Claire Harris 1937–

Author

Trinidadian-born Claire Harris is considered one of Canada’s leading poets. Her incisive verse, rife with images of her West Indian land and culture, deftly describes the African-Caribbean experience in cities like Toronto. Harris’s work, widely taught in studies of Canada’s multicultural literature, features a deeply feminist streak as well. Susan Rudy, writing for Essays on Canadian Writing, remarked that “Harris writes not just her life but also for her life.… She speaks out against the potentially unravelling oppressions of race, gender, and class in contemporary Canada, refashioning poetry, narrative, autobiography, and the English language itself in the process.”

Harris was raised in middle-class comfort in Trinidad’s capital city, Port of Spain, where she was born in 1937. Hers was an achievement-oriented family, and her mother instilled a sense of pragmatism at an early age. “When I was about three years old, my mother told me that every woman has to have a profession,” Harris recalled in an interview with Sonya Kraus for Fryburger,. “That way you are not dependent on any men. Plus if you have a profession you do not merely continue in the tradition of the African woman who could not lead a self determined life.”

Harris’s family background bore this sentiment out: her paternal great-grandmother was a successful seamstress in Trinidad. In contrast, her mother’s father had run one of the island’s “penny” banks, but his family was impoverished after his death. Growing up, Harris and her cousins spent school vacations at a country estate her family owned. As she remembered in an interview with Arun Mukherjee for West Coast Line, “My father would bring boxes of books with him. He would insist that the radio be turned on only twice a day, to hear the news. And the rest of the time we ran wild, and made up our own stories, and read.”

It was in the countryside of Trinidad that Harris experienced her first unease with the class system that separated her black family from the majority of others on the West Indian island. On their property was a river pool and waterfall. Others would use it, but leave if the Harrises came to swim. “It was awful. I realise now it was a singular display of arrogance. Not the sort of upbringing Canadians expect an African-Caribbean person to have had,” she told Mukherjee. She also noted that Asians came to Trinidad to perform labor that black Trinidadians refused to do, and that these socio-economic factors made the emigrant experience in places like Toronto and Montreal all the more difficult. “African West Indians think they know what racism is and they come to Canada and discover that all the classisms they’ve directed at other people can be directed at them,” Harris told the West Coast Line.

Trinidad was part of the British colonial empire during these years, and British customs and culture were a strong presence. Growing up, Harris felt little connection to Africa. “If Africa or its customs were ever referred to, they were referred to in the most negative ways,” she recalled in the interview with Mukherjee. “For example, I remember a nun insisting that no one could wear earrings in school, because earrings came from Africa. It was so hilarious.” Harris then discovered

At a Glance…

Born June 13, 1937, in Port of Spain, Trinidad; emigrated to Canada in 1966; daughter of Conrad Arthur Knowlton and Gladys Claire (Cardinal) Harris. Education: University College, Dublin, B.A. in English, 1961; University of West Indies, diploma in education, 1963; University of Lagos, diploma in mass media and communications, 1975. Religion: Roman Catholic.

Career: Poet and editor. Secondary school teacher (English and drama) in Calgary, Alberta, Canada, c. 1966; Poetry Goes Public, editor, 1976-79; Dandelion (magazine), poetry editor, 1981-89; Blue Buffalo, a Magazine of AB, co-founder, 1982, managing editor, 1982-84.

Memberships: Writers Guild of Alberta; Dandelion Magazine Society; Amnesty International; Inter Pares; Association League of Canadian Poets.

Awards: Dragonfly Award for Haiku, 1978, 1983; Commonwealth Prize for Poetry, 1984, for Fables from the Women’s Quarters; Alberta Poetry Award, 1984, for Translation into Fiction; Writers’ Guild of Alberta S.G. Stephansson Award and Alberta Culture Poetry Prize, both 1987, for Traveling to Find a Remedy; Alberta Achievement Award, 1987; Alberta Culture Special Award for poetry, 1990, for The Conception of Winter, nominee, Governor General’s Award, 1993, for Drawing Down a Daughter.

Addresses: Home —701, 300 Meredith Rd. N.E., Calgary, Alberta, T2E 7A8, Canada.

an illustration of English king Charles I. beheaded by his political enemies in 1649, wearing earrings.

Harris went to Ireland to study. She earned an undergraduate degree from University College in Dublin in 1961, and then a diploma in education from the University of West Indies two years later. She arrived in Canada in 1966 and found a job teaching in the Catholic school system in Calgary, Alberta. In the 1970s she took leave from her job to travel in Africa, and earned a diploma in mass media and communications from Nigeria’s University of Lagos in 1975. Her stint in Africa inspired her to begin writing. Upon returning to Calgary, she became editor of Poetry Goes Public, a series of posters embellished with verse from major poets. The series ran between 1976 and 1979. She served as poetry editor for Dandelion, a literary magazine, for most of the 1980s, and co-founded Blue Buffalo, a Magazine of AB, in 1982. For two years she served as its managing editor.

Harris’s first collection of poetry to be published was Fables from the Women’s Quarters, in 1984. Some of the verse commented on the work of Guatemalan political leader Rigobertu Menchu, who would later win the Nobel Peace Prize in 1992. It was followed by Travelling to Find a Remedy, which appeared in 1986. It featured several lengthy poems from Harris, some medium-length ones that one critic found strongly metaphoric, and even haiku. In 1989’s The Conception of Winter, Harris’s poem “Towards the Color of Summer” dominated the book’s first half.

Harris explored the relationship between mother and daughter in her 1992 collection Drawing Down a Daughter. The work was nominated for one of Canada’s top literary prizes, the Governor General’s Award. A mix of poetry and prose, Drawing Down a Daughter is a highly autobiographical work, chronicling one woman’s journey from Trinidad to Canada. In the first poem, a woman waits alone, expecting a child, while her husband is in Trinidad seeking work. She does not want to go there, and tells her family history to her unborn daughter. “Girl i’m not going to make your grandmother’s/mistakes no no/i’m going to make a whole/new bunch of my own/the most we can hope/kid is primal mesh/occasionally take it from me daugh-terhood expert,” she writes.

Harris retired from teaching school in Calgary in 1994. Since then she has published several other volumes, including Grammar of Dissent: Poetry and Prose, a work co-authored with Dionne Brand and M. Nourbese Philip, and Dipped in Shadow. In the West Coast Line interview, Harris affirmed her intentions of giving voice to the African-Canadian experience through her work. “I believe that African poetry in the Americas, or in Europe—in the diaspora—is written out of a subconscious dialogue that’s constantly running through our minds… a continuing engagement with a society that in all its manifestations still wants to convince us that we’re less than others,” Harris remarked. “So the stance can only be oppositional, critical, unyielding.” And her readers can look forward to her future work continuing to address these and other important issues.