Writing from Ruins: On Scarborough’s Literary Movement
Something is afoot in Scarborough, Ontario. It’s not a mind-numbing news report about urban violence at an unspecified intersection. It’s not “Toronto’s next big food scene,” replete with hot takes from academicians and food blog videos in 4k. It’s not news about transit ruination in a place that lacks sufficient ways to get around town.
It’s a literary movement.
Since 2017, a plethora of books from and about Scarborough have exploded onto the literary scene. Catherine Hernandez’s Scarborough, David Chariandy’s Brother, and Carrianne Leung’s That Time I Loved You debuted together to much fanfare, and made their way into awards lists and school curricula. In 2018, Uzma Jalaluddin published Ayesha At Last, her South Asian Muslim retelling of Pride and Prejudice set in Scarborough. After finishing a first draft in 2014, I published Rouge in October 2018, with the good folks at Mawenzi House. Half a year later, in 2019, Téa Mutonji’s Shut Up You’re Pretty took the fiction world by storm. This autumn, Natasha Ramoutar will release her debut poetry collection, Bittersweet.
In Spring 2021, Téa, Natasha, and I will publish FEEL WAYS (Mawenzi House), an anthology of Scarborough’s emerging writers. We have edited with the intention of continuing the momentum of literary energy that our community has built. As young authors in the literary scene, this collection is our way of paying forward our blessings, showcasing the latent talent of the place we have long called home.
Over the past couple of years, different venues have taken notice of this collective labor, from Matt Galloway’s CBC Metro Morning to the Toronto Star and every literary accolade under the roof. This work has even made its way into academia and professional literary criticism. In March 2020, two literary scholars at the Modern Language Association (MLA) put out a call for “Scarborough in/as Canadian Literature,” seeking papers on theoretical and close reading approaches to the work our community has brought into the world.
This “florescence of literature,” as the MLA panel description puts it, is not without its precedent. David Chariandy’s 2007 novel Soucouyant inspired us to articulate the pains of a common experience: a global hometown and a fraught relationship with aging parents. Carrianne Leung’s 2013 debut novel, The Wondrous Woo, offered similar themes through a kung-fu fighting Chinese girl in Toronto and Ottawa. These remarkable forebears trace a transnational Scarborough, one that tugs just beyond the woven strings of this thing called Canada, across seas and oceans.
And before these books, a long tradition of spoken word poetry—like RISE (Reaching Intelligent Souls Everywhere) Edutainment—found fertile soil in the tucked away spaces of libraries, shopping malls, and church halls. This community’s words were hummed, snapped to, and recited as oral tradition for as long as (if not longer than) we have written them down.
But for all the musical, culinary, artistic, and literary bloom in the crevices of my hometown, it often seems that nothing about the community’s narrative from the outside shifts. Media outlets continue to homogenize and misrepresent the region as a society in tatters. Eglinton Avenue remains rubble “under construction,” preventing efficient commute times back east and becoming a running joke for people on the move. Hardly any trains touch the neighbourhoods east of Victoria Park. The buses, coming in caravans of five at a time every hour and a half for weary pilgrims, are hardly worth the journey to the west.
Scarborough, in Toronto’s popular imagination, remains a punchline, the subject of quotidian dismissal. During my last year of grad school, within earshot at a college event, the son of a Canadian dignitary once proudly declared that “no high culture comes out of Scarborough.” He then proceeded to list fine, award-winning works of Canadian letters. I wonder what he’d have thought of the 2017 winner of the Rogers Writers Trust Fiction Prize?
A nauseating cognitive dissonance washes over me whenever Scarborough writers are hailed as “Canadian Literature.” After years of neglect, from the Toronto cosmopolitan imagination to the national one, we’re supposed to believe that this canon was suddenly “making room” for us?
As an English major at the University of Toronto Scarborough, I was required to take a Canadian Literature course. Hadn’t I, as a naive student and obnoxious Americophile, read enough CanCon for a lifetime? Didn’t I get enough Murdoch Mysteries and Margaret Atwood growing up? To push this onerous business out of the way, I enrolled in a St. George Campus summer course after my third year. The professor, bless their non-Canadian heart, attempted to infuse the class with excitement over the literatures of this thing called Canada.
Was there hardly any space for Indigenous and Black writers, let alone immigrants of colour, in this windburnt and anemic corpus we call Canadian Literature?
They handed out the syllabus: Charles Sangster and the Confederate Poets, E.J. Pratt, Alice Munro, a single poem by Dionne Brand, and five pieces by First Nations poets during the very last week of classes. Perhaps a Tekahionwake (E. Pauline Johnson) piece in Week One, but only insofar as we read her in relation to the ineffable Charles Sangster. Was there hardly any space for Indigenous and Black writers, let alone immigrants of colour, in this windburnt and anemic corpus we call Canadian Literature?
A few years later, the Canadian canon, and the literary industry itself, exploded. In 2015, the University of British Columbia suspended the novelist Steven Galloway while the school investigated him for allegations of physical and sexual assault. Under the collective “UBC Accountable,” big names from Canadian Literature defended Galloway’s supposed right to due process, afforded to him by his career’s trajectory and by tenure at a major institution. Galloway was fired in June with payout, and has since launched a defamation lawsuit.
In the years that followed, creative writing programs and publications have experienced a veritable reckoning from professional writers who have faced, often in terrible and violent ways, the horrors of this nation’s literary industry. Stories have emerged from women, queer, trans, Indigenous, Black, and racialized writers about the rampant gatekeeping across institutions. The Galloway case, and other cases across Canada, have made clear that Canadian Literature is, by and large, a cishet whites-only club, with no place for the differently embodied and minoritarian voice. Daring to challenge this status quo would be met by swift and systemic retribution.
Through its systemic abuse and gatekeeping, under the guise of ‘professionalization,’ CanLit-as-industry has stolen and plundered the literary imagination.
In 2018, editors Hannah McGregor, Julie Rak, and Erin Wunker published Refuse: CanLit in Ruins, a collection of essays that responds to the wave of public controversies around the literary enterprise. The contributors lay bare the mangled politics of CanLit and posit possible alternatives in rebuilding the collective work of literature. What should be a trusted establishment of literary education is instead verbed as a criminal cartel of rampant discrimination, rape culture, and economic exploitation. Through its systemic abuse and gatekeeping, under the guise of “professionalization,” CanLit-as-industry has stolen and plundered the literary imagination. Canadian Literature is, was, and remains in ruins.
What if Scarborough refused to create out of this refuse? What if Scarborough were a beautiful and creative world unto its own? What if we could stitch together an imagination threaded from our global experience and our local knowledge, away from this thing called Canada and Canadian Literature?
In the middle of that summer semester, my friends and I celebrated our poet-mentor’s birthday with the most fitting of events: a poetry reading. After the reading, and over many beers, we joked about my disdain for the Canadian Literature class. “You should just drop it and take my class in the Winter!” When pressed to make his case, my poet-mentor declared his intent to bring in active writers in the local community. We were to read their work the week before, then bring them in for a reading and book signing the following class. Living, breathing poets? I was sold.
Literature isn’t just dead old white guys. Literature is a nebulous, living creature constantly made and remade on the page, in the book signing, and in the public event. I marvelled at the meditative pace of Souvankham Thammavongsa reading from her collection, Light. Or Nyla Matuk’s brazen and ambitious Sumptuary Laws, and Trish Salah’s piercing and moving Wanting in Arabic. And then, my classmates and I wrote our own pieces to perform for each other and brought them to the many poetry readings that dot the city west of Victoria Park Road.
But that’s the problem. Beyond our classrooms, we had to venture west of Scarborough to read our works and find literary communities elsewhere. In Kensington Market, or at Pauper’s Pub on Bathurst and Bloor, or on the Danforth, we found some listeners, but only if we happened to know someone from an MFA program, or in the eccentric (but unmistakably warm) world of Toronto’s poetry scene. My friends and I decided to write poetry about this town on our own. If the commute westbound proved too arduous, we could read them to each other instead.
Literature is a nebulous, living creature constantly made and remade on the page, in the book signing, and in the public event.
Writing Scarborough poetry was not without its precedent. In 2014, Michael Lista published his poetry collection The Scarborough, on the infamous Karla Homolka and Paul Bernardo murders in the late 1980s. To this day, some of those pieces continue to haunt me, like his description of the Scarborough Bluffs: “[the] keloid scar where a wound has frescoed/[o]ver the vanishing land’s gag order to the south.” While tragedy does organize much of our work, the recent “florescence” of Scarborough writing offers something new: voices and characters of colour, across social class, with different understandings of beauty in their hometown. In a 2019 CBC interview, Téa refuses the tragic mode altogether: “Galloway [the Scarborough neighbourhood] was amazing.”
Audaciously, well before our hometown’s literary glow-up, we imagined the emergence of an entire Scarborough School of Literature™.
In 2015, Natasha and I once joked about starting a new literary movement together, like the Beat Generation, or the Black Mountain School. Audaciously, well before our hometown’s literary glow-up, we imagined the emergence of an entire Scarborough School of Literature™. What would our aesthetic mission be? “Scarborough writing needs to make you feel ways.” Not just to feel a way, in the singular, like that Drake song. Not to feel some type of way. But to feel ways: to stir up a plethora of emotions that compel you into action.
Ate (Tagalog: older sister) Catherine’s Scarborough makes me feel ways. It also has the distinction of being the first book to make me bawl like a baby in years. I devoured it in a few short hours on a single bed at the University of Hawai‘i, where I spent part of graduate school. As the spirit of Laura, a girl who died in a fire with her abusive father, glides away into the unknown, clutching at moments of her dear friends as they age, I also clung to the book’s last pages, not wanting the story to be over. A continent and half an ocean away from my hometown, the story between Scarborough’s glossy black covers made me ache for my neighbourhood. But most of all, Scarborough offered an example of what my hometown is and could be: “diverse” out of the detritus of globalization, anti-racist in the work of bringing these people together.
I don’t want to be a Diverse Canadian Author. I want to be a writer who happens to be Filipino and has something to say about the literary work of anti-racism and decolonization. I want the writing from my community to be read, considered, critiqued, and—yes—criticized on its own terms, and on its own imaginings beyond this thing we call Canada.
In her own words, my friend Carrianne Leung aptly captures what we all set out to do. Writing from the east side of Toronto, just west of the volatile Pickering Nuclear Power Plant, we are a “thorn in the side of and in excess of the narrow containers” of this thing called Canadian Literature.
A little-known secret about Scarborough: it’s a marvellous hiking town. Along the Rouge Beach in the town’s far east, you can meander through some trails beside the wailing railroad tracks. Watch out for the thorny shrubs that poke you on the side on your way out towards Pickering. Down on the water below, sometimes the cry of the loon pierces through the air, in cacophony with the occasional whoop-whoop of the power plant. The plant’s narrow grey containers house little supernovae, its by-products seeping westward, washing upon the radiance of the little stars that constellate into home.
