31 Days of Short Stories: Day 14. “The Motor Car,” by Austin Clarke

Posted 14 August, 2008 in Short Stories, 31 Days of Short Stories |

From Choosing His Coffin: The Best Stories of Austin Clarke

The rhythms of Austin Clarke’s prose dance to a calypso beat, to the music of the Caribbean and to the distinctive patterns of West Indian speech.

Clarke’s subject in “The Motor Car,” as elsewhere in his short fiction and novels, is the immigrant experience in Canada. Rarely has this experience been rendered with such precision and such unsentimental candour. We like to think of ourselves in Canada as colour blind and devoid of racist impulses, but the difficulties many immigrants face upon arriving in this country might suggest that something other is the case; that the institutional racism that pervades Canadian society is a more deleterious strain than the overt kind, if only because it is so easy to sweep under the rug and ignore.

The protagonist in Clarke’s story is Calvin, who, like his Protestant namesake, is “a God-faring man.” A native of Barbados, Calvin is determined to emigrate to Canada. He is convinced that Canada will provide him with more opportunity than what is available to him in Bridgetown, where he spends his days washing cars “till his back hurt and his belly burn.” It is 1968, and to Calvin, Canada represents a kind of El Dorado, a land of wealth and opportunity where he will be able to free himself of his wage-slave shackles and live well. When his best friend, Willy, suggests that Calvin will be able to get better salt fish in Canada, since that is where they are imported from, Calvin replies with indignation, “Be-Jesus Christ, when you see me leff this blasted backwards place call Barbados, that is the last time I eating salt fish. I eating steaks!”

Naturally, the reality that Calvin encounters is far removed from the fantasy he has concocted in his mind. The early promise that his journey holds out for him — the white stewardess on his Air Canada flight calls him “sir,” “first time in Calvin life a white woman ever call him that, that way” — is quickly dashed. He has to work three jobs simply to keep his head above water, and his landlady charges him double the rent she charges her white tenants.

Nevertheless, Calvin works hard and saves his money, all in the service of realizing his dream: buying a brand new motor car, a Chevy or a Galaxie. With his white girlfriend (the “Canadian thing” who lives in the apartment above his) in the passenger seat, he will “go for a spin down Bloor as far as Yonge, swing back up by Harbord, turn left at Spadina, take in College Street, and every West Indian in Toronto bound to see him in his new motor car before he get back home.”

But the chasm between his Barbadian upbringing and his current life in Toronto continues to plague him. He tries to distance himself from the militant Black Power movement for fear that it will frighten the whites around him, particularly his landlady. When Willy sends him a post card signed “Willy X,” he is terrified that his landlady has read it and will evict him, until his “Canadian thing” tells him that the landlady is herself an immigrant who can’t read English. Even his girlfriend’s well-intentioned comments evince a lack of understanding about Calvin’s situation in his adopted country. She suggests he get a job at IBM, and he responds incredulously, “Doing wha’? Cleaning out the closets?”

Ultimately, Calvin is required to fall back on his Barbadian machismo as a coping mechanism; when his girlfriend begins singing along to a calypso song on the car radio, “wukking-up and enjoying sheself so,” he gets “vex as hell,” remembering how his own mother forbade him to sing calypso when he was a boy. Calvin reacts violently, hitting the brakes on his car so suddenly that his girlfriend slams into the windshield, breaking her neck.

Calvin’s final two encounters are indicative of the pervasive otherness with which he is branded. The policeman who arrives on the scene of the accident believes Calvin’s trumped-up story of what happened to the girl in the passenger seat and loads her into his cruiser to drive her to the hospital. His comment to Calvin — “Wish our native coloured people were more like you West Indians …” — is meant as a compliment, but in fact testifies to a kind of unstated racism that operates under the surface of daily experience. As Calvin tries to move his stalled car out of the road, he encounters the more overt kind of racism, as other drivers shout at him to “get the fuck out of the road, nigger.” Calvin is left standing by the side of the road, having rifled his girlfriend’s purse for money, “wondering how much a taxi would cost, and if one would stop.”

Clarke’s story casts a clear gaze on the realities of the “cultural mosaic” that Canadians so often trumpet, but that may exist more as wishful thinking than reality. In 1968, Trudeau’s official policy of multiculturalism had yet to take effect, but there is every indication that the immigrant experience in 2008 is no less arduous for being officially sanctioned. It is frequently artists to whom we turn to expose the painful truths that society does not wish to face. In “The Motor Car,” Clarke has done this bravely, exposing the levels of prejudice — both acknowledged and unacknowledged — that too frequently plague our putatively tolerant society.

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