Book Reviews

Generations

Dawn P. Williams (Editor)
Who’s Who in Black Canada 2: Black Success and Black Excellence in Canada, a Contemporary Directory. Self Published
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Lorna Goodison (Author)
From Harvey River: A Memoir of My Mother and Her People. McClelland & Stewart Ltd.
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Reviewed by Katherine Verhagen

Lorna Goodison’s From Harvey River records and transforms her family history into a multi-generational narrative about perseverance and adaptation. Dedicated to her parents, this book is a family memoir in which Goodison appears as a character who frames the narrative in a few short pages at the beginning and at the end of the book. Doris, Goodison’s late mother, leads the narrative from Part Two onward, meeting challenges from crowded urban housing, economic hardship, working in a lunatic asylum, the loss of a spouse, and family illness. Goodison does not present a simple account of her mother but of her “generations, familial relations as the Jamaicans call them”: whenever Doris is faced by great adversity, she finds strength in thinking of her forebearers, such as her sister, Cleodine, or her grandfather, George O’Brian Wilson. Similarly, in the epilogue, Goodison (the character) awakens confused in a hotel room but reorients herself by recalling her lineage and her place within it. Underneath the surface of her thoughts, she dives to find the “evidence of my generations” as the bedrock of her “mind like [a] riverbed.” The book begins with the dedication to her parents and then her family tree, all presented before we get a glimpse of young Lorna “asking urgent questions” of her mother and father about their genealogy.

Yet as the opening African proverb to Dawn P. Williams’ directory warns, “[u]ntil lions have their own historian, [t]ales of the hunt will always glorify the hunter.” Goodison relates her family memoir that uses the history of post-plantation, pre-Independence, and then post-Independence Jamaica. She uses not only her family members to tell the nation’s story but also unrelated characters who populate the rural landscape of Harvey River – the river that bears her family’s name – to “hard life” urban Kingston. As a result, I find some of the extra-literary promotional writing, on the inner leaves and back of the book covers, to be distracting and trite. For instance, the McClelland & Stewart book leaf description states that Goodison “tells a universal story of family and the ties that bind us to the place we call home.” As well, one of the reviewers, Merilyn Simonds, gushes that “these characters will move right in and take up permanent residence in your heart.” Goodison’s story is not universal; it is the story of Jamaica. Also, her characters are fallible human beings, not clichés. Therefore, Austin Clarke’s quoted review is far more apt in revealing the context of Goodison’s memoir: “she has ‘taken back her language’ from the clichés and drowsy characterizations of a country and its people.” Like her mother before her, Goodison loves her Harvey River roots, but she is not infatuated with them.

Dawn P. Williams also believes that it is necessary to know one’s roots in order to grow as she compiles the second edition of Who’s Who in Black Canada. Not only are several prominent members of the African-Canadian community included as prospective role models for African-Canadian youth but so are the models’ mentors, mapping a generational tree of influence. To develop a mentoring theme, Williams has many contributors include personal mottos in their entries, to motivate their potential readers. For instance, Dany Laferrière quips, “J’écris comme je vis” while Althea Prince warns, “Never cut anything that can be untied.” Several entries have e-mail contact information listed, to permit readers to expand their networks to include these writers, artists, businesspersons, educators, and so forth. Readers can also search for role models by primary activity of interest as well as by province and will see advertisements for mostly secondary and higher education and business “black excellence.”

In her acknowledgements, Williams comments on how many reviewers and readers understood the first edition’s “significance . . . for Black youth [and] that it serve[d] as an affirmation of achievements and an acknowledgement of possibilities.” However, another important use for this invaluable resource representing those who are “striving and achieving,” in Williams’ words, is for “African/Black Canad[ians] . . . to know each other better and to organize,” in the words of George Elliott Clarke. This expanded edition gives a more coherent network to a community in need of a better understanding of its breadth and diversity in order to, one day, achieve more political and economic power.

Both Goodison and Williams’ works give their African-Canadian readers a lineage – personal and political, respectively – as well as an understanding of who they are in respect to those generations before them. I would recommend both texts as necessary reading, Goodison’s for her Standard and Jamaican English lyricisim and Williams’ for her comprehensive and enlightening wealth of African-Canadian talent and success.

Related book reviews

• From Harvey River: A Memoir of My Mother and Her People by Lorna Goodison (LITERATURE - Afro-Canadian)
• Dry Bone Memories by Cecil Foster (LITERATURE - Afro-Canadian)
• Invisible Shadows: A Black Woman's Life in Nova Scotia by Verna Thomas (LITERATURE - Afro-Canadian)
• Governor of the Northern Province by Randy Boyagoda (LITERATURE - Afro-Canadian)
• Kipligat's Chance by David Odhiambo (LITERATURE - Afro-Canadian)

This review originally appeared in Canadian Literature #198 (Autumn 2008), David Odhiambo. (pg. 134 - 135)

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