Bordering on African American: Wayde Compton and the Readability of Blackness

Abstract

This essay attempts to establish a critical context for the African Canadian literary imagination that situates itself in Western Canada and, specifically, British Columbia. Wayde Compton's poetry offers several sites for questioning black identity in Canada by visiting the trope of borders. Blackness in Canada is more readily viewed apart from rather a part of the central histories of the nation. In Western Canada, this tendency is even more apparent since regional black histories do not conform as easily to the master narratives of underground-railroad rescues and benevolent abolitionism that are more readily accessed in the central and eastern provinces. In response, Compton's poetry attempts to negotiate a regional black diasporic aesthetic by challenging the fixity of race and place. This essay shows that in engaging the ephemerality of black communities in British Columbia, Compton's poetry underscores filiation through chance relationships and demonstrates black belonging through discursive readability.