Dear Reader: Here’s the 4th and last post of this short series titled “Dear Carrie.” This might be the last newsletter for a while as I work on my MA in Art Education.
* * *
November 29, 2022
Dear Carrie,
I was delighted this morning to receive your reply to Dear Carrie #46! (Dear Reader, you have to read that reply, to which I replied there in the comments!!). I will now add that, as I write-edit this a few days later (Dec 1 and so on), what is carrying over for me is the truth of your reality, and the fissures one must somehow create to allow eruptions to flow. If it weren’t for this project, I wouldn’t have had the pleasure to be privy to those important details of your life and how they have affected you. Thank you for responding so openly.
You said, “I don’t think I’ve ever really felt connected to Vancouver.”
I arrived in Vancouver in 1981. You arrived in 2009.
I had plenty of time to adjust, one might think. But what is involved in adjusting, in creating/finding community, in feeling belonging? (I know, I return and return to this question.)
Is it us or is it Vancouver? Or cities of certain sizes?
Or maybe it has nothing to do with the actual city.
So, who are you in place? Who am I, here in Halifax?
How are you different in each place?
Vancouver/Edmonton. Vancouver/Halifax.
And why? (Or, why not?)
I feel each city has a quality, a feeling. From my perspective, Vancouver changed after Expo 86. I often wonder how urban design and planning, or the lack of it, changes cities.
For thoughts on urban planning, I turn to Richard Sennett, author of many books on urbanism.
He said, “The migrant strength lies in coming to terms with displacement.”[1]
He describes the successful migrant (“a model urbanite”) as one who is able to live in the present (“the new dwelling”) while still feeling the absence of what was home or familiar. (I’m not sure if you ever feel an absence for Edmonton—I seem to remember you don’t.) Essentially, Sennett’s idea of the migrant requires that they be open to experiences.
I get that. I recognize that that is an important attitude, but, Vancouver really brought me down.
Sennett shapes his idea of the migrant around two concepts: migrant strength and a philosopher of displacement.
He provides several examples to expand on these ideas, he mentions:
Tegu Cole. Wrote “Open City: A Novel” (2011, a barely disguised autobiography, Sennett says) where the protagonist, a Nigerian doctor, discovers the city as a flâneur and through his psychoanalytic work recognizes “his patients’ mental displacements” as “his own geographic uprooting.” The “narrator realizes he has become doubly alien, belonging neither there nor here, then or now.” The narrator explores the “pains of migration, but displacement does not undo him.” He learns to live in New York even if “he does not entirely belong” there.
Okakura. The Japanese artist and writer, said, as paraphrased from Sennett “you do not need to throw down roots in order to dwell in a place; you need instead to come to terms with absence.” (What do we feel absence for?)
Alexander Herzen. Russian exile, 19th century. “After years of wandering, Herzen comes to conclude that ‘home’ is a mobile need. That is, the migrant or exile packs the desire for home in her suitcase—ever gnawing, it should still not prevent him or her from travelling.” Herzen disliked “Russian exiles who lived in the past in a permanent state of regret, isolated from the places where fortune had flung them.”
Migration by choice. A young woman Sennett met, a librarian from Medellín (Colombia), left for the hunger of new experiences and ended up in New Zealand. She may still miss home but has established herself legally so other family members may join her.
This model of migrant strength, according to Sennett might serve other urbanites.
A migrant is also someone moving from province to province within the same culture/country. We cannot attend to questions of home/belonging/community without considering gender, sex, race, socioeconomic status, citizenship status, stage in life, disability, mental health, physical health, family history…it’s not just about intersectionality…it is so much more…the accumulation of life experiences and their scarring…as you revealed in your response:
“No. I don’t think I’ve ever really felt connected to Vancouver. I moved here in 2009, after my sister’s husband, one of the most irritatingly optimistic people you could ever meet, killed himself. His death readjusted everything in my life. Everything seemed surreal after that for quite some time, and that ephemerality still seems to sit in Vancouver for me.”
***
A short list of city smells: Vancouver/Halifax
Vancouver
Pungent, fishy, sour Chinatown
Pissy, pissy, pissy, suffocating, hold-your-breath alleys in Gastown and the downtown Eastside
Onion soup along Boundary, Kingsway, Victoria…it travels
Stinky smell of the chicken rendering plant on Hastings and Commercial
Halifax
Burning wood smell from Brothers Meats, around the North End of Halifax (brings me back to Guatemala!)
Smell of hops from Oland Brewery, Agricola/Young area in the North End
…Halifax is pretty neutral smelling so far. The smell of burning wood is nice.
A list of phrases from my readings…
“space of appearance” (Hannah Arendt, this digital space is a way for me to appear and to create a meaningful digital encounter)
“a process of becoming” (Bickel, B. et al)
“to create means to relate” (Corita Kent—the reason for this public Dear Carrie)
“becoming through writing” (Springgay, Irwin, Kind)
“walking-with” (Donna Haraway, troubling walking)
“unfolding and responding” (Nicole Lee)
interstitial spaces (it’s everywhere)
“staying with the trouble” (Donna Haraway)
“research that breathes” (Springgay, Irwin, Kind)
* * *
December 3, 2022
Carrie, last night I dreamed of loneliness. Returning home but not going in because I didn’t want to be alone. Instead wondering the streets, people around but no one paying attention, caring, or making eye contact. Thinking I had a phone date with my sister but no answer. She texts me that we are supposed to talk at midnight! The haunting feeling of loneliness.
The dream is a reminder that I need to focus on intention and attention. Looking to volunteer with immigrants is both attending to attention and intention, maybe it’s being ‘situationally aware’ (Tom’s phrase) but in a different sense, as in being aware of your needs in this moment. What do I need and how can I get it. Identifying as not from here and not really Canadian is tiring—I am tired for the immigrants and the refugees who have a long journey ahead. I was stuck in those thoughts for a very long time but here in Halifax with all that I’m doing I feel something is shifting.
Maybe I am finally becoming a model urbanite…and making displacement work for me.
And here, now, I would like to leave this Dear Carrie series on a note of hopefulness and to focus on attending to and to research that breathes.
Thank you for letting me play with your Instagram posts, which were instrumental in helping me think through this creative mapping project for which the objective was to answer, “how do you conceptualize community?”
Talk to you soon,
Laura.
[1] Sennett, R. (2018). Building and dwelling: Ethics for the city. Farrar, Straus and Giroux.