Framed| Claire Harris| Poem Analysis and Interpretation by Gayathri K

References

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Claire Harris 1937–
Author

At a Glance…

Selected Writings

Sources

Trinidadian-born Claire Harris is considered one of Canada’s leading poets. Her incisive verse, rife with images of her West Indian land and culture, deftly describes the African-Caribbean experience in cities like Toronto. Harris’s work, widely taught in studies of Canada’s multicultural literature, features a deeply feminist streak as well. Susan Rudy, writing for Essays on Canadian Writing, remarked that “Harris writes not just her life but also for her life.… She speaks out against the potentially unravelling oppressions of race, gender, and class in contemporary Canada, refashioning poetry, narrative, autobiography, and the English language itself in the process.”

Harris was raised in middle-class comfort in Trinidad’s capital city, Port of Spain, where she was born in 1937. Hers was an achievement-oriented family, and her mother instilled a sense of pragmatism at an early age. “When I was about three years old, my mother told me that every woman has to have a profession,” Harris recalled in an interview with Sonya Kraus for Fryburger,. “That way you are not dependent on any men. Plus if you have a profession you do not merely continue in the tradition of the African woman who could not lead a self determined life.”

Harris’s family background bore this sentiment out: her paternal great-grandmother was a successful seamstress in Trinidad. In contrast, her mother’s father had run one of the island’s “penny” banks, but his family was impoverished after his death. Growing up, Harris and her cousins spent school vacations at a country estate her family owned. As she remembered in an interview with Arun Mukherjee for West Coast Line, “My father would bring boxes of books with him. He would insist that the radio be turned on only twice a day, to hear the news. And the rest of the time we ran wild, and made up our own stories, and read.”

It was in the countryside of Trinidad that Harris experienced her first unease with the class system that separated her black family from the majority of others on the West Indian island. On their property was a river pool and waterfall. Others would use it, but leave if the Harris came to swim. “It was awful. I realise now it was a singular display of arrogance. Not the sort of upbringing Canadians expect an African-Caribbean person to have had,” she told Mukherjee. She also noted that Asians came to Trinidad to perform labor that black Trinidadians refused to do, and that these
socio-economic factors made the emigrant experience in places like Toronto and Montreal all the more difficult. “African West Indians think they know what racism is and they come to Canada and discover that all the classisms they’ve directed at other people can be directed at them,” Harris told the West Coast Line.
Trinidad was part of the British colonial empire during these years, and British customs and culture were a strong presence. Growing up, Harris felt little connection to Africa. “If Africa or its customs were ever referred to, they were referred to in the most negative ways,” she recalled in the interview with Mukherjee. “For example, I remember a nun insisting that no one could wear earrings in school, because earrings came from Africa. It was so hilarious.” Harris then discovered

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