Resilience and Memory in the Poetics of Africadia: Sylvia D. Hamilton's And I Alone Escaped To Tell You

Vicent Cucarella-Ramon

doi:10.17561/grove.28.6301

Abstract

Sylvia D. Hamilton’s collection of poems And I Alone Escaped To Tell You (2014) revolves around the vindication of the little remembered legacy of slavery of Africadians – George Elliott Clarke’s neologism to refer to African Canadians from the Maritime provinces – which acts as a metaphor of the silenced history of Black Canadians. To do so, Hamilton relies on memory work through the lens of resilience and, hence, participates in the recent post-trauma paradigm that is intent on highlighting resistance rather than victimhood. Thus, the resilient memory that emerges from the collection dismisses the position of victims for Africadians and, contrarily, focuses on the capacity to ‘bounce back’, to withstand historical adversities, to endure by being malleable and to adapt to conditions of crisis. Simply put, this resilient memory acts in the poems as the dignified exercise to keep on reinstating and vindicating the silenced history of Black Canada.

Highlights

The Memory of Africadian LiteratureIn his groundbreaking book The Black Atlantic Reconsidered: Black Canadian Writing, Cultural History and the Presence of the Past (2015), Winfried Siemerling traces back the origins of African Canadian literature and explains that “black writing in what is Canada is over two centuries old and that black recorded speech is even older” (3)
The selection of poems that comprise And I Alone Escaped To Tell You endeavor to give the historical aftermath of slavery events a human voice, blending a resilient approach to memory with experience and imagination to evoke and recover the lives of the early Black Nova Scotians and of the generations that followed
The poems rely heavily on synergic traits that transform the trauma associated to Africadian history into a vector of resilience by invoking a memory that can restore and eventually foster a rehabilitated version of the histories of African Canadians

Summary

Introduction

In his groundbreaking book The Black Atlantic Reconsidered: Black Canadian Writing, Cultural History and the Presence of the Past (2015), Winfried Siemerling traces back the origins of African Canadian literature and explains that “black writing in what is Canada is over two centuries old and that black recorded speech is even older” (3). As Clarke himself states, “the Africadian literature commenced in 1785 when John Marrant, and African American Methodist missionary, who lived in Nova Scotia from 1785 to 1879, published his popular Narrative of the Lord’s Wonderful Dealings with John Marrant, a Black” (Odysseys 107) It is one hundred and eighty-nine years later when a corpus of narrative and imaginative rendition of the lives of Black Nova Scotians took shape in urgency in response to the historical events that suffused the lives of Africandians. Africadian writing has been bent on providing new and corrective directions in the representation of a Nova Scotian reality that is “self-consciously Black” (Mannette 5) and determined to underscore “its persistent concerns: liberty, justice, and faith” (Odysseys 108) through a constant exercise of memory work This move coincides with the shift, within postcolonial studies, towards the field of social history and to its focus on the Foucauldian “counter-memory”. The importance of memory in the poems revolves around the re-establishment of the history of a past denied or repressed and appears hand in hand with the concept of resilience aiming to foster “community consciousness” (Akyeampong 185) against the silencing of African Canadian (hi)stories

Memory and Resilience

Resilient Memory in And I Alone Escaped To Tell You

Conclusion