Abstract
Several years ago the Ghanaian poet Kwame Dawes published a book on Caribbean writing—Natural Mysticism—that turned out to be an extended puff for his own poetry. Nobody was quite sure whether to applaud it as a characteristically West Indian act of bravado or decry it as an unforgivable distortion of the literary landscape. In the end most critics decided to ignore it. Nova Scotian poet George Elliott Clarke's book on African-Canadian literature, Odysseys Home, suffers from the obverse problem. Clarke entirely omits his own work from his map of African Canada, and one is not sure whether to approve the omission as characteristically Canadian self-effacement or lament it as a real shortcoming of the book.
Published Version
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