Poetry Review
J’Accuse . . . ! (Poem Versus Silence)
by George Elliott Clarke,
Exile Editions,
198 pages, $26.95
Some poetry whispers. Some poetry shouts. This collection of poetry shouts out loud, with great creative skill. And it shouts for good reason.
That reason? The title says it all. This collection of poetry by the former Parliamentary/Canadian Poet Laureate (2016-17) is, of course, based on the title of the famous open letter published in a French newspaper in 1898 and written by Emile Zola to protest the blatant antisemitism that led to the jailing of the Jewish French officer, Alfred Dreyfus, who was clearly innocent and eventually exonerated, but not after spending punitive time on Devil’s Island, a French penal colony.
Canada now has its own Dreyfus Affair with George Elliott Clarke in the role of the unjustly maligned personage. There have been a number of unfair attacks to destroy Clarke’s reputation. Canada has no Devil’s Island but the media, both social and traditional, can sometimes be used in a punitive way.
So, what happened to cause this ‘affair’? The poems in this collection directly explain the event and its ramifications. Clarke was contacted some years ago by a man who was a poet and wanted to start an acquaintanceship with the well-known Canadian writer. The man was a Canadian living in Mexico under an assumed name. He did not, of course, bother to mention to Clarke that he had once been convicted, along with a second white man, of raping and murdering an Indigenous woman in Canada, and went to Mexico after his release from prison, and then changed his name.
Somehow, word got out that Clarke had innocently befriended this fellow and soon the much-honoured Canadian poet was being vilified in some media. Cancellations of various honours, readings and so on soon followed, as well as calls to remove his books from libraries and bookstores. All because he had been duped by this criminal who he repudiated soon after he learned the truth about his background.
As Clarke writes: “I praised good poetry by a bad man. / I wasn’t whitewashing Bloodshed. / I was trying to advise a poet– / not help him scrub up as sparkly as Liberace.” (p. 71)
Quite often poetry comes across as a whisper in a quiet room with few listeners but sometimes the truth must absolutely be shouted by he who has been unjustly silenced and is forced to rail against that silencing. These poems clearly do not whisper subtle secrets but shout out and declare that being wrongly silenced demands the response of a righteous and forceful poetics. But, what of those poetics themselves? How do they stand up? Very well, indeed.
Clarke is never afraid of taking chances with the language, using wordplay and unusual and creative lingo to stretch its possibilities to the most daring limits: “Thin, chapped lips chafed like scabbards. Tongues mimed swords. / Shrill nerves begat chilling Invective— / screwball skirmishes, defective blackboards, / ashtray tubs staggered with clubfoot-shaped stubs.” (p. 87)
To declare that someone of Clarke’s background is complicit with Indigenous-hating femicides is the ultimate insult. For years, Clarke has been forceful and outgoing in his response to racism wherever and whenever it appears. As a scion of a black family from Nova Scotia, he has always been intimately aware of racism’s many guises and disguises.
The poetry consistently maintains the forceful pushback required of such a collection. As always in his work, Clarke’s use of language is unique in many respects, and powerful in its driving energy.
The words ‘guilt by association’ appear a number of times in these poems as that is the ultimate unjustifiable complaint that has been used against him. He writes: “Guilt by Association – yapped the Propaganda— / the McCarthyite caca– / the Spanish Inquisition mantra– / the Kafka-inspired, ersatz Pravda! // (Truth bein immaterial.).” (p. 125)
The author’s use of catchy phrases is exceptional: “…a tsunami of vitriol” (p. 131), “a kangaroo court jury / of the spuriously judgmental” (p. 143), “tramps, scamps, scalawags, sleazebags / all poised to pose as a posse” (p. 143), “While charivari and brouhaha circus’d through broadband” (p. 173).
Clarke points out that the most damning vitriol of all should have been directed at the paltry punishment the pair of rapists and murderers received for their evil deed. In the section titled Shadow of a Doubt, he points out that the murderer he knew ended up: “Serving but 3.5 years of 6.5 sentenced / (less than the usual 8 or 12 or 25)” (p. 59). The defense at the trial came up with a number of unjustifiable excuses for the murderers: “’Too much Southern Comfort had sloshed each boy’s head!’ / Thus a pale jurist—judicious—tut-tutted: / ‘George was a prostitute, / thereby impervious to Rape, eh?’” (p. 53). (The murdered woman’s family name was George.)
Clarke is also careful to thank those groups who “proved righteous,” (p. 194) that did not attack him but backed him through it all. These included the Aga Khan Museum, the Association of Italian-Canadian Writers, the Delmore “Buddy” Daye Learning Institute, the Ontario Poetry Society, The Trinity Review, the University of Toronto, and Victoria University.
In the end, George Elliott Clarke has created a strong wind of powerful poetry to disperse the dark, choking fog of racism (in all its forms), as well as false blame and unfair attacks on a fine upstanding poet who embodies the essence of free speech and non-silenced poetics.
