Once again Spacing is pleased to be a part of Toronto Public Library’s Keep Toronto Reading program. This April the library hopes the whole city will join in reading Austin Clarke’s 2009 Toronto Book Award winner, More, a novel that has inner-city Toronto as its very backbone. Throughout the month, Spacing Toronto will present a series of posts exploring the book and its relationship to our city.
Spacing dedicates a lot of time and energy to discussions of public transit systems, both at home and abroad. It is understood that the way people move around-and the way that they are able to move around-says a lot about the city’s values. More captures wonderfully several elements of our own Toronto Transit System. How they speak to our values as a city I am hesitant to say.
Idora’s travels are so carefully mapped, corner-by-corner, streetcar stop by streetcar stop, that her use of the TTC becomes a record of how the system actually works, how each form of transport feeds into the others. Sometimes she makes easy trips: If she walks from the Trinity College dining hall where she works to the El Mocambo for a white rum and Diet Coke, she’ll take the 506 east to get home.
But many of her routes are complicated ones. As a new immigrant, living outside the downtown core and working as a maid in Rosedale, “she had left for work in the darkness; travelling by bus, then streetcar, then subway, then having to walk down into the cold Ravine” (65). To go to her Holy Aposticals Church she requires two buses (north on the 75 Sherbourne, and then north on either the 29 Dufferin or the 63 Ossington) and a subway, which lucky for Idora runs on Sunday mornings. Dozens of voyages like the following assert that the novel is here and nowhere else:
“The train crosses a bridge. I glance up at the route map to check the station I want to get off at. Yonge Street. One stop west of Sherbourne, where I must get off. The next time the subway train stops, I read BROADVIEW, printed on the cement wall of the station. YONGE, my stop, has not yet come up.” (155)
But the feeling of what it’s like to be a rider on the TTC is also brought out in More. Riding transit in Toronto is, most often, an exercise in extreme discretion. Bumping into someone means muttering the quietest sorry you can get away with. In return, they will nod as quickly as they can, probably never making eye contact, and neither of you will acknowledge each other for the rest of the ride. For the most part, this apparent desire to remain singular, isolated, and usually headphoned is unfriendly but harmless. This tendency to ignore those a foot away is less quirky, more rude, when it involves ignoring the woman with a rambunctious toddler she’s trying to hold onto, or the tiny Nona with a million grocery bags who can’t even reach the overhead bars. It also leads to this:
“The streetcar conductor had been pleading with passengers from the time they transferred at Sherbourne and Carlton, and at each subsequent stop, “Move down the aisle please! Move down the aisle please!” And after they disobeyed his pleadings, he said, “I am not moving this streetcar, ladies and gentlemen, until you move. Please, move. Please. Move down the aisle!” (196-7).
We are also (and I make this only as a personal observation; I have no statistics on my side), terrible about supporting other passengers, even when they are clearly in the right. In some countries, when two people fight on transit, the crowd will hiss at them until they stop: it is shameful to behave like that in a confined space full of strangers. We, on the other hand, seem quick to declare it not-my-battle and look away.
“Going to work, the other day, I am holding on to the metal bar in the subway coach, standing over a woman who has just asked a teenager, a girl wearing a school uniform, sitting beside her, ‘to please take your boots off the seat, if you don’t mind. I am sorry to have to ask you to….’
“The snow on her boots was melting. The student put her other foot on the seat…and then this student tells the woman, ‘And fuck you, bitch! You’re not my fucking muvver!’ And the other passengers hear the girl. And they hold their heads down. Some are looking into their newspapers […] And the woman turned redder in her face. She looked as if she had put too much strawberry powder on her face; and meanwhile, still the passengers remained silent.
[…]
The subway door closed behind the little girl […] And then the passengers in the coach immediately began to talk, amongst themselves, saying what they should have done, if…and what they should have done, if…”
(150-1).
What is the explanation for our collective wimpy kid psyche? Part of it may be the close quarters; getting involved in a conflict when there is literally no way to extract oneself from it is intimidating. But it’s not just a fear of conflict, surely: it’s a fear of interaction. Idora lies in bed thinking about her “silent journey home, sitting beside men and women she did not know, who do not speak to her, not even saying “Cold-enough for ya?”, no one saying “Good evening” or “Good morning” (68), and compares it with the literal and figurative warmth of her native Barbados, how “she said “Good morning” and “Good afternoon” to strangers, especially to old people […],” (69), and how ‘”Lordy-Lord! Its hot-hot today, eh!’ Even this friendliness would greet a stranger” (70).
We are not, as individuals, a mean bunch. And while Idora’s TTC may not reflect the day-to-day, they certainly feel familiar. Surely, as a collective, we are not both timid and unfriendly?
Photo by fortinbras.
4 comments
This is all hardly unique to Toronto, though — the same could be said about people on public transit in many English-speaking cities. Londoners are renowned for being silent and stony-faced on the Tube — there are hilarious pictures of a woman completely ignoring Tony Blair’s attempts to engage her in conversation during a photo op (http://solo2.abac.com/themole/tubenews.html#blairtube).
“Surely, as a collective, we are not both timid and unfriendly?” This is Toronto, and yes, we are.
I have long noticed a kind of collective angst on crowded subways, streetcars and buses. It most often occurs during the rush hour(s) period of going to and returning from – work. A kind of sad desperation where people are lost in their own world of worry, very occasionally glancing at strangers just feet or inches away, their glum expressions getting glummer as they reinforce each others’ sad expressions. All prisoners of a society not of their individual making but collectively built by adapting to isolaing ways.
A viral sickness of sadness?
Those were some of my favourite parts of the book, Idora’s travels through the city, including her walkabouts in the neighbourhoods surrounding her and her excursions.