The Complicated Place of André Alexis in Black CanLit by Scott Fraser

Essay

In 1960, James Baldwin told the CBC’s Nathan Cohen that “There is something very safe about being a Negro…” And with a heavy, heart aching sigh he continued, “you can blame anything that happens to you on it. The worst thing about it [being a Negro] is that at one point, somewhere inside yourself, you have to realize that alright…you’re a Negro and all this [He’s referring to the horrors of 1960 America for Black people] is true but before that you’re a man and your life is in your hands. You’re responsible for what happens to you. You cannot blame anybody for it. There’s no point. There’s nobody to blame.”

These words were spoken by a gay, black artist in a time and place where his homeland didn’t recognize his full humanity because of his race and because of who he loved.

Baldwin spoke about race as a crutch that both whites and blacks, and indeed any people trying to live together in close proximity, simply had to learn to do without. And he said this in spite of the brutal facts of his time and place. He called race a crutch in order to call out those lives as though they need the concept of race. Whether that be a white man who needs someone he can reliably patronize, pity, or look down on or a black man who gives in to lowered expectations or whose identity is one of perpetual victim. Baldwin may have been familiar with the insights of Albert Ellis and his Stoic inspired Rational Emotive Behavioural Therapy, later evolving into Cognitive Behavioural Therapy, the thrust of which is for us all to stubbornly refuse to be miserable, regardless of what life throws at us. Or Baldwin may have just been possessed with an indomitable spirit. Either way, he certainly didn’t consider himself to be a victim.

This is important context for a critical understanding of André Alexis’ growing but complicated position within Afro-CanLit.

Conflicted? Isn’t he one of the most celebrated black writers in this country’s history?!

The fact is that André Alexis is a brilliantly talented writer and also the subject of substantial debate within Canada’s Black literary community and the main reason for this is that he tends to avoid the subject of race all together.

1967 was, by all accounts, an exciting year for Canada. It was the Centenary. Expo ’67. Maple Leafs won the cup. “Vive le Québec libre!” Pierre Berton famously called it “Canada’s Last Good Year.” It was also the year when restrictions on “coloured immigration” were relaxed, a reform that led to a wave of immigration from the “West Indies.” This wave brought with it the parents of both André Alexis and David Chariandy.

When he’s not writing culture shifting, masterful works of literature, Chariandy, who is of mixed Asian and African decent, contributes a great deal to the scholarship of Afro-CanLit. Chariandy regards Alexis as part of what he calls the “second-generation writers of Caribbean descent” meaning “those almost wholly socialized within ‘white’ countries and [who] often possess only indirect or second hand connections to the Caribbean.” Elsewhere he distinguishes the “Second Generation” from other Afro-CanLit experiences exemplified by perhaps deeper rooted or at least longer historied African-Canadian writers like the proud Africadian George Elliott Clarke. This distinction is important because it establishes Chariandy as a counter-cultural figure within the reductive and white normative conception of blackness. Chariandy himself doesn’t “appear” to be “black” in the superficial and reductive framework of race. Everyone living in a racialist society can see the physical difference between say David Chariandy and Desmond Cole. We’re socialized this way. It’s part of the crutch Baldwin implored us to drop, and yet it’s as obvious as anything. Chariandy could, if he were a man of low integrity, deny his African heritage in order to blend in as one of the slightly more desirable or less reviled Others in Canada. All things being equal, Anti-African racism is far more pervasive, violent and pernicious than Anti-Asian racism. So it’s significant in and of itself that Chariandy has embraced the totality of his cultural origins in his work and chosen self-identity.

That the African-Canadian experience isn’t a monolith isn’t news to Black people in Canada. These individuals are well aware that most of them do not descend from runaway slaves from America via the Underground Railroad, or as descendants of relocated Maroons, or rewarded émigrés from cynical European-Colonial wars.

The reality is that there is a diversity of traditions, attitudes, ambitions and politics within the broader category of Afro-CanLit due to the fact that African people have arrived in this place from disparate contexts. Look no further than how Mohamed Abdulkarim Ali wrote about his Somali family’s attitudes towards the Jamaicans they lived amongst at Jane and Finch and you understand that there is no such thing as a singular Black experience in Canada. Ali, and many more recent immigrants from Africa, have had to go through a process of racialization in Canada before truly becoming “black” in the North American context. Before coming here, they were Somali, Igbo, Zulu, etc, etc. It’s only in a place like Canada that all these people get glommed together in a melting pot of generalized blackness.

CanLit’s “progressive,” white mainstream makes no such distinctions and will happily promote the disparate Afro-CanLit authors as part of some homogenous and uncritical celebration of melanin for melanin’s sake. This is manifested annually during Black History Month, during which time the establishment will celebrate any sufficiently “black” author’s work, as an end in itself, without taking the divisions and controversies within Afro-CanLit seriously. It’s enough to simply list a few Black writers without much in the way of critical attention given to the richness of Afro-Canadian thought, origin, and context.

This mainstream unwillingness to seriously engage with the intellectual currents and tensions within “diverse” Canadian literature is the practical application of the contemporary approach to representation in our cultural spaces. Why engage with the debates happening within Afro-CanLit, not to mention the other non-European groups with their own interesting internal debates and ambiguities, when “we” can play it safe and uncritically celebrate “10 Black Writers You MUST Read in 2020”? Remember Baldwin’s lament: “There is something very safe about being a Negro.” In this context, might we not be pigeon-holing all African-Canadian writers into producing the kinds of literature that a racist society expects of them? Is the trauma narrative the pinnacle of Black literary achievement?

If one concedes the fact that there is a diversity of African experiences, origins, cultures in Canada today, as Chariandy shows, then one ought to apply the same criteria to Black writers as is applied to European or “white” writers. Baldwin begged us to give up the crutch. In that spirit, could this not lead to a serious question of Lawrence Hill’s qualifications to write The Book of Negroes? After all, he is a light skinned, biracial man with all of the advantages that conveys in a racist society. Moreover, his family, his lived experience has nothing to do with the Black Loyalists who settled in Canada and from whom George Elliott Clarke is descended. The Hill family moved to Canada in the 1950s, making him a bit of an orphan in the context of the major waves of Black migration to Canada. Of course, this is ridiculous. Hill studied, worked hard, was empathetic, and created Aminata, the heroine of an unforgettable novel who stands with Offred in the pantheon of female CanLit heroines.

But what of André? His most widely known and celebrated book is Fifteen Dogs, winner of both the Writer’s Trust Award as well as the Giller Prize. It’s in part a philosophical inquiry into the nature of consciousness, in which the main characters cannot seriously be racialized as they aren’t human. To paraphrase Alexis, it’s a work of pure imagination. It’s got nothing to do with race. Alexis flirted with blackness and race in the short stories Chariandy found problematic back in 2004, suggesting that they “may help us identify some of the symptoms of growing up ‘black’ or ‘ethnic’ in Canada.” In those early works, Chariandy argues that when Alexis does address race and his cultural background, he does so in a way that flirts with self-disgust over his Blackness while the elements of his Caribbean culture are depicted as something menacing.

The mature Alexis has now more or less opted out of the racial conversation, saying “We’ve been going through a period where real-life experience, actual human trauma, have been valued above pure imagination…” In that Maclean’s magazine interview, Alexis expressed surprise at having once been nominated for a Trinidadian literary award because he considers his writing to be so completely Canadian.

And yet, at a time when Black writers in Canada are mainly being celebrated for works exploring real-life experience and actual human trauma, André, whether he likes it or not, remains a part of and apart from Afro-CanLit. In his most celebrated work, we see a Black Canadian author who should be celebrated for the Baldwinian achievement of dropping the crutch. It’s in that sense that Alexis is an avant-garde voice within Afro-CanLit and a hopeful figure, despite his infrequent and unpopular interventions on questions of race.

His achievement in attaining such widespread acclaim is that his most celebrated work subverts the expectations of what’s considered desirable from a Black writer. The white literary mainstream is very comfortable with stories of Black suffering. Hill is celebrated for a novel about slavery. Chariandy is celebrated for a novel about contemporary police violence against Black bodies. As brilliant as these two novelists are, and they are beautiful truth tellers, there remains something remarkable and hopeful about a Black, second-generation artist who writes with the confidence and ability of one who even if affected by racism, has the right to exist as an artist. That is what makes Alexis the most avant-garde Black novelist to have achieved prominence in this country. In rejecting the single Black story that is so pervasive today, in rejecting the status of permanent victim, Alexis has shown that he’s a Black man who has figured out, as everyone with any kind of subaltern identity must do, how to survive and thrive in a world that isn’t designed with their comfort in mind. He’s demonstrated that he’s an artist willing to defy expectations. And that is a sign of hope. A cause for optimism. The rest of us may still need Baldwin’s crutch, as least from time to time, but in André Alexis’ work, may we not be optimistic that he’s pointing the way to a brighter future?

It's no coincidence that as one of the few Black-Canadian acquiring editors, I’m so excited about two forthcoming titles from my press: Yume by Sifton Anipare, and The Son of the House by Cheluchi Onyemelukwe-Onuobia. Both novels are authored by African (racially and geographically) women. Anipare was born in Ghana, and Onyemelukwe-Onuobia Nigeria. In Canada, both women are considered “black.” Both novels demonstrate a remarkable independence from popular racial trauma narratives. Yume is about a young, Black woman teaching English in Japan. And although she encounters the kind of anti-African racism that is all too typical in many Asian societies, the story mainly involves her mysterious encounters with Japanese folkloric spirit beings called Yokai. The Son of the House, deals with culture, class, and the role of women in modern Nigeria. There are traumatic events in the book, but here’s the interesting thing. There isn’t a single European/white character in the story. The traumas and challenges are entirely African. Will the mainstream Canadian book press be drawn to Black authored, Black edited stories that don’t centre on the North American racial catastrophe? Time will tell, but without a writer like Alexis having paved the way, it’s doubtful that the business case for acquiring these two books would have been as strong.

Race, after all, is a construct that must be demolished and abolished to the dustbin of history. It’s entirely fair for Black readers to wonder if the dominant, white society is at all ready to drop its crutch. At the same time it’s entirely reasonable to continue bringing a critique to bear on the ongoing anti-Black racism in this society. Alexis, whether he likes it or not, also has to live with the consequences of race, and yet…even if the white establishment, not to mention those Trinidadians who looked to repatriate his output, aren’t ready to do so, Alexis at least has put down the crutch insofar as his art is concerned. A Black man who is secure enough to pursue works of “pure imagination” is an encouraging sign in these difficult times. It’s a great thing that he’s now being joined by new voices like Sifton Anipare and Cheluchi Onyemelukwe-Onuobia. More of us need to follow this example unless we want the North American racial nightmare to continue.