This paper explores a series of five poems from the collection Red (2011) by Nova Scotian writer George Elliott Clarke. It focuses on the central role that place, and more specifically, urban space, plays in the construction of the region he significantly renames “Africadia”, from the perspective of the black community. Although people of African descent have lived in the island since the seventeenth century –forming the vastest African community in Canada– this presence tends to be unacknowledged or deliberately erased –as is the case of the razing of the neighbourhood of Africville–. In these poems, Clarke vindicates this denied space, imbuing it with the lives and experiences of its Africadian inhabitants.
An Interview with George Elliott Clarke
