By Daryn Wright
Photo courtesy of Vancouver Public Library

What does it mean to be excluded or included in a city’s history? What relationships emerge between the self and the social space of a city’s east side or west side? How can poets remove the layers of history and geography in order to uncover “the self”? These are some of the questions that the Poets and the Social Self: Vancouver discussion will be addressing on March 7.

Wayde Compton, Joanne Arnott, Michael Turner and Renee Sarojini Saklikar will be handling these concepts and reading from their work, with the hopes of addressing the role of the poet and the development of identity through spatial relationships.

Compton, co-founder of the Hogan’s Alley Memorial Project, is also the author of two books of poetry, 49th Parallel Psalm (1999) and Performance Bond (2004). His work with Hogan’s Alley is a prime example of how an individual’s identity is often informed by a city’s priorities and histories. The Peak sat down with Compton and talked about Hogan’s Alley, social awareness, and how poets translate these problems into language.

The Peak: Can you tell me about Hogan’s Alley and the pushing out of the black community during this time? How does this relate to the discussion of the social self, and how is this important in the identity of a city-dweller?

Compton: The urban renewal trend of the mid-20th century was continent-wide. It began in New York, but the strategy spread to many cities in North American from the 1950s to the 1960s. In short, it was a new urban planning emphasis on the car, and connecting suburbs to cities via freeways — the creation of the commuter culture we have today — and away from the old model of cities in which people lived near their workplace. The problem was where to put these freeways when cities were full of residents. Invariably, the answer was solved by institutionalized racism: they put the freeways through the communities that were easiest to bully, and that meant, almost always, black neighbourhoods or Chinatowns.

In Vancouver it was both: Hogan’s Alley and our Chinatown were chosen, unsurprisingly, as the place they would put their freeway. This was justified by modernist experiments in urbanism that favoured large tower block housing — in the US, they were those terrifying “projects” that worsened black urban life everywhere they were created. Jane Jacobs was an early critic of this ethos, who pointed out how inhuman and disastrous it was for communities to have their neighbourhoods razed and changed so drastically, without their input.

All this happened in Vancouver too, and it happened to the black community in the east end, at Hogan’s Alley. They even built projects intended to house us — the McLean Park Project — but it didn’t work, as the black community chose that moment to integrate all over the city.

It changed a lot for our community, in that it scattered us, and destroyed our networks of communication, shattered many of our businesses, eventually led to the decline of our community-based church, broke old social relationships of mutual aid and self-help, and created a sense in this city that there is no black community because of the loss of a civic neighbourhood that was known as a black area.

How is one excluded or included from a city’s history? How does this relate to the black community of Hogan’s Alley, or even indigenous groups, or even as a European immigrant?

C: For me, the lesson of Hogan’s Alley is that neighbourhoods need more power in deciding what happens to them. And by “neighbourhoods” I mean the people who live in an area, and not just homeowners or businesses — everyone who lives there, in equal measures, should have the power to determine what happens to their neighbourhood. In the long view of history, I think the Hogan’s Alley residents, who did not want their neighbourhood wrecked and rewritten as a freeway, would have given us a better Vancouver.

How can language bridge these gaps?

C: To a certain extent, witnessing and telling the tales of injustice can help to repair racism and colonialism, but I believe it will take more than that. Concrete acts of inclusion must be taken.

How do we include ourselves in a city’s history, and what do those acts look like?

C: At least one progressive city councillor in the 1930s, Helena Gutteridge, interviewed residents, and their ideas were to improve the streets and buildings that were already there rather than to clear the slum. I think they were correct all along, and history shows that the people who live in an area are more likely to understand its needs, not least of which because it is they who will live with the consequences of any sort of planning. This is far better than letting developers, who are primarily motivated by short-term profit, lead us in making decisions about what our city will look like, who it will serve, and how it will change.

Do you tie your own identity to a specific city space? How is this explored not only through poetry, but through other art as well?

C: I think art and, for me, specifically literature, is a way to think differently about civic life because it is a freer kind of language. It allows us to edge away from rationalist thinking, which has its place but can also fail us, and can help us examine the web of rhetoric and cliche that we are often mired in. For example, I think a poetry or art movement might have very helpfully challenged urban renewal in the 1950s, if it had been ready to do so here.

I can very much imagine artists examining the concept of urban renewal from different angles, challenging its rhetoric and premises and social assumptions in a way that could have very helpfully undermined the certainty with which this city plunged forward into a very inhuman model. As it turns out, that didn’t happen, but it makes you wonder what’s going on now that we might look back at it 40 years in the future and think, “Why didn’t the artists challenge that?”

When I look at the writers and artists who are tackling things like gentrification, and the ideology that precedes it, or our reliance on fossil fuels and the use of BC land for big oil, or those who are challenging colonialism — I think the artists and writers who are directly trying to deal with these issues are doing the right thing. We need to be thinking about these issues now, when they are having an early impact, and not 40 years after some catastrophic oil spill on our coast, for example.

I’m proud to be part of a movement to carry witness to, and draw attention to, the memory of a past injustice, because that’s necessary, but we should also try to get ahead of these injustices.