“Friday, September the twenty-ninth, in 1955, was a dramatic day in my life. I arrived at the airport in Toronto, bound, as a student, for the University of Toronto.”
So Austin Clarke tells us in his new memoir, ’Membering, in an introductory chapter entitled the “The Little Black Englishmen,” which helps to set the tone for his journey from Barbados to Canada and his life thereafter. Using hurricanes as a marker at the start of his voyage, he draws on the names of female acquaintances in order to recollect the names of the different storms. With the aid of flashback, he recounts his early school years in Barbados and demonstrates a love-hate relationship with the colonial mother country. There are points in this recollection of his time as a student at Barbados’s Harrison College where he marvels at the classic English education he received. Although appreciative of his heavy...
Lisa Tomlinson has taught at universities and colleges throughout the Greater Toronto Area. She specializes in literary and cultural studies of the Caribbean and African diaspora. She is currently a lecturer at the University of the West Indies, Mona campus in Kingston, Jamaica, where she teaches undergraduate courses in literature and film.
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