Archivists from two sides of the ocean are coming together to celebrate a special birthday.
The virtual event One Love and Venceremos: Celebrating the Correspondence of Austin Clarke and Andrew Salkey is being held on Thursday, July 25 at 11 a.m. EDT to mark the 90th birthday of the late Austin Clarke.
The free lecture will celebrate the correspondence and friendship between Austin Clarke and Andrew Salkey, two pivotal Caribbean diaspora writers. Though divided by oceans, borders, and distance, both writers were united by a sense of brotherhood rooted in shared origins, and the emergent Black political consciousness of the 20th century.
“This correspondence is a joy to read. As writers, language was the brush with which they painted their worlds,” said presenter Myron Groover, archives and rare books librarian in the William Ready Division of Archives and Research Collections at McMaster University Library. “Here we see them effortlessly moving between different registers of expression and dialect as they reflect on both the pivotal and mundane events of their lives.”
Austin Clarke was a Barbadian-born, ground-breaking, incendiary voice in Canadian and Caribbean literature. Andrew Salkey was an accomplished Jamaican novelist and a central figure of Britain’s Caribbean diaspora.
Clarke and Salkey’s poignant, furious, and funny letters reveal the inner lives, public triumphs, and private reflections of two very different men, both sustained by a sense of international community, deeply rooted in considerations of space, place, identity, exile, belonging, and transcendence.
The event will bring together scholars and archivists from McMaster University Library and the British Library to discuss this remarkable documentary legacy. Organizers say it is particularly meaningful to revisit these letters now that Clarke’s work, and the work of Caribbean diaspora writers more broadly, is receiving a long-overdue critical reappraisal.
McMaster University Library is proud to hold Clarke’s extensive archive, which contains material from between 1949-2013. It consists of a number of manuscripts including a version of The Polished Hoe with the author’s hand-written revisions, manuscripts of his short stories, plays and poetry as well as a large number of tape recordings of interviews and programs he recorded as a correspondent for the CBC, including a 1963 interview with Malcolm X.
The British Library holds Salkey’s large and varied archive, which includes literary drafts, correspondence, research notes, diaries, photographs and ephemera that shed light on the different aspects of Salkey’s life and work in the literary, academic, and political spheres of the Caribbean diaspora in Britain and North America.
“The British Library is delighted to be part of this event, which will allow us to showcase the depth and breadth of the Salkey archive to a wider international audience,” said presenter Helen Melody, lead curator, Contemporary Literary and Creative Archives at the British Library. “Austin Clarke is the single largest correspondent within the Salkey archive, and it will be wonderful to work with McMaster to shed a light on two such significant figures in 20th century Caribbean Literature.”
This event is presented by McMaster University Library, the British Library, McMaster Alumni, and McMaster’s Department of English and Cultural Studies in the Faculty of Humanities and is part of a project titled Austin Clarke at 90 funded by the International Initiatives Micro-Fund and the Office of the President.
A conference will also take place in September 2024 at McMaster University and Toronto Metropolitan University. The conference, Austin Clarke, Black Studies and Black Diasporic Memory is being organized by Ronald Cummings, associate professor, Department of English and Cultural Studies at McMaster University and Darcy Ballantyne, assistant professor in the Department of English at Toronto Metropolitan University. Registration will open once details are finalized.
Cummings says the initiative for this project grew out of a course he has been teaching in the department for the last two years titled Windrush Writing/Writing Windrush: Empire, Race and Decolonization.
“This project not only celebrates Clarke and Salkey’s correspondence, but also seeks to understand them in relation to a wider transatlantic public and networks of Caribbean diaspora,” said Cummings. “In keeping with the diasporic friendship of these men, it is fitting that this project connects archives on different sides of the Atlantic and will hopefully lay the groundwork for future collaborations.”
Registration
