Robert Edison Sandiford
Acts of Fact and Fancy
Beatrice Chancy by George Elliott Clarke, Polestar Book Publishers, 1999. $16.95.
Both proficient and prolific, George Elliott Clarke is one of Canada's leading auteurs. He has written three volumes ofpoetry. His second one, the astonishing Whylah Falls (1990), won the Archibald Lampman Award in 199 1. A Nova Scotian of African-American descent an "Africadian"-he has produced anthologies on black Canadian literature, a screenplay, One Heart Broken Into Song (1999), an opera libretto and a verse-play based on his own work. Clarke, only 39, has also taught at Duke University in North Carolina, McGill University in Montreal and is currently at the University of Toronto. And yet, though acclaimed for the quality and character of his verse, he is not as widely read as he might be. Beatrice Chancy, what the poet has called "my first real book since Whylah Falls," should guarantee he is no longer underappreciated.
It's hard not to be enthusiastic about this book. Described by Clarke as a passional - a verse-play containing the sufferings of its eponymous, tragic heroine - it may equally be read as a romance. It is nearly a soap opera, withplentyoflove, lust,jealousy, andbeautiful dreamers, not to mention violently paced. If ever a writer made reading poetry and drama today both demanding and fun, it is Clarke: the first printing of the book - all 1800 copies sold out within four months of its publication.
Beatrice Chancy is an updating of the story of Beatrice Chancy, "beheaded at the age of twenty for the crime of parricide, on September 11, 1599, in Rome, Italy." Clarke, however, is grateful for the inspiration of other Beatrices throughout the ages, be they from art, literature, film, or a restaurant. In his version, set in Paradise in the Annapolis Valley of Nova Scotia in 1801, Beatrice is the daughter of a black slave raped by her white master, Francis Chancy. Raised in his house, Beatrice - "clever, kind and cultured" - becomes his 46 prize possession." But, as the book's synopsis further reveals, "her declaration of love for a slave [named Lead] sparks tension that culminates in a monstrous act: the rape of Beatrice by her own father...." Just returned from a convent school for white ladies in waiting, she is only 16. The crime takes place over a long Easter weekend.
From the start, the rhythm and mood are distinctly Clarkean: "Sunning itself between the North Mountain and South Mountain ranges, five o'clock light lounges, one-quarter dark." But more than lyricism or poetics, the aim is a distillation of language, yielding beauty and truth indeed. Chancy's slave Deal, for instance, "beautifies a single-piece shift.... Her blackness, big-boned, colours liberty."
Whether laying out a scene as above or in dialogue, Clarke is witty, erudite, punning, alliterative, humourous, and bawdy. His images are sharp: a whip "vipers in the wind," a slave seer, Dumas, "excited a banjo." Occasionally, there is a word or phrase or line off key. This usually occurs when the characters slip into snippets of French, Italian. These switches sometimes seem forced - particularly when spoken by or directed to a character whose understanding of the language would be unaccountable. They lend the prose a precious air, even if the action is rarefied.
Such missteps, though, hardly mar the brilliance of the text. From the presentation of the dramatis personae, virtually every line of Beatrice Chancy has meaning. Witness how precisely the names of the players express their nature: Lead, Beatrice's beloved, exudes elemental strength; Peacock, a holy man, is a preening hypocrite; Lustra, Chancy's wife, shines on the outside while inwardly void; Chancy, his station aside, is anything but lucky. Clarke composes with a perpetual sense of rapture, yet his aesthetics are balanced. He rarely goes over the top.
Such control makes the work wonderfully quotable. Choice words noticeably increase when it comes to the discussion of slavery, which is the issue at the heart of this bleak love story. Clarke is powerfully adept at showing how slavery distorts and corrupts the human spirit. Beatrice Chancy gathers force in its exposition.
Lead: ... If prayer could bust iron, we'd be free. (p. 13) Peacock: Slavery shackles whites to blackest crimes. (p. 26) Peacock: Turbulent man, your deeds are wounds. Beware: Cruelty cannot be mother to Love. (p. 58) Chancy: Our system is a machine of cruelty. (p. 58) Deal: Would slavery be slavery if slaves wasn't hurt? (p. 60)
Even if "slavery in Eastern Canada (including Ontario) was a minuscule economic activity" compared to the variety practiced in the southern U.S. in particular, Clarke observes in his preface that "slavery is slavery, and the black slaves in what is now Canada felt every bit as oppressed as their cousins in the United States, the Caribbean and South America."
This is why his dialogue is so refreshingly, brutally honest. To agree or disagree with what the characters say or think is not the point. The fact is there is no softening of their portrayal to placate anybody: they are true to their circumstances and surroundings, but also to their times and beliefs. When Chancy says, "Everything that comes puking/ From between a woman's legs is corrupt," his worldview is abundantly clear. Quite possibly the worst thing about the slaveowner's rape of Beatrice is the deliberateness ofthe offense. In this Nova Scotia, this Canada, which is yet our own, slavery is the vilest of man's sins against man, blacks and whites hate each other bitterly, and even well-bom white women are considered chattel.
More than half a decade in the making, Beatrice Chancy is Clarke's best work to date. It is a frankly literary work: there are whispers of Shakespeare, Dante, Milton, Blake, T.S. Eliot, and countless other antecedents.But it also charts previously neglected territory in its exploration of slavery in these Americas prior to its abolition throughout the British Empire in 1834. Even if Beatrice Chancy "is not a work of history but of imagination," Clarke nevertheless asserts the second epigraph to this book from Best - "Men write history; Women are history." His Beatrice's hanging Thanksgiving Monday is nothing short of a sacrifice meant to redeem the souls of the black slaves of Paradise. With honesty, eloquence and verve, Clarke has committed a great act of fact as much as of fancy.
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