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"The first work of non-fiction from award-winning poet, playwright and novelist George Elliott Clarke, Where Beauty Survived is a vibrant, revealing memoir about the cultural and familial pressures that shaped his early life in the Black Canadian community of Africadia in Halifax, Nova Scotia. As a young child, George Elliott Clarke knew that a great deal was expected from him and his two brothers. The descendants of a highly accomplished family on his father, Bill's, side, including famed opera singer, Portia White, and the first Black officer in the British Army, William Andrew White, he felt pressured to live up to the family name. Visits to his paternal grandmother, Nettie, in Halifax were formal; in contrast, his mother, Geraldine's, family came from a rural area and he recalls nourishing trips to the country, warm and accepting grandparents. These contradictions underlay much of his life and upbringing--Black and White, country and city, outstanding and ordinary, high and low. With vulnerability and poeticism, bold and physical language, George interrogates these dualities in Where Beauty Survived and shows us how he emerged from them as a poet and thinker. At the centre of the book is George's difficult relationship with his father. He recalls Bill explaining racial difference to him and his brothers when they were very small using a bowl of white sugar and a bowl of brown sugar. Bill was an autodidact who valued art, music and books, and he worked as a railway porter. He committed acts of violence, assaulting George's mother and sometimes George and his brothers, too. George worshiped and feared him--and as he grew older, he resented and eventually grew to accept him. In this memoir, George's intense desire to achieve and live up to his esteemed heritage, to make his father proud and win his love, is juxtaposed with the emotional trauma he experienced, his love for his mother, the coldness he felt from his grandmother Nettie--who, he tells us, was relegated by her family to live in a barn when she became pregnant out of wedlock in the 1940s. Where Beauty Survived is the story of a complicated family, of the unique geography of Africadia, of a child who became a poet, of long-kept secrets. Vivid, lyrical, unflinching, it's an unforgettable work from one of our most beloved literary voices."-- |
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