Tribute to a twentieth century black Canadian writer: The Legacy of Lorris Elliott.

Lorris I. Elliott was one of Canada's well-known Black writers. He died quietly last summer (1999), after a long battle with Alzheimer's disease. In his passing he left a legacy from which black artists, educators and students may understand the importance of their role and the role of art, in particular writers and their writing in the development of a black Canadian thought. The essence of his ideas expressed the institutionalization of writing by black authors. His contribution may not read in volumes, but its value is a significant part of black Canadian literature today. In the profoundest sense, he created the stage for the contemporary black Canadian voice.

I knew very little of Lorris Elliott the person. What I know of him is from his writings and the impact of the McGill conference of 1980, "The Black Artist in the Canadian Milieu." Elliott did three very important things for black Canadian writing: He set the stage for the development of a racial consciousness in Black Canadian thought, through the integration of native and naturalized Canadian writers. He redefined the boundaries of racial space in black Canadian writing and he introduced black Canadian writing to a wider audience and respectability.

I first came into contact with Lorris Elliott while he was coordinating the McGill conference. We briefly spoke on the phone about the conference and possibilities of my participation. This conference was a scholarly collaboration. Black academics from across Canada representing various disciplines of study converged at McGill University to exchange divergent theories about black creativity in Canada. I met him in person for the first time in 1983, when our paths crossed briefly. He was also a guest of the St. Vincent and the Grenadines Association of Montreal Inc., invited by "Alfie" Roberts the General Secretary of the organization to have a book signing at the opening of the organization's annual art and book exhibition.

The event held at the Cote-des-Neiges House of Culture. We met again in 1984. He was the guest speaker at the association's second annual exhibition held at the same venue as the previous year. This was a memorable moment. We talked about The Germination Of Feeling my first collection of poems after which he asked permission to include a couple of the poems in an anthology he was working on. This I agreed too with delight. I felt counted among the writers in the Diaspora. A few months later I received a letter from his publisher advising me that Other Voices an anthology of writing by black writers in Canada, edited by Lorris Elliott would be released the following year. One of our last meetings was at a private showing of my paintings in 1986. Our meetings were always brief and somewhat unexpected, but in those brief moments we would share ideas about writing by blacks in Canada.

In the late seventies early eighties, Lorris Elliott opened the window on Black Canadian creativity supported by the office of the Secretary of State, Department of Multiculturalism, and the McGill Graduate Studies and Research Faculty. He began to explore the presence of black Canadian creativity giving body to and expanding the notion of a "collective consciousness" first mentioned by Harold Head (Introduction: Canada In Us Now, 1996). Head related to a naturalized Canadian consciousness, while Lorris Elliot expressed a black Canadian consciousness based on the integration of both native and naturalized writings. His teaching program also expressed this and so was the physical sweep of the black Canadian literary landscape he made in the early eighties. This survey was also the source of Other Voices. The anthology published by William Wallace Publishers, in 1985. The collection shows a variety of perspectives in black writing and introduced a new crop of writers including Ayanna Black, Dionne Brand, George Elliott Clarke, Ernesto Cuevas, Cyril Dabydeen, Sylvia Hamilton, Claire Harris, Marlene Nourbese Philip, Maxine Tynes and Fredrick Ward who are important names in Canadian Literature today. Both native and naturalized writers are found within this Canadian reality as distinct voices. The collection provides also an understanding of the black Canadian soul of the early eighties. Themes are about disillusionment and the black mind's struggle to come to terms with the indifference of place. One of his intentions when he put together the anthology and the bibliography concurrently, was to create "role models for aspiring black writers in Canada..." Which he succeeded

His bibliography of writing by blacks in Canada (1986, William Wallace) is a major piece of work. It is the only reference book to date on black authors and books published in Canada. For Lorris documentation meant being rooted to place. The bibliography is one of the most frequently mentioned works by writers on black Canadian literature. He is one of the first black Canadian writers (if not the first) to redefine the boundaries of space in Canadian writing. For him the term "Black writer" meant black writers outside the African Diaspora, as he states in his introduction to Other Voices, "That the term black writer includes not only the descendants of Africa, but also Afro-Asians and others of the diaspora." He related to the logic that in order to define a black Canadian identity one has to first understand how the dominant culture defines ethnicity and place. Hence the idea if it's not white Canadian literature it's therefore ethnically black Canadian literature, with new-world African Canadian writing as a distinct part. Elliott's determination to create an identity for black writing in Canada was not an estrangement from his cultural origins but an expansion of it. His novel Coming For To Carry and his short fiction express the oral tradition from which he originated.

The Lorris Elliott I knew was a quiet, unselfish, reserved but approachable kind of person. His words on paper and his actions were much louder than his speech. For his accomplishments, I will say his name warrants honorable mention as a black Canadian of the twentieth century for bringing respect and recognition to black writing in Canada as genuine form of art. His contribution is an indelible one to Black Canadian consciousness.

Such is the legacy of Dr. Lorris Elliott to black Canadian thought. Adieu fellow traveler! Your travels are way beyond us now.

Anthony Joyette, is a painter, poet and KOLA editor and critic.