Montreal Serai

They say home is where the heart is. Or is it the hearth? Or both? What constitutes homelessness? Are people homeless because they brought it upon themselves,  as some would argue,   or because they have no choice, as mounting evidence would seem to indicate? Is having no home the same as having no shelter? Is a love of liberty and sleeping under the stars the same as fear of being incarcerated in an institution?  Is  ow(n)ing a mortgage the same as owning a home? Is one entitled to privacy in a public space? Are public spaces really for the public?  And most importantly, what are the causes of homelessness? What are the responsibilities of society towards the homeless?  These are the questions that Montreal Serai writers and artists have explored for our readers. Their answers have taken the shape of articles, commentaries,  reviews, short stories, poetry and multimedia art. The locales are as varied as large cities like  Kolkata, Chicago, Montreal and London or small nameless generic towns. The causes are  as dissimilar as the floundering of high finance is from  the sinking of the soul. The protagonists are individuals,  peoples, nations, statistics. Whatever it is, sit back and  read on.  No, don’t sit back. Sit up and pay close attention – because homelessness could soon strike a person near you.

 

I almost took a Sculpture class once.  The first assignment which was to create an outdoor installation and my idea was to address the manner in which a person who lives on the street becomes perceived as being of the streets, like an organic part of the urban landscape.  I propped up a stuffed human form dressed in old clothing in a corner, almost camouflaged amid discarded materials and garbage bags.  Unfortunately, it was “not art” and I ended up leaving the class, but I did continue to think about the spatial relationships between people and the materials they use and discard.

A few years later, I watched a television documentary about people who live and work in a Mexico City garbage dump.  People who work in the dumps wading through the garbage and collecting and sorting recyclable materials to sell are referred to as the pepenadores, ‘the garbage people’.  Thousands not only work but live in the dumps, building their homes out of and on top of garbage.  In the documentary a woman showed a reporter how she had organized and decorated her small dwelling, built of cardboard and scraps of metals and plastics.  She was hospitable and welcomed the guest and cameras into her space.

All over the world, -from Mexico to Manila, Philippines to Itipini, South Africa to Olinda, Brazil; from Bangkok, Thailand to Port au Prince, Haiti, to Phnom Penh, Cambodia, to Managua, Nicaragua; and from Mumbai, India, to Cairo, Egypt to Tegucigalpa, Honduras to Bulawayo, Zimbabwe, -people live and children are born in garbage dumps, living their lives as society’s discarded material.  The very definition of garbage, includes reference to people who are considered “totally worthless”.  The literal distinction then, between a discarded refrigerator and the person sleeping in it in a garbage dump does not exist.  Likewise, the distinction I had attempted to address in the sculpture class, between inanimate and living urban refuse.  Apparently, human worth, -the moral and social value of every person- is not a given.  Those who live in the assigned residential spaces are people; those who do not are somehow different.  As if the unstable spaces they occupy interact with their bodies, disrupting the boundary between what is interior and exterior, and creating such species as garbage-people.

I began to construct the Study for Berth Series as a response to what I had learned.  I found referring to the space on which the Study was being built as a garbage dump problematic and began calling it ‘the village’; not to deny the location, but to acknowledge a space where people live together as a community.  The documentary and subsequent research had left me pondering the human drive to organize and decorate the spaces in which we live, and the role this ordering plays in defining a space as “home”.  I had recently been told that a family member “did not have an address” and was living in his car in a major American city.  I wondered; is not having an address the same thing as being homeless?  What qualifies as a ‘home’?  And how does having a particular kind of ‘home’ protect us from melding with our environment?

I used many personal artefacts in the Study, parting with them and symbolically with various pasts each signified in my life (…a piece of the old such-and-such that so-and-so gave me or that I saved from such and such…). The idea of passing these things on to be recycled by the population of the village added a ritualistic and cathartic element to the project.  Reusing the items drained them of their former meanings and I found recycling material culture and giving new life to the fragments as a way of resituating my self in the world.  

Eventually the ‘village’ became too crowded, and The Berth Series was born, in a way an expansion from the dump into a shanty town or barrio.  I chose the word berth thinking about how each of us are born (birthed) into certain circumstances, with more or less space to manoeuvre and reposition ourselves.   We each are assigned a starting berth in the world, and this personal location largely determines the kinds of subjects we become and our possible future locations.

Throughout the series I struggled with a fear of romanticizing poverty, while wanting to capture the beauty of both the strange aesthetic of colourful debris and of the human interaction and daily living that was taking place within each space.   I was mindful of coveting an imagined non-industrial, non-materialistic, indigenous culture.    Working with the individual berths quite different than the village; it felt as though there had been a growth and fragmentation, and that the berths represented a new form of alienation and containment.  Compartmentalizing impoverished people in the margins of society enables us to control how much of them and the reality of their circumstances that we see and likewise, most of the berths have lids that can close and safely suppress, if not conceal the contents.  Viewers have to get close to the berth, repositioning either themselves or the berths in order to truly gaze at the colourful people going about their lives inside.

Sieglinde Lemke has argued that a diaspora aesthetic (referring to the African Diaspora) is concerned with the dialectic of the ‘home’ and the ‘host land’, and often reflects a nostalgic yearning for diasporic roots[i].  This frame can be applied to the Berth Series in that the work reflects such nostalgia and concern with ‘home’ and homelessness, but the success of the work remains questionable.   Several viewers have commented that they would like to live in a particular berth, suggesting that I captured something desirable in the berths, -perhaps a sense of communalism,-but not the stark, toxic reality of living amid garbage.  The one time the Series was exhibited feedback included one viewer who wished she had the outfit one of the figures in a berth was wearing, and another that felt it was a shame that the berths were ‘such dreary colours’.  In the way these comments suggest, I have found that especially treated individually, the berths are too easy to treat like decorative little underdeveloped doll houses.  They need the strength of their numbers to make a statement, so the twenty-four berths should have been attached together.  To exhibit them again I would use no less than one hundred, precariously stacked and attached to one another on a mound of rotting garbage.

I have found traces of the ideas behind both my attempted outdoor installation and The Berth Series realized with great success in the work of Nigerian artist Dilomprizulike, “The Junkman from Africa”, and therefore conclude this reflection with a brief discussion of his work.  Dilomprizulike builds assemblage people out of ‘junk’ and old clothing that he finds in his environment.  He lives with his family on an isolated compound in Lagos called the Junkyard, where he runs the Junkyard Museum of Awkward Things and now offers studio spaces, artist in residency and international exchange programs.  For Dilomprizulike “The junkyard is a heap of things that we call junk, but really, a heap of materials that tell stories, just like Lagos is a heap of human beings, cars and stuff that tell stories as well.”[ii]

Dilomprizulike was born Dil Humphrey-Umezulike.  He explains that his name Dilomprizulike is an icon, and that an icon “is defined as the significance or the meaning of a thing.”[iii]  His comment recalls the weight attached to naming in African cultural traditions, and in naming himself the “Junkman from Africa” he assigns himself the role of junk-keeper, while at the same time flirts with the identity of junk-man, like the pepenadores in the Mexican dump.    He refers to his name as the meaning of a thing rather than of a person, thus blurring the boundary between himself and his junk.  For Dilomprizulike, the meaning of his life lies in his role as Junkman; not just any Junkman, but The Junkman from Africa.  At a 2005 exhibition Dilomprizulike commented that contents of the rucksack worn by one of his figures are “pointers to what is happening in his life”.  When asked “who is he?” the Junkman answered “He is one of us.”[iv]

Dilomprizulike’s assemblage installations refer to what he describes as “the alienated situation of the African in his own society” and remind us that African dislocation and fragmentation exists within the continent as well as without.  The artist explains: “The alienated situation of the African in his own society becomes tragic. There is a struggle inside him, a consciousness of living with the complications of an imposed civilisation. He can no longer go back to pick up the fragments of his father’s shattered culture; neither is he equipped enough to keep pace with the white-man’s world.”[v]  As has been noted elsewhere, Dilomprizulike’s description of the struggle to achieve balance “between the Nigerian city-man and his bruised knowledge of his authentic roots”[vi] echoes Frantz Fanon’s analysis of black alienation resulting from colonialism and the legacy of the colonial encounter.[vii]

Dilomprizulike’s figures appear to be of the environment in which they are installed and also appear to be of one another.  As artist Uchechukwu James-Iroha has put it in reference to Dilomprizulike’s 2003 “Waiting for the Bus” (shown), the work seems to be one piece “broken into individual, but very organized bits”.[viii] The achievement of this sense of oneness creates the sense that the figures exist and move communally, in this case waiting together for the bus “to the promised land, in the form of economic prosperity, development and better lives.”[ix] 

And perhaps to ward against any nostalgic Western pining (diasporic or otherwise), on being asked if he feels an association with the figures waiting for the bus, Dilomprizulike’s response is that “The work – as pieces, individuals or as a whole – are living their own lives, we are watching them. There are no sentiments about them.”

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[i] Lemke (2008) “Diaspora aesthetics: exploring the African diaspora in the works of Aaron Douglas, Jacob Lawrence and Jean-Michel Basquiat” in Kobena mercer, ed.  Exiles, Diasporas and Strangers

[ii] Dilomprizulike quoted in Wood, Molara (2005) “Dilomprizulike: Wear and Tear”, The Gaurdian, Nigeria Retrieved 31-07-2009 from: http://www.odili.net/news/source/2005/apr/17/1.html

[iii] Dilomprizulike, quoted in “Dilomprizulike: The ‘Junkman From Africa’ (Nigeria)”, in Spring, Chris (2008) ANGAZA AFRICA: African Art Now.  Exh. Cat. Laurence King Publishing Ltd., London. p. 92.

[iv] Wood, Molara (2005)

[v] Dilomprizulike (2002) Africas: The artist and the City: A journey and exhibtion”, quoted in “Biographical data: Dil Humphrey-Umezulike”, African Success: People changing the face of Africa.  Retrieved 31-07-2009 from: http://www.africansuccess.org/visuFiche.php?id=165&lang=en

[vi] Africa Remix: Contemporary Art of a Continent (2005), Teachers’ package.  Hayward Gallery, South Bank Center, London. Retrieved 31.07.2009 from: http://www.southbankcentre.co.uk/minisites/africaremix/source/AfricaRemix.pdf

[vii] “Biographical data: Dil Humphrey-Umezulike”

[viii] Quoted in Wood (2005)

[ix] ibid

 All works below by rosalind hampton except Image 5 and 12.  These works are by by Dilomprizulike.

 

If homelessness of an individual or family is a tragedy, homelessness of millions of people must multiply that tragedy millionfold, mustn’t it?

Here’s a recipe for disaster.  Take a city of eight million people, destroy forty per cent of its housing stock – nearly  one and a quarter million homes – in less than eighteen months and make more than forty percent of its population technically homeless. 

That, in World War II, was what happened to London, England just one of hundreds of cities around the world faced with similar calamities.  In London, it was largely the consequence of the Blitz, concerted German aerial bombing of Britain’s capital between 1939 and 1941.  In Dresden, Germany, the British wrought similar destruction.  Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan, were devastated by the USA exploding the world’s first nuclear weapons.  Yet within just a few years, in these and countless other shattered cities, destroyed infrastructure had been restored and homelessness was virtually unknown.. 

Worldwide in 1945, almost irrespective of political system, there was a high degree of social consensus.  Housing the homeless was seen as a community challenge, a responsibility taken up with alacrity.  Multiple approaches were applied.  Overcoming the personal and social tragedy of mass homelessness transformed cityscapes and social expectations.  One consequence of meeting that challenge successfully was the remarkable fact that by the early 1950s absolute homelessness, people living rough on London’s streets, was almost unknown. 

We know it could be done then.  So why not now?  Why does solving the problem of homelessness now feel like an unattainable dream?  Do the people who tell us to be ‘realistic’ know something we don’t?  Well, many lessons have been learned and, to mix metaphors, a lot of bucks have flowed under a lot of burning bridges and the bucks don’t stop flowing.

 To answer that ‘why’ question, jump forward fifty years to 1992.  Two stories in one issue of the Wall Street journal provided a fascinating snapshot of 90s “reality”.  One explained how India, a country with a population then approaching one billion, was denied a development loan of $200 million, less than twenty cents per head.  The banks, the newspaper explained, could not be sure India would repay that loan.  The other reported that, for reasons not unrelated to preventing the possible collapse of several major Canadian and US banks, three property-developer brothers from Toronto were about to be bailed out with a twenty-billion dollar rescue package, almost seven billion dollars per head.  Less than two years later the Reichman brothers’ construction company declared bankruptcy owing seventeen billion dollars.  Interestingly, they ended up neither homeless nor even penniless.

It was no news for that day’s Wall Street Journal that by 1992 for well over a decade, thousands of people had been living and some were dying on London’s streets, the very streets from which homelessness appeared to have been eradicated in the 1950s.

Logically, morally, housing must be a human right, mustn’t it?

Not without justification, Canada is proud of its Charter of Rights and Freedoms. Canadians who know are doubly proud because the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the UN’s model which has been used so successfully to invoke human rights and inspire progressive legislation around the world since 1948, was drafted by Canadian, human rights lawyer John Peters Humphrey. 

Check out the Canadian Charter or the Universal Declaration online.  Do a word search.  The words ‘house’, ‘housing’ or ‘home’ appear nowhere. 

Yet a 1998 travelling exhibition to mark the Universal Declaration’s fiftieth anniversary showed that in his preparatory notes and first drafts, Humphrey had included the right to housing.  Eleanor Roosevelt  who championed the Declaration and chaired the UN committee which ultimately approved it was also sympathetic.  So how was that crucial right omitted?

Jump forward two years from the WSJ article to 1994, then a further fifteen years to 2009.  Look at what was and is happening in the United States.  Publicly reported hysteria reached levels associated with the McCarthy era and the height of the cold war.  The focus of the frenzy?  The idea that Americans might have a human right taken for granted in the majority of what are often labelled “advanced democracies”, the right to healthcare irrespective of their wealth or poverty.

In the late 1940s the witch-hunt target was different – housing then, healthcare now – but the motive was the same.  The Soviet Union, the embodiment for the USA of the evils of Communism, had a constitution guaranteeing its citizenry the right to a home.  How it was to be achieved or even what that guarantee meant were never spelled out.  But the knowledge that Communists assured that right was enough for its opponents to mount an attack on the very concept. 

As today’s rentayanks appear on television, run weblogs, write articles or take to the streets to vent rage at the imposition of “socialism” on their market-oriented lives, much work takes place behind the scenes to ensure that the usual beneficiaries, the corporations, will continue to benefit.

In the USA of the late 1940s housing was hardly a high profit investment.  From the 1915 recession, until shortly after Word War II, US house prices remained virtually unchanged.  Action was needed to turn housing into a sure fire winner.

 For nearly three decades post-war British governments of all colours competed to outplan and outbuild each other in housing provision.  Although publicly funded housing for the poor could be traced back a millennium, a local authority model that had emerged in the early 20^th Century prevailed.  It came as no surprise to anybody that in a 1959 General Election campaign a British Conservative Prime Minister promised that his government would build three hundred thousand publicly subsidised new homes – social, , not private, market housing.  The 1945 Labour government had started a massive programme of house-building, developing on schemes underway since the 1930s.  Those were intended not just to rebuild the shattered housing stock of the World War I era and provide “homes fit for heroes”, they were a Keynesian strategy to kick-start the economy which had been left in shreds.  Much of the work was carried out by local council or government labour forces.  Many materials and components were produced in publicly funded and operated factories.  The schemes provided remarkably high quality housing at a cost with which the market could simply not compete and make profits.  Housing was treated not as a commodity but a basic right, even though no constitution guaranteed that right.  It created political consensus and social cohesion. 

Socially mixed housing estates, even entire towns were planned and built, providing not only houses but also social, educational, recreational, health, commercial and transport infrastructure. Minimum space and amenity standards were introduced.  Planning was the key.  The model was soon widely emulated around the world.

Globally over the next decades the expertise acquired in rebuilding after wars and natural disasters led to massive programmes of publicly planned and administered, semi-public, co-operative, community and voluntary-organisation-managed social housing schemes.  Hundreds of millions of people were housed, infrastructure provided.  It looked as though the scourge of homelessness could go the same way as smallpox.  House and community building boosted construction and other industry, created employment, improved social conditions.  With governments of all types supporting housebuilding, the United Nations promoting its construction and providing training, skills and experience, the World Bank providing support funding and the International Monetary Fund offering expertise, the future looked as if it could be rosy.  The UN declared 1986-7 International Year of Shelter for the Homeless and the UN Centre for Human Settlements encouraged governments to work towards a target of decent housing for all by the year 2000.  But by the time the International Year of Shelter for the Homeless arrived, there had been a sea change.

Where did it all go wrong?

Opposition to making housing a universal human right in 1948 was more, much more, than just an ideological stance.  It was part of a strategy to create scarcity, allow market prices to soar and make money for banks and corporations.  For a while it appeared to work.  The stated ideological underpinning was that old familiar song, only the market can provide housing in the most efficient way and social provision can never compete with the market.  In truth markets would only ever provide mass housing if there are guaranteed profits to be made.  To make their profits the opponents of social housing would do anything to manipulate the market.

In Britain the first changes arrived in 1951 with the first post-war Conservative government.  Instead of local authorities and government being allowed to fund housing and infrastructure construction directly from revenue and taxation, new laws forced them to borrow the money needed to build housing from specially constituted financial institutions and pay it back with interest over a number of years, twenty five or forty.  It would end up costing far more.  Now the banks were interested.  House and city building could mean big money for them.  Gradually commercial banks got their hands on the loans.  Initially low interest rates rose over time.  The new model was established. 

In the United States, promising mass social housing projects started to face opposition, singled out for concerted Republican attack.  As economies started to boom in the 1950s there was a lot of money to be made out of financing housing construction although regulations introduced to prevent a repeat of the 1929 crash limited potential profits for speculators.

It took the arrival of Margaret Thatcher in Britain and Ronald Reagan in the USA, both believers in the Chicago School of Economics, followers of the philosopher Friedrich Hayek and advocates of free enterprise to take the new model global.  Both expressed visceral hatred for the concept, even the word, “planning”, then carefully planned and orchestrated their actions.  Both professed unwavering belief in “free markets”, then worked ceaselessly to manipulate markets, ensuring they were anything but free.  The idea of housing being provided on the basis of need was replaced by the insistence that housing was to be available only to those who could afford it.  To support this changed concept, transformation of social attitudes to housing became essential.  Henceforth housing would be promoted as “an investment”.

Margaret Thatcher struck the first death blows for publicly owned and managed social housing in Britain, introducing the attractive sounding “right to buy” while acting to block public building of housing by withdrawing its funding.  She introduced a range of short-term alternative models, support to housing associations and co-operatives, gave them some of the money taken from the public sector, then over time, progressively withdrew that funding.  To accompany these changes, new tax provisions incentivised an entirely new market, to be known as “buy-to let”.  Individuals could make their fortunes there.  Neither Tony Blair nor Gordon Brown, believers in the magic of the market, would challenge the Thatcher model.  For good measure, arguing that a healthy private housing market would eliminate homelessness, Margaret Thatcher sold off most of Britain’s homeless shelters, solid older buildings in good locations, to developers to turn into luxury apartments or boutique hotels.  They were not replaced.

In the US Ronald Reagan appointed Vice-President George Bush as his czar for deregulation of the main housing finance sector, the Savings and Loans banks.  This led in 1988 to the then biggest financial sector failure since the 1929 crash and the Great Depression.  In 1989, then President George Bush was forced to rush through a 165-billion-dollar rescue package for the S&Ls.  In 1990 Stanford University estimated that the true cost to the American public over the life of that rescue scheme would reach 1.4 trillion dollars.

Despite this minor setback, the US continued to push internationally for a series of co-ordinated actions in just one direction.  One major step in globalising the strategy of a shift from public to private provision was something apparently unconnected.  The United States started to withhold its contribution to various parts of the UN system and demand internal reforms.  These were followed by demands for changes in the policies the UN could promote.  Programmes were cut, staff sacked, future projects shelved.  For the UN Centre for Human Settlements, co-ordinating International Year of Shelter for the Homeless, projects based on  self-help, community initiative or public provision were out.  When, a few months later, the World Bank rode to the rescue with new funding, it imposed on the UN agency policy changes already familiar to many poor countries, recipients of World Bank loans.  Publicly owned housing – alongside other public assets – was to be sold off “to reduce the public debt” and “realise public asset values”.  Across Africa, model housing estates based on British council housing were put onto the market.  Most had been housing not for the population at large but for civil servants.  Suddenly they could no longer survive on their already low and frequently unpaid salaries.  They were forced to look for second or third jobs just to meet housing costs.  Opportunities for corruption increased exponentially.

The UN no longer supported public provision, self-build, community or co-operative housing,.  Governments were to switch from provision programmes to “enabling strategies”.  “Enabling” meant advising individuals and governments at all levels on how to contract loans, read ‘get into debt’. 

To be fair, the World Bank recognised its ‘enabling’ policies were not within everybody’s reach.  It had the decency to acknowledge that one of its buzzwords of the 1980s and 1990s, “affordability”, did not apply to the lowest-earning tenth population percentile, that part of the population on ten percent or less of average national income.  It played down the fact that in many countries, massive inequality meant that the lowest tenth percentile could constitute as much as ninety per cent of the population.  For them, the World Bank and the UN offered – nothing!  Homelessness rose exponentially.

UK homelessness may not have figured prominently in  the Wall Street Journal but over the years The Economist published a series of graphs showing that from 1979, as construction of publicly funded housing in Britain fell, official homelessness rose at almost exactly the same rate. 

Meanwhile one further element of the co-ordinated plan was working its way through the system.  Manipulation of housing shortages, management of an international media message that housing was not just a place to live but a long-term, iron-clad investment that for many people could become their retirement pension.

People who looked beyond what became known as the Anglo-Saxon model of economics grasped that these policies had led to a frenzied bidding upwards of house prices.  By the 1980s, in the world’s second largest economy, a country which ought to have been able to provide adequate housing for all, it was only affordable on five-generation, 125-year mortgages.  In the late 1980s Japan’s housing market collapsed taking down major banks in the process and leaving the country in a crisis from which it has yet to emerge nearly twenty years later.  Homelessness there hit new peaks.  Even now, people are living in tent cities in places like Tokyo.  Will Japan’s new government dare consider real change?

Manipulation of the “free market” depended on generating a climate of fear.  If people didn’t get onto the “housing ladder” they risked becoming homeless.  Rediscovered Victorian values divided the poor into “deserving” and “undeserving’.  The homeless, irrespective of how they had become so, were treated as feckless.  In Margaret Thatcher’s Britain people who had not earned their first million pounds by the age of thirty were viewed as failures.  It took time but over the next decade and a half the Anglo-Saxon model engineered housing price rises of several hundred percent.

In the USA extensive understanding of the dangers of overheated housing markets, based on the 1980s experience of the Savings and Loans collapse was not just ignored, it was systematically suppressed.  People who knew and wanted to regulate finance to prevent a repeat of the US and Japanese disasters  were fired and made unemployable.  Regulators were swept aside.  What were known as Recognised Accounting Practices or RAP were replace by something that favoured the fantasy that “no regulation is good regulation”. In came Creative Recognised Accounting Practices or CRAP.  The CRAP regime ushered in the era of the sub-prime loan. 

To compete and stay in business in a globalised world, banks and financial institutions were forced to participate in the CRAP race to the bottom.  Easy access to credit and the promise that rising prices ‘ensured’ that however high interest rates rose, the rising value of property would make “investing” in property worthwhile.  When that myth crumbled last year, not just banks but entire countries became technically bankrupt.

Have the collapse of housing financing institutions around the world over the past two years and the massive increase in homelessness sounded a warning to the world at large?  Far from it!  As major banks start laying claim to massive profits again, it looks as if they will be returning to “business as usual” meaning more homelessness.  British and US media are heralding new increases in housing prices as being a good thing. 

The next collapse will come much sooner and have an even more devastating effect on housing and homelessness than the last. 

Individuals faced with homelessness rarely have the resources to provide decent housing.  Local communities can pool and co-ordinate their limited assets but post-war experience showed only governments can mobilise all the resources needed to build their way out of mass homelessness. 

By promoting monetarism through the World Bank, IMF and UN, the US government forced one choice on all governments, mortgage and debt-based private housing, often benefiting US financiers.  That created homelessness and failed the poor.  Governments recently co-ordinated and marshalled far more than the cost of housing everyone in the world to protect failed bankers’ bonuses.  Without another world war, will we ever see them mobilise as effectively to house the needy and homeless?

The Victorian pauper, with tuppence in his pocket, might gloat: “You pays your money and takes your choice”.  Today’s homeless can only bemoan, “We pays our money, they takes our choices.”

 

Twenty five years ago a man strolled by me on Viger Street in Montreal. I figured he was a drifter. He looked straight ahead through his round John-Lennon glasses.  He had a slight stoop to his walk. For a split second, he had looked at me and I had looked at him, as well. His long hair had been cut in awkward clumps and it seemed like they had just fallen off. He had a straight line walk. He did not look to the side. He did not want his eyes to meet anyone else’s. His shoulders drooped. Very little of his cheeks were visible.  His black and white beard hung down to his chest. His jeans were dark and tattered around the edges and at the knees.  He wore a dark jacket, whose pockets were weighed down by stuff that he had put in, in plastic bags. I noticed all this in the few yards that we passed each other by. Something about his eyes and his face, however, made him remarkably familiar. I turned around and looked at him and he kept walking away towards the east and I kept turning around to see if he would stop and turn around and he did not and he kept getting smaller and smaller in the distance.   I could sense that he was getting swallowed by the huge structure that was the Jacques Cartier Bridge in the distance. His face kept haunting me. Unlike the folks, known as panhandlers,  around Viger who perform silly antics to draw attention, do a little jig, or make strange faces and put their hat out, this man kept walking, never looking sideways.

I saw him again about a week later at another spot, near Chinatown. This time he did not see me. I was determined to see his face in an unobtrusive manner. He sat down after about five minutes of my following him, at a bench in a park built by the city on top of the Ville Marie tunnel. I stood in a bus stand and watched him. Doves, seagulls or pigeons were flocking around him. He took bread crumbs out of his bag and threw them around. He watched the birds for a while and then he sat up straight, pulled his hair back and stared out. I recognized him then. I could not quite figure out, whether I should go and talk to him. After all, this was a guy who hung around a group of students who went to McGill in the mid seventies. He was doing his MBA in Finance and he was a lively, cheerful guy, who always had some nasty humour to share with the whole gang. I did speak to him a few times and I knew he had a huge crush on one of the women who was also in this rather talkative and disco-loving group that I had run into.  He was possibly from Bombay, the old name for Mumbai.  I asked a mutual acquaintance about him and she said that he had either had some psychological problem or he had an affair that had severely traumatized him. He left his academic life, walked out of his apartment and had simply started walking the streets. His parents had tried to find him and they never did. I saw him a few times later and then never saw him again. He disappeared and was never heard of and seen again by anybody. What is remarkable about this young and bright man, as I was told later by others who knew him, was that he came to do graduate studies in McGill, submitted his thesis but never came back to see his professors or pick up his degree. He came from a fairly well established family and refused to recognize anyone from his past. While he was seen taking meals at the Old Brewery Mission, he did not panhandle and did not ask for money. He did not also talk to anybody.  He left no trace. No address.

A few years ago while on a trip to Kolkata, where I was born and lived for twenty years, I headed up to the main street from the side street where I had lived, and I realized that the long time rag pickers there had become pavement dwellers. They had not only taken over a large section of the main pavement along the main thoroughfare, but they had built shacks, tea stalls, erected a small temple-like obelisk, where people gave donations and a small TV set was also tucked away in one corner, under a tent-like structure. This was their home. They were no longer homeless. They were pretty vociferous, confident and did not care about the fact that the bus stand was no longer usable, because they had used it to build some structures and had created a variety of sleeping arrangements in and around the bus stop. As much as one could be disgusted by the squalor and cockiness of these people, you would realize after some reflection that after more than sixty years of India’s independence from the British Empire, 38% of India’s population live in extreme poverty. They mostly come from the rural areas, running away from drought and starvation, looking for work, either as rag pickers, cleaners or resort to begging. And when they come to the city, they learn to hustle, because as they are mostly minorities or people belonging to the lower rungs of the caste system, they cannot even be considered for all of the jobs that they are prepared to take. There is however a perception amongst those who walk by them, holding their noses, that they are born smugglers, thieves, crooks, prostitutes and petty criminals. The police constables are frequently seen taking bribes from them, so that they can store their rag baskets in huge mountains in various stretches of the pavement, never mind the illegal structures on the pavements themselves, for which the local councillors are reportedly taking the “licensing ” fees. Years ago, on that same pavement, I met a nearly blind man, who sat down on the pavement with his arms outstretched. The pavement was then clean, no squatters, no pavement dwellers. I had gotten to know the blind man. He was always well-dressed, clean shaven and he wore a pair of dark glasses. Sometimes I had helped him cross the main avenue. From time to time people walking by would drop a few coins into his palm. He would give them a salaam and smile. He had a Bachelor’s degree, but could not get a job, so he had learned welding. While working at the docks, he got blinded in an accident and had no option, other than to beg. He told me his story and I listened. There was nothing I could do, other than introduce him to my friends. He remained well shaven and well dressed always, sitting on the pavement. Two years ago, I found out that a taxicab had run over him. I asked around where he had lived and found out that he had no home. He slept on the ramp to a garage, along an edge. He washed himself clean every morning, put on the same pair of clothes and sat down all day in the sun, until he had enough money for a meal.

All the hype, all the rockets in space, all the software sexiness and all the corporate posturing cannot fig leaf the nakedness of India’s poor. All the tall claims of growth, the technical arrogance, the rising number of Indian billionaires, the nuclear powered attack submarines and still some 297 million people, in a study done recently by a committee commissioned by the government, live in absolute poverty! 

A news story now. London, July 24: More than 20 people aged between 5 and 74 slept rough on paving stones and gravel outside a park at Hampstead in the UK capital and raised 8,000 pounds for a Kolkata based charity.

People slept at Rosslyn Park Unitarian Chapel to “experience” what homeless in Kolkata feel like. ‘Kolkata Rescue’ provides healthcare, education and vocational training to homeless in the Indian city.

American-Dutch businessman Glen Kendall, who worked for a year as the administrator of the charity, decided to raise funds for the organisation by planning the “Big Sleep in Hampstead” to mark the 30th anniversary of the organisation.

Kendall said they wanted to build a ‘bustee’ for the Big Sleep, but realised that they could not source authentic materials to make such a ‘bustee’ in London.

He said the volunteers, in the age of 5 to 74, braved cold wind, discomfort and noise on the pavement along with worrying about police asking them to move from the pavement. End of Story.

Canada? Well, here is the end section of a rather informative piece in Wikipedia.

“Canada is one of the few countries in the world without a national housing strategy (United Nations, 2009). Many of the federal governments’ expenditures are cost-sharing, one-time only funding initiatives that lack long-term leadership on homelessness. The United Nations has also noted the lack of information on these expenditures, including the number of houses produced. Housing has been declared a fundamental human right. Canada helped to draft the 1948 UN Declaration of Human Rights that includes a right to access housing in Article 25. Canada also ratified the International Covenant on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights in 1976, which recognizes an adequate standard of living, including housing, in Article 11. Currently, there is a court challenge stipulating that the crisis of homelessness violates the right to security of the person and to equality for disadvantaged groups under sections 7 and 15 of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms.” 

The debate about homelessness, as also about poverty, can go on forever. There are those who feel that it is only individual actions and “misfortune” that cause homelessnes and therefore it is only individual remedial actions and charity that can resolve a part of these situations. It can never be resolved totally. There are others who believe that the concept of a society includes a provision to care for and take responsibility for the disenfranchised and impoverished. That social safety net is fundamental to the concept of a caring society. This is as opposed to a society where only the highly aggressive and competitive can survive. Without government policy firmly in place for low cost social housing and redistribution of wealth, without a fundamental belief that having a home is a constitutional right, in this fast changing economy, homelessness is inevitable.

 

The Soloist. Written by Steve Lopez and Susannah Grant. Directed by Joe Wright. Starring Jamie Foxx and Robert Downey Jr.

The Soloist could have been easily called The Duo since it is the true story of  how Los Angeles Times reporter Steve Lopez met and tried to “rescue” Nathaniel Ayers, a brilliant Julliard School of Music  drop-out and schizophrenic who also happens to be homeless. They develop a symbiotic relationship  which proves to be  problematic in the long run. The Soloist could also have been named The Multitudes because it is the story of 90,000 homeless persons  in the Greater Los Angeles area as incarnated by one lone man.

The story line is archetypical. A burnt-out  journalist meets a homeless man when he hears him play classical music with a two-string violin in front  of Beethoven’s statue.  The journalist is impressed and spins off a column. The column attracts media attention, more columns, a book and political largesse and interest by the public, including the gift of a cello by a retired  arthritic  music master. It also wins the journalist an award and there is  financial success for both of them at the end of the journey. But all’s not well that ends well because Ayers refuses to take medication and remains schizophrenic as well as homeless since he is loath to live in the confines of LAMP, the community home where he is allowed to play the cello.

The story is also a cautionary tale. The roots of homelessness, mental illness, poverty and alienation might be dark and deep but they are certainly intertwined. Treating homelessness as a mere blemish on the face of a city is like treating skin cancer as a cosmetic problem that can be erased  with a salve. By the way, the aerial shots of the City of Angels crisscrossed by endless freeways is worthy of a Beethoven symphony.

 There is nothing much to be said about the acting, because the actors  do not act at all. They just are.  Downey’s personal experience with drug abuse (one of the leading causes of homelessness) and Foxx’s musical training inform their work. They embody the characters they play so thoroughly that the audience forgets that  they are actors, and not protagonists in this drama. The same could be said for the 500 or so extras that the director hired from the underbelly of  Los Angeles. Being homeless and getting paid to depict their plight  lends authenticity to the film.

 The Soloist is a film to be experienced solo, in duo or in multitudes.

Short video clip of my friend Edward Charles Lewis. Ed was my inspiration for writing for this article. He is 54 years old and is a homeless man in and of Chicago and has been homeless off and on for the last two decades.   Transcript of the video can be found at the bottom of this page.

 

literally dazed and confused, no one knows what’s in the mind of a homeless person, they stand off the highway ramps begging for money (who really knows for what) they wander  in the parks lonely and in their need for rest (day time sleep), they walk and sit  around the busy metropolitan areas of the city they sometimes congregate the  churches soup kitchens, some even only lonely visit your garbage to eat, some hitchhike cross country some ride the freights, some live in the desert and others in the forest just to wander out once in a while for tobacco & scraps then mystically go back not to be seen for a long while. Some homeless people have been abused as a child while some have abused someone (took their smile). Some were born into drugs and some have supplied drugs, some are sad about something and others about nothing, some are mad about something and others about nothing, some are running from something (painful themselves) others are running to find something (happiness), some have never known happiness and others are always happy, some have killed and others are dead, some are genius smart but they really really really smell really bad, some have girlfriends (boyfriends) some want boyfriends (girlfriends), some are totally disgusted by women (men), some have open sores on their feet that really hurt, some are strong and healthy some have aids and herpes, some are gods spirits in disguise, spirits that can look into your soul and give you advice, some just talk to themselves so they wont be bothered or treated as someone normal, but most all of them would probably if it came down to it try and save your life especially if no one else was watching, some are homeless just for fun (freedom), some consider homelessness – finally with a home – having a place that cannot be lost because of what I do or don’t do, most homeless are like immature monk sages that relish in what is provided daily to them from god and spend the rest of the time.

giving thanks

+++++++++++++++++++++++

QUESTION – GAR so ed i wanted to ask you another question. what do you want people to know about homeless people, people you’ve known that that’s been homeless and yourself as a homeless person.

ANSWER – ED
aum   to be homeless is not a bad thing you have a chance to experience of how to make it in the world the way Jesus did he went through all around the world, he had no money, he talked to people, had a good time-you know, spread good spirits-aright, I’m the same way, i talk to people always have something good to say, i don’t more else gonna say

            In the middle of the 9 a.m. newscast I have to leave for work, which is a shame. They’ve just started a story on a heroic rescue in New York. Something about a subway train.

            At a quarter  after eleven, Sandra di Angelico walks into the store. Her hands are shaking; her breathing is fast and shallow. Nerves.

            “What on earth–let’s get you seated, Sandra. Take a load off.”

            I grab a chair from a fitting room, carry it into our back office and return to the front counter where Sandra stands. We’re well staffed this afternoon at Marjorie’s Lingerie, so I don’t have to worry about coverage on the sales floor. I place my hand lightly on Sandra’s shoulder and we walk into the office, where I help her into the spare chair from the fitting room. Then I sit in the desk chair and swivel it over to her so that we sit side by side. I take her hand. Her  nails dig into my flesh but that’s okay, I don’t mind a little discomfort when I am helping a person through something.

            Her eyes are open as wide as they will go, they dart around like she’s trapped, looking for escape. She is so worked up now I can see she has moved on to a whole new level. She’s afraid of her fear, afraid of herself.

            When my best friend Doreen got like this, she only had one thought. I learned how to help.

            “It’s okay, Sandra,”  I say, “you are not going to die. You’re safe.”

            In a few seconds the breathing changes. She inhales deeply, coughs, coughs again.  She sucks in so hard it startles her and then she starts making choking sounds.  I can see in her face that the fear is rising again.

            “You’ll be fine.  Don’t worry. You’ll get your breath back,” I say.

            Asthma, allergies,  lung diseases–all kinds of medical conditions can make a person’s breathing  go haywire. But I saw Doreen through many  panic attacks  years ago and I can see the signs now in Sandra. I’m unafraid of her crazy breathing. My job is to help her be unafraid too.

            Once the breaths start to come more easily I go to the mini fridge we keep in the office, get out a bottle of water and bring it to her. She twists off the cap and takes a sip. The shaking has stopped. I wait. She will figure out how to get to the next stage of relief. Talk would be fine. So would silence.

            “Thanks, Irene,” she says.  Her voice is level. “Have you got a bit of time to talk?”

            “I do.”

            “Okay,” she says, “but how do I explain it to you? It’s mixed up in my head, the stuff from today and the stuff from years ago that has crept up on me today. I have no idea where to start.”

            “What’s in your head at this moment?” I ask.

            “Corn,” she says.

            “All right,” I say. “Start with corn. and let’s see where that takes us.”

            ”For me, corn means freedom,” she says. “Doesn’t that sound ridiculous?”

            “No,” I say. “Go on.”

            “Last night,” she says, “Eric and I  had Taber corn with supper–Alberta’s best, maybe the world’s best–and after we ate I sank my teeth into the bare cob and broke it into chunks and sucked the juice out. It’s a noisy process, I know that. Just  can’t resist that Taber corn juice.”

            I don’t know how corn cob sucking leads to panic, but it’s Sandra’s story to tell in her own way.

            “Eric likes to see me enjoy my bizarre little corn ritual. He says it speaks of my joyful nature. But thirty-plus years ago, when I was in my twenties–long before Eric entered my life–I lived with a guy named Chris and he was not so charmed by my corn routine. By the way, I don’t suck cob in public–you do understand that.”

            “Never crossed my mind you would,” I say. “We’ve all got queer habits that we don’t reveal away from home. Personally, I have a thing about keeping my navel spotless, completely clear of lint. But it’s not something I take care of  when I’m out on the sales floor dealing with customers.”

            “Right. Well, one night, Chris and I had corn for dinner–it was just the two of us, in the privacy of home–and we had never had corn on the cob together before–and once we’d finished the–you know–conventional part of the eating, I sank my teeth into the bare cob and bit off a chunk. Then, of course, I sucked. Well, Chris blew a gasket, and before I knew what was happening, he was beating the life out of me.”

            “Because of your corn ritual?”

            “Yeah, supposedly that was a good enough reason. Then lots of things started to set him off–me sucking on chicken bones; me overcooking pasta; me not shifting from second gear to third fast enough.”

            “All those were crimes punishable by beating?”

            “That and more. He was always finding new reasons to get furious and physical. And he kept finding new techniques.

            “Like what?”

            “Humiliation. Like one Saturday afternoon, we were walking down the street together. I was depressed and not talking. He kicked my ankle.

            ‘Piece of shit,’ he said. ‘You’re a piece of shit.’ And by then, I believed him.

            “How many times did he blacken my eye, break my glasses, berate me for not being a perfect housekeeper? Finally I had an affair.”

            “Who could blame you?” I say.

            “At first it was a relief to have someone treat me with kindness. But my boyfriend-on-the-side was married too, with three little kids, and I felt as guilty as sin toward his wife. So I broke it off.”

            “Must have been tough,” I say.

            “It was. And then I confessed to Chris, although I was afraid he’d beat me to death. But here’s the confusing bit. He forgives me, buys me flowers, takes me to dinner. As soon as we get home he changes. Just like that. Suddenly he’s in a silent rage. His face is contorted as if he’s possessed. He punches me full force. Left side of the face. Eye, lower jaw, mouth. I scream, threaten to call the police.

            ‘About what?’ he says. ‘I’m  not doing  anything to you.’

            ‘Go to your own room now,’ he says, and I say, ‘I have no room, only the one we share.’

            ‘You heard me. Go to your room.’

            “I start heading up the stairs, thinking maybe I can reach the phone in the bedroom somehow, but he comes after me, pulls me around to face him. He pins me onto the staircase. Grabs hold of my hair and starts beating my head up and down onto a stair. I’m thinking, This is it, I’m about to die.”

            “But you didn’t die,” I say. “You got through it, and you’re with me now. Safe.”

            “I break free of him somehow, run down the stairs and out the door. I’m wearing heels but terror carries me down the street.  I reach my friend Myra’s house and call the police. They’re good to me and they act fast.”

            “What happened before you came into our store today, Sandra?” I ask gently. “What’s brought you back to that awful night?”

            “He liked to hit me on the left side of the face. I’ve had surgery for a detached retina on the left eye, that eye has also bled inside, I’ve got a jaw disorder on the left side, I’ve lost three teeth on the upper left palate.”

            But how does that connect to today? I’m thinking. Patience.

            “Today at the supermarket I had a cashier. I read her name tag. Shirley. She scanned my groceries quickly, packed them efficiently and told me the total, one hundred eighty-two forty-six. Once we were done she thanked me pleasantly. She was a good cashier.”

            Still it is a struggle to figure out how this event could have led to Sandra’s panic attack. Best to let her go on without interruption now. She’ll let me know in her own time and way.

            “After I left,” she says, “I called the store on my cell phone and asked for the manager. Luckily, they put me through to him right away. I asked if the company had an employee assistance program and he said yes. I told him that I had had fine service from Shirley but was worried about her. The right side of her face was one big purple bruise and I had seen black and blue welts on her neck and upper chest. He said he had just gotten on shift and had not seen Shirley yet, but he would find out right away if she was receiving employee assistance and if not, he would see to it that she did. I said maybe she needed some healing time right now and he said, ‘That could well be’ and he told me this was his highest priority today–to make sure Shirley got support.

            “My abuser liked the left side of the face; Shirley’s likes the right. So what has changed since thirty-five years ago when I was assaulted?”

            “Well,” I say, “nowadays at least some companies have got those employee assistance programs.”

            “It’s a step, I guess,” she says.

            She is breathing normally now, although she doesn’t seem to realize it. You don’t notice your breathing unless something goes wrong with it. Then you can’t think of anything else.

            We walk back onto the sales floor. Sandra has not come in just to get help catching her breath; she really does need some lingerie–control top tights for the winter. In the past she has told me that she is prone to yeast infections so she cuts out the cotton gusset of the tights with a pair of scissors. That way she can breathe down below.

            Later I meet my young friend Julie for coffee at the Bean Wave. She’s wise for twenty-one–for any age, really.

            “What would you do if a man started beating you up?” I ask.

            “Kick him in the balls, gouge his eyes, call 911 on my cell phone and run like hell.”

            “Sounds as if you’ve planned your strategy carefully,” I say.

            “Every woman has to,” she says.

            “But why?” I ask.

            “Because,” Julie says, “those guys are still in business.”

            Tonight, I’m supposed to be winding down; that’s what I’ve  promised myself. My neck hurts from tension. I make a cup of chamomile tea and sit down with my Chatelaine magazine. I  read words but their meaning doesn’t register.  I turn on the TV to  watch the news. They lead with that New York incident. Finally I learn the full story. A 20-year old man has a seizure and falls on to a subway track in New York.  A 50-year old man Wesley Autrey,  makes a split-second decision, jumps in, sees the train emerging through the tunnel, hurls the young man into a narrow drainage trough in between the rails. Then he throws his own body over the young guy’s.  By now the driver can see what’s happening and reacts,  but the emergency brake can’t stop the train fast enough and it passes over them, with two inches leeway between them and the underbelly of the train. They both make it.

            What drove  Mr. Autrey to do what he did for that young guy?  What drove  Chris to do what he did to Sandra?  I don’t get it. They’re members of the same species.  My species.

 

The glare from the neon lights bores through my eyelids making them flutter. I fight  back and force them shut. They flutter again and one sleep-crusted edge disengages from its counterpart with a subliminal pop. Re-entering my dream is futile so I give up. The sharpness of daytime had somehow cut through  countless walls and malls and halls into this windowless hellhole severing my ties with that alternate reality where I am always the main dude. I shift my aching hipbone from the hard and wet surface that holds it in place and turn to face the wall. The surround stench takes hold of me like an octopus, forcing my eyes  open. The bikini-clad girl on the billboard is about to plunge into a translucent turquoise sea. The sea stinks of pee. My pee. I want to crap as well but it is too early for that. I no longer need a double latte to activate my entrails. I have jettisoned all that ballast from my old life. A cup of American-owned Canadian-branded Tim Horton’s  generally does the trick.  But I have no need of that today. Is it Saturday today? Or is it Sunday? Who cares! But I do. On weekdays the toilets  open earlier and close later, on weekends the place has the air of an abandoned jail. Or a Tarkovsky movie, complete with rusting pipes, water leaks and the odd humanoid walking about as a counterpoint to inorganic decay. My gut cramps. It must be the half-eaten Subway I rescued from the recycle bin. Slathered with mayo. I never liked the stuff anyway. Mother used to say that mustard is better on account of its sting – if it burns your nostrils it will also zap the critter in your gut. Especially if it is dee-jon, made in France. The girl on the billboard is shaking her body like the chicks in the bars on St. Laurent. That always hits a chord. The first train of the day has arrived in the station. I don’t know why they bother with early trains  considering that the usual passengers are the newspaper boy from Sri Lanka, the cleaning lady from the Azores and the pure-laine metro staff. They are generally grumpy and have nothing much to say and nobody to say it to. But somebody has to be first. I prefer the last lot of passengers. They are more convivial and sometimes obnoxious which provides entertainment if you’re in the mood. Besides obnoxious is good. It makes mall security forget about the likes of us. People with nowhere to go. No, I won’t say they’re heartless. They turn a blind eye to our presence, especially in winter, even though it’s against the rules. Unless the other guys, the ones who look like war-game clones, are around. These guys mean business. They walk around with their chests puffed out as much as their bullet-proof vests let them, looking for people to harass. And sometimes real cops come around and try to take us to shelters just to please politicians and habitual letters-to-the-newspaper writers but we know and they know what it’s like over there, no smoking, no drinking, no nothing except be a good boy and follow their senseless rules. The bikini-clad girl is now walking through a clump of rotting sea weed. Stinking sea weed I should say. The pee in my pants has cooled down making me shiver but somehow my groin starts feeling warm again. Holy shit! It’s not on account of Miss Bikini on the wall! I’m glad my pants are former Outfitters, just the right khaki colour. But the Salvation Army people forgot to give me the Boss perfume that goes with the outfit although I do have the unshaven look. Hope nobody notices. If I can’t persuade the bible-toting lady to give me some fresh pants from her church stash, I will just have to take matters into my own hands for the common good. Or maybe I won’t have to filch and split. For all I know,  they might have a street sale today. Quaint name, street sale, when this place is a massive underground penitentiary, but then they can’t call it penitentiary sale, can they? Ha! If worse comes to worse, I can always rinse my pants in the men’s room when nobody is looking. They’re already wet, anyway. I turn again and make myself  comfortable. My eyelids weigh a ton. The bikini-clad girl bends over me. I think she is going to kiss me. The last time she paid attention to me was when she actually went down on me sending me to paradise until that stupid Westmount cow interrupted my dream and started yelling at me. She had the nerve to tell me to remove my hands from my pockets and to zip up my fly properly. She also told me that I’m shameless and that decent people don’t go around behaving as if they were at home alone. But I am at home. This is my home, the only one I can remember. Very conveniently located. Near public transportation and a panoramic view of the sea. Ah, Miss Bikini is not going to kiss me after all, but she is holding my wrist daintily as if she were afraid of breaking it. She mumbles something to the guy with her. He hands her a syringe. She unrolls my sleeve, swabs me with something cool  and plunges the needle into my forearm. I start drifting off but I can still feel the guy’s  strong hands under my armpits. She grabs my legs. They plop me onto something soft and cart me away. The train rumbles by. Cay-shun, cay-shun, cay-shun, it says. Intoxi-cayshun. A loudspeaker fills up the space above. I can’t make out the words but I know what they mean. The public transit system wants the janitorial staff to come to my corner of paradise and clean up the mess I left behind.

 

Lost in the Land of Plenty

 

I live in a welfare hotel

and when the electricity

gets shut off again

in the room provided

by Homeless Services,

without the heater,

even with blankets,

it’s freezing cold.

 

I hurry to dress

so I won’t miss the bus

that will take me to school,

even though I hate it,

’cause they call me names

and make me sit in the back

with the other homeless kids.

 

But I’ll try to ignore

how the teacher treats us,

how the other kids treat us,

because I’ll be warm.

 

Bureaucratic Priorities

 

The mayor of New York proposed

a basic five-year action plan

to end chronic homelessness,

which so far has managed

to put more families on the street.

The city spends our tax money

while innocent children suffer

terrible horrors on the street,

exposed to crime and violence

and the city keeps counting,

instead of finding solutions

for children cruelly abandoned

by the richest city in the world. 

 

 

The Counting of the Homeless

 

Instead of offering

sufficient services

to address the problems

of a specific group

removed from the normal haunts

of alienating society,

whether from dysfunction,

or dire calamity

such as fire, or loss of job,

the money expended

in counting the homeless

should be used

to provide shelter.

 

With nails that curved over toes. Her limbs, limp, her eyes vacant. She took her acoustic guitar to music lessons. She attended art courses at the Douglas Hospital for the mentally disabled. She had lived in shelters and foster homes. She visited emergency rooms at different hospitals.

Cognitive disorder associated to epilepsy, chronic. Contribution of sarcoidosis to mental state is unknown. Mental retardation and psychotic episodes greatly impair insight and judgment. She has basic ALD. Adult learning disability and anxiety disorders. Although she was on welfare, she received a settlement from the sale of her former family house. Less than a year later, she was penniless.

The kitten ran and hid under the bed when it saw me. The Persian cat with a broad round head, long silky hair, and a thick tail. Within a few weeks, it looked as sickly as my daughter did. Bony and undernourished, its hair unkempt and tangled.

The last Thursday of April, Susan, her nurse, called me from St. Mary’s Center Outpatient Psychiatry Clinic: “Can you stay with your daughter until I come to pick her up in the morning? I have a tryout appointment at a foster home in LaSalle. I don’t want Marisa to check herself into emergency. We will not be able to find her.”

“I’ll stay with her,” I promised.

Lemon-yellow apartment block. Alley view of walled gardens. Fragrant with new blooms of red tulip, daffodil, purple crocus. Hum of traffic on Decarie Boulevard. Notre-Dame-de-Grâce.

I arrived unannounced. Knocked on Marisa’s door. “I can take care of myself. Go home!” Her eyes blazed with anger.

Behind closed doors, acrid, pungent smell of cat litter. Here in these three overheated rooms of my daughter. Hardwood floors. Canvases. An easel. Metal rack of CD’s, black guitar, rickety table. Stale pizza crusts littered the refrigerator. “Did you eat yet?” I opened a can of chicken soup. Popped a toast.

White T-shirt, blue jeans, and running shoes. After supper, she lay down on her crumpled bed. Unhung paintings leaned against a walnut dresser. A landscape of turquoise, pink, and orange. Vibrantly embroidered floral motifs. Her rent check returned with insufficient funds.

I watched her stroke the cat’s knotted hair. Moon-pale, my first-born daughter. At times, I wished I could hug her as she hugged her kitten. I looked at Marisa and the cat. They didn’t accept pets at the foster home. New and unfamiliar world.

She lost all things that she dealt with daily. Everything in her house and kitchen garden. Red ochre stucco with long windows and narrow green shutters. Five years ago, she had a home. Interim divorce court. Her husband obtained custody of their two daughters ages five, and three. Five-month-old son.

The woman in those pictures is skinny, tense looking, and young. Her brown hair is short. That final summer, before her bout with chronic depression. Before Youth Protection Court declared her an unfit mother. Before I supervised her children’s visits.

Today, I bedded down on the living room floor, fully dressed. All night, Marisa tried to leave the apartment. In the dark, I yelled: “Don’t even try it!” Dozing, I awoke to see the door ajar. Down one flight of stairs. Cold cement steps under my stockinged feet. I caught up with her in the lobby. Hugged her close. Felt her gaunt, rigid body: “Come back upstairs.”

“I’ll hit you! I’ll hit you!” Her face, ashen, her eyes wild with rage. “Don’t do it. Don’t hit your mother!” I clamped her face with one hand. My fingers pressing her cheekbones. I held her there. “Don’t even think about it!” The sky, a curtain of indigo. Candles to light a room. Four in the morning. I hadn’t slept. Neither had she.