Revival: An Anthology of Black Canadian Writing

Nanette Morton teaches English at McMaster University in Hamilton.

Donna Bailey Nurse is Canada’s foremost critic of African-Canadian
writing and the author of What’s a Black Critic to Do? Her expertise
shows in this anthology, which showcases the latest work from Canada’s
best-known black authors. As Nurse notes in the introduction,
immigration, rejection, economic exploitation, and cultural dislocation
are frequent themes in these works. In David Odhiambo’s
“Kipligat’s Chance,” the narrator’s educated immigrant parents
fail to find work, while in George Elliot Clarke’s “George and
Rue,” two young black Africadians try to scrape together a living on
the margins of Nova Scotian society. The heroine of Althea Prince’s
“Loving This Man” feels “ungrounded and dislocated from my
centre.”

Many authors look back to a place of origin, negotiating the spaces and
identities formed by both there and here. The Barbados Robert Edison
Sandiford describes in “Sand for Snow: A Caribbean-Canadian
Chronicle” is both strange and familiar to him: “The land is
different in Barbados, the soil, the mud, than that of Canada. ... But
the land is also the same. You work it. It yields.” Afua Cooper’s
“Memories Have Tongue” is particularly rich and evocative, recalling
a grandmother’s experiences of love and death. Other works, such as M.
NorbeSe Philip’s “Cashew #4,” are full of the joy of sensuality.

Though wide-ranging, the anthology is not definitive: space constraints
meant that drama had to be excluded, and the full sweep of longer works,
such as Lawrence Hill’s “In Cold Blood,” and Suzette Mayr’s
“The Widows” can be only partially appreciated. Fortunately, Nurse
provides a list of suggested readings, so that readers can explore the
depth and breadth of African-Canadian literature.