[011] "If Something Pops Off, We’re Here Together."
Encampment residents in Toronto, v2: On the relationships that keep Moss Park's Tent Town safe, and one poet's memories of "the old ways" that survived in Three Mile Plains, Nova Scotia.
Hello, Tired Ones,
Another week, another sign of life, another reason that showing up’s still worth it.
In my work as a writer and designer for culture change, I come across important stories about progress that’s actually working for people.
These are stories that refuse the false choice: sweet indulgence, or the bitter pill.
They help us to remember: before there was bureaucratic care, or self-care, there was simply care.
So come on in, sit down. For the next few minutes at least, there’s no rush. It’s a new week, after all.
December’s care workers: Encampment residents (and neighbours) in Toronto
“But Beauty survived, secreted
In freight trains snorting in their pens…”
Sourcing notes: Photo by sergio souza on Unsplash.
—
This weekend, I spoke on a friend’s online panel about grief during the holidays. I told some stories about my Mom, and my family, and some things that have helped us get through losing her.
Among the people I could see on video, most of them cried in response to the things I shared. But I didn’t feel emotional at all. And not in the way I’m used to not feeling emotional, either. I felt calm.
I don’t know if it was because I’ve gotten used to grief, or because I’m not at all used to it enough. And anyway, I’m wondering what might happen next time – if I can let go of this apparent need to be calm in matters of grieving.
A song, for pairing
“Time and Affection” by Aquakulture, from the album Legacy (2020).
A Halifax neo-soul group, led by Lance Sampson, record a sparkling album with prize money from CBC’s 2018 Searchlight contest. Sampson wrote the winning track, “Sure,” while teaching himself guitar during a sentence at Nova Scotia’s Springhill Institution. Listen to more.
Sourcing notes: via “Aquakulture. Legacy. Black Buffalo Records.” a review by Jesse Locke for musicworks.ca.
I found his music by searching for Jeremy Costello, one of his bandmates – who’s, incidentally, the songwriter behind the truly excellent podcast theme featured below.
A healthy idea, to chew on
“Water,” by an episode of the podcast We Are Not the Virus, by Encampment Support Network (ESN). September 1, 2020.
On the norms and relationships that make Moss Park’s Tent Town safe – as explained by the Mayor of Tent Town, Little Man – and how journalists can stop messing up their coverage of unhoused residents and communities:
Little Man:
So where we’re standing, we’re at the North end of Moss Park Baseball Field. I’m on the West side of the diamond… we have tents all around us. We call it Tent Town – not Tent City. Tent Town. And I’m the Mayor, slash security guard, of Tent Town.When we started this there was about ten tents. Now we’re over a hundred. If people could come down here and see how we’re living, they’d be amazed. We BBQ… You’d think we’re at a trailer park. I swear to God, you’d think – I should start charging admission.
My name is Richard Dixon, aka Tent Town’s Mayor, aka The Most Weezy Leezy Geezy Little Man. […]
Aliya Pabani:
I’m Aliya Pabani. A couple of months ago, I joined the Encampment Support Network, this ad hoc group of people who started doing outreach to encampments around the city once the pandemic hit. […] It’s hard to overstate how much things can change in an encampment day-to-day. And a lot happened on the two days that I was at Moss Park. The Tent Town you’ll hear about in this episode is not the Tent Town that’s there now. […]
Little Man:
I grew up in Regent Park, one of Toronto’s – or could have even been Canada’s first [eds. public] housing complex. It was awesome. When I was growing up, there was no doors locked. Every house looked after all the kids, all us kids. […]So you know, like, they ripped down all my – the housing I grew up with, like [inaudible] Court – Regent Park’s all gone for, like, buildings. It’s changed. Like this, all this, that used to be the RCMP building at Jarvis and Dundas. That’s the only building from back twenty years ago. All of this is new. Look at this! Moss Park is still standing, amazingly. But there’s nothing for us. […]
All of these guys, I grew up with. I know them from my hood. So that’s what also makes it easier, you know? […]
At 11 o’clock, we try to quiet it down. If someone’s playing their music, we’ll go over there – [whispering] “Listen, can you just quiet it down?” Because there are people who go to bed earlier. There are older – you know? In the morning, I go check out all my friends. I call names. I make sure, you know what I mean? He’s my family. Over there, this lady, they’re my family.
They’re the ones I go to when I’m hungry, I need a smoke, I need a couple dollars, this, that. They’re the ones – and they come to me. And they know that at the end of the day, if something pops off, we’re here together. You know, safety in number is how I see it. The more we have looking for each other, the less we’ll lose.
AP:
From the outside, encampments might just look like a couple of tents sort of scattered around. But there’s actually a lot of intention behind where people set up. And even though Tent Town’s only been set up for a few months, Little Man tells me they’ve got a whole decision-making structure for keeping things cohesive.
Little Man:
A lot of people want to move out here, but—
AP:
What’s the process people go through if they want to move up here?
Little Man:
Well, I give them an application, and then we go to the committee, and then we vote on it. And it has to be three elite committee members or more – can vote – have to say yes. So if I want my friend from down there to move up here, and I’m the only one who says yes, then he’s not moving up here. We go to the – we call them the Dog’s Den – and we say, “Listen, this guy wants to move up here, is there a problem?” If there’s no problem, he can move up here. That’s—
AP:
So who are the, like, the people who make the decision in this area?
Little Man:
Yeah, I can’t give you that information. All I can say is we call ourselves the Dog’s Den, you know. Woof! Woof! We get it done. I find out if they’re warring with anybody up here, I find out if they’ve done any dirt down here. They say, no, they just want to relax and shit, then I come bring it back to my people, and we vote on it. […]Suspects, we call ‘em. We call everyone a suspect. Like, when you first came here, you were a suspect. We don’t know if you’re a cop or not. Then I get to know you and I can figure it out.
AP:
Wait, how did you know I wasn’t a cop? How’d you figure it out? [laughing]
Little Man:
Well, because… most cops… don’t help. Most cops are out to arrest you, or see what – it’s their training to feed, you know, to get information. You’re not asking me the vulnerable information. What you’re asking is the vital information. Which is housing, which is what’s going on out here. Cops aren’t like that. Cops give themselves away. […]
AP:
I ask Little Man if he’s considering moving out.
Little Man:
They want to put us out in North York. Well, I got a grandchild on the way. I got a sick mother, a sick aunt, they live together. They need me – close to them. I can’t be traveling 3-4 hours to get to my Mom if she has an accident. So, you know, really and truly, there’s no affordable housing down here. To get a one bedroom apartment, single man, in downtown Toronto, they want 1500 dollars. We really need housing! And not – put us in a hotel over here, put us in a hotel down here. Oh, okay? How are you going to give grown people a curfew? I don’t understand that. Eleven o’clock curfew, check in. Like, I’d rather tent. I’m going to tent all summer, if I have to do that. My word! I will not go – it’s like being in jail.
A good practice, to freeze for later
If Something Pops Off, We’re Here Together.—We Call Ourselves The Dog’s Den. Woof! Woof! We Get It Done.
Encampments, surprise surprise, are human societies. Even after only a few months, there is governance. There are norms and rules and committees and frickin’ application forms. Of course there are! Most importantly, there are relationships that go back decades. And those include relationships between people and the place itself – to say nothing of the places that don’t even exist anymore. I spent a fair bit of time in Moss Park a few years back. You know, in that way where you start to recognize the people in the area, and maybe sustain a few conversations with some of the workers. But people like Little Man know this place like home. Because it’s been home.
Not all of Toronto’s encampments are like Tent Town, but that’s not the point. The point is, you can’t represent a place without taking cues from the people who know it best. In other words, knowing the character of a place requires appreciating the people who live there, and working with them as more than just your characters. Aliya points this out in conversation with Dan Misener, the Broadcaster In Residence at Ryerson’s Allan Slaight Radio Institute – speaking alongside her co-producer Allie Graham. Here’s Aliya:
Another realization I had was just how important the place [Moss Park] was to the people living in it. And that’s not always as much the case with all encampments. Sometimes people have different concerns, like not being discovered, or just being in a place that’s near water, or being in a place near people they know. There’s myriad concerns that people have when they choose the place. But Moss Park is pretty unique in the sense that, you know, a lot of people can speak to a strong connection going from childhood…
In podcasting, I strongly believe that one of the ways to get out of the limitations of the podcasting storytelling structure – that, like, This American Life has really dictated – is to try to think about… how the structure should follow from who you imagine the main character to be.
Like, I come in so late in the episode, as a narrator. And the problem of the episode comes in late in the episode. The first things you hear is the amazing voice of Grant Ellis, a little bit of poetry, and then it’s Little Man just describing the space, and then finally, maybe a third of the way through, you hear about water.
Sourcing notes: CJRU The Scope at Ryerson, Radio Everywhere: Encampment Support Network Profile. December 9, 2020. Based on panel discussion, hosted November 16, 2020.
I really can’t stress this enough: the people who know the place you want to report on, or work with – they really are smart people. I only dwell on this because it’s become something of a folksy truism among journalists and service providers to trust ‘lived experience.’ But it’s practiced much less often than its lip service would suggest. Aliya picked up on this, too:
It’s become a bit of a cliche to be like, you know, “Unhoused people’s voices matter.” But actually treating it like they actually do matter. They actually do have all the information we need to know. We don’t need to frame and reframe. I’ve been really quite moved by the extent to which people’s analysis of their particular place, politically – within the context of the larger culture – like, it’s so on point. You don’t need some expert to come in and say, “This is a result of a housing crisis.” People know. They’ve lived it, and they know.
There’s a strong desire among privileged professionals – storytellers and audiences, planners and funders – to mediate and re-frame the stories of people whose lives have been marked by large systems and structures. While providing context is a vital role of journalists, still – professionals like me seem to have trouble trusting people’s capacity to accurately describe the underlying structure of their own lives. And that has a lot to do with what we don’t see, and especially what we don’t want to see. The good news, as producer Allie Graham points out, is that there’s a way forward. Audio journalism offers a medium that can help audiences like me put aside that urge to infantilize the “characters” of the news – provided that the journalist can put the urge aside, too. Here’s Allie:
When you have to deal with the direct impact of how messed up our political and social systems are right now, you have a very good sense of what is and isn’t working. […] And so, even thinking about the poem we hear at the beginning – I’m so glad we start with that, because I think that’s one way of articulating how deeply painful but also formative the experience of being unhoused is, and not being seen by people, and not being treated well by people in the systems you’re living in. […]
What’s so wonderful about audio being the medium here, is that… A lot people can’t – even when they want to – look past the visual judgements that they have about people. People see people living in parks, and they… Like, I do outreach at Trinity Bellwood’s, and you see some people looking at people, looking at their homes, looking at the stuff around it, which a lot of people see as trash. And it’s their stuff! And it’s their house. So what’s so good about it being audio, it removes this visual judgement that people immediately have about people, and about what poverty looks like to them, and what trash or mess, or all these other things that impede us from knowing about people, and caring about people.
If something pops off, we’re here together. We get it done.
A poem, to cleanse the palate
“Look Homeward, Exile” by George Elliott Clarke, from Blues and Bliss (2008). Written in 1985.
It begins:
I can still see that soil crimsoned by butchered
Hog and imbrued with rye, lye and homely
Spirituals everybody must know,
Still dream of folks who broke or cracked like shale…
On the poet’s homeland in Three Mile Plains, Nova Scotia, and “the old ways” that helped him remember:
But Beauty survived, secreted
In freight trains snorting in their pens, in babes
Whose faces were coal-black mirrors, in strange
Strummers who plucked Ghanaian banjos, hummed
Blind blues — precise, ornate, rich needlepoint,
In sermons scorched with sulphur and brimstone,
And in my love’s dark, orient skin that smelled
Like orange peels and tasted like rum, good God!
I remember my Creator in the old ways…
Sourcing notes: via the Atlantic Canadian Poets’ Archive.
Or, for something truly, truly special—listen to the poet himself perform it live in studio, after a conversation with Desmond Cole on the Canadaland podcast back in 2016. [Starting at 31:35.]
Something sweet, for the road
And now, a very happy baby—in some Thousand-dollar Pants.
Sourcing notes: via @keimfam6 (TikTok).
That's all for this week.
Remember: Drink when you're thirsty, nap when you can.
Kind regards,
Chris Connolly
Manager, Personalized Care
(Acting Director, Standardized Care)
Humane Resources Division
The Dept. of Emotional Labour