A vibrant, revealing memoir about the cultural and familial pressures that shaped his early life in the Black Canadian community of Africadia in Halifax, Nova Scotia. As a young child, George Elliott Clarke knew that a great deal was expected from him and his two brothers. The descendants of a highly accomplished family on his father, Bill's, side, including famed opera singer, Portia White, and the first Black officer in the British Army, William Andrew White, he felt pressured to live up to the family name. Visits to his paternal grandmother, Nettie, in Halifax were formal; in contrast, his mother, Geraldine's, family came from a rural area and he recalls nourishing trips to the country, warm and accepting grandparents. These contradictions underlay much of his life and upbringing--Black and White, country and city, outstanding and ordinary, high and low. With vulnerability and poeticism, bold and physical language, George interrogates these dualities in Where Beauty Survived and shows us how he emerged from them as a poet and thinker.