Matt Stranach Defends Geroge Elliott Clarke’s George & Rue
Click here to read Salty Ink’s introduction to George Elliott Clarke, George & Rue, and nominator Matt Stranach.
George and Rue is a fiercely imagined novel.
It is a savage prose-poem.
Based on historical events, it nevertheless eschews all but the most passing claim to factual accuracy.
It is a highly “literary” novel, but is accessible to nearly any reader. It rewards both a casual and a deep reading.
You don’t have to know anything about Fredericton, or George and Rufus Hamilton and their decades-old crime, or their subsequent execution in order to become engrossed in this book.
The major plot-points of George and Rue can be found summarized in less than one page in the poem “George and Rue: Pure, Virtuous Killers” from Clarke’s (Governor-General’s Award winning) Execution Poems: “They were hanged back-to-back in the York County Gaol. / They were rough dreamers, raw believers, set out like killers…”
(A strong case could be made for Execution Poems as the greatest book of poetry written by an Atlantic Canadian author.)
The Fredericton (and the Halifax, and the New Brunswick, and the Nova Scotia) described in George and Rue is at once foreign and troublingly familiar. References to places such as the green (in Fredericton), the Bay of Fundy (Saint John), and Barrington Street (Halifax) abound throughout the novel.
It is rare to read a book where you can visualize where its events take place without any difficulty.
As someone who grew up in Fredericton I would like to think that my hometown is not as conservative and “whitewashed” as it is described in Clarke’s novel. Nevertheless I can’t help but think that The City of Stately Elms is still, in many ways, the same town in which the Hamilton brothers commit murder and are in turn killed. The fact that George and Rue frequently pulls you outside of your “comfort zone” is a testament to Clarke’s skill as a writer.
The fact that George and Rufus Hamilton are black has both nothing and everything to do with their crime(s). The murder of the (white) cab driver Nacre Pearly Burgandy (AKA “Silver”) is shown to be the most pedestrian and commonplace of criminal acts: murder for money. It is also a tragedy of epic proportions. The killing is a deeply personal, moral failure of two specific young men. It is also a failure of an entire community, and of history itself. The structure of the novel alludes to the inequities of the past bearing down on the here-and-now in its sections “Whip”, “Hammer” and “Rope”. In his naming of these sections, Clarke extends on a riff from Execution Poems in which Rue utters: “The blow that slew Silver came from two centuries back. / It took that much time and agony to turn a white man’s whip / into a black man’s hammer”.
(Geo, Rue’s foil in the poems and in the novel, refuses to acquiesce to history’s role in their personal disaster, replying “No, we needed money,/ so you hit the So-and-So,/ only much too hard.”)
In this exchange both are equally correct.
Clarke’s novel fuses poetry, fiction, and historical data to create a living document which (perhaps miraculously) has at its core the DNA of two angry, destitute young men who wanted more than their surroundings were willing or able to provide. What could be the impetus for their robbery-turned-murder? The short answer is that George and Rufus were hungry and cold and agitated that day. The longer answer runs some two hundred pages.
At the end of the novel two photographs are presented. The pictures do not have captions. Each photo is a headshot of a young, black man. Presumably one picture is of George Hamilton, and the other is of Rufus Hamilton. It is up to the reader/observer to determine who is who. Clarke’s point in presenting these images in such manner would seem to be that context is everything, and that context is always changing.
Clarke’s novel is the poetry of the marginalized and the dispossessed. It is a celebration of life experienced through the vitality of its language, and the universality of its themes. These are just a few reasons why George and Rue is one of the greatest books by any writer, never mind from Atlantic Canada.
- Matt Stranach
On June 18th, polls will open for the public to vote for the book, by an Atlantic Canadian author, that they think the country should read this summer! Follow the contest here: http://saltyink.com/atlantic-canada-reads-competition/
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