TOK 5: Writing the New Toronto ed. by Helen Walsh (review)

TOK 5: Writing the New Toronto is the fifth volume from Zephyr Press's Diaspora Dialogues series. The poems and short fiction in this collection centre on the city: though most pieces emphasize character development, the volume's focus on urban spaces directs readers to understand Toronto as made up of shared places that are experienced in different ways by different individuals and communities. The instruction to the reader from the editor, Helen Walsh, to "be a tourist in this known, and yet unknown, Toronto" (7), highlights these differing perceptions of the city. This imagined reader is already familiar with Toronto: the pleasure of reading is seen to come from having known spaces recontextualized, as the reader is invited to see through the eyes of an imagined Other. The writer is thus positioned as a kind of guide, set up to reveal "the truth" of ethnic experience to a "foreign" audience. It is logical, then, that the bulk of the collection is realist fiction, accessible to a reader who needs to recognize a familiar space in order to understand it also as a new destination.

The anthology includes work drawn from Diaspora Dialogues's mentorship program, which means that it contains work by established writers—Emma Donoghue, M. G. Vassanji, Nalo Hopkinson, and Shyam Selvadurai are examples— alongside work by emerging writers. Despite the diversity of the pieces, some common themes emerge. Many of the writers engage with questions of power in both public and private spheres, and many contest ideas of inheritance or family through expressions of anxiety over parenting. The power of racist narratives to limit expressions of personal identity is a repeated motif, and this racism is seen to come from within particular communities as well as to be imposed on them from outside. Taken together, these pieces present the idea of the multicultural city as being made up of a series of spaces that fragment individual identity. For example, in "Gaughin's Chair," Selvadurai's novella extract, the protagonist experiences York University campus as a place of loneliness and anonymity, but it is also a place where he can "be" gay, pursuing a relationship with his classmate, James. In contrast, his home is invaded by countless cousins, in front of whom he must remain closeted. Who he is allowed to be, and the ways that he can express his identity, are dictated by where in the city he is, and there does not seem to be anywhere that he can be fully himself.

Several pieces explore ideas of power and complicity in ways that complicate a simple victim/victimizer paradigm. In Michael Fraser's short story, "Around the Way," the child protagonist accompanies his father on visits to his father's many lovers, until he realizes that knowing his father's secrets gives him control of the situation. "Tableau Vivant," by Emma Donoghue, based on the historical fact of Clara Ford's 1895 murder trial, is written as a transcribed interrogation that reveals the truth even as it conceals it. Ultimately, it suggests that the questions that are asked are embedded in a context that strives to allow only one story to be told. However, Donoghue's writing subverts this intent, allowing a different understanding of the situation. A particularly interesting look at power comes up in Leslie Shimotakahara's short story, "The House on St. Clarens," which details a father's brutal insistence on forcing his mother to confront a painful past. The truth revealed here is not healing, but caustic. Though it brings the protagonist a new understanding of her father, the father's insistence on revealing the past seems no more beneficial than his mother's denial of it. And if we understand the father as a kind of writer, seeking to replace one story with another, we see troubling questions raised about the role of the artist and the power that he or she may wield.

Other pieces, particularly the poems, explore the possibility of art and...