SOURCE: “A Sense of Style,” in El Dorado and Paradise: Canada and the Caribbean in Austin Clarke's Fiction, University of Western Ontario Press, 1989, pp. 152–85.

In the following essay, Brown discusses Clarke's conception of style and spiritual power.

Clarke's mastery of the Barbadian dialect as a narrative form has always been one of his most obvious strengths as a writer, and this talent has become a somewhat tired commonplace in popular reviews of his work. In fact, Clarke's facility with his dialect forms is rooted in a strong self-consciousness about language and style, one that encompasses standard English as well as the Barbadian form of English-Caribbean creole. William Jefferson's fascination with “the power of the word,” in “The Man” is not unlike Clarke's own life-long experience with language (When Women Rule, p.96). His colonial education and his early interest in English literature immersed him in the colonizer's language, as...