Whylah Falls and Sense of Belonging

restlessness: People would tell me to consult his poems, as though they were some kind of elixir that cured the restlessness and doubt that ailed those of us itching to feel a sense of belonging in this country.I started with Whylah Falls, a poem that won Clarke early praise and launched his identity as, what he calls, an Africadian writer.I discovered these lines: There a black wind howlin' by Whylah Falls; There a mad rain hammerin' the flowers;There a shotgunned man moulderin' in petals;There a killer chucklin' to himself; I was and remain mesmerized by this book, not only because of its haunting language but because it was the first time I had encountered so stark an account of Black love, life and death within contemporary Canadian literature, according to NOW Magazine. In the telling of the stories of the fictionalized Whylah Falls community, Clarke showed that Black people have been inextricably part of the Canadian story for centuries, that our lives are and have been deeply enmeshed with the collective project that is Canada. Clarke work kept surfacing in those days. And it pained me to realize it had taken so long for me to know that. I plumbed and devoured a hidden history, one that featured Mathieu da Costa, Mary Ann Shad, Thorton and Lucie Blackburn and many other Black people who had lived extraordinary and very Canadian lives. From this important literary discovery I went about revising the Canadian story in my own mind. (www.immigrantscanada.com). As reported in the news.