Narrative
Growing Up Stupid Under the Union Jack
Austin Clarke · 1980
Synopsis
In the Barbados of the 1940s, during the Second World War, young Tom grows up in the village of St. Matthias, where the neighbours are proud of this “Cawmere boy”, a pupil at Combermere School. His mother struggles to give him the best possible education, and the school holds up a distant England as his model, under British masters who are sometimes cruel: the boys see their island as a “little England” and learn things that have no immediate meaning for them.
Context
Published in Toronto in 1980 by McClelland and Stewart, the first volume of the author's autobiography, the book received the Casa de las Américas Prize the same year. A critic in Contemporary Novelists reads in the word “stupid” in the title the naivety of the educated colonial subject, ignorant of his own history, but also, in Caribbean usage, absurdity. The Canadian publisher Dundurn reissued it in 2005.
Who it is for
For reading a Barbadian childhood under the British Empire, told with humour by a Barbadian Canadian novelist.
Prizes and reception
Darryl Pinckney, in the New York Review of Books, found it tender, funny, sensitive and with nothing of the tract about it.
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