J’Accuse...!:

by George Elliott Clarke

“ J’Accuse...! is so dynamic, joyous in its language and emotion, and consistently exciting, engrossing.... A page-turner! And mysteriously easy to read given the inventiveness, color, and torsion of the poetic language.... A wonderful combination of the sophisticated, the primal, and the available. Great poetry has this sense of generous, human outreach from a very high and deep place. Something that comes down from the mountain yet without condescending.”
—A.F. Moritz, Guggenheim Award & Griffin Poetry Prize Laureate & Toronto Poet Laureate (2019-23)   What is it like to be “cancelled,” to be shouted down by the virulently self-righteous, and to be permitted no hearing, no defence?   In J’Accuse...! (Poem Versus Silence), an essay-in-poetry by Canada’s Parliamentary Poet Laureate emeritus, George Elliott Clarke contemplates how terrifyingly easy it was for him to fall victim – in January 2020 – to shrill defamation and scurrilous denunciation, to face “anti-social” media intimidation – all facilitated by reportage that spurred outrage rather than reflection. The result? Censorship and silencing, blacklisting and gag orders, the specialty of tyrannies, including the newfangled cult of #8220;cancellaires” and “digilantes.”   J’Accuse...! is a poignant manifesto that calls upon intellectuals and radicals to never submit to impulses that intentionally, or even unintentionally, forbid debate and questioning.   J’Accuse...! ponders what is truly injustice.   J’Accuse...! is a cri-de-coeur that unflinchingly reveals the personal cost – borne by all poets who strive to “bear witness to Treasure – / despite all opposing Battery.”

Genres: Poetry

208 pages, Paperback

Published December 1, 2021

About the author

A seventh-generation Nova Scotian, George Elliott Clarke was born in 1960 in Windsor Plans, Nova Scotia. He is known as a poet, as well as for his two-volume anthology of Black Writing from Nova Scotia, Fire in the Water. Volume One contains spirituals, poety sermons, and accounts from 1789 to the mid-twentieth century; Volume Two collects the work of the Black Cultural Renaissance in Nova Scotia, which, in Clarke's words, "speaks to people everywhere about overcoming hardships and liberating the spirit." Currently on faculty at Duke University, he is now writing both a play and an opera on slavery in Nova Scotia, a reformulation of Shelley's The Cenci. He has won many awards including the 1981 Prize for Adult Poetry from the Writers Federation of Nova Scotia, he was the 1983 first runner-up for the Bliss Carman Award for Poetry at the Banff Centre School of Arts and 1991 winner of the Archibald Lampman Award for Poetry from the Ottawa Independent Writers.

Books: Saltwater Spirituals and Deeper Blues (Pottersfield, 1983); Whylah Falls (Polestar, 1990, 2000); Provencal Songs (Magnum Book Store, 1993); Lush Dreams, Blue Exile: Fugitive Poems, 1978-1993 (Pottersfield, 1994); Provencal Songs II (Above/ground, 1997); Whylah Falls: The Play (Playwrights Canada, 1999, 2000); Beatrice Chancy (Polstar Books, 1999); Gold Indigoes (Carolina Wren, 2000); Execution Poems (Gaspereau, 2001); Blue (Raincoat, 2001); Odysseys Home: Mapping African-Canadian Literature (UofT Press, 2002)