George Elliot Clarke talks to Sachi Nag about his new book
1. “J’ Accuse” likely alludes to the acclaimed open letter by Émile Zola that he wrote to the president of the French Republic in defense of Alfred Dreyfus (accused of treason); how does the title of this work relate to this piece of literary history? How did you arrive at the title?
GEC: When Kancel Kultur Krusaders ganged to censure me, in winter 2020, because I refused to say who I would quote in a paper I had neither researched nor written, I was shocked that the CBC and others could snorkle up and regurgitate anti-intellectual vomit as legit, civil discourse. A McCarthyite episode; an Orwellian Two-Minutes-Hate campaign: Journalists aided and abetted hectoring invective, scurrilous defamation, to render me the #1 news story of Day 2 of 2020. Worse? The refusal of the same news organs lambasting me to allow any rebuke of their yellow journalism and blacklisting. I wrote an essay—that no one would publish—for fear, perhaps, that the same Keyboard Keystone Kops who hounded me would also swarm their websites. Some folks counselled suing malefactors, but I refused to wager on the courts. However, Barry Callaghan of Exile Editions suggested that I respond in irrefutable poetry. That decision made, in August 2020, I realized that Zola’s famous 1898 letter in defence of Alfred Dreyfus, a French Jewish army officer falsely convicted of treason, had to be my model for addressing my accusers and attackers. (Thus, my title employs the identical font as Zola’s newspaper headline.)
2. You have said that “J’ Accuse” contemplates what it is like to be cancelled.” What was your opening belief in writing this? Did your closing belief change in any way?
GEC: My nascent belief in writing J’Accuse…! was simple: I’ll set the record straight! But I didn’t realize that there were (and are) those who prefer to blame me—an Afro-Métis man—for the April 1995 murder of Pamela George, a Cree woman, and for the easy-peasy sentences awarded the two paleface, bourgeois brutes who beat her to death, namely, Stephen Kummerfield—later Brown—and Alex Ternowetsky. Although I wasn’t living in Canada when the revolting evil occurred, I somehow became the scapegoat for Indigenous outrage over the stupefyingly racist and misogynist Saskatchewan justice system; but I was also set-up by a mainstream-headline “news story” to activate an “anti-social” lynch mob. My closing belief, then? Facts don’t matter. There are those who must credit that an Afro-Métis poet and intellectual is somehow complicit with the violence of Caucasian squatters. And/or there are those, envious of my accomplishments, who relish besmirching a black man by smearing me with their (white settler) gore. Facts be damned! Yet, I aver that poetry possesses a virtue that repels or repulses propaganda.
3. How did you arrive at the form/structure of the work? Was it guided by the aforementioned central question “what it is like to be cancelled”? Did you have a form/structure in mind when you started? What other forms/structures or shapes did you consider? What was driving the choices of form/structure – efficiency or something else …style, urge for innovation, compulsions of the genre, compulsions of a literary movement it aspires to connect with?
GEC: On Manitoulin Island, in August 2020, the poem began to take shape as a series of page-long, free-verse “howls,” recollections of experience, i.e., what it felt like, to enter the Year of the Rat after chugging way too much Champagne; and then to trudge upstairs from my basement, only to hear, through radio, a tinnyvoice, whinging that I refused to preview, in public, an essay I had neither researched nor written. Thanks to such “reporting,” an online petition, wanting my talk cancelled, gathered 5,000 signatures inside hours. Based on the notion that “He Should Have Known”; i.e., I was magically supposed to know that a person who requested my help with his poetry had committed a murder a decade before we met (and 25 years before I learned about it). This surreal fanaticism dictated that the poetry fill discrete chapters, each titled after a Hitchcock film. After all, a steady theme of the auteur’s oeuvre is that of false accusation and/or wrongful conviction—plus running-dog lynch mobs bawling to fang and claw the spurious villain. Then, reworking each page-long lyric, I began to incorporate satiric, mordant rhymes in the style of Jules Laforgue.
4. How do you intend for the value of the work to be assessed – as a piece of work that shares a compelling message or makes a social, political, or practical point or is it to be seen as a cultural event/phenomenon – an object of taste or a statement of your aesthetic?
GEC: J’Accuse…! (Poem Versus Silence) is all of the above: A socio-political cri-de-coeur against the cutthroat injustice that is Kancel Kultur—which can destroy individuals, but not (oppressive) institutions. So, its “vengeance” be prima facie farcical. Yet, my book-length poem is also a cultural artifact: My autobiographical and poet’s response to being torn apart in a media circus, and why? For aiding a good poet who I did not know was a convicted murderer. My aesthetic is plain: To plunge into hidden, obscured violence and excavate it for its potential insights. That’s also my strategy in Whylah Falls (1990), Execution Poems (2000), and in Canticles I (2 vols., 2016 & 2017). Tragic it is that poet Stephen Kummerfield/Brown slew Pamela George, herself a poet, and then sought me out—to assist his poetry, only to sink me into his disrepute (with a gleeful assist from the CBC). Thus, the value of the work is manifold: As socio-political critique, as autobiographical experience, as artistic and cultural response. Anyway, the form ended up being relatively free—even free associating—except for Beauty’s presence in those pungent, plangent, poignant rhymes….
5. Was there a specific incident or experience or series of events that inspired this work? What was the development process for the inspiration to become this newest collection?
GEC: The inciting events? Kummerfield—later Brown—and Ternowetsky slew Ms. George in April 1995; got caged in 1996; sprung in 2000; next, in 2005, Kummerfield asked clueless me to review his poetry. I did: I saw talent. A 14-year-long correspondence ensued that was suspended in September 2019 when Kummerfield/Brown admitted to me his crime. When I planned to give a talk on the complicity of Saskatchewan poets with violence against Indigenous Women and Girls, some folks feared that by reciting the ex-con’s poetry (in any context), I’d be exculpating Kummerfield/Brown: So, they sic’d the CBC on me. The public broadcaster colluded promptly with “anti-social” media to see me “cancelled,” thus granting a provincial reporter a “scoop” on a no-news day. Balderdash and bunk! (Absurd was the story, but once the Internet bloodhounds heard the dog whistles impugning this black man, they smelled blood, and came charging: Hell hounds on my trail!) Unable to respond in prose to the hatred directed at me by the propagandized ignorant, I decided to author J’Accuse…! to expose the blacklisting and yellow journalism to which I’ve been subjected since Jan-Feb 2020. Through analysis and anger, I speak back to unspeakable scandalmongering.
6. Can you reflect on any social contexts that might have been inspiring or generative for this work?
GEC: The social contexts—or vortices—that licenced my tar-and-feathering were 1) Indigenous indignation and outrage over the “injustice system” and the insultingly light sentences apportioned Kummerfield and Ternowetsky in 1996 (9 years before I read Kummerfield’s verse; 25 years before I learned of a duo’s savagery); 2) the Caucasian guilt-complex over their cultural and actual genocide of Indigenous peoples; 3) the puritanical presumption that anyone who favours art by a criminal is “guilty by association” of equivalent criminality (this was the super-market-tabloid-level, “journalism” pitched upon me); 4) and the surging blood-lust to hang high—from his sacrosanct Ivory Tower—a too-prominent, black public intellectual. These storm-troopers constituted a perfect storm! Indeed, University of Regina—spineless—profs scrupled to scapegoat me—an Afro-Métis man—as okaying homicide because I prefer academic probity to witless hysteria. The stoked Reaction? A version of Robespierre’s Terror! Giddily did the guillotine blade hover above my neck! Yeah, a Kancel Kultur Kuorum sought my silencing. Complying, the Canadian Comparative Literature Association and the Congress of Social Sciences and Humanities 2020 labelled me persona non grata and even insinuated—libellously—that I was “dangerous.”
7. What would you say is the most fundamental difference between your earlier work and this new collection? Where would you put this title in your body of work – as a continuation of previous or a work that charts a new territory?
GEC: Though I’m a pacifist, ruddy crime doth cayenne pepper my oeuvre. So, J’Accuse…! (Poem Versus Silence) follows my verse-novel Whylah Falls (1990), my verse-tragedy and opera libretto Beatrice Chancy (1999), and my narrative-lyric-sequence Execution Poems (2000), in covering a Real-Life Slaying. Yet, J’Accuse is much more documentary: I include a 2017 chant that I wrote, i.e., “For the Murdered and the Missing,” denouncing violence against Indigenous Women and Girls; a verse-essay chronicling how I—a poet—became the butt of sensationalist “news”; much poetry of protest and witness; several slanderous letters; a Zoom Incident Report about a “John Miller” who Zoom-bombed a session on poetry translation to call me a “nigger”; prolific footnotes; a bibliography of my pro-Indigenous scholarship; and legal judgments related to the 1985 murder of Catherine Wright—an Africadian sex-worker—in Halifax (NS). Yes, J’Accuse is sedulously documentary. Yet, this work also resembles my narrative-lyric suites—Traverse (2014), a bio of my beginnings as a poet (ages 15-45, 1975-2005); Illicit Sonnets (2013) and Extra Illicit Sonnets (2015), both of which fictionalize a romantic relationship. Yet, J’Accuse differs by being far more intensively personal and public, the poetry-though vivacious—assuming the capacities of scholarship.
8. With what other book(s) will this work make a good comparison? Are any ideas/ themes/ tropes/ forms in this collection that relate to a comparable work?
GEC: Italian-Canadian author Caroline Morgan Di Giovanni has written an “impressionistic” review of J’Accuse, deeming it “operatic.” I reprint it as my answer:
“When I first read George Elliott Clarke’s new book, J’Accuse…! (Poem versus Silence), I heard a howl in the language of a wounded wolf. It was a Ginsberg howl without inhibition….
As the pages took me along, following the tracks of the bloodied beast, my first impression changed into a different soundscape entirely. This collection of well-wrought poems actually became for me the libretto of a modern Grand Opera….
As the curtain opens we hear the chorus singing the spiritual “For the Murdered and the Missing.” Gradually as the music continues, each of the characters sings in the appropriate voice. The wounded Hero sets the sombre tone in a deep, rich Bass Baritone that will return throughout the performance. The callous young men who commit the hideous crime sing the tenor parts. The murder victim sings with a pure Soprano. The intellectual academics chatter in Alto squawks, frequently rushed and incoherent.
After the opening chorus in Spiritual mode, there will be two other forms of choral singing: Chorus #1, Indigenous voices and rhythms to interject the plot line about the original injustice. Chorus #2, lower register with scat phrasing, the media hypocrites….”
9 How would you characterize the stance taken by this work in relation to the most immediate socio-cultural concerns of the readers it is intended for?
GEC: Always an advocate of Free Speech, I am now more so. Strange: At the same time that I was being vilified as a “tribal wanna-be” and admonished to “shut the fuck up,” PEN America (NYC) invited me—in Winter 2020—to join a cosmopolitan panel of writers to decide the $50,000 (US) PEN/Nabokov Award for Achievement in International Literature. My nominee—poet M. NourbeSe Philip—won. So ironic: In Canada I was told that I deserved to be silenced; but, in Gotham City, I raucously exalted Freedom-of-Speech—with scribes who hold that liberty dear. Previously, I’d merely paid lip service to the constitutional right to express opinions and ideas—because I took it for granted. But I now know—from dire experience—that concerted, hit-squad sniping can drill structurally fatal holes in democratic and/or research institutions. (Consider the Truckers Attempted Putsch in Ottawa in Winter 2022.) I say thrice in J’Accuse that never must Poetry (Rhetoric) or Civil Rights be cancelled to prove solidarity with any community of righteous grievance. To do so is to welcome patent, blatant Tyranny. Free Speech and political activism ally, y’all!
10. What questions, other than the central question (“what is it like to be cancelled?” does this title raise? How do you think the work responds to the questions it raises in the context of the time and place the work is situated in?
GEC: How is my “Kancellation” akin to Alfred Dreyfus’s being stripped of his rank and medals and exiled to a penal colony? Mine’s but a parallel injustice. Academia and media—in lock-step—stripped me of my voice as a public intellectual and exiled me to the “silenced” margins. At least Dreyfus had two trials—albeit via Kangaroo Courts. But I was permitted no defence. Instead, mainstream media collaborated with “anti-social” media to urge the anonymous venting of mass opprobrium at me, but, not at the “injustice system” that blamed Pamela George for her murder and then merely lightly rapped the bloody knuckles of her killers. But, lookit! Nowadays, White Supremacy is free to hound and drag down victims from every nook and cranny of the Internet. Yet, it’s not just the Right that assails; the Left also wishes opponents ostracized and/or castrated “by any means necessary.” But I believe—with Eddy Said and Malcolm X—that the role of true intellectual (a status that includes poets) is to express loud dissent whenever warranted, no matter how discomfiting that may be. That is our job! That is our sovereign, universal duty!
11. What books were you reading when you wrote this?
GEC: My rage at my media-circus lynching echoes Zola’s ire in his 1898 letter. But I also referenced Graham Greene’s 1982 fulmination against municipal bunga-bunga in Nice, France, also titled J’Accuse. Then, I found Harlem Maoist Bill Epton’s 1966 pamphlet, We Accuse, protesting New York City Gestapo Negrophobia; and I viewed Abel Gance’s anti-war film (1938), also titled, J’Accuse. Treason of the Intellectuals (1928) by French Jewish intellectual Julien Benda enacts a “j’accuse” condemning Europe’s talking-heads for talking up Fascism. May my essay-in-poetry take its place in this august lineage of backtalk? I read Céline’s Castle to Castle (1957), to tap his acerbic satire, his diction that weaponizes puke and fecal matter. For poesy, I took up Dennis Lee’s Civil Elegies (1968, 1972)—a “j’accuse” attacking Anglo-Canadian “continentalism.” Finally, Ezra Pound’s Pisan Cantos (1948), pencilled while he was literally caged in Pisa, Italy, in 1945, suggested the technique of allowing wafers of fugitive thoughts/bytes to appear as needed, each stanza or page section segregated by centred asterisks. That permitted me a jazzy, sinuous freedom—to fold in sundry items; or to ramble and amble about a labyrinthine, verbal collage.
12. What do you intend for the readers to be left with after the final page?
GEC: The knowledge that our constitutional liberties can be inhibited, suspended, repealed, by any aggrieved mob out to harm vulnerable parties. I also pray that readers will see that poetry can respond—with intelligence informed by emotion—to hurtful, painful events. I also pray that readers will appreciate that the plight of Pamela George—herself a poet—has been repeated innumerable times—especially in Saskatchewan—where white squatters have been assaulting, raping, and killing Indigenous persons since the interlopers crept from whatever ship or train or plane that here transported them or their ancestors. I demand that broadcast media act judiciously, and not be cavalier about incensing senseless mobs. (Indeed, the attack on me was deliberate—plotted—for, on the very day that the phoney “news” story broke, a CBC Halifax journalist called to warn me that I’d better appear on The National, on January 2, 2020, or else my scheduled University of Regina lecture would be cancelled. I asked Murphy why that would be so, and he replied, “because the [media-stoked] pressure will become too great.” Thus, was their game exposed.)
The 4th Poet Laureate of Toronto (2012-15) and the 7th Parliamentary/Canadian Poet Laureate (2016-17), George Elliott Clarke is a revered wordsmith. His recognitions include the Archibald Lampman Award for Poetry, a Bellagio Center (Italy) Fellowship (US), the Pierre Elliott Trudeau Fellows Prize, the Governor-General’s Award for Poetry, the National Magazine Gold Award for Poetry, the Premiul Poesis (Romania), the Dartmouth Book Award for Fiction, the Eric Hoffer Book Award for Poetry (US), and the Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Achievement Award. The foremost scholar of African-Canadian literature, Clarke has taught at Duke, McGill, and Harvard. He teaches currently at the University of Toronto.