SOURCE: “Signifying Contamination: On Austin Clarke's Nine Men Who Laughed,” in Essays on Canadian Writing, Vol. 57, Winter, 1995, pp. 212–34.

In the following essay, Kamboureli focuses on Clarke's self-reflexive introduction to Nine Men Who Laughed as a tool for understanding Clarke's relationship to postcolonial discourse.

For a writer to “wrestle with his shadow,” he must be certain of casting one. …

—Françoise Lionnet (322)

I

It has become almost typical for writers of postcolonial and multicultural critical discourses to begin by rehearsing the polarities of centre and margin, of us and them, and of other configurations that bear similar eventualities. More often than not, this is accompanied by the writers' self-proclamation, an enunciation that defines them in unequivocal (that is, “real”) terms of race and ethnicity. This metacritical instance of self-location speaks of the perceived need to identify the position from which writers speak in terms that, blending as they do...