'Membering

by Austin Clarke

Austin Clarke is one of Canada's most distinguished and celebrated novelists and short-story writers. His works often centre around the immigrant experience in Canada, of which he writes with humour and compassion, happiness and sorrow.

In 'Membering, Clarke shares his own experiences growing up in Barbados and moving to Toronto to attend university in 1955 before becoming a journalist. With vivid realism he describes Harlem of the '60s, meeting and interviewing Malcolm X, and writers Chinua Achebe and LeRoi Jones. Clarke went on to become a pioneering instructor of Afro-American Literature at Yale University and inspired a new generation of African-American writers.

With a writing career that spans more than fifty years, Clarke has been called "Canada's first multicultural writer" and has been awarded the Giller Prize (The Polished Hoe), the Commonwealth Writer's Prize, the Toronto Book Award, and the Martin Luther King Junior Award for Excellence in Writing.

Genres: Canada, Biography

496 pages, Paperback

First published August 15, 2015

About the author

Austin Ardinel Chesterfield Clarke was a Canadian novelist, essayist and short story writer who lives in Toronto, Ontario. He has been called "Canada's first multicultural writer".

Clarke had his early education in Barbados and taught at a rural school for three years. In 1955 he moved to Canada to attend the University of Toronto but after two years turned his hand to journalism and broadcasting. He was a reporter in the Ontario communities of Timmins and Kirkland Lake, before joining the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation as a freelance journalist. He subsequently taught at several American universities, including Yale, Duke and the University of Texas.

In 1973 he was designated cultural attaché at the Barbadian embassy in Washington, DC. He was later General Manager of the Caribbean Broadcasting Corporation in Barbados (1975-1977).

Returning to Canada, in 1977 he ran as a Progressive Conservative candidate in the Ontario election. He was writer in residence at Concordia University, Montreal, Quebec and at University of Western Ontario.From 1988 to 1993 he served on the Immigration and Refugee Board of Canada.

Reviews

[Mandy · Rating 1 out of 5]

I found this book really irritating. For reasons best known to himself, and to me quite incomprehensible, Austin Clarke, celebrated novelist, short story writer and poet, decided to write this autobiography in short disconnected paragraphs that start and end at random, breaking off half way through sentences and then starting half way through a sentence with the next paragraph. Just when you’re reading something interesting, the narrative breaks off and goes on to something else. Why do this? Clarke was one of Canada’s foremost writers and his work as a journalist allowed him to meet many interesting people, from Chinua Achebe to Malcolm X. He was born and grew up in Barbados, then moved to Toronto in 1955 to attend University. He became a journalist and later taught Afro-American Literature at Yale. He had an interesting life and I would have liked to learn about it. But this disjointed way of writing made me impatient and I ended up skipping much of it.

[Sarah]

Membering Austin Clarke is a wonderful collection – a both discerning and poignant tribute to one of Canada’s great writers, which will be a landmark work in Austin Clarke criticism for years to come. Paul Barrett has assembled some of the leading names in Black Canadian criticism, along with several friends and fellow travellers of Clarke, resulting in the production of a manuscript that will be widely read beyond an academic audience. "

[Enrico Downer]

As far as I am concerned, the late Austin Clarke (or Tom Clarke as we knew him) was one of Barbados' best novelists of this century. I've noticed that other reviewers on Goodreads do not take kindly to the style of his last book 'Membering. But Tom Clarke was never a conventional novelist; his writing never did fit the structure and the orthodoxy of fiction writing that most readers might expect. For example, his sentences could run for an entire page before colliding with a period. He himself admitted that he liked to 'creolize Oxford English'. He loved the music, the Africanity and the cadence of Bajan dialect.

I also think this last book presaged his own death: he was eager to get some things off his chest and get even with a few of his perceived enemies before he shuffled off. He was like an old man with a few grudges who gets up in the morning, walks to his bedroom window with his chamberpot (which we Bajans call a po) and dump the overnight contents out his window.

I noticed a few of the rancid drops fell on the heads of both the BLP and DLP in Barbados.
Also on the head of Tom Adams for the time he warned that Barbados was about to be invaded by one Sydney Burnett-Alleyne, who, as it turned out, was a crazed individual allegedly approaching the island in a boat with guns and ammunition purchased overseas purportedly to overthrow the government. Sydney was a gunrunner who was imprisoned for two years thereafter before he retired to the UK and drifted into obscurity.

Even my good friend, the late Harold Hoyte, formerly of The Nation, had one or two droplets of Tom's secretion fall on his head. But Austin Clarke saved a good dowsing (undeservedly I might add) for the one he called "Dippah Barrah" for relieving him of his job as the top dog at CBC, providing fodder for the late calypsonian Sir Don to write a song named 'Tom Say' that was number one on the charts that year. And although this book may not be in the league of "The Polished Hoe" or "Growing up Stupid ...", I still love his last book, "Membering" in spite of his meanderings and loathings and disgruntlements.

And now that his po has been emptied of its contents, may Tom rest in eternal peace.

[Donna Davis]

This puppy goes back to the publishers because there's a flaw in the formatting that I can't get past. It's a shame, because it sounds as if it would have been a good read.