This guest blog generously provided by George Bancroft – first in a series celebrating Black History Month.

George is a student at the University of Toronto, and works at the Office of Shelley Carroll, a Municipal Councillor for the City of Toronto.

Stay tuned to the Indigo Blog for future installments.

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My father was 60 when he had me. He was three years younger than I am now when, alone, in 1948, he boarded a ship headed for McGill – a new life. I remember one night sitting with my dad in our kitchen. I remember him describing the brave face his own father wore as he stood on the banks of what was then British Guyana to see him off.

Decades later my aunt Gwen would pull my father aside; she would let him know how late on the night of his departure she would hear my grandfather, a paragon of strength, in a moment he thought was his own, quietly mourn the loss of his son to a new and as yet unknown land.

Perhaps you have histories like this, family stories, growing pains that come of that proverbial embarkation out on into a new world.

When my cousin asked me if I would be interested in doing a blog for Black History Month my “yes” came pretty quick. Perhaps too quick. The Black Diaspora literature is immense, had I bitten off more than I could chew? Who was I to synthesize the work of poets, scholars and philosophes? A perpetual undergrad whose formative years should, in all honesty, have passed quite some time ago, I wondered about my own perspective and what relevance it would have against the perennial tomes unearthed each February - the reminders of where Blacks had been – what we had accomplished.  I knew that eventually I would be faced with that first blank page - the gentle indictment of a blinking cursor.

As I waited for inspiration, I found it funny that the story of my grandfather was the first thing that came to mind. I wasn’t boarding a ship or watching my son embark upon his own far away journey, yet somehow I knew that if I were to do this my way, the leap could very well lead me off into a deep end.

Grappling with these questions, I put my pen down and visited my dad’s basement study. I crossed the works of Dubois, Martin Luther King, Jr., James Baldwin, Frederick Douglass,and  Alex Haley. As all my fond memories of Black History Month returned, I was reminded of how with each testimonial, with each work, accompanying feelings of pride and intrigue would be a feeling – a yearning to have these applied to my experience.  To understand the American, African, Caribbean Diaspora narrative in a way that connected to my voice, the voice of my own parents and friends to the immediate reality of my own life, my own Canadian experience.

Sitting in my dad’s study, grappling with what direction I would take I stumbled upon George Elliot Clarke’s Odysseys Home by my father’s chair. The title caught my eye and I felt maybe this would be a good place to start.

Odysseys Home:  Mapping African-Canadian Literature didn’t do much to assuage my fears that I was out of my depth. It borders that thin line between an academic and casual read often veering into the former. But investing the time and energy in reading it pays a heavy dividend. Clarke’s work has often been described as pioneering and it is. In Odysseys Home, Dr. Clarke takes on the task of mapping the Black Diaspora dialogue as it moves in and out of the Canadian paradigm. Clark unpacks the works of authors like Andre Alexis, Dionne Brand, Austin Clarke, Claire Harris and M. NourbeSe Philip against the backdrop of George Grant, Pierre Elliott Trudeau and the competing and complementary strains of universalism, black nationalism, conservatism and liberal thought. An expansive work chronicling a history of Afro Canadian literature running from 1785-2001, Dr. Clarke manages to unpack a huge breadth of material in way that is both sharply analytical and deeply personal.

In recounting his own experiences in Nova Scotia, Clarke describes himself as a young man developing his sense of identity in the interstices between Black American, Nova Scotian, First Nations and French Canadian influences and lineages. I felt a kinship with Dr. Clarke’s ideas and, more broadly, with the sense that, particularly in Canada, we are as much pioneers in the creation of our identities as we are inheritors of an immensely diverse and proud tradition. The tensions between our particularistic and collectivist selves aren’t something to be afraid of; in a multicultural society they are what facilitate our definition. Perhaps most significantly, this tension mirrors Canada’s perpetual regional, linguistic and cultural fault lines – a fluid set of relations that are part and parcel of a quintessentially Canadian experience.

So what does all this mean? I am by no means a scholar, and the level of writing and contributing ideas incorporated in Clarke’s essays did come across as intimidating at first. But the knowledge that the competing and complimentary strains of argument about what it means to be Black in Canada has an organic history within the same dialogue about what it means to be Canadian in general did much to melt away my own insecurities. History has not reached its Fukayaman end - Black History is not static and we are all participants in finding where it lives, breathes and, ultimately, leads us forward. We are all, in our own way, embarking on into our own new worlds.

So, this month we’ll take a look at the earliest experiences of Afro Canadians, the post war generation, as well as some contemporary writers to see how these speak to some of the more familiar texts February traditionally brings.  As the weeks progress I hope you’ll join me as I engage black history in an informal setting, unpack the histories that have changed my life and reinterpret them as part of what I feel is an important, rich, communal Canadian dialogue.

Until then…

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