Canada - Ethnic & Race Relations, U.S. Authors - African American - Literary Biography, African Diaspora (outside U.S.) - History, Ethnic & Minority Studies - Canada, Canada - Travel Essays & Descriptions, African American Literary Biography, British Colu

Into and Out of Dislocation

Name: Into and Out of Dislocation
Author: C. S. Giscombe
ISBN: 9780865475410

by C. S. Giscombe

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Overview

A thought-provoking meditation on the connections between landscape, race, and family

It was on his third or fourth trip there that the poet C. S. Giscombe grew aware of the space Canada had staked out in his imagination. Giscombe later spent a winter with his family in British Columbia, and his time there provides a lens through which he interrogates his preoccupation with Canada's otherness. Giscombe writes that "border crossings are always sexy. And racial." And so this book is filled with both actual and metaphoric exploration--and his travels serve as points of departure for a series of riffs on racial, national, physical, and psychological borders.

At the heart of this book is the author's ambivalent pursuit of John Robert Giscome, a man who may or may not be a relative. John R., as Giscombe calls him, was a black Jamaican explorer who flourished in British Columbia during the last half of the nineteenth century. Giscombe documents the places that John R. passed through, and he uncovers stories about mining, pioneer life, and even cannibalism. Giscombe likes to imagine John R. as a "self-aware outsider," and that status comes to seem more important--more interesting--than any historical truth.

Into and Out of Dislocation is an intriguing and wryly told travel memoir by a writer Henry Louis Gates called a "major figure in contemporary African American letters."

About the Author, C. S. Giscombe

Born in Dayton, Ohio, C. S. Giscombe is the author of several books of poetry, most recently Here and Giscome Road. He lives with his wife and daughter in State College, Pennsylvania, where he teaches English at Pennsylvania State University.

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Editorials

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

In a book part travelogue, part memoir, poet Giscombe embarks on a quest to plumb the mystery of America's vast northern neighbor, Canada, while researching the legend of John Robert Giscombe, the noted black Jamaican pioneer who crisscrossed the region during the last half of the 19th century, and who may or may not be related to the author. With his wife and daughter in tow, Giscombe goes on a winter sojourn into British Columbia, dogging the explorer's trail and pondering his own evolution from a crisis-filled childhood to a more emotionally stable African-American manhood. Giscombe's evocation of Canada, during both John's time and the present, is deeply affecting; he renders its people, history and culture with remarkable clarity and detail. He finds newspaper accounts of John's exploits and accomplishments, and retraces his steps through old mining towns, pioneer settlements and historic wilderness sites. An avid reader and film buff, Giscombe also presents an eclectic list of books and movies that have shaped his own view of the world as he has confronted racial prejudices and his handicap of a missing arm. Despite occasional spots where it becomes chaotic and unsettling, his stream-of-consciousness style provides many reflective gems, especially on the issues of race and culture. What makes this book such a substantial achievement is not so much Giscombe's confused start-stop search for his predecessor's essence, but his probing of our human ability to adapt to and endure the sometimes monumental challenges of otherness. (May) Copyright 2000 Cahners Business Information.|

Kirkus Reviews

In his debut work of nonfiction, poet and academic Giscombe (English/Penn. State Univ.) searches for a possible 19th-century ancestor, a Jamaican miner and explorer whose surname, Giscombe, has become `affixed to the geography` of British Columbia. Giscombe divides his memoir into numerous sections, but one serves as the principal string threading the beads of the myriad memories and musings that comprise this remarkable, moving work. These `Winter in Fort George` sections (Giscombe distributes more than half-a-dozen of them throughout) provide the closest thing to a traditional narrative structure, but even they sometimes wander off into unknown or unexpected territory—just as Giscombe himself is apt to do as he pursues by foot, bicycle, car, train, and airplane his ancestors and his interests, from Jamaica to British Columbia to Cornell to Illinois and Alaska. He writes that he endeavors `to live at some extremity, at places where my mortality might be visible to me.` Giscombe's search for his obscure ancestor—for the reasons that a town, a rapids, a canyon bear his name—fuels an explosion of words and ideas that traditional organization cannot hope to contain. He moves effortlessly through time, back and forth and back again—each crafted sentence a wave that brings to shore a dazzling bounty of beauty and surprise. Such an array of subjects! From films by Chaplin to jazz by Miles Davis to bears, crocodiles, nighthawks, wolves, and foxes; from Chinese food in remote restaurants to family, race, sex (`Eros is eros, boys, everybody gets to play the fool`), pain, loss, the fraternity of cyclists, the inability of undergraduates to write essays, and meditationsonthe frailty of his own body (that `portable old site of my being alive`). As he considers the `tribes` that are our families, he concludes that each has `a lot of centers, a lot of stories, a lot of homeplaces and hearts.` Masterful and mesmerizing; informative, rich, wise, and wonderful.