The Humber River is a major artery of Toronto/Tkaronto, flowing from the Niagara Escarpment through the city’s west end and eventually into Lake Ontario. Because I am a cultural outsider, I had to learn the other names for the Humber River: “Cobechenonk” meaning “leave the canoes and come back” or “Gabekanaang-ziibi” for “the River that Stands Still” in Anishinaabemowin; and “Niwa’ah Onega’gaih’ih” as the “Little Thundering Waters” in Haudenosaunee. From these names, I can see that the river holds a deep significance in Indigenous cultures, but it is difficult for me to sense these multiplicities today when I cross the spanning Humber Bay Arch Bridge just above the meeting between the river and the Lake. Appearing like an animated backdrop, the river is now experienced as a visual object from the bridge, which connects as much as it disconnects. And as I see the other pedestrians walking along the structure taking pictures of the river with other people unintentionally in the frame, I begin to feel as if I am part of the background as well, for this postmodern urban landscape has structured everyone into feeling like walking talking silos.
And it is precisely this – dare I say – Torontonian affect that Dionne Brand’s stunning 2005 novel What We Long For touches upon. Beginning near the Humber River, the text brings readers inside a Toronto subway car on the Line 2 Bloor-Danforth hovering decametres crossing a railway bridge over the thundering water on a Wednesday spring morning. The novel is really about Tuyen, Clara, Oku, Jackie, and Quy, but we don’t see them first and not all at once. The Torontonians in the subway car are foregrounded before even Tuyen, Clara, and Oku step onto the train and begin to talk, disrupting the silence around them. There is a blurring between the contours of the subway riders and the three main characters, as we see the riders themselves listen to the characters’ conversation and weave it into the larger narrative of their lives. The subway car riders are not just NPCs in the background but thinking and feeling characters like the main protagonists. The blurring through the multi-perspectivity in the narrative then flattens the distinction between major and minor characters: for the subway riders, Tuyen, Clara, and Oku’s conversation functions as a minor event in their lives; and for the three characters, the other passengers become a backdrop. Through the foregrounding of the riders, Brand disrupts the characters’ illusion of living in Toronto – that they are alone and untouched by others.
The illusion of being alone has a Schrödinger nature with both an aversion to and a yearning for intimacy, since the riders – and the five main characters – feel the alienation of the city and want to connect with other people but not without discomfort.
As Brand writes,
Mornings are like that on the subway trains – everyone having left their sovereign houses and apartments and rooms to enter the crossroads of the city, they first try at not letting the city touch them, holding on to the meagre privacy of city with three million people. (4)
Suggestive here is how architectural designs of the city in terms of homes emphasize individualism and spurn community to fuel the fantasy that people live alone and apart from one another, yet the illusion falls apart through the public, communal space of the subway car. The city is designed to attach inhabitants to the belief of autonomy so much so that they feel averse to any proximity to strangers.
At the same time, there is a deep longing for connection: “People turn into other people imperceptibly, unconsciously, right here in the grumbling train” (Brand 6). Even though outwardly Torontonians want distance, they are still listening to each other on the subway.
So there is a sense of missed connection here that Brand encapsulates in the novel because they do not bond over their similar sense of alienation and detachment. Yes, these Torontonians represent the diversity and pluralism of Canada’s multiculturalism, but why don’t they bond over their “heterogeneous baggage” with their own “ghosts” (6-7)? We must ask, what then prevents intimacy between them (or us)? As we will see in the “main” drama with the five characters, the source of this paradoxical tension is not simply architectural design but greater structural forces.
The four friends – Tuyen, Clara, Oku, and Jackie – are Canadians who also yearn for connection but feel repelled by it. Tuyen is the second-generation daughter of Vietnamese parents, and she is in love with her best friend Carla, who is half Black and Italian. She struggles to admit her feelings to Carla and to subscribe to her family’s traditional Vietnamese values. Carla, on the other hand, does not reciprocate Tuyen’s feelings. She is ambivalent towards intimacy because of the trauma surrounding her fractured family. She wants to protect her brother Jamal but is also overwhelmed by the responsibility. Oku, the son of Jamaican immigrants, wants to be closer to his father but is pressured by his expectations, and he is attracted to Jackie but is afraid to be intimate. Jackie whose parents are Black Nova Scotians feels ambivalent towards Oku because she does not want to give up her independence, and she also dates only white men.
Longing is tied to issues of belonging. While the four friends are connected by their shared struggles of diaspora and racialization, especially since all share a sense of ambivalence toward their parents and their cultural heritage, there is a perpetual sense of detachment that is structural. As David Chariandy notes in his 2007 article “The Fiction of Belonging,” the four friends feel alienated because they feel that no matter what they do they will be “eternally … regarded …as outsiders” (823). The characters struggle to feel an affinity with Canada because they are burdened by the lingering effects of surviving white Canada. So, to a large extent, it is structural exclusions within Canadian society deter intimacy for racialized Canadians.
What about subjects who do not have citizenship yet are tied to Canada? The fifth character of the novel is Quy, Tuyen’s older brother who was separated from her parents before she was born. Quy represents the unresolved trauma for Tuyen and her family, and the novel is interspersed with chapters of his first-person narration of his survival. Although he longs to be reunited with his family in Canada, he does not belong in Canada. As noted by Naava Smolash and Myka Tucker-Abramson, “Quy always remains on the border” in the novel to reflect his non-citizen status (187). Quy eventually comes to Canada, and his ending (which I won’t spoil) is a contentious and multi-perspective one. It prompts readers to circle back to the novel’s suggestive introduction and understand that there are no minor (outsiders) and major characters (insiders) here, just perspectives. The true antagonistic force in the novel is the structural conditions which continue to alienate and separate us.
So, the implied object for the eponymous What We Long For is intimacy and the blockages of it. Brand’s alienating urban post-modernist city is a metonymic function of the greater nation-state project of Canada under which we desire connection all the while it evades us.
Works Cited
Brand, Dionne. What We All Long For / Love Enough: Two Toronto Novels. Vintage Canada, 2020.
Chariandy, David. “‘The Fiction of Belonging’: On Second-Generation Black Writing in Canada.”
Callaloo, vol. 30, no.3, 2007, pp. 818-29. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/30139279.
Accessed 30 Sept. 2024.
Smolash, Naava, and Myka Tucker-Abramson. “Migrants and Citizens: The Shifting Ground of
Struggle in Canadian Literary Representation.” Studies in Canadian Literature, vol. 36, no. 2,
2011, pp. 165-196. University of New Brunswick, https://journals.lib.unb.ca/index.php/SCL/article/view/18922.
Monique Attrux
After spending two decades in Hong Kong where she was born and raised, Monique took her passion for literature with her to Toronto, where she became a PhD candidate at York University. She is deeply passionate about exploring how language shapes and reflects ethnic identities in the realm of literature. Her academic journey has been enriched by the generous support of several scholarships: York Entrance Scholarship (2020), the Vivienne Poy Hakka Research Award (2020), the Ontario Graduate Scholarship (2021), the SSHRC Joseph-Armand Bombardier Canadian Graduate Scholarship (2022), the Canada-China Initiatives Fund (2022), and the Clara Thomas Scholarship in Canadian Studies (2023). She is shaped by Evelyn Lau, Roxane Gay, George Orwell, bell hooks, and Audre Lorde. Although she has a bias for clean prose, her reading tastes are eclectic, and she has yet to claim a favourite author. In time, she hopes to dabble in some creative writing of her own, but for now, she will enjoy the sweet escapes of getting lost in other people’s wor(l)ds.