When Women Rule: Stories

Carolyn Hlus was a lecturer in English literature at the University of Alberta, Edmonton.

When Women Rule is Austin Clarke’s ninth published book. His interest in the Barbados, where he was born, provided the inspiration for his first two novels, The Survivors of the Crossing and Amongst Thistles and Thorns. The humorous, yet socially critical trilogy of Caribbean immigrant life in Toronto (The Meeting Point, Storm of Fortune and The Bigger Light) established Clarke as a leading Canadian novelist. In When Women Rule he forges into new territory. While still considering the life of the immigrant, especially the West Indian immigrant, he explores the polarization of the sexes. All the stories are pessimistic; characters are consistently caught in hopeless situations and relationships.

“The Collector” describes a day in the life of a wino, Nick Evans, who is just one step ahead of his landlady, whose intent is to collect his rent at 4 p.m. that day. Like other characters in Clarke’s collection, Evans lives on the fringe of society and is openly racist. He marks his world of DPs, “fuggy” Greeks, Italian immigrants, Indians, homosexuals, and winos into an order as untenable as a stack/stake of empties.

Like Evans, Pat, the protagonist of “Give It a Shot,” is a war veteran and loyal subject. “I’m no fucking immigrant! This country owes me a goddam living...,” he declares. In the beginning of the story, Pat works for the Drivers’ Examination Section of the Department of Transportation, but when his wife leaves him, he quits his job and becomes the apartment super. He goes rapidly downhill when he gambles the rent money away to the Jamaican who stole his wife.

In “Griff,” a pecking order of not only certain males, but of blacks comes into play. Griff, from Barbados, sometimes denies he is black, believes he is a black Englishman — he had attended Ascot many times and had seen the Queen in her box. But when they visit Toronto, he assumes the identity of black Americans. Like many of this book’s characters, he is set on getting rich quick at the race track, but, before he can, he must prove his manhood and confront the reality of his wife’s flirtations.

The title of this collection implies that the male characters will be the victims of women, but Clarke fails to make his female characters powerful enough to be held responsible for the fates of the men, most of whom are merely subsisting and living in constant hope of gambling windfalls. The women, who appear to castrate their men openly, are not fully developed; they appear at the end of stories, often suddenly and unjustifiably, as Gorgons. What causes the tragic outcomes in these stories is the larger society, the “majority” society, which makes no concession to men on the edge: winos, immigrants, black immigrants, old war veterans, the unemployed and, sometimes, the employed, but the employed in undesirable jobs — postal workers, miners, green hornets.