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Paul Taylor, ed., The Heart of the Community: The Best of The Carnegie Newsletter. Vancouver: New Star Books, 2003.

Reviewed by Reg Johanson
The Rain 2:2 (March-April 2004): 4


“People shouldn’t have rights. It restricts others, makes it harder to change. You have to be flexible.”
— Gordon Campbell in 1995, scooped in the Carnegie Newsletter.

The Heart of the Community selects poetry, journalism, editorials, tributes, eulogies, and cartoons which have appeared in the Carnegie Center’s Newsletter since 1986. In a tribute to/review of the Newsletter—published in the Newsletter in 1991—Sandy Cameron says “in the Carnegie Newsletter the people of the Downtown Eastside are exercising the power to define their own reality”; the Newsletter “overflows with the liberating power of self-definition” (47). “Pain”, “anger”, “compassion”, and “caring” are its hallmarks. “The Carnegie Newsletter is political because it helps people find the power to define who they are, and because of its prophetic sense of justice […] The Carnegie Newsletter, however, is not political in the traditional way followed by many who are committed to political struggle. You won’t find many abstract references to socialism or capitalism” (48). “It is a joyous expression of the politics of the heart, and it is a fundamental threat to any ideology” (49).

So for Cameron, “ideology” is opposed to “the politics of the heart”—“ideology” is abstract, intellectual, imposed from without, while “the politics of the hear”—pain, anger, compassion, caring—cut through the pre-defined or other-defined forms of ideology and struggle to create “self-definition”.

Certainly, the struggle to define themselves has been critical for residents of the DTES. City governments, in cooperation with the police and developers, have been trying to get rid of the neighbourhood for years. This is graphically represented in the City of Vancouver’s map of “Downtown Vancouver Neighbourhoods” reprinted in the anthology (119), in which the “Downtown Eastside” disappears completely beneath the more tourist-and-condo-buyer-friendly names “Central Waterfront Port Lands”, “Gastown”, “Chinatown”, “Victory Square”, and “False Creek North”.

Much of the poetry collected in the anthology is written against personal annihilation. The “you” in many of the poems indicts the killers:

If I were a rat in a bucket
instead of your daughter,
would you take up the shovel just once,
killing me outright?

[…]

If you were a wild dog
instead of my father,
how many times would I try to befriend you,
before shooting you down? (34—Joanne Arnott, “If Truth Is Honour”) 

In “your drug problem”, Jiang Chang writes:

your drug problem
pushes me underground
makes me dirty
makes all my money go to
greedy gangsters and
warmongers
instead of into health care

[…]

your prison industrial complex
your courts and lawyers and detox beds
your drug problem
destroys others’ lives (188)

In the poem by N’ingin Snapping Turtle, “Society” replaces “you”:

Society says
education
and skills
are most
necessary
I think
sometimes
it kills
Communication
must be more
than that
I
know people
who are scared to speak
cause they don’t
talk good
couldn’t write
any better
pretty bad—
I had a friend
who killed himself
his people
were very humiliated
on his note
he misspelled
suicide
on his grave
I wrote
George is dead, diedand gone to Hell
‘cause he couldn’t spell (42—“Condemned”)

And in “Take Down Your Pants”, Patricia Chauncey switches the “you” around by putting on the voice of the “society” as it makes its humiliating demands:

TAKE DOWN YOUR PANTS AND
SHOW US
YOUR PAIN WHILE WE EXPIRE IN
OUR
MIDDLECLASS POSTURE OF SYMPATHY (79)

The point of view in these poems is from within the “community”, while the “you” is the constitutive outside of “World-Class” Vancouver and its boosters, most often represented in The Heart Of the Community by the Gastown Business Improvement Association, The Chinatown Merchants’ Association, The Vancouver Sun, and the BC Liberals.

The “ideology of the heart” espoused in The Heart of the Community makes sense in terms of the wide coalition necessary for defending the DTES. But anthologies and communities always leave somebody out. What, and who, does the ideology of the heart and its plain-speaking ethos ignore? While The Heart of the Community does include debates and disagreements between members of the community it claims to offer a voice to, I notice, for example, that criticisms of DERA/Coalition of Progressive Electors are not included in the anthology, only alluded to in the published responses to those criticisms. Even the NDP escapes, despite their vicious welfare-slashing and the waiting periods they imposed. These are serious omissions, especially when these groups have so much power and money. There is only one reference to the term “poverty pimp” in The Heart of the Community, and it refers to the Vancouver Police Department’s propaganda film Through a Blue Lens—an easy target.

Readers interested in the Carnegie Newsletter would do well to read its uncritical support for the Portland Hotel Society, DEYAS, DERA, and other players in the poverty business claiming to have the best interest of the community at heart against the newsletters published by The Housing Action Committee, the Anti-Poverty Committee, and End Legislated Poverty, among others.