Oral History

George Elliott Clarke is one of Canada’s most prolific poets. He is also a renowned essayist, scholar, playwright, and, in many ways, a songwriter. His work largely explores and chronicles the experience and history of the black Canadian community of Nova Scotia, creating a cultural geography that Clarke refers to as “Africadia.” Clarke was born in Windsor, Nova Scotia in 1960, near the Black Loyalist community of Three Mile Plains, as a seventh-generation Canadian of African American and Mi’Kmaq Amerindian heritage.

d’bi.young anitafrika is a Jamaican-Canadian dub poet, monodramatist, educator, and Dora Award-winning actor and playwright. In this month’s Oral History we are gifted with an on stage interview with d’bi.young, and we get to witness the power of dub poetry in action by one of Canada’s most renowned dub poets.

This reflection was written by Bob Wiseman, and appeared in the April 2022 edition of the ImprovNotes newsletter. It was in Toronto in the 1980s. I was searching for meaning…