughters, the poet canvasses the anxiety of the feminist generation in trying to establish women\u2019s equality and<\/i> establish quality relationships. So there\u2019s an elegiac tinge to these lyrics. Parents, lovers, children \u2013 all \u201cbewilder and beguile,\u201d and she is as anchored in place geographically as she is adrift emotionally.<\/p>\n
A prose passage remembers a brother who drowned, while another recalls a surviving brother who was verbally abused: \u201cI\u2019d say, \u2018I wish you were the one who drowned.\u2019\u201d Later, \u201cI ask him if he remembers. He says no. \u2018I\u2019m sorry anyway.\u2019\u201d In a poem, a daughter, fearing breast cancer, asks, \u201cMom, \/ does this mean \/ it\u2019ll get me, too.\u201d Brinklow is nakedly natural, utterly unpretentious, and the result is rootsy, earthy, soulful.<\/p>\n
For the Boy with the Eyes of the Virgin: Selected Poems <\/i>
\nby John Barton
\nGibson, BC: Nightwood, 2012
\n136 pp. $20<\/p>\n
The Rapids <\/i>
\nby Susan Gillis
\nLondon, ON: Brick Books, 2012
\n104 pp. $19<\/p>\n
A book of selected poems reminds one that life is brief, but art takes a long time to master. The mature poet must wish to look back at the work accomplished and take comfort in its excellence. John Barton can. Albertan by blood, then an Ottawa bureaucrat, and now a Victoria, B.C.-based, editor of The Malahat Review<\/i>, Barton explores, in his verse, his capacity for love, specifically of men. His career spans the years of furtive affection, those of activism and fear of AIDS, and those of \u201cmetrosexual chic\u201d and civil union.<\/p>\n
R.M. Vaughan\u2019s bravura introduction to For the Boy with the Eyes of the Virgin: Selected Poems<\/i> celebrates Barton\u2019s \u201chammer-brutal honesty\u201d and poetry that exemplifies being \u201cbrave, stupid, prone to romantic misadventure, and, best of all, alert.\u201d Barton\u2019s selection begins in 1981, when he was 24, and ends with 2009, when he was 52: Three decades on. The tyro poet follows Margaret Atwood and Sylvia Plath, taking up their employ of violent imagery to narrate his sense of his sexual difference: \u201cMy doctors will be shocked. \/ Hitler will be shocked. \/ They never knew I would give birth \/ to a new age\u2026. \u201cNine months after the first jolt, \/ you mushroomed forth, an icon, a holocaust. \/ The world melted through my eyes\u2026. \/ You left me comatose. \/ It was all new, all over.\u201d<\/p>\n
Strong as they are, the early poems are inconsistent, producing compact precision and gaseous diffusion. However, the once-prominent Atwood\/Plath influence is more controlled by the time Barton is 33: \u201cI used to wear a suit of cellophane \/ snug and \/ clear as a surgical glove.\u201d Barton also takes to W.H. Auden and Constantine Cavafy. Discipline results, as in \u201cGreat Men\u201d: \u201cThis is courageous. \/\/ This makes men \/ ghetto themselves in the arms of women \/ they do not love.\u201d Along with rigor, there is also desire, to tell truth, even to speak of where one is and where love can be. \u201cNaked Hearts\u201d achieves these ends: \u201cmeeting the first evening, \/ fingers linking somewhere along Saint-Denis\u2026. \/\/ The grief of our bodies \/ retells the world\u2019s body of grief\u2026. \/\/ In this century those like us \/ refuse like us \/ to live as if we have never been.\u201d<\/p>\n
In his later 30s, Barton is more his own man, with a gift for details: \u201cHe is approaching. \/ The horse lumbers before the milk wagon, \/ one shod hoof before the other, \/ the gravel in the alley \/ grinding like teeth\u2026.\u201d In his 40s and now 50s, Barton has achieved an elegant economy of expression and the beautiful freedom to say what he wants in just his own way: \u201cThis body: its constitution \/ beyond amendment and spastically tense, the upper \/ and lower chambers of the heart loud with perpetually ringing \/\/ bells and filibusters remembered from the past: my 60s childhood, premature bedtimes, random Montreal mailboxes blowing \/ up into the October Crisis\u2026.\u201d The mid-career and later poems win canonical status. Bravo!<\/p>\n
Once a Haligonian, Susan Gillis has lived on the Pacific, but is now a Montr\u00e9alaise. The Rapids<\/i> is her third book of poetry, and it is spectacular in offering cascades of thought, images, the movement of the mind, stating, guessing, second-guessing, re-stating. The book has just this dynamic: A poem appears in one way, and then, many pages and other poems later, it reappears, rewritten. Each lyric is a kind of \u201cshooting of rapids\u201d: one plunges, lunges, curves, swerves, from one eddying idea or scene to the next, on to endings that are only pauses.<\/p>\n
These poems are fits and starts and jump cuts. \u201cA blue lake surrounds the house: snow \/ restored by twilight to a version of its original self\u2026. \/ Gradually the first stars prick the sky around the moon\u2019s pearled curve. \/ The last of the year\u2019s scrap wood is ready for burning.\u201d Observation becomes revelation: \u201cThe train arrives first as broken light \u2013 \/ utterly, utterly silent \u2013 \/ across the trestle bridge, flashing \u2013 \/ then as a screech and a roar we press toward, \/ one hundred exhalations willing open the doors.\u201d Gillis honours ocean ports: \u201cSpring makes me sick for coastal cities. \/ All that burgeoning! Crowds and leaves. \/ Going for a walk is its own aperitif, \/ air in the nose like cracked pepper.\u201d The Rapids<\/i> is as exhilarating as a salt-spray Spring. I end with my own line, from Whylah Falls<\/i>: \u201cAprill is the most beautiful month<\/i>.\u201d<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Hugging the Huge Father<\/i>
\nby Chad Norman
\nNS:Grant Block Press, 2011
\n74 pp., $15<\/p>\n
Kids-Tots and Forget-Me-Nots: Childhood Memories<\/i>
\nby George Borden
\nDorchester, NS: G.A.B. Consulting<\/p>\n
Hugging the Huge Father <\/i>is Truro, NS, poet Chad Norman\u2019s newest book. It is self-published through his significantly titled press because he wants \u201cto bring out books without government money\u201d (usually received as a \u201cbloc grant.\u201d) More important \u2013 perhaps \u2013 than the enterprise of the enterprise is Norman\u2019s desire to praise, to laud, to celebrate important masculinities \u2013 fathers, grandfathers, uncles, workers, farmers, co-workers \u2013 as well as boys and sons.<\/p>\n
Norma\u2019s mission may be earnest, and his reverence borders on didacticism: We must like his heroes, for they are likeable, and they are heroic, and they are like all men. But his portraits also arrive with whimsy and wistfulness, nostalgia and tender regard. The poet\u2019s son asks, \u201c\u2018Dad, what if time runs out?\u2019 \/ I laugh, then hold him \/ afraid of my answer.\u201d The poet\u2019s father is conjured in a long elegy that moves fitfully, yes (it could be shorter), but ends movingly: \u201cAnd that dead man, my father, is gone, \/ to be alive somewhere, and I can tell \/ the world what it is like to be one, \/ the recipient of a dead man\u2019s desire.\u201d Norman\u2019s best paeans and elegies and recollections are studded with images that speak volumes.<\/p>\n
\u201cMasstown, Nova Scotia\u201d is one such poem. A \u201cfarm-house\u201d is \u201ctucked away on acres of history\u201d; \u201cAnd the empty Governor-General bottles \/ lined to the back of the cupboard \/ winked beside the new tube of Brylcreem\u201d; \u201cthe herd moved up out of the muck\u201d\u2026. A world is canvassed with miraculous, meticulous economy. \u201cA Branch Over the Path\u201d presents the poet as an unlucky trespasser. A property owner is \u201cunmistakably kind,\u201d but still wants the poet to \u201cstop \/ using the easy way to the job.\u201d The poet thinks of deer that also \u201ctrespass\u201d: \u201cNo signs hang from the branch, \/ and what would it matter, I had \/ become a deer, and \u2018Keep Out\u2019 \/ wouldn\u2019t have caught my eye.\u201d Norman philosophizes, but is also plain. There\u2019s much to be said for a poet who exalts salt-of-the-earth types and who writes to be read, not to receive cash. His poems could use further editing, but are eminently enjoyable. Seek him out.<\/p>\n
Another plain and self-published poet is George Borden, whose latest publication is Kids-Tots and Forget-Me-Nots: Childhood Memories<\/i>. The Dartmouth, NS, poet dedicates his lavishly illustrated\u2014if lovingly amateurish\u2014book of rhymes to \u201ca community of neighbours, friends and relatives who as playmates, passed their childhood years in peace and harmony unsurpassed elsewhere on this celestial planet.\u201d<\/p>\n
The purpose of these homespun rhymes is to recall a world that has passed away \u2013 the childhoods of those \u201cwho grew up in semi-rural Nova Scotia during the 1940\u2019s and 50\u2019s,\u201d \u2013 and to pass on the recollections to today\u2019s children and youth, \u201cso that they may be reminded that preceding generations were not so much unlike themselves.\u201d Charm is the intent; the colourful, crayon, cartoon-style drawings invite; the rhymes are artless and affecting: \u201che teaches me \/ so many things \/ \u2019bout fishing, sports \/ an\u2019 broken wings. \/ He scolds me good \/ when I am bad \/ then loves me more\u2026 \/ \u2019cause he\u2019s my dad.\u201d<\/p>\n
An Africadian poet, Borden follows the deliberately simple style of the great African-American poet Langston Hughes. (Norman mentions Hughes too). But these poems are \u2018raceless\u2019; they are for kids, anywhere and everywhere. A righteously fun poem is \u201cNelson Made a Wagon,\u201d which illustrates a boy\u2019s construction of a wagon out of scrap and cast-offs. It\u2019s too creaky to win any races, but its creator loves it to pieces: \u201cIt squeaked, it scraped, it looked like junk \/ and parts were always draggin\u2019; \/ but not one kid in the town \/ was prouder of his wagon.\u201d Similar pleasure is available in \u201cNelson Made a Tent\u201d: \u201cFrom crooked poles, a cardboard box \/ and rags not worth a cent, \/ with torn sheets and flour bags, \/ our Nelson made his tent.\u201d<\/p>\n
The point of these poems is that pluck, luck, imagination, and industry can help anyone fulfil a dream \u2013 despite limitations of poverty or material. It\u2019s the power of dream, unleashed in play, which gives one the courage to change one\u2019s circumstances. Seek out this book too.<\/p>\n
Colored Zion: The History of Zion Baptist Church and the Black Community of Truro, Nova Scotia<\/i>
\nby Donna Byard Sealey
\nSelf-published, 2000
\n294pp. $15<\/p>\n
Africa\u2019s Children: A History of Blacks in Yarmouth, Nova Scotia<\/i>
\nby Sharon Robart-Johnson
\nToronto, ON: Dundurn Press, 2009
\n240 pp. $29<\/p>\n
The late great amateur historian Pearleen Oliver (1917-2008) started an intellectual revolution in African-Nova Scotia (Africadia) when she published A Brief History of the Coloured Baptists of Nova Scotia<\/i> in 1953. She was building upon the history written by Peter E. McKerrow and published in Halifax in 1895, and she was also issuing a call, if silently, for other Africadians to follow. And they have, and they have mainly been women.<\/p>\n
Since Oliver (and her own subsequent history of the Beechville United Baptist Church [1994]), other women have scribed histories of various Africadian communities, focussing on churches. One fine example is Donna Byard Sealey\u2019s Colored Zion<\/i> (2001), her lovingly researched history of the Zion Baptist Church in Truro, NS, and also of its several Africadian neighbourhoods. It is a model for other church\/community histories. Less ambitious examples of the excellent efforts of Oliver and Sealey are Shernera D. Colley\u2019s history of the East Preston United Baptist Church (1996), Cherry Paris\u2019s history of the Windsor Plains United Baptist Church (2001), and Edith Cromwell\u2019s Inglewood, My Community<\/i> (1993). (One notable male work is a history of the Emmanuel Baptist Church of Upper Hammonds Plains, Whatever Your Will, Lord<\/i> [1984], by Willard P. Clayton [1922-2007].)<\/p>\n
Amid all the salacious commentary on the Nova Scotia Home for Coloured Children and the allegations of various crimes, it is good to remember that that institution\u2014and the one-and-only African (United) Baptist Association of Nova Scotia were born out of a redemptive dream of liberty and equality and faithfulness. Lest we forget\u2026 Africadian history is not only about trials and suffering. It is also about triumph and success. That\u2019s what the little church histories and community chronicles trumpet.<\/p>\n
Sometimes folks wonder, \u201cWhat have you African-Nova Scotians achieved, anyway?\u201d One can answer by narrating bios and listing names: Richard Preston, Maxine Tynes, George Dixon, Sam Langford, Rocky Jones, Portia White, Capt. Rev. Dr. William Andrew White, Dr. Daurene Lewis, Dr. Leslie H. Oliver, Hon. Donald Oliver, Q.C. (a senator), Viola Desmond, Delmore Buddy Daye, Sylvia Hamilton, Pearleen Oliver, Dr. Mayann Francis, Hon. Donald Oliver, etc. But another answer is also \u2013 historically speaking \u2013 transcendent: Our ancestors created black communities \u2013 without outside help \u2013 in a colony, a province, that didn\u2019t want them \u2013 except as the cheapest labour, located on the poorest land, segregated in society and geography and both patronized and terrorized by the law.<\/p>\n
That our ancestors founded and maintained forty-plus black communities, over generations and centuries, in something like Third-World poverty and common illiteracy, but survived \u2013 to produce divines, lawyers, doctors, artists, politicians, entrepreneurs, persons-of-state, pugilists, track stars, provincial cabinet ministers, etc., is an excellent testament. One more proof of this legacy is Sharon Robart-Johnson\u2019s Africa\u2019s Children: A History of Blacks in Yarmouth, Nova Scotia<\/i>. Published in 2009, Robart-Johnson\u2019s book is not only a chronicle of the African Methodist Episcopal Disney Chapel or Greenville United Baptist Church, it is as ambitious a history as those penned by Oliver and Sealey and McKerrow.<\/p>\n
Indeed, Robart-Johnson examines the records of slavery in Yarmouth County, and finds court records of maltreatment (torture) and the general misery of human bondage. As she writes, \u201cNegroes in Yarmouth were bought and sold like cattle at an auction\u201d and were given, \u201cin some cases, only bread to eat and stagnant water to drink.\u201d When slave owners hastily buried a slave girl, Jude, on their property, in 1800, her injuries were so severe, even after exhumation for a coroner\u2019s examination, the men responsible were charged with murder, though they were later acquitted. Robart-Johnson traces the careers of Yarmouth born-and-bred Africadian heroes, heroines, and a few villains too. Her careful research and lively prose establish, once again, that we Africadians descend from hardy, inventive, and resourceful souls. We ought to value the culture that they established.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
American Uprising: The Untold Story of America\u2019s Largest Slave Revolt <\/i>
\nby Daniel Rasmussen
\nNew York, NY: Harper Perennial, 2012
\n288 pp. $27<\/p>\n
American Uprising: The Untold Story of America\u2019s Largest Slave Revolt<\/i> tells the two-century-suppressed story of a mass uprising of slaves, on French-owned plantations near New Orleans, Louisiana, on January 8-9, 1811. A Harvard University undergraduate thesis, developed into a full-scale history, published on the bicentennial of the insurrection, Daniel Rasmussen\u2019s research reminds us that slaves were never as passive or as happy as the propagandists of Dixie pastoralism enjoy imagining. Instead, they resisted their oppression in every way that they could: \u201cBy aborting their own children, poisoning livestock, lighting fires, and escaping [\u2026], the slaves struggled to dilute, deflect, and if possible demolish slaveholders\u2019 authority.\u201d<\/p>\n
Their ultimate rejection of slavery took the form of rebellion, from the successful, mass insurgency (1791-1804) that eventually founded Haiti as the world\u2019s first black republic to much smaller and unsuccessful revolts such as that led by Nat Turner, in Virginia, in 1831. Apologists for slavery \u2013 from Nova Scotia\u2019s Thomas Chandler Haliburton to U.S. historians like Ulrich B. Phillips \u2013 have found it essential to caricature slaves as \u201cstupid, negligent, docile, inconstant, dilatory, and \u2018by racial quality submissive,\u2019\u201d for the simple reason that, as Rasmussen suggests, African slavery in the Americas was the philosophical engine of the Enlightenment, the political instrument of American and European imperialism, and the economic propellant of the Industrial Revolution. Truth: Slavery benefitted too many people, empires, and nations to be depicted as tyrannous and slaves as unhappy, never mind that, for instance, \u201cSugar, cotton and coffee don\u2019t grow themselves. They demand backbreaking, intolerable labor \u2013 labor to which no free man would choose to submit.\u201d<\/p>\n
Rasmussen\u2019s clear and here-and-there poetic narrative establishes that a multicultural coalition of Lousiana slaves \u2013 with leaders from Louisiana, the Kongo, the Asante kingdom, and with \u201cFrench, German, Spanish, West African, and Anglo-American\u201d names \u2013 numbering between 200 and 500 souls, partly armed and partly horsed, marched some twenty miles to within sight of the church spires of New Orleans, planning to massacre whites and liberate blacks. That was on January 8, 1811. The next day, a smaller force of scared, but well-armed planters routed the rebel band. Next came torture, executions, and the terrorist planting of lopped-off black heads on poles and posts \u2013 all along the Mississippi \u2013 for crows to feast upon. (Nova Scotian, William Stairs perpetrated similar beheadings in the Congo, 1887-92.). Too, the rebellion was recast as criminal banditry, and expunged from history.<\/p>\n
Nevertheless, Rasmussen persuades one that the insurrection had consequences, including the annexations of Florida, Texas, and other adjacent territories, in concord with a policy of \u201cEconomic development through slave-based agriculture,\u201d i.e., the further expansion of an \u201cagrarian republic,\u201d whose \u201cfarmers\u201d were really slaves. One other result of the brief \u2013 but mass rebellion \u2013 was the learning of the lesson, by slaves, that one needs weapons if one wants liberty. Thus, during the U.S. Civil War, blacks flocked to Union lines and, once they were permitted to do so, joined Union forces, and fought \u2013 with discipline and ferocity \u2013 against their former masters.<\/p>\n
I turn from Rasmussen\u2019s fine history to Stephen Spielberg\u2019s latest, history-based film, Lincoln<\/i> (2012), which narrates the backroom skulduggery necessary to ensure the passage of an anti-slavery amendment to the U.S. Constitution. The movie is more about political battles than military battles. I wager that this drama is intended as a compliment to U.S. President Barack Obama. I think that Spielberg is asking Americans to see Obama\u2019s struggles to achieve health care and economic \u201cfairness\u201d \u2013 in the face of recalcitrant courts and wealthy (and sometimes racist) opponents \u2013 as mirroring Lincoln\u2019s struggles to entrench anti-slavery. Perhaps like Lincoln, Obama believed too much in compromise in his first term. Now, as with Lincoln in regard to the 13th<\/sup> Amendment, the message is, \u201cNo more Mr. Nice Guy.\u201d<\/p>\n Fiction, Poetry and Black History The Testament of Mary by Colm T\u00f3ib\u00edn Toronto, ON: McClelland & Stewart, 2012 112 pp. $25 Vox Humana by E. Alex Pierce London, ON: Brick, 2011 76 pp. $19 The Testament of Mary, a novella-size novel by Irish, New York-based author Colm T\u00f3ib\u00edn, was […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":1439,"parent":93,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-672","page","type-page","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue15\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/672","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue15\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue15\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue15\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue15\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=672"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue15\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/672\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1332,"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue15\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/672\/revisions\/1332"}],"up":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue15\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/93"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue15\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1439"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue15\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=672"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}*Some of these reviews first appeared in Nova Scotia\u2019s The Chronicle Herald<\/i>.<\/h6>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"