The nature of black writing in Canada: an interview with Cecil Foster

Kola, Spring, 2008 by Horace I. Goddard, Clifton Ruggles

This interview was conducted by Horace I. Goddard and the late Clifton Ruggles. They interviewed Cecil Foster, who was on a Canada tour called "The Three Griots."

Goddard: Welcome to Montreal, Cecil. I've listened to you last night and you talk extensively of the immigrant experience. Can you elaborate for us on that whole issue of the immigrant experience in Canada.

Foster: Well, to me it's central to the experience of the reality of quite a number of people who are living in Canada, and not people who have physically moved from one place to come to another. When I think of the immigrant experience, I think of Blacks in places like Nova Scotia, Windsor, Edmonton who are forced almost to live the life of an immigrant in the country in which they were born. Now we know the story of walking down Halifax. Windsor or whatever and being stopped and asked: where are you from?

I also think they live the lives of immigrants in terms of expectations, in that somehow it is assumed that they would aspire only so far, and that they would be willing to sit back and hope that the next generation is always the one to reap the fruits, and it is always a dream deferred.

So that has been my approach or the way that I'm thinking at this point in my life. I want to look at the reality of those of us who live the Black experience in Canada, and it's an experience that finds most of us on the periphery, with very few of us making it into the mainstream, or that we're not doing it at a fast enough rate; that the trickle has not become a flow commensurate with the talents, the experiences, the education of those.

That is what I try to deal with now. Obviously, as someone who is proud to be a hyphenated-Canadian in the sense that I celebrate my West Indianism, my Bajan roots, I think that's what makes me. I lived my formative years elsewhere. I have a way of thinking that reflects that, and I don't think that I'm any less Canadian for thinking that way.

In terms of the tour, the way that I see it, is that this is an attempt by us to go out and just simply give a sampling to the wider community of the amount of work that is coming out, the prodigious work, the excellent work, very high quality work. I mean, this isn't tokenism. This is work that can stand on its own and is only a small reflection. There again, if you talk about the trickle, it is only a small reflection because just about everyone I know is going to write something or is writing something. So, this is the reality, and this is what I think we're hoping for with the tour. That we'd get people to listen, and maybe people in academia specifically.

Goddard: Cecil, the image of the grandmother is pervasive and, I should say, in Barbadian writing. Lamming has a grandma and a grandpa in most of his works. It's in Austin Clarke, and now you've used it in both of your novels. What is the significance of the grandmother image for you as a writer, in Barbadian/Caribbean writing?

Foster: Well, I think it's more than in Barbadian writing. I think it is very much so in Black writing. When I brought out No Man in the House, and I went into the United States, I met people in the Southern United States who talked about it. When I went into Halifax and other areas like that, there were people who talked about the role of the grandmother.

I think that what this shows is the extent to which the extended family is ingrained in our culture. And I think that some of the difficulties that we as Black people have, even though we've had a legacy of four hundred years in this country, is that over that time we have never willingly accented the nuclear family. I think that we're still trying, at this point, to adapt from the extended family to the nuclear family. This is a society which is very hostile to the extended family.

It's a society that doesn't look well on welfare. It's a society that suggests to you that if you have a kid, you better be responsible for it. It's a society that suggests that kids are very useful once they have become men and women and they can go into the army; hey become warriors and things like that. It's not a nurturing society in that sense. So that if I see a little kid in the street, I'm not expected to invest my time and my efforts, in that kid. That's the mother's and father's business.

The society that I know and that I've grown up in has always said that the family is not just mum and dad. It is the aunts, the uncles. It's the next door neighbour. It's the priest. It's the undertaker. It's the shopkeeper who at times might cuss you and say, 'you're not paying your bills on time, but still I'm not going to let you go hungry.' He might not give you everything you want on the list, but might turn around and say that this is the minimum you need to get something to eat, right, but he might not give you what I consider the frills. But it was that notion that we help each other, and I think that Blacks, have resisted this notion that you should always be on your own.

I think that part of the reason for resisting, is that it has to be a survival technique. It also has to be grounded in the fact that we knew the kind of society that we live in; that we need one another; and that we need to reflect ourselves in others and to see others. So that my success, reflects somebody else's success. My kids can look at somebody else and say, 'well if a Black brother can do it, then maybe someone else can do it.'