George Elliott Clarke shows us Where Beauty Survived in his memoir of ‘race, family secrets, and Africadia’

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π‘©π’π’π’Œ π’“π’†π’—π’Šπ’†π’˜ 𝒔𝒑𝒐𝒏𝒔𝒐𝒓𝒆𝒅 π’ƒπ’š π‘Ύπ’“π’Šπ’•π’† π‘΅π’π’˜! π’˜π’Šπ’•π’‰ 𝑱𝒐𝒏 π‘»π’‚π’•π’•π’“π’Šπ’†.

π‘Šβ„Žπ‘’π‘Ÿπ‘’ π΅π‘’π‘Žπ‘’π‘‘π‘¦ π‘†π‘’π‘Ÿπ‘£π‘–π‘£π‘’π‘‘: 𝐴 π‘€π‘’π‘šπ‘œπ‘–π‘Ÿ π‘œπ‘“ π‘…π‘Žπ‘π‘’, πΉπ‘Žπ‘šπ‘–π‘™π‘¦ π‘†π‘’π‘π‘Ÿπ‘’π‘‘π‘ , π‘Žπ‘›π‘‘ π΄π‘“π‘Ÿπ‘–π‘π‘Žπ‘‘π‘–π‘Ž, 𝑏𝑦 πΊπ‘’π‘œπ‘Ÿπ‘”π‘’ πΈπ‘™π‘™π‘–π‘œπ‘‘π‘‘ πΆπ‘™π‘Žπ‘Ÿπ‘˜π‘’

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George Elliott Clarke was visiting Halifax this summer and he managed to squeeze in an hour to talk to me about his old friend, Charles R. Saunders. George was Charles’s first friend in Halifax and he helped Charles land a job as a columnist at the Halifax Daily News.Β 

George and I stopped by Charles’s grave on the way to the airport. I asked George about some of Charles’s life that had eluded my understanding. George shared some wisdom, and the best was his advice to read his own autobiography, Where Beauty Survived. I then left him alone with Charles. George pulled out his notebook and began capturing what could be the birth of a poem.Β 

After, I bought the audiobook version, which I highly recommend. George is a seasoned, performing poet, and his passion, joy and wicked sense of humour leap into your ears. George seems to walk in a cloud of words, and here he forms them into a storm about his coming-of-age in Africadia, his name for our part of the Black North Atlantic.Β 

Where Beauty Survived reads like a Dickensian novel as George balances his personal story of his highly accomplished extended family (which would eventually include Charles after his marriage) and that of the wider African Nova Scotian worlds. Through his poetry, George would go on to join the Order of Canada, the order of Nova Scotia, and be named poet laureate for the Canadian parliament. But this superbly written book stays mostly in Halifax and Three Miles Plains in the 1960s and 1970s.Β 

My recommendation: buy the audiobook and start taking daily walks with George Elliott Clarke. Step by step, he’ll change the way you see our world. It begins with a haunted dream in 2020 and sweeps you away into a portrait of the poet as a young man.