Where Beauty Survived

The first book-length autobiography from award-winning poet, novelist, essayist and playwright George Elliott Clarke, Where Beauty Survived is a vibrant, revealing memoir about the cultural and familial pressures that shaped his early life in the Black Canadian community that he calls Africadia, centred in Halifax, Nova Scotia.

As a boy, George Elliott Clarke knew that a great deal was expected from him and his two brothers. The descendants of a highly accomplished, Virginia-descended family on his father, Bill's, side--including famed concert singer, Portia White, and the first Black officer in the British Army, William Andrew White--George felt called to live up to the family name. Visits to his paternal grandmother, Nettie, in Halifax were formal; in contrast, his mother, Gerry's, family were down-to-earth country folk and George recalls nourishing trips up home to see these warm and accepting grandparents. Such contradictions underlay much of his life and upbringing--Black and White, country and city, outstanding and ordinary, high and low. With vulnerability and poeticism, bold and physical language, George interrogates these dualities in Where Beauty Survived and shows us how they shaped him as a poet and thinker.

At the book's heart is George's turbulent relationship with his father, an autodidact who valued art, music and books and worked as a railway porter. George recalls Bill using a bowl of white sugar and a bowl of brown sugar to explain racial difference to him and his brothers when they were very small. But Bill also acted out destructive frustrations, assaulting George's mother and sometimes George and his brothers, too. The child George worshipped and feared him--but, as he grew older, came to resent Bill fiercely before learning to accept him. In this memoir, George's intense desire to live up to his esteemed heritage, to make his father proud and win his love, is juxtaposed with his protectiveness of his mother, his journey toward social activism and self-expression as a teenager, and startling discoveries about the family he thought he knew.

Where Beauty Survived is the story of a complicated family, of the emotional stress that white racism exerts on Black households, of the unique cultural geography of Africadia, of a child who became a poet, of long-kept secrets. Vivid, lyrical, unflinching, it's an unforgettable work from one of our most beloved literary voices.