The more things change, the more they stay the same. And it can’t be ignored here that so many times when we see the way the poor are forced to interact with brutal figures of authority, violence is the response. Clarke’s retelling slyly reverses the roles and instead of a motherless child, a mother laments the loss of her son. The song later became significant as one of the Civil Rights Movement’s most moving anthems. The title of this story references a well-known Negro Spiritual, Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child, which laments the pain of life from a point of view (the slave) that was almost unheard of in the dominant culture which inspired it. In this reading, recorded on stage at the Harbourfront Reading Series in 1991, Clarke reads the final story from his collection, In This City, which presents the lives of Torontonians as they love, fight, explore, fear, intimidate, feel dispossessed, disobey and search for unpredictable moments of grace both within the confines of their communities but also in the cold and sometimes violent communities that lay beyond walls. Austin Clarke was a writer who was long fascinated by how we are both nurtured by and damaged by the communities that surround us - and most particularly how Caribbean and West Indian communities in mid-20th century Toronto both nurtured and damaged young Black men.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |