SOURCE: “Inside the Mosaic,” in El Dorado and Paradise: Canada and the Caribbean in Austin Clarke's Fiction, University of Western Ontario Press, 1989, pp. 85–105.

In the following essay, Brown explores the relationship between Canadian fiction and Caribbean nationalism in Clarke's writing.

In the Clarke short story, “Doing Right,” a street fight between a black and an Asiatic Indian inspires some sly jesting at the expense of Canadian multiculturalism: “… multiculturalism gone out the window now … I remember how one minister up in Ottawa say different cultures make up this great unified country of ours. I remember it word for word. All that lick up now.” The jest is barbed: it typifies the scepticism which informs Clarke's fictive insights into the ideals and realities of Canadian society. In his more recent Canadian fiction, the focus continues to be on the tensions and ambiguities of the society, and on its underdeveloped sense...