Growing Up with Austin: Notes on Post/colonial Pedagogies

The first book by Austin Clarke text that I read was Growing Up Stupid Under the Union Jack.

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he first book by Austin Clarke text that I read was Growing Up Stupid Under the Union Jack. I read it at as a teenager growing up in Jamaica. In my high school, each year there was a prize giving ceremony to reward academic achievement and to commemorate our scholarly rankings. This was a practice and process of not only celebrating achievement, but also marking the “bright” ones among us. Presented with tokens to honour scholarly accomplishments as well as our faithful attendance at school, our prizes were usually books (ones not on our curriculum). This was no doubt meant to cultivate a love of reading and an interest in writing more generally. Although for one year, for some reason, I remember being gifted with a basketball. I look back at this with some degree of curiosity and confusion. I guess since I was a boy, I should have been interested in sporting pursuits.

On one of these occasions, I was given Austin Clarke’s book. I don't know if my teachers were aware of the book’s deep critique of colonial education, its practices of ranking achievement and its role in discarding or marginalizing those not deemed accomplished and hence not worthy. Clarke notes this ongoing practice of ranking—an extension of the colonial pedagogy of classification—in his narration of lessons taught on the Scriptures at Combermere College which, as he notes, “was nothing like the way Miss Smith taught it in Sunday School” (14):

The master at Combermere enters the classroom. He sits at his elevated dess, below the large blackboard nailed into the wall. And opens his book to the lesson.

“What's the lesson for today?” he asks.

The monitor stands and says, “Axe chapter one, sir?”

The previous time he had told us to study chapter one in the Acts of the Apostles, but this is the way they do things at the “big schools."

He would then ask each one of us sitting in the order of the alphabet or in the order of our academic achievement, to recite a line; or if he was in a bad mood two, three, four sentences. (15)

This collective performance of citation and recitation was part of what Clarke calls “the drama of learning and instruction staged daily” (13). Clarke, in his writing, dissects the content of colonial pedagogy, noting how details regarding their lives in Barbados were absent from the curriculum or rendered as abject lessons and cautionary tales:

We were introduced to the prose of Julius Caesar; and the verse of Vergil. A master who taught us English literature ranted and raved before us in his love for Keats and Byron and Shelley and Milton. (51)

In addition to noting the steadfast focus on English literature and knowledge, Clarke incisively critiques the mode of colonial instruction, highlighting its regimented system of rewards and punishments including corporal punishment. Aaron Kamugisha in his reading of Clarke’s Growing Up Stupid Under the Union Jack notes that “the lasting memory of school that the reader takes from Clarke is the relentless physical violence that purports to instill order and discipline” (47). Kamugisha reflects on the political and historiographical importance of Clarke’s memoir as record concluding that, “We are yet to have a clear history of the methods through which corporal punishment became wedded to the apparatus of the colonial state's schools in the aftermath of emancipation” (47).

What I knew was that my teachers were keen that we, as young people growing up in postcolonial Jamaica, should learn about Caribbean literature and society, and this perhaps influenced their decision to offer me the gift of Clarke’s writing about his boyhood in Barbados. They were keen that I should hear the story of another boy living on another Caribbean Island.

There were legacies of this strict kind of pedagogy that marked my experience of school in the Caribbean. However, in contrast to the steadfast focus on the British literary tradition that Clarke documents, what I knew was that my teachers were keen that we, as young people growing up in postcolonial Jamaica, should learn about Caribbean literature and society, and this perhaps influenced their decision to offer me the gift of Clarke’s writing about his boyhood in Barbados. They were keen that I should hear the story of another boy living on another Caribbean Island.

Growing up in Port Antonio, Jamaica, I was part of a generation of young people who came of age at a time when there was a significant and vibrant tradition of local and regional writing being read and taught in schools. This was a time when the O-level and A-level examinations, set in England, were being replaced by the Caribbean Examination Council (CXC) certificate examinations and later by the Caribbean Advanced Proficiency Examinations (CAPE) administered in the region. Indeed, while we still read and studied Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre and other texts from the British canon as part of our schooling, we also read books like Jean Rhys’ Wide Sargasso Sea and Michelle Cliff’s Abeng which responded to Bronte’s narrative of the mad creole West Indian woman. I also read books by writers such as Victor Reid, C. Everald Palmer, Michael Anthony and Jean D'Costa. Many of these books were about the experience of growing up as Caribbean children. And this was how I read Clarke's book in my first encounter. Clarke’s attempt, as Aaron Kamugisha puts it, “to craft a tale of Bajan Boyhood […] filled with aching humour and ghastly tales of suffering” resonated with me. I hope that it's a book, with its subversive lessons, that is still being offered to teenagers to read across the Caribbean.


A few years later I would read Clarke’s book again, this time as part of my curriculum at university. I attended the University of the West Indies in Jamaica where I studied in the Department of Literatures in English. By the time that I arrived, the name of the department had been changed a decade before from Department of English to its current name, the Department of Literatures in English, as a way of signaling the decentering of the study of great English texts and a move towards a critical examination of a diversity of writing being produced across various Anglophone contexts. This change in name was also an extension of earlier critical debates originating at the University of Nairobi, Kenya, at the end of the decolonizing decade of the 1960s, calling for the abolition of the English department. In that instance, what was instituted there was the Department of Literatures which no longer exists. [1]

At university, I reread Clarke’s book as part of a literature course on West Indian prose narratives which positioned Clarke's memoir alongside Jamaica Kincaid’s Annie John, George Lamming’s In the Castle of My Skin and other texts that made us understand the importance of the “bildungsroman” as a key part of a Caribbean tradition of articulation and critique. We were also made to understand how Clarke's experiments with language in that text were not just part of a Caribbean refashioning of literary forms but also of the English language itself.


If these first two early encounters with Clarke’s work were in the context of the Caribbean and Caribbean literature, since then, other returns to Clarke's writing and in particular to his text Growing Up Stupid Under the Union Jack, have helped me to understand Clarke as a writer of transnational significance. I am keen to frame Clarke in this way as his work and biography complicates easy positioning just in relation to Caribbean literature or to Canadian literary contexts in which his work has been primarily discussed.

Teaching Clarke helped me to understand him in a broader generational context of writers—particularly those from formerly colonized countries—who, in the latter part of the twentieth century, significantly transformed the literary traditions that they inherited. Their work was not simply about inclusion in a canon but about reimagining and transforming the textual and political landscape and the literary world in radical ways.

I taught Clarke’s work for the first time in 2015, ten years ago when I was hired as an assistant professor of postcolonial literature at Brock University in St. Catharines[2]. At the time, I joked that I had been hired into one of the last postcolonial literature jobs as increasingly, there was a shift in the academic marketplace towards jobs that had “Global Anglophone literature” and “World literature” in their titles. These literary studies frames, while representing dynamic shifts in and a more inclusive vision for the teaching of literature, did not offer the same political contexts as postcolonial studies did when it emerged in the decade of the 1980s. As part of that job, I taught a second-year course on postcolonial writing and Clarke was one of the writers whose work I selected to teach alongside other writers such as Michelle Cliff, Tsitsi Dangarembga, Bessie Head and Salman Rushdie. Teaching Clarke helped me to understand him in a broader generational context of writers—particularly those from formerly colonized countries—who, in the latter part of the twentieth century, significantly transformed the literary traditions that they inherited. Their work was not simply about inclusion in a canon but about reimagining and transforming the textual and political landscape and the literary world in radical ways.

More recently, I have been working on a project that has deepened my thinking about the transnational and generational contexts of Clarke’s writing. In collaboration with researchers and archivists at McMaster University library and the British Library, we developed a digital project titled “One Love and Venceremos” that considers the extensive correspondence archive between Austin Clarke (held at McMaster library) and his friend and fellow writer, Andrew Salkey (held at the British Library). They wrote to each other often across several decades. If Clarke’s writing in Growing Up Stupid Under the Union Jack offers us an insightful vision of his early years, these letters allow us to consider him alongside and as part of his literary generation and to observe the narration of life events as recounted to his friends. As part of this project, we have invited friends, family members and literary heirs from across different places—the Caribbean, Britain and Canada—to read letters written between these men and to reflect on the social context of their literary friendship and political solidarities, as well as the impact of their work.[3]

Both Salkey and Clarke were of that generation of writers who, I have argued above, sought to radically transform the world they inherited. Writing to Clarke at the end of the turbulent decade of the 1960s, Salkey remarks about the political context in which they were living:

The whole fucking thing, from Nixon to Eric [Williams], want dismantle, ol’ man. All like Capitalism? That so ol’ and creaking that is only guns and bombs can keeping it struggling on. As I see it, plenty centuries ol’ systems done for, complete, and the world asking for new forms… I am all for twisting things out of shape and coming up with a brand new something, all about the world, but more so in our Caribbean, Black America and Canada, Black South America, Black Africa, and wherever Black people are living. (Andrew Salkey, letter to Austin Clarke dated 11. 5. 1970)

This transformative search for new forms was something that Clarke also shares, and he engages this in his writing and politics. How else does one account for some of the complex political allegiances that marks Clarke’s public life in Canada? In reading these letters, we see both men struggling with changes in society, their changing place in society, as well as struggling with institutions, and indeed with each other. But we also observe their shared desire for social change. When Clarke wins the Casas de las Americas Prize in 1980, for the book Growing Up Under the Union Jack, he immediately writes to Salkey, telling him,

I feel honoured to be a recipient of the 1980 Casa de las Americas literary prize. As you said, the bread is the least important of the prize. (Austin Clarke, letter to Andrew Salkey dated 13. 02. 1980)

For Clarke and Salkey, literary recognition, though they desire it and cherish it (as can be seen in many of these letters), is not the primary or sole purpose of the work. Both writers engage a practice of trying to rethink and re-envision the world that they inhabit. This attention to change can also be seen in the way they seek to rethink the form and function of the novel and insist on its political function and its possibilities for clarifying an understanding of the social and political world.

Austin Clarke died at the confluence of important historical events. On the weekend that he died, the Brexit vote happened in the UK. I was headed to England to attend a conference that weekend. I got off the plane and heard the news that he had passed away. I could not help but think of his indictment of the British in Growing Up Stupid Under the Union Jack and the ways he lays bare many of absurdities of British cultural politics that we see restaged in the violences and social neglect of modern conservative Britain.[4] Clarke’s Growing Up Stupid Under the Union Jack is a text that we can also return to in order to understand the vexed upheavals of our present marked as it is by war and the creeping spectre of Empire. Remembering Clarke today asks us to continue to be attuned to the ways in which the past repeats in our present and the absurdities of this—the often-everyday stupidness and cruelties of this world.




Works Cited

Bogle Cornel. 2023. “Listening to Austin.” The Ex-Puritan. Issue 63: Fall 2023. https://ex-puritan.ca/listenin...

Clarke, Austin. [1980] 2005. Growing Up Stupid Under the Union Jack. Toronto: Thomas Allen Publishers.

Cummings, Ronald. “The End of the English Department: Decolonizing Futures.” English Studies in Canada (ESC) 46.1: 1–12.

Cummings, R. (2020). “Ain’t no black in the (Brexit) Union Jack? Race and empire in the era of Brexit and the Windrush scandal.” Journal of Postcolonial Writing, 56(5), 593–606.

Kamugisha, A. (2012). Austin Clarke’s Bajan Boyhood: Coming of Age in “Amongst Thistles and Thorns, Growing Up Stupid Under the Union Jack, and Proud Empires.” Journal of West Indian Literature, 21(1/2), 42–59.


[1] For further reflections on these debates and historical shifts, see my essay “The End of the English Department: Decolonizing Futures.” English Studies in Canada (ESC) 46.1: 1–12.

[2] Cornel Bogle references this course in his essay “Listening to Austin” published in The Ex-Puritan in 2023, introduceing the issue announcing that year’s winners of the Austin Clarke Prize. https://ex-puritan.ca/listening-to-austin

[3] The project “One Love and Venceremos” can be viewed here: https://expo.mcmaster.ca/s/one-love-and-venceremos-celebrating-the-correspondence-of-austin-clarke-and-andrew-salkey/page/welcome

[4] For a further elaboration of the links between Clarke’s work and the critique of Brexit politics, see Cummings, R. (2020). “Ain’t no black in the (Brexit) Union Jack? Race and empire in the era of Brexit and the Windrush scandal.” Journal of Postcolonial Writing, 56(5), 593–606.