Where Beauty Survived
with George Elliott Clarke
Hosted by Wayne Grady
Podcast Memoir
In this memoir of growing up in Nova Scotia, the former parliamentary poet laureate paints vivid scenes of his early life: his family’s urban home, his parents’ split, his mother’s rural background. Underlying the story of his complicated family life is his unique Africadian mixed heritage, the stress of racism, and secrets that, when revealed, explain everything.
Don’t miss this conversation between acclaimed author, editor and translator, Wayne Grady and internationally-renowned poet, novelist, playwright, screenwriter, librettist and scholar, George Elliott Clarke, on his latest publication, Where Beauty Survived: An Africadian Memoir
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, George felt called to live up to the family name. In contrast, his mother, Gerry’s, family were warm, down-to-earth country folk. Such contradictions underlay much of his life and upbringing—Black and White, country and city, outstanding and ordinary, high and low. With vulnerability and humour 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 but worked an unfulfilling railway job. 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.
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