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.”

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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.”

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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.”

 These are only mere scratching of the surface in terms of literary contributions by people of African heritage. Stop in your neighbourhood bookstore or public library to satisfy your taste for fresh literature – storytelling at its best.