When I wrote to author Austin Clarke requesting an interview, I asked if we could meet in his neighbourhood, “at a favourite café or park bench that might add some local colour to my post.” Boy, did Clarke deliver: upon my arrival at his home bordering Toronto’s troubled Moss Park, the writer suggested we step out to his favorite “ghetto convenience store” for a pack of smokes and a newspaper. Not everyone could get away with using the “g” word but Clarke means no disrespect; he’s lived on this sketchy strip for years and there’s not much he hasn’t seen from his second-story writing room overlooking the park.
Superficially, Clarke’s most recent book, More, is the story of an immigrant woman from Barbados whose life in Canada does not play out as she once dreamed; the book is “a biography of the neighbourhood,” observes Clarke. A sad tale, richly told, More won the 2009 Toronto Book Award and is this year’s pick for the Toronto Public Library’s annual One Book reading celebration. On Thursday (April 22) Clarke will be participating in an online chat about the book and the following week (April 27) he’ll be at Monarch Park Collegiate discussing the story with students there.
The author is “excited” to be meeting with his readers: “Writing is a solitary pursuit,” he acknowledges, “so it’s good to get out in the community and meet with people.” The TPL is running a “dinner with Austin” contest in which one lucky book club will be selected to break bread and conversation with the author. It will be a spellbinding evening if my hour with Clarke is any indication.
More is Clarke’s second consecutive novel featuring a female protagonist; 2003’s The Polished Hoe captured the Giller Prize, among other honours. Writing from a woman’s point of view comes naturally to Clarke who spent his formative years as an only child basking in virtually all of his mother’s attention; his stepfather was a police officer who lived in barracks and spent every other weekend at home with the family. “So his presence was always there but it was as if she was living alone. So I got to know her extremely well.”
As an example of their closeness, Clarke recounts that his “mother was terrified of hurricanes and storms and she would seek shelter and safety in a storm by going under the bed where she would take me with her, along with the bible. That’s another aspect of the novel, the reliance on God for protection and strength. But what appealed to me and touched me more was to witness and touch her fear of the elements. That fear existed side by side with her love for her son.”
This is the kind of detail that makes Clarke such a vivid storyteller. The protagonist of More is a woman named Idora who lives in a basement apartment facing the park, a basement just like Clarke’s, whose windows provide a view of “the men and women and the children passing; but there are only the legs and thighs of the women, and the bottoms of winter coats and thick woollen leotards and the trousers of men, and the briefcases in their right hands.”
The constrained view from the window is a metaphor for Idora’s limited view of her adopted city. “Idora does not know these people,” explains Clarke, “because she has never visited them. She has become aloof because of her background in Barbados; she is, after all, a graduate of one of the best high schools in Barbados and she went to the teacher’s college to be a teacher. The only reason she came to Canada as a domestic is that it was the easiest way for her to escape Barbados . . . So Idora is dispirited by the lack of concern her new society has for her, after all she is only a black immigrant in their minds. So she internalizes all the regrets and disappointments and that becomes the exposed nature of her life.”
Walking along Shuter Street, a casual observer sees a mix of derelicts and drug addicts, students and young professionals, but from his window above the street, Austin Clarke sees much, much more, he sees the stuff of literature.
Photos by Christopher Jones
Social bookmarks
Scroll to the Form to leave a comment.
Currently there are no comments related to article "One Book: Toronto is Reading More".