"Don't scratch too deep or I'll bleed": Archiving with Austin

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ike many Canadians, the stories of my parents are bound up in the broader story of migration. I’m the unlikely progeny of a Black St. Lucian immigrant and a former Hutterite. My father, born to St. Lucian parents in England during the 1960s, came to Canada in the 1970s. My mother, born on a secluded Hutterite colony in Manitoba, grew up speaking German and left the colony at the age of ten. Despite their vastly different upbringings, my parents share one enduring passion: reading. Their literary tastes rarely overlap, but two Canadian novels brought them together: Miriam Toews’ A Complicated Kindness

and Austin Clarke’s The Polished Hoe. Before my own love of literature took root, I often passed the family bookshelf where both novels sat side by side, barely giving them a glance. It wasn’t until years later that a well-read friend of mine, Lawrence, a man several decades my senior, properly introduced me to Clarke.

One afternoon in 2021, Lawrence stopped by the bookstore where I worked and began browsing the Canadian literature section. Within a minute, he held up a book and called across the empty store, “Perhaps the best Canadian novel I’ve encountered.” The book, of course, was The Polished Hoe. I bought a copy and soon found myself absorbed by the haunting confessions of Mary-Matilda and impressed by her wisdom. “Education,” Mary-Matilda reminds us, “is not the same thing as learning.” The distinction between learning: the congenital, lifelong accrual of knowledge through experience—and education: the systematic receiving and transferring of knowledge, galvanized my curiosity. Mary-Matilda insists that it is “not merely education but learn-ning” that delivers us from the metaphorical chains that life imposes. Was Clarke paradoxically suggesting that experience delivers us from the weight of experience? That insight lingered with me. If Mary-Matilda’s lesson unsettled my assumptions, Clarke’s own life unsettled them even more.

Curious, I began to learn about Clarke and was startled to discover that he had been both a fierce voice for Black Power in 1960s Canada and, a decade later, a Progressive Conservative candidate in 1977. His contradictions made my brain itch. Clarke’s late biographer, Dr. Stella Algoo-Baksh, once recalled that when Clarke directed her to his papers at McMaster University, he warned her: “Don’t scratch too deep, or I’ll bleed.” The warning, half-joke and half-defence, seemed to acknowledge that the story of his life was not blemish free, but scabbed. His archive, conveniently housed in the William Ready Division at my alma mater, made this request difficult to honour. With a recalcitrance characteristic of Clarke, I decided to scratch.

My encounter with Clarke’s archive was an education. He sold his papers to McMaster in 1982; after ten accruals, the collection consists of 172 boxes of correspondence, drafts, photos, and other miscellanea. Clarke is widely remembered for being the first Black Canadian author to publish a novel in Canada and, in 2002, the first to win the Scotiabank Giller Prize for The Polished Hoe. Yet the archive reveals that his legacy as a novelist has overshadowed his achievements as a journalist. Thanks to an exceptionally diligent archivist, I was directed toward the boxes containing his journalistic career. From my experience of sifting through these boxes an intricate portrait emerged; one far richer than the novelist fixed in public memory. His raw, experimental, and politically charged journalism foreshadows the contradictions that would shape his later life. Each box felt like another layer of skin turned back.

Those contradictions were already visible before his 1977 political “transformation” or Maclean’s racist attempt to commodify him in 1968 as “Canada’s Angriest Black Man.” Ironically, Maclean’s caricature of Clarke was partially a reaction to articles he wrote for the Toronto Telegram, a conservative newspaper that folded in 1971. In the 1960s, Clarke’s work appeared in several newspapers, but the “Dissent” columns he wrote for the Telegram offer a particularly fascinating window into a neglected aspect of his early career. By the early 1960s, the Telegram had remade its page seven into a “forum of opinion,” and Clarke, then a young Black West Indian migrant, became one of its most provocative contributors. If the archive bled when scratched, these columns were among the most tender tissues.

His raw, experimental, and politically charged journalism foreshadows the contradictions that would shape his later life. Each box felt like another layer of skin turned back.

Between 1964 and 1968, Clarke published at least sixteen opinion pieces and several book reviews with the Telegram. The paper’s choice to repeatedly publish his voice was significant. His columns tackled divisive political topics such as civil rights, racism, Caribbean-Canadian unionism, immigration, cultural values, justice, and Canada’s nascent identity crisis. Such topics rarely aligned with the sensibilities of the Telegram’s conservative readership. As Barry Callaghan, Clarke’s literary editor, admitted: “Austin was not a natural fit.” Clarke was not trying to fit; he was trying to make Canada feel the discomfort he already felt.

Clarke’s archive contains thirty-two manuscripts written for the “Dissent” column and numerous letters from editors. Several articles he published never made it into the archive, while several manuscripts preserved in the archive were never published. That mismatch alone reveals both Clarke’s persistance and vulnerability. At least half the material he wrote for the Telegram was never published. Yet he kept writing, submitting, revising, insisting. His decision to preserve drafts, rejections, and correspondence suggests these writings were not merely professional exercises but part of a deeper personal reckoning.

Clarke entered journalism for both pragmatic and passionate reasons. Supporting a young family while pursuing art was difficult and journalism allowed him to do both. He began writing in 1959 for the Timmins Daily and soon after for the Globe and Mail. During these early years he was shaped by Pierre Berton, Richard Wright, Langston Hughes, LeRoi Jones, and James Baldwin. Clarke felt Berton had “done more than most politicians and bureaucrats in Toronto and in Canada, to rid our society of racism and prejudice.” But it was Baldwin who captivated him. Inspired by Baldwin’s language and moral urgency, Clarke approached the CBC in 1963 with a proposal for a radio program about Baldwin. Although Baldwin was abroad, Clarke’s trip to Harlem yielded something unexpected: an interview with Malcolm X. “Sixty-three minutes of Malcolm X on tape,” Clarke remembered, “awaken[ed] the black population of Canada to the philosophy of other black people like themselves” and shook white Canadians out of complacency. The interview marked Clarke as one of the few visible commentators on the Black Canadian experience. Few Black writers in Toronto were defending Black communities in print during the early 1960s, and Clarke felt the weight of that absence. Newspapers, he later wrote, engaged in racist discourse easily because Canada “had no black men born amongst them who were writing—even if they were not writers.” Responsibility became an itch Clarke had to scratch.

Inspired by Berton, Malcolm X, and Baldwin, Clarke began submitting his “Dissents” to the Telegram in 1964. For four years, it became the site of some of his most daring interventions. He wrote on Black America’s nonviolence movement, Canadian youth intellectualism, capital punishment, European immigrant entitlement, the Americanization of Canadian literature, personal freedoms for public officials, Canada’s foreign policy in the Caribbean, Muhammad Ali, and Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination. His unpublished drafts on corsets, erotic exhibitions, the Canadian Red Ensign, Quebec separatism, and traffic laws, and Adlai Stevenson reveal an intellect unafraid to wander. Yet beneath the eclecticism ran a consistent thread: the psychic and political damage of racism in Canada. Clarke’s “Dissents” returned repeatedly to what he called “racial bias in immigration policy in Canada and the remorseless mutilation of the black psyche.” This was the scab he kept touching, the one that bled when scratched.

Clarke’s early journalistic career represents a significant moment in Canadian racial discourse. His work for the Telegram made Black Canadians more visible in mainstream print and helped create conditions for more Black writers to publish in Toronto newspapers. In the 1970s, Black journalists became increasingly visible. Newspapers like the Toronto Star adopted aspects of the Telegram’s diverse page-seven model. Even former Telegram owner John Basset, reflecting on the paper’s closure, acknowledged “what the paper had done to improve the climate of racial tolerance in the city.” Clarke’s “Dissents” were historically significant because they unsettled the myth of Canadian racial innocence. He articulated what many Canadians refused to confront: the presence, depth, and violence of anti-Black racism. His writing belongs to the earliest discursive attempts to challenge Canadian racial sensibilities in print. His most enduring contribution, however, was his ability to place Canada within the transnational conversations of the Black Atlantic. His journalism linked Toronto to Harlem, London, the Caribbean, and the Civil Rights Movement, making Canada legible within a broader emancipatory struggle. Clarke was not a natural fit because he refused to be “naturalized.” He refused the comfort of easy narratives and uncontested national myths. He insisted on the scratch; the abrasion that reveals, the irritation that teaches “learn-ning.” And he understood that scratching leaves marks.

He refused the comfort of easy narratives and uncontested national myths. He insisted on the scratch; the abrasion that reveals, the irritation that teaches “learn-ning”.

Black journalists—Desmond Cole, Malcolm Gladwell, Matt Galloway, Adrian Harewood, Tracy Moore—are now more visible in Canadian discourse than ever before. They continue to probe, unsettle, and push against the stories Canada tells itself. Whether they are “natural fits” is irrelevant. Clarkean, they scratch anyway. And in that sense, his warning “Don’t scratch too deep, or I’ll bleed” reads differently now. It is not only a confession of vulnerability but an invitation to witness the truth beneath our skin. Clarke wrote “Dissents” for the Telegram because Canada refused to recognize its own scab: white supremacy. His archive, his journalism, his contradictions—all of it cuts and scabs. He simply refused to stop scratching when the country insisted he should. Today, as the Canadian racial state enters another era of nation building and continues to rely on the labor of overwhelmingly racialized temporary foreign workers, we too must keep scratching.