Author Austin Clarke speaks to local students
Date: Friday, February 24 @ 00:00:00 UTC
Topic: Black Habits Articles


FANNIE SUNSHINE, Mirror Staff - While passing a field in Barbados one afternoon, author Austin Clarke observed a woman, dressed all in white, carrying a hoe. "It occurred to me the hoe she was using was longer than the hoe I had seen growing up. I tried to imagine what her life would be like."

That was how his latest novel, The Polished Hoe, came to fruition.

Clarke told this story to a group of about 40 East York Collegiate Institute students ,as part of the school's Black History Month celebration.

"I had to understand what her life would be like as a field worker. When I started to write I decided she would be a worker in a field in the year 1920. I decided not to make it an historic novel but a novel about a woman living in a certain time."

The Polished Hoe is set on a fictionalized West Indies island called Bimshire, a local name for Barbados.

The book, for which Clarke won the 2002 Giller Award - one of Canada's most prestigious awards for fiction writing - tells the story of a woman named Mary-Mathilda who confesses to a murder.

"I thought I was writing a humourous book but it's not taken that way. It's taken very seriously."

He told the students he chose make the main character a woman rather than a man because society still tends to treat women as inferior.

"It was more effective telling the story through a woman."

It was also important to Clarke that Mary-Mathilda spoke the Barbadian dialect instead of "proper" English, he said.

He then read a passage from The Polished Hoe, which had been revised from its original format in 1993.

"I'm allowing you to read what I wrote in longhand in Barbados in 1993," Clarke said, handing out photocopied copies of the original passage.

The purpose was to understand a writer could go through several rewrites before the finished copy is complete, he said.

STARTED AS A REPORTER

After immigrating to Canada from Barbados, Clarke began writing in 1964 after he quit his job at a post office and took a job as a reporter in Timmins, Ont.

"My experience as a reporter was good and I thought I would try my hand at (novel) writing. I was jealous of Leonard Cohen because he was such a bright poet."

The author, who resides in downtown Toronto, told the students that age doesn't matter when it comes to penning a novel.

"I saw all these young Canadians publishing things and thought I'm so old but it doesn't matter because you could become a writer at age 80. I don't feel a writer can do their best work until later on in life."

Clarke's books include the memoirs Growing Up Stupid Under the Union Jack and A Passage Back Home and the food memoir Pigtails n' Breadfruit: the Rituals of Slave Food.

W.O. MITCHELL PRIZE

His novel The Question, was nominated for the Governor General's Award in 1999, the same year he was awarded the W.O. Mitchell Prize. Clarke told The East York-Riverdale Mirror he was working on a new novel and is planning to publish his memoirs in 2006.

"It's such an exciting time in Canada for writing and what better person to talk about writing than a writer?" he said, adding his daughter Jordan is an OAC student at East York Collegiate Institute.

"I talk at a lot of schools. It doesn't take any preparation or adjusting my schedule. I feel it is important to talk to young people because some of them may be future writers and they learn about it first hand."







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