Execution Poems: The Black Acadian Tragedy of “George and Rue” by George Elliott Clarke
My rating: 5/5 cats
Childhood II
Rue: I craved blue shoes, a yellow suit, and a green shirt – and jackets sewn from the torn-off, leather covers of books.
i wanted to don jackets emblazoned with Eugene Onegin, Claudine at School, Sonnets from the Portuguese, The Three Musketeers –
all the works of Pushkin, Colette, E.B. Browning, and Alexandre Dumas –
all those secretly Negro authors.
Instead, I witnessed all this:
A boy’s right arm stuck to a desk with scissors; a father knifed in the gut while shaking hands with a buddy; two Christians splashed with gasoline and set ablaze in a church; a harlot garotted in her bath; a bootlegger shot through the eye in a liquor store; a banker brained in a vault; two artists thrown into the Gaspereau River with their hands tied behind their backs; a pimp machine-gunned to bits outside a school; a divine getting his throat slit; a poet axed in the back of the neck; a Tory buried alive in cement; two diabetics fed cyanide secreted in chocolates; a lawyer decapitated in his office.
Everywhere I saw a Crimea of crime, calamities of houses rigged from tarpaper and rape, windows blinded with newsprint or burlap sacks. I could only start the stove with sparks and fear, watch yellow terror eating
yesterday’s bad news.
A poor-quality poet crafting hoodlum testimony,
my watery storytelling’s cut with the dark rum of curses.
This is how history darkens against its medium.
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and that, my friends, is george elliott clarke. i always review his books with his own words, because it is easier to show how marvelous he is than to describe it in my own inarticulate way. this is a book i have wanted for a really long time: it is a poetry cycle based on the same source material as his only novel, george and rue. it covers the story of two of his cousins, hung for the murder of a white cabdriver, ten years before he himself was born. these poems describe the general culture of violence and racism pervading new brunswick in the late 40s, and give a voice to the voiceless. the novel is richer in detail and tragedy than these poems, but as a companion piece, it is essential and wholly moving. my deepest gratitude to bill thompson, canadian goodreader extraordinaire, for plying me with all the canadian books that i cannot get here. expect more lists, my friend.
