Backwater

I

moved to Surrey, BC, having already felt how definitions smoothen the world into something more firmly grasped. I moved having learnt that those with power define while others play into and wheedle out of definitions according to need. Perhaps this is to put it too simply. Definitions abound. Power takes form as select definitions are circulated until naturalized. Yet power is what first makes definition thinkable, for to define is to exert power. Every immigrant already knows this. Entering Canada means acquiescing to definition, official and unofficial. Being termed an international student, for instance, makes one legible to Canadian immigration bureaucracy. It marks one as to be extracted from and imposed on, for much traffics with such terminology. One might wield it to conjure the racialized immigrant without having to be so crass as to mention race.

Given how practiced Canada is in this linguistic subterfuge, I walk Surrey’s streets, soliciting its every definition, asking what Surrey conjures. Surrey is another man’s homesickness, I’m told. H.J. Brewer’s. Standing on the banks of the Fraser River in New Westminster, he inhaled deeply and held in his eyes the opposing landscape. Those flat, empty lands call me home. Nostalgia set alight this municipal clerk’s geographical sense as he projected across the water all that he left in the County of Surrey, which sits across the Thames from Westminster. A minor bureaucrat’s whim backed by imperial might sought to displace the land relations of the Semiahmoo, Katzie, Tsawwassen, Qayqayt, Kwikwetlem, Musqueam, and Kwantlen peoples. Brewer bestowed Surrey with its name and so it was incorporated in 1879. Its future, he must have thought, now tethered to his past would be ensured.

Entering Canada means acquiescing to definition, official and unofficial. Being termed an international student, for instance, makes one legible to Canadian immigration bureaucracy. It marks one as to be extracted from and imposed on, for much traffics with such terminology. One might wield it to conjure the racialized immigrant without having to be so crass as to mention race.

Surrey’s history seems not to beckon like the past of Kingston, from where I moved. As Canada’s first capital, a repository of old money, and home to both Queen’s University and the Royal Military College of Canada, the King’s town corrals one into a study of its colonial intrigues. Perhaps a similar attraction occurs in New Westminster; its moniker, the Royal City, hawks its historical heft. Fort Langley, and by extension the City of Langley, also hails one. Named after a director of the Hudson’s Bay Company, Fort Langley enjoys a prominent place in the colonial machinations that make Canada. It was where in 1858 Governor James Douglas proclaimed British Columbia a colony and where children reenact this proclamation. These appellations once served to assert the limitless, expansive reach of empire, attaching a sense of purpose to land seizures, military fortifications, and trading posts. Now, they paper over these histories to offer what can be marketed as the quaint, the historic, the fun for whole families.

Without monarchical associations, Surrey must appear homely. Surrey is a wait at the bus stop. Or perhaps Surrey is apprehended as an addendum, there to serve what is more significant. Surrey is a well of cheap labour, a catchment of cultural difference. Draw as needed. Surrey is incidental, there because of something more significant. Surrey is a contradiction, meagre in history yet otherwise excessive. Surrey is a stuffed school, a bass-y car, a clatter of languages.

Before Surrey and before Kingston, before my immigration but after my ancestors’ indentureship, I lived in Trinidad, in a village tiny in its populace as in its official history. Historical records bring no answers as to its provenance. In high school, however, I received an abode of worth: Grant House. Upon enrollment, each student was shuffled into one of these quasi-fraternities and made to learn its origins. I memorized that Grant House was the namesake of Reverend Doctor Kenneth James Grant, a missionary from Nova Scotia who founded the school in 1894. These learned men composed the school’s song and its motto just as they defined the pedagogical philosophy that generations worshipped. These Canadian missionaries extended their Presbyterian sensibility to every eager body instructed in that school. Their proselytizing involved defining the darkness that they would banish with their light. I was thus inducted into a defining relation with Canada long before I realized.

Surrey is a contradiction, meagre in history yet otherwise excessive. Surrey is a stuffed school, a bass-y car, a clatter of languages.

Surrey, I’ve come to find, is similarly enveloped in simulated darkness. Ascribing unpalatable traits to Surrey and Surreyites allows our neighbours to shore up their civility. As Gurpreet Singh Johal explains in his scholarly article “The Racialization of Space,” “Surrey itself has been marked as a space of degeneracy in relation to the respectable spaces of Vancouver.” Jean Walton explains the same in her book Mudflat Dreaming, a history of squatting alongside Vancouver waterfront fringes. She considers the jibes that constitute Surrey: “For Vancouver, the place to joke about is Surrey, and this has been true since the 1970s. If it’s not the crime rate, it’s the low IQ; if it’s not the toxic waste dumps, it’s the down-at-heels suburban mindset. And the ‘Surrey girl’ jokes are right out of the X-rated encyclopedia of dumb blonde jokes.” Walton clarifies that certain subdivisions within Surrey—Guildford, Newton, and Whalley, for example—are more frequently the targets of derision. Likewise, Johal’s take on Surrey delineates the production of zones of degeneracy and respectability within the city. Take Surrey’s Glenwood subdivision, he says. With the Trans-Canada Highway serving as a buffer separating Glenwood from the rest of Surrey, developers took the opportunity to rebrand the area Fraser Heights. Its distinction was coordinated via zoning ordinances and by-laws such that Fraser Heights would be without the East Indian “monster home” that characterizes Newton. Monstrosity, in this case, is constituted by “architectural styles that incorporate multifamily dwellings, basement entries, tile roofs, lack of landscaping, and disproportionate building-to-lot size ratios.” Similarly, Johal identifies the Gurdwara as “a site of struggle over the symbolic meaning of landscape in Surrey.” He describes perceptions of it as “a space that threatened the order of civilized bodies” and as “a congregation point for bodies that were incapable of the self-discipline necessary to gain the respect of Canadians.” What both Johal and Walton make clear is how the projection of degeneracy onto certain spaces and onto the racialized and classed bodies in those spaces buttresses the bourgeois respectability of Canada proper. Surrey is the well-worn story of classism.

This real and imagined contrast between Fraser Heights and the rest of Surrey or between Surrey and Vancouver makes clear that wrestling with today’s Surrey requires knowing yesterday’s struggles over land use. A testament to this necessity is Bridgeview, a neighbourhood in North Surrey whose travails Walton details in Mudflat Dreaming. Bridgeview waged a decades-long battle to secure access to sewers. Parts of this battle are captured in Some People Have to Suffer, a 1976 documentary that takes its title from a statement made by Fred Beale, an alderman who identified suffering of the few as part and parcel of city expansion. Walton sums up the situation by referring to the coverage of local newspapers. “They couldn’t seem to decide,” she explains, “which was funnier: these working class rowdies, many of them recent immigrants with strong European accents, who persisted in living in a rat-infested cesspool, or the businessmen politicians whose evasions and prevarications, delays, and outright condescension no doubt masked their ties with developers.” The stakes of this situation were clear enough. Neglecting this neighborhood until the residents fled would allow for profitable industrial expansion in that area. Figures like Bill Vander Zalm, former Mayor of Surrey and eventual premier of BC, appear in Some People Have to Suffer in defence of unadulterated greed. Yet in juxtaposition are figures like Moggel Wittenburg, a German immigrant and Bridgeview resident who fights for her family’s well-being. In a neat, firm tone, she makes it known that “it’s a nice place to live in. It’s not expensive, I mean up the hill it’s nice and maybe they have bigger houses, but I personally think I have a happy house here, and it counts more.” The community-making at work in Bridgeview in these decades and the defiant pride of Wittenburg’s words are indicative of what histories course quietly through Surrey. Surrey is where working class immigrants are boxed into compromised positions; Surrey is working class activism.

I now live in Newton, which is named after an early settler, Elias John Newton. Within Newton, one finds a neighbourhood called Strawberry Hills. It’s a charming sobriquet whose origins are shared on a stout bronze plaque erected outside the public library’s Strawberry Hills branch. Surrey is a story of internment. In 1942, Japanese Canadian families, who had established the strawberry farms that gave Strawberry Hills its name, were stripped of their properties and rights and were interned. The Canadian government sought to erase their presence from the landscape, and few returned. In many ways, I can’t access the depths of this violence, but I subsequently stood in the Surrey Art Gallery and observed Cindy Mochizuki’s Autumn Strawberry installation. With its prompting, I wondered at how the name Strawberry Hills summons inquiry into this sordid history while so easily displacing it altogether. Surrey is where history lies fallow and where artists make the city anew. Surrey is where Brewer’s vision proves insufficient and where the gradations of worth derived by settlers are contested. Surrey is where we flout the idiom of historical fringes and cultural backwaters.