Our Authors Tell Remarkable
Cultural Tales
By William Doyle-Marshall
February is known as “Black History Month”
or “African-Canadian History Month”. I have frequently argued something is
wrong with this designation. People of African Heritage make history daily in
every field imaginable. This blog emphasizes their involvement in the literary
field. A perfect example to be aptly noted. Three of our writers have presented
us with material that captures our language and social involvement in this
world.
World Fantasy Award Winner Nalo Hopkinson’s
“Falling in love with Hominids” captures some Caribbean folklore and other
cultural experiences in her science fiction genre. If your roots are implanted
in Caribbean soil, you are likely to encounter familiar characters and sayings.
In her story “Left Foot, Right” you come face to face with douens. These are
characters we never really understood except that adults told us you should not
go out at night in the dark yards otherwise you would encounter these creatures
who are likely to take you away into the woods. And guess what would happen
next? You would never be seen again.
Nalo’s story picks up a transaction in a shoe
store. “Allyuh have this in a size 9” Jenna puts the shiny red patent shoe down
on the counter. Well, it used to be shiny. She’s been wearing it everywhere,
and now it’s dulled by dust. It’s the left side of a high heeled pump,
pointy-toed, with large shiny fake rhinestones decorating the toe box. Each
stone is a different size and colour, in a different cheap plastic setting. The
red veneer has stripped off the heel of the shoe. It curls up off the white
plastic heel base in strips. Jenna’s heart clenches. It’s exactly the kind of
tacky, blinged-out accessory that Zuleika loves – loved to wear.
 |
| Louise Bennett-Coverley |
”
The girl behind the counter is wearing a
straw baseball cap, its peak pulled down low over her face. The girl asks, in a
puzzled voice, “But don’t you bought exactly the same shoes last week?”
And the week before
that,
thinks Jenna. And the week before that. “I
lost them,” she replies. “At least, I lost the right side” -- she neatly chokes
on the half truth – “so I want to replace them.” All around her other sales girls help other
customers. The people in the store zip past Jenna, half-seen, half-heard. This
year’s Soca road march roars through the store’s sound system. Last month Jenna
loved it. Now any happy music makes her vexed.
“Jeez,
what’s the matter with you now,” the girl says. Jenna startles guiltily. She
risks a look at the shoe store girl’s face. She hadn’t really done so before.
She has been avoiding eye contact with people lately, afraid that if anyone’s
two eyes make four with hers, the fury in hers will burn the heart out of the
core of them.
But the girl isn’t looking at Jenna. With one
hand she is curling the peak of her cap to protect her eyes against the sun’s
glare through the store windows. Only her small, round mouth shows. She seems
to be peering into the display on the cash register. She slaps the side of the
cash register. “Damned thing. It’s like every time I touch it, the network goes
down.”
“Oh,” says Jenna. “Is not me you were
talking to, then.”
**********************
Pamela
Mordecai’s Red Jacket taps into the rich language of our Jamaican family. The
same expressions are present in other Caribbean states. Our unwitting use of
French, Spanish, Portuguese even Hindi and African phrases with the learned
English language that was drilled into our heads are quite natural. While we
tease each other about our speech patterns, we all draw from a variety of
basins for colour, without being aware of the practice. Remember teachers
drilling into our heads the necessity to “speak properly” (meaning speak the
Queen’s English. So we grow up in a bilingual existence. But the hoity toity
members of our society frown on those who spoke in their natural language. But
behind closed doors every man Jack did likewise. Remember Miss Lou challenging
those who claimed Jamaican language was a bastardization of the English. She
often corrected them with the reminder that it was the English that was
bastardizing the Jamaican language.
“As they grow and Grace is looking more and
more different from Pansy and Stewie and the others, one and two people in the
district not bothering to talk behind their hands anymore. Don’t mind that they
are standing right beside her, they throw their remarks into the air like Grace
is deaf and can’t hear them. The thing they say make her feel bad, though she
try not to pay them mind, so she is glad for her brothers, Stewie (first boy,
tall and stringy), Edgar (third child, thick and solid), and Conrad (after
Grace, short and stringy) that help her not to heed these people too much.”
“Those boys behave like somebody give them
happiness sweeties with their cornmeal porridge in the morning, porridge that
Grace hate like poison. But the boys sneak and eat her porridge between them,
and then they pick whatever fruit is in season from the trees they pass on
their way to school – mango, orange, redcoat plums, June plums, pawpaw, star apple
– and give to Grace so she don’t go to school hungry. Either that or else they
thief out Gramps allotment of brown sugar for his cocoa-tea, for Grace can just
see her way to eating the porridge if it have plenty brown sugar in it. Again
and again Ma ask where is the suar she set out in Gramps cup, first thing.”
*******************
Austin
Chesterfield Clarke my very good friend of almost 40 years has thrown “Membering”
into the literary fray. And this informs readers of those days gone by when it
was not fashionable to be Black or West Indian in Toronto or Canada as a whole
– long before multiculturalism or the political phrase of diversity that is now
being thrown around like a puck in a skating rink.
In “Membering” Clarke reflects on Garfield
Weston who was a wealthy businessman the owner of Loblaws supermarket and
Weston bakery. “He had vast investments in South Africa at a time when South
Africa boasted of its racial segregation and its demonization of black people,”
Clarke recounts.
.
“We in the Canadian Anti-Apartheid Committee were boycotting South African
goods and South African athletes in international sports competition, like
cricket and the Olympics. Not many nations supported all the boycotts.
“In these times we inspected all the labels
on wine bottles to see if the wine was made in South Africa. And also the
labels and the advertising print on oranges. And then we felt our hearts skip a
beat when we discovered that the oranges that before the boycott might have been
imported from South Africa, had disappeared from the shelves of supermarkets,
and had reappeared as oranges from Israel. It was the identical orange now
packaged as “product” of Israel. Our intelligence wondered if an arrangement to
switch the labels had been made between Israel and South Africa. Until we
realized the dissimulation, we had been eating South African oranges with
Israeli stickers, on their fleshy, beautiful skins.”
“But to get back to Mr. Weston: in one of
his meetings, as a board member of an important enterprise in South Africa, he
made a statement that was felt to have demonized not only black people in
Canada, and in South Africa, but throughout the world. The statement was:
“Every black piccaninny or every black mammy can call on the government for
solutions to every social problem.” When I read the statement in its full
context, in the Toronto Star I could not believe my eyes.
Mr.
Weston used to produce in his bakery on Davenport Road a loaf of broad called
Wonder Bread. The slices were cut to precision. If you hold a fresh loaf of
Wonder Bread in your hand, and squeezed it, it seemed as if the slice of the
entire loaf could be reduced to almost the thickness of one slice of an
ordinary loaf. All Toronto children , including Janice and Loretta, grew up on
this bread and many of our wives and husbands worked for Mr. Weston.”
“We were in a quandary about what to do in
protest of this raw, stupid, new expression of the disregard for black women’s dignity.
First of all I stopped buying Wonder Bread for my children. And I spread the
word amongst like-minded members of the Canadian Anti-Apartheid Committee
headed by a gracious, intelligent Canadian Negro (to use the contemporary
term), Mrs. Jean Daniels, to make more firm and illustrative our disapproval of
the allegiance and the support that Canadian businessmen and the Canadian
Government itself, during this black time of apartheid, had been giving through
duplicity to the Verwoerd government. The University of Toronto also had huge
investments in South Africa at the time.”
