Concrete // Adrian De Leon

Adrian De Leon looks at the meaning of "concrete" as he wraps up his month as guest editor at The Town Crier. In the poem “Astronaut Family,” contributor Shazia Hafiz Ramji yearns over the tenuous work to keep kinships alive in an age of gentrification. Scattered across North American cities, the speaker and their chosen family grasp at the gossamer threads of love in ephemeral ways: Facebook messages, mutual memories, wandering in brief sojourns. Those precious few moments with those we love, we gather in the asbestos snowflakes that tumble from ceilings of our crumbling gathering places. This is the quality of dust. This month, I asked ten contributors to join me (and you, our intrepid readers) in literary flânerie. Tawahum Bige, Joanne Leow, and Ryanne Kap wander by car and bus, while Natasha Ramoutar pulls us upstream in the stubborn rivers of our city life. Among poets, fiction writers, ethnographers, social media writers, activists, and historians, The Town Crier has facilitated our desperate gatherings of that dust that piles up our haunted relationships to our cities that no longer are—and, perhaps, may never have been—built for us. As Shirley Camia invokes for our contemporary moment, everywhere is nowhere is home.But what if our words demand more than the ephemera of dust? Our homely cities crumble before us not by their own passive volition, but by the detonations of suited vultures. The rubble of our beloved bookstores asphyxiates us into a stranglehold, clenching until we cry mercy at the blinding glisten of newly-laid glass. AsZalika Reid-Benta reminds us, we must mourn that destruction, and listen to the ghosts of refuges whose ends were met by wrecking ball. Our words must demand the form of concrete. That is, the initial formlessness and the coalescence of concrete.Sometimes, concrete can be liberating. The public roads upon which Amanda Harvey-Sánchez walked in Mexico City cultivates moments of young, intimate love otherwise denied to urban flâneuses. In other instances, concrete belies haunted stories that span continents. In England and China, Minying Huang sifts through the ephemeral tastes of concrete streets at once foreign and familiar, as I did in Scarborough and Manila. In Singapore, Joanne Leow finds the imperfect marriage between the concrete and the jungle that once ruled the island. And in the sidewalks beneath the glass behemoths of cancerous glass condos in Toronto, Marlena Cravens finds the cracked greyness of death.At my undergraduate institution, concrete is a shameful Brutalist dystopia. Unlike the St. George campus, the University of Toronto Scarborough lacked the simulacra of Mother England’s Oxbridge towers. But if you dilate your gaze enough, you might notice the fingerprints of the workers that smoothed the walls and gave shape to the formless masses of coagulated dust. And indeed, our intellectual and creative work breathed new life into a campus built for the detritus of the Ontario school system. Perhaps the greyness of the Andrews Building is the ultimate act of kindness from concrete: blank slates upon which we can etch our own worlds anew.To be concrete—nay, to demand concreteness—means to demand that our labour carve out spaces made by and for us. In Toronto, rubble gives way to glass buildings built on shores not yet ceded. In turn, our writing must give way after the shattering of windows, in the quality of knife-like dust.If you should ever take to record the ephemera of urban life, those bits of wandering our cities dear to us like golden dust, know this: Our work is not to salvage what was gone, but to reawaken what could have been, and trace what remains to be.