Canadian Experience

Standing before the oval-shaped mirror, barely managing to see himself, the protagonist of Austin Clarke’s ‘Canadian Experience’ stood and simply laughed at himself; laughed at the “morbidness of his own thoughts” as the author writes. For a man, who migrates to another country leaving behind an apparently prosperous life on the Barbadian plantation of his homeland, in search of better prospects, morbidity is all that this alien life has to offer him. Being torn apart by a crisis of identity as a black man in a white land, he lives in penury with the dreams of a brighter future shattered. His ‘otherness’ has not just turned him into an alien but has ripped his self esteem apart. It is only his own laughter that helps him get through the ironies of reality—a reality consisting only of disappointments. Even the actress next door with “cold sores” on her spine faces a similar predicament of trying to make her ends meet by going for auditions one after the other and taking long baths just to make sure she looks just right cause “you never know what the directors are going to ask you to do.” This statement gives us a glimpse of the ugliness of reality that even this young actress has to face to find a ‘room of one’s own’—to quote Virginia Woolf.

The man is caught in a tussle with himself as the elevator goes up and down. The corporate woman he sees in the fourteenth floor and the flowers and the floor in its entirety intimidates him and paralyses him with fear. He is unable to bring himself to attend the interview because of the fear of rejection—the same rejection that he deals with in his everyday life. Ultimately he is seen standing at the train station looking at the oncoming train and the author takes a full circle by bringing us back to the same reflection that the man had seen of himself, of himself in the eyes of the driver and we are left to draw our own conclusions when we are told that he simply “steps off the platform”---maybe making us aware of the dreadful consequence of a ruthless reality.

Ishita Chakravarty

PG II