Product Description

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-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 symbolic status comes to seem more important-and 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."

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #510906 in Books
• Published on: 2000-05-03
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 304 pages

From Publishers 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 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Review
"...Giscombe's Into and Out of Dislocation is an impressive book indeed..." -- Robert Creely

"In Into and Out of Dislocation...is seeking heritage instead of freedom..." -- Ishmael Reed

About the Author
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.

Customer Reviews

Crossing and re-crossing the border(s)
In his travel memoir/meditation, Into and Out of Dislocation, C.S. Giscombe takes us not just back to the Bristish Columbian landscape of his long poem Giscome Road, but also traces the routes of other journeys and the geography of both "home" and "away from home." With Giscombe, the reader wends her way by bicycle, train, auto, boat and rarely by airplane to Oxford, Jamaica, Victoria, B.C., Prince George, B.C., Vancouver, Seattle, Bloomington, IL, Ithaca, NY, etc. The author sets off on long-distance solo bicycle adventures, his guiding principle seemingly always to push further. Giscombe pays little mind to chronology when meditating on his experiences in various locations. All journeys seem to turn back upon themselves, bump up against other times and places, until they blur together into one continuous quest along the particular edges of landscape, of family and heredity, and of cultural and racial complexity. The author's formal task is to research the "facts" about John R. Giscome, the Jamaican miner, explorer and possible relation whose name graces several geographical features near Prince George, B.C. The "facts" that we finally stumble upon, however, are those of visibility and invisibility with their attendant pleasures, accomodations, and responsibilities. Along the way there is much talk of miscegenation, bears, good and bad restaurants, and even Big Foot. This book is a thinking person's delight.