Displacement, Dialogue, and Literary Dwelling: Reflections on Creative Life Writing from Vancouver's Downtown Eastside

Abstract

This article examines the capacity of intersubjective and textual dialogue to create a “home-place” for writers who are marginalized and displaced by poverty. Through a close analysis of a literary group called the Thursdays Writing Collective that meets on Vancouver's Downtown Eastside, the author analyzes the writing spaces and the dwelling possibilities of two dialogic practices—witnessing and word-squatting—to foster self-determination and relational connection, as well as to stimulate personal and sociopolitical change.

Acknowledgements

I am indebted to Elee Kraljii Gardiner for her insights and encouragement on this article, and to the Thursdays Writing Collective for welcoming me into their writing community and sharing their stories and thoughts with me. A special thanks to Antonette Rea and Jan Tse for allowing me to publish their remarks. I am also deeply grateful that Elee was able to share this article with John Asfour—co-editor of V6A: Writing from Vancouver's Downtown Eastside, inaugural writer in residence at Joy Kogawa House, and honorary member of the Collective—the week before he passed away. Elee remarked to me and posted on the Thursdays Writing Collective website that, as they read through the article together, John “had a chance to relish the fact that his work has made a real, definable difference in changing attitudes about writers from the margins.” This article is dedicated to him in recognition of the difference he has made for writers on the Downtown Eastside.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. Thursdays Writing Collective is not preceded by the definite article “the” in its common rendering. However, for the sake of flow and clarity, I precede it with “the” in this article.

2. I borrow the term “creative life writing” from Celia Hunt, who also describes this form of fictional and poetic self-expression with the term “fictional autobiography.” While the terms “fictional autobiography” and “creative life writing” could be used interchangeably, I use the latter in this article to signify a wider range of self-expression than “autobiography” conveys. For further discussion on this literary form and its various contexts, see Hunt's “Therapeutic Effects of Writing Fictional Autobiography” and Transformative Learning through Creative Life Writing.

3. I draw here on Martin Heidegger's “Building, Dwelling, Thinking,” where he describes “dwelling” not as the buildings that house and shelter us, but as a fundamental human way of being in the world that includes preserving freedom, peace, and care. Dwelling, in short, is ontological, a way of being: “the old word bauen, to which the bin belongs, answers: ich bin, du bist mean: I dwell, you dwell. The way in which you are and I am, the manner in which we as humans are on the earth, is Buan, dwelling” (Heidegger 145). Given this definition and recognizing the fraught terminology of “home” in displacement and resistance literature, I tend to use the term “dwelling” throughout this article to convey the experience of ontological, textual, and relational habitation in creative life writing (both in its community and its literary processes).

4. Perhaps this performativity is what Theodor Adorno had in mind in his own context of war-torn Europe when he writes, “In his text, the writer sets up house. Just as he trundles papers, books, pencils, documents untidily from room to room, he creates the same disorder in his thoughts. They become pieces of furniture that he sinks into, content or irritable. He strokes them affectionately, wears them out, mixes them up, re-arranges, ruins them. For a man who no longer has a homeland, writing becomes a place to live” (87).

5. Since its inception, the Carnegie has been a center for culture and education in the community. It was originally constructed as Vancouver's main public library and museum, completed in 1903 with money donated by Andrew Carnegie. In the 1950s, the building fell into disrepair and, in 1968, it was condemned as “derelict” by mayor Tom Campbell, who wanted to see it torn down and “a modern highrise office building or hotel [built] in its place” (N. Boyd et al. 11–12). However, community-poverty activists from the Downtown Eastside Residents Association challenged Vancouver's city council to turn it into a public space for local residents, and it reopened in the 1980s as the Carnegie Community Centre.

6. I think specifically of the sociopolitical dimensions of witnessing and testimony explored in Kay Schaffer and Sidonie Smith's Human Rights and Narrated Lives: The Ethics of Recognition, Gillian Whitlock's Soft Weapons: Autobiography in Transit, James Dawes' That the World May Know: Bearing Witness to Atrocity, and Meg Jensen and Margaretta Jolly's recent collection, We Shall Bear Witness: Life Narratives and Human Rights, to name just a few.

7. Ricoeur also poses “here I am” as an alternative sense of dwelling in the world to Heidegger's Dasein, one that is rooted in responsibility and relationship. Ricoeur takes Heidegger's sense of dwelling and shifts it from an ontology without ethics to an ontology with ethics (“Life Stories” 167). For Ricoeur, Dasein is thrown into existence passively and without choice—a state of being that does not bode well for choosing ethical action or responsibility for others (Oneself 349). Alternatively, “here I am” is an orientation of being that is potent, active, capable, and relational: “being-with, being-faithful, being-in-accompaniment with one's community or people” (“Life Stories” 166). This ontology extends being-in-the-world to being-with-others in an active and responsive way, which reinterprets dwelling as an ethical orientation.

8. Notably, Turner's work with the concept continues on its own terms while the Collective has developed word-squatting to suit its creative purposes.

9. Ongoing studies in the field by such researchers as Geoff Lowe, James Pennebaker, and Joshua Smyth and Stephen Lepore reiterate these claims with experimental studies, showing that the health benefits of writing not only include a greater sense of mental well-being and ability to deal with trauma, but can also contribute to an improved immune function and other physical benefits.

10. Kristeva defines trauma as that which is unrepresentable and meaningless as a result of being unable to symbolize or assimilate it in the social order. As Oliver notes of Kristeva's work, “Entering the social order requires assimilating its authority through a revolt by which the individual makes meaning his or her own” (“Revolt” 410). Literature and psychoanalysis (as symbolic systems) are two primary domains of revolt, giving individuals “a sense of inclusion in meaning making and in the social that supports creative activities and the sublimation of drives” (410). Without revolt and the resulting feeling of inclusion, individuals struggle to make or find meaning. Revolt, from this perspective, is necessary for human happiness and freedom (410).