Black Market Baby

By Renée Clarke

(Backroads Productions, San Cristóbal, NM 2009)

January 18, 2010

In 1940, when Renée Clarke was born and World War II was taking shape, it was illegal in Canada to misrepresent the ethnic background of an adopted child to the adopting family. In Montreal, social stratification was considered normal and anti-Semitic feelings ran high. French Canadians who couldn’t have their own wanted to adopt French Canadian babies; Jewish families wanted to adopt Jewish children. Pregnancy outside of marriage was an abomination and young women who found themselves in such situations were whisked away from their homes and dumped into convents and hospitals, away from the eyes of proper society, to wait out their terms. Babies were taken out of the arms of these young mothers, often without their consent, and sold to married couples wanting children. Babies were smuggled across the U.S./Canadian border, papers forged or destroyed, and the shameful trafficking of humans continued to make some people extremely wealthy. Thousands of nurses, doctors and adoption agencies were complicit in this human trafficking, willfully ignorant of the repercussions.

Renée Clarke was one such child, bought and sold, her ancestry forever lost to her. In her new autobiography, “Black Market Baby,� Clarke charts her life growing up as an adoptee—the sense of rootlessness, denial and, finally, the search to discover the truth of her past. Shame pervades the book: the shame of unwed mothers, the shame of being different, the shame of being abandoned by one’s one mother or born of a questionable past, and the taboo of adoption. In that time and place, when unwed mothers were hidden from view by proper society, people did not talk about adoption, and the setting was ripe for a world unseen to thrive—a black market of babies.

In an interview with the author, Clarke said that the writing of the book made her adoption real for her. Clarke was not told by her parents until she was 11 years old, a mistake she says is made by many adoptive parents. “Tell the kids. Be honest. Answer their questions; and if you don’t know the answers, still, talk about it.� Clarke lived most of her adult life ignoring the fact that she had been adopted. It wasn’t until her late 40s that she began to examine herself—her past—and began looking for information behind so many unanswered questions. This is a tale of discovery, and while her attempt to discover the truth of her biological parents is never satisfied, Clarke discovers that it is the search itself that is important.

Clarke follows a conventional plot of starting from the beginning and ending at the end. She is a gifted writer. Her style brings to mind the skill and clarity of Stephen King to paint a scene that is vivid and sensual—from her metropolitan origins of 1940s Montreal to her eventual migration West, where she finds comfort and home in the majestic wilderness of North America. But, often, it seems Clarke tries to encompass too much. Too frequently, there were scenes left hanging—moments begging to be explored further but abandoned in the attempt to include everything, with the result of much being left out. This would be a more powerful book if Clarke had narrowed her focus, concentrating either on the stratified and hypocritical society of 1940s Montreal or instead, her great love: the expansive North American forests. She recounts, with loving detail, hikes with her daughter in the forests of the U.S. and Canada, worthy of an Ansel Adams landscape.

If she had narrowed her focus, Clarke could have developed the story more richly, instead of relying somewhat irritatingly on so much self-psychoanalysis. With the rise of creative non-fiction, such works as Mary Karr’s “The Liar’s Club� have set the bar for autobiography that Clarke is capable of but misses. While Clarke may not have been attempting to create a work of art, the potential is there and it is disappointing that it is not fulfilled. With her constant need to analyze and clarify, one is reminded of the #1 rule in writing: “Show, don’t tell.� Clarke reveals the neurosis of her adopted mother, the repressed rage manifesting in her family. She has the ability to set the stage so elegantly but then breaks the spell unnecessarily with an authoritative narrative voice, like an unwanted soliloquy. I wish Clarke had let her reader linger in that world—where we are allowed in to the psyche of an adopted child residing in the subconscious realm of doubt, shadows and mystery—instead of bringing in the proverbial therapist’s couch.

Clarke’s book therefore becomes a genre niche, important to people who have come from similar backgrounds—namely adoptees wrestling with their textbook symptoms: feelings of abandonment, alienation, lifelong restlessness, the need to please, and a search for the truth of their past. This was evident at her recent book-signing at Brodsky Bookshop. Like a wandering tribe finding itself, the people at the signing began most of their conversation with the same phrase, “I’m adopted, too.�

Clarke is a sculptor and author of five books including, “Taos Whole Food Cookbook,� “The Last Garage Sale,� and “Within the Earth, a Mountain.� She and her husband, a filmmaker, live in the forests north of Taos.