FINGER IN OUR EYE QUOTATION

“‘Barbados education is the best?/Then why, why so many expert in de town?’

…It reminds me of the same question, but clothed in the accusatory language of a statement, a sentiment of political condemnation, that another of our poets put to us [in ‘Negus’], at a time when, like the one Bruce St John talked about, we were going through the first phase of political independence.  Kamau Brathwaite pushed his finger in our eye, blinding us to the accusation of our profound misunderstanding of freedom and of ourselves, as that self is placed in history.”

—Austin Clarke, The Inaugural Earl Warner Memorial Lecture, March 10, 2003 

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Austin Clarke is a professor of literature and has taught at Yale, Brandeis, Williams, Duke, and the universities of Texas and Indiana.  Clarke’s work since 1964 includes eleven novels, six short-story collections, four memoirs, and a poetry collection.  He is the author of The Polished Hoe, which won the Giller Prize, the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize and the Trillium Prize, and he lives in Toronto.