Читать книгу Benjamin Drew. The Refugee. Narratives of Fugitive Slaves in Canada онлайн

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Canada was then filling up with white people. And after Brant went to England, and kissed the queen’s hand, he was made a colonel. Then there began to be laws in Canada. Brant was only half Indian: his mother was a squaw – I saw her when I came to this country. She was an old body; her hair was quite white. Brant was a good looking man – quite portly. He was as big as Jim Douglass who lived here in the bush, and weighed two hundred pounds. He lived in an Indian village – white men came among them and they intermarried. They had an English schoolmaster, an English preacher, and an English blacksmith.

The ex-slaves’ African Canadianité as practiced in Drew’s volume also signals the new African Canadians’ wish and efforts to become part of their new country. In so doing, they will, albeit without their knowledge, open the way for a new and heterogeneous representation of Blackness in Canada.¹² Drew’s collection evinces thus the multiple ways in which the new citizens of the welcoming country contribute to the increasing of settlements and, therefore, turn into Black settlers within the Canadian realm. In this manner, these recent African Canadian testimonies join other literary accounts in a cultural bid to reshape Canada as a country, precisely on the eve of its birth as a nation. This is so because, as Ana María Fraile-Marcos clarifies, “the Canadian nation emerges in the nineteenth century as a self-willing effort at narrating itself. Literature plays an instrumental role in the creation of a system of cultural signification” (“National Identity” 116). Hence, Drew’s volume plays its role in this endeavor in which “from its inception […] literature was called in as an indispensable element to confer cohesion, unity, and character to an emergent sense of Canadian identity” (Fraile-Marcos, “National Identity” 117).