![Sample our Humanities journals, sign in here to start your FREE access for 14 days]({"type":"image" , "src" : "/sda/5939/TOC-Subject-Sample-2021-Humanities.jpg"})
ABSTRACT
This essay attempts to perform a “disorientation” of received notions about the black diaspora through the work of the black Canadian writer Wayde Compton, a key figure in placing in conversation a circumatlantic mooring of blackness and a Pacific Rim perspective through the construction of a black (Canadian) Pacific as a contact zone with other historical British Columbian populations, most of all Indigenous and Asian. It reads his poetry, short fiction and essays to show how roots and routes come together in Compton’s communal and artistic projects, and how they reconcile the apparently antithetical pulls of regionalism and diaspora, mapping out the connected itineraries of diverse peoples both within the Pacific board of North America and across the Pacific Ocean. The essay traces some of the major symbols and recurrent features of Compton’s work in outlining the cartography of the black Pacific, including the boat and the island, and argues that it is generally inflected by his location vis-à-vis the broader nation as well as by the transnational flows of black history that have shaped not just black British Columbia but also the city of Vancouver and the whole nation-state of Canada.
Acknowledgements
The author would like to thank the editors of this special issue and the anonymous reviewers for helping make this essay stronger and more nuanced.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes on contributor
Pilar Cuder-Domínguez is Professor of English at the University of Huelva (Spain), where she teaches British and Canadian Literature. Her research interests are the intersections of gender, genre, nation and race. She is the author of three books and editor of eight collections of essays. She is currently lead investigator of the research project “Bodies in Transit” (bodiesintransitproject.com).
Notes
1 Hamilton, “Visualizing History and Memory,” 218.
2 Clarke, Directions Home, 10.
3 Gilroy, The Black Atlantic, 4.
4 For instance, Toronto poet Dionne Brand, originally from Trinidad, has reflected at length on the historical and genealogical rift made by the slave trade in A Map to the Door of No Return (2001).
5 Vernon, “Writing a Home for Prairie Blackness,” 67.
6 See Mathieu, North of the Color Line, for more information on the subject of black migrations from the USA, particularly 21–27 on the Oklahoma migrants led by Rev. Sneed that settled Amber Valley.
7 For a discussion of this novel as an example of the retrieval of erased black Canadian history, see Cuder-Domínguez, “Transnational.”
8 Edugyan, Dreaming of Elsewhere, 25, 31.
9 Brydon, “Global Friction,” 3.
10 Taketani, The Black Pacific Narrative, 6; my italics.
11 De Loughrey, Routes and Roots, 2.
12 Taketani, ibid., 6–7.
13 Statistics Canada, “National Household Survey.”
14 Killian, Go Do Some Great Thing, 18.
15 Compton, 49th Parallel Psalm, 68.
16 Killian, Go Do Some Great Thing, 30–34.
17 Compton, 49th Parallel Psalm, 18 and 44, respectively.
18 Ibid., 46–47.
19 Ibid., 52.
20 Ibid., 54.
21 Killian, Go Do Some Great Thing, 116.
22 On this subject, see also Roberts, Discrepant Parallels, 174–176.
23 Compton, 49th Parallel Psalm, 163.
24 On the diasporan aesthetics of Compton's poetry, and particularly his confluence with Kamau Brathwaite, see Siemerling, “Transcultural Improvisation,” and Smyth, “The Black Atlantic.”
25 Compton, 49th Parallel Psalm, 34.
26 Ibid., 175.
27 Compton, Performance Bond, 31.
28 Ibid.
29 Ibid., 32.
30 Shilliam, The Black Pacific, 2.
31 Ibid., 42 and 44, respectively.
32 Ibid., 46 and After Canaan 113, respectively. The description of this particular project appears in After Canaan, 112–117. The terms “last stop” and “terminus” also allude to BC as the terminus of the Canada National Railway, and thus as essential in the building of the nation-state of Canada, as Lowry has argued in “Cultural Citizenship,” 23.
33 Ibid., 45.
34 Boelhower, “I’ll Teach You How to Flow,” 39.
35 Significantly, this was not the only black Canadian settlement to fall prey to urban renewal plans around the same period, a case in point being the destruction of Africville in Halifax, Nova Scotia, in the 1960s.
36 The fictitious Portals replicates a real collection of interviews to East End Vancouverites published in the 1970s with the title Opening Doors. This is another example of the recurrent mirroring effects in Compton's work.
37 Pratt, Imperial Eyes, 8. Compton cites this text in After Canaan, 189.
38 Compton, Performance Bond, 137.
39 McKittrick and Woods, Black Geographies, 4.
40 Compton, Bluesprint, 16 and 15, respectively.
41 “Africadian” was minted by Clarke from the combination of Africa and Acadia “to denote the Black populations of the Maritimes and especially of Nova Scotia” because he considered all other terms “unwieldy” (Fire on the Water, 9).
42 Clarke, Fire on the Water, 9. Compton also follows Clarke's ground-breaking work in referring to and including “orature,” that is, oral literature.
43 Compton, Bluesprint, 20.
44 Ibid., 17.
45 Brathwaite, Conversations with Nathaniel Mackey, 34.
46 See DeLoughrey's Routes and Roots, particularly the book's introduction, 1–48.
47 Again, this tidalectic notion of history may be suitable to understand the ebbs and flows of black people in other locations of the black Pacific, for example Hawai’i, where from the 1790s there has been a fluctuating black population, often mixed-race (known with the local term hapa). There are striking similarities between Hawai’i and the history and demographics of British Columbia. For an analysis of the black population of Hawai’i vis-à-vis other racial groups, see Nitasha Sharma, “Pacific Revisions of Blackness.”
48 Compton, Bluesprint, 26.
49 Pal, “Palimpsest Crossroads,” 105.
50 Lowry, “Cultural Citizenship,” 37. Lowry's account falls in line with Roberts's cited above.
51 He has continued this line of work as director of the Writers’ Studio at Simon Fraser University, nurturing new local talent. In 2015 The Revolving City was edited by Compton in collaboration with the Vancouver poet Renée Sarojini Saklikar; the book collects poetry originally presented at the Studio's Lunch Reading Series and it was nominated for the 2016 City of Vancouver Award.
52 The documentary is one of several available on the website; it can also be accessed on YouTube, see “Secret Vancouver: Return to Hogan’'s Alley.” Accessed 30 August 2017. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B-8lgpvj0Hg.
53 Compton, After Canaan, 107, 108.
54 Ibid., 109.
55 Ibid., 98.
56 Rothberg, Multidirectional Memory, 1–12.
57 Compton's website, accessed May 11, 2016. A 2008 performance of the Contact Zone Crew is available on Vimeo, see “Wayde Compton, Jason de Couto-The Contact Zone Crew.” Accessed 30 August 2017. https://vimeo.com/5736532. See also Compton's live performance in collaboration with the musician Nick Storring at the University of Waterloo, 2013 on YouTube, “Wayde Compton & Nick Storring at the Critical Media Lab.” Accessed 30 August 2017. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4MuUirGB2Oo.
58 Compton, After Canaan, 183–201.
59 Compton, Performance Bond, 15, 16 and 17, respectively.
60 See Clarke, Odysseys Home, 210–237, on “Canadian Biraciality and Its ‘Zebra’ Politics” for a contextualized reading of this poem.
61 Compton, After Canaan, 23.
62 For a discussion of mixed race in Canada, see Hill, Black Berry, Sweet Juice; McNeil, Sex and Race in the Black Atlantic; and DeRango-Adem and Thompson, Other Tongues, as well as Clarke's abovementioned Odysseys and Fraile Marcos, “Urban Heterotopias.” For mixed-racedness among other populations of the black Pacific, see Sharma's “Pacific Revisions of Blackness.”
63 Compton, After Canaan, 26.
64 For more on the subject of the “readability of blackness,” see Bickersteth, “Bordering on African American.”
65 Compton, After Canaan, 14–15.
66 For a history of the Canadian short story cycle, see Lynch's introduction to The One and the Many, 1–32; and for a definition and history of Afrofuturism, see Yaszek, “Afrofuturism.”
67 DeLoughrey is drawing from two major theories of the Caribbean, Kamau Brathwaite's aforementioned tidalectics and Antonio Benítez Rojo's “repeating islands.” See DeLoughrey's introduction to Routes and Roots, 1–48.
68 Delany, Vancouver, 19.
69 Compton, The Outer Harbour, 104.
70 Ibid., 105.
71 On the symbolism of glass in a range of artistic representations, textual and non-textual, of the city of Vancouver in recent years, see also Darias Beautell, “The Intrinsic Potential.”
72 Compton, The Outer Harbour, 107, 109.
73 Sassen, The Global City, 3–4.
74 Although perhaps Ellis Island and Angel Island on the east and west coast of the USA respectively are better known, this practice is not alien to Canadian history either. Grosse Île (Québec) on the Gulf of St. Lawrence was a quarantine depot for Irish immigrants in the first half of the nineteenth-century. These three instances attest to the colonial perception of the island as isolated space that DeLoughrey pointed out.
75 Compton, The Outer Harbour, 184 and 159, respectively.
76 Ibid., 22.
77 Ibid., 76.
78 Ibid., 81.
79 Martín Lucas, “Psychic Spaces,” 96.