The R. C. Harris Water Treatment Plant (Photo: Richard Kang)
I can vividly recall my first trip to London. I was 14 and visiting some relatives with my mum and sisters. I remember the distinct sogginess that filled the air; the macabre feel of the narrow streets at night; the epic walks that would blacken my sandal-clad feet; and all the clever lads who called me “love.”
Yet, I’m not sure if this is an actual reminiscence or a blending of memory and fiction. London just so happens to be the setting of many of my girlhood favourites: Oliver Twist, Mrs Dalloway, Bridget Jones’s Diary, and later, The Intimate Adventures of a London Call Girl. The city has weighed heavily on my imagination for as long as I can remember.
But Toronto is the city I call home. It is the backdrop of my own bildungsroman–a personal story of self-discovery that has been alternately windy and Romantic. In following my “heart” I’ve made terrible mistakes, learned a series of important life lessons, and had many happy accidents all over this city. I remember one morning in particular, when I left a party under the Don Valley Parkway at the brink of sunrise, rolling down the Riverdale Park hill, which was still wet from the previous day’s rain. The exhilaration of being covered in moss and soaked to my marrow in mud was unlike anything I’d ever felt before.
If you were to collect all the labyrinthine lives of individual Torontonians, they would yield a plenitude of stories, enough to seduce any author. Yet Toronto’s literary tradition is often to be eclipsed by more sublime settings. Disguised as “worthier” metropolises in films, or dubbed Canada’s New York by dwellers and travellers alike, Toronto has long been denied a proper footing in the landscape of fiction.
On a recent visit to my local library I browsed a list of books set here, and discovered to my disappointment that most “Toronto stories” are works of historical fiction. Nothing against history–I was a major in it–it’s just that I like my history like I like my oranges, bloody. And this shortage of skeletons in Toronto’s past can make for some dull reading.
I was assigned Michael Ondaatje’s In the Skin of a Lion to read during my second year of university. While reading the paperback on the subway one evening, a guy approached me to say: “That book is about my hometown.” I didn’t get the joke at the time, so I arrogantly replied: “I think it’s actually about Toronto.” And it was, is. Ondaatje fictionalized the lives of the immigrants who physically built Toronto, fusing their hardships into the concrete setting: the Bloor Street Viaduct and the RC Harris Treatment Plant are prominent figures in the text, which reach out to readers, asking them to question the validity of official history by seeking out other stories.
I’m still twenty pages shy of completing In the Skin of a Lion, but this novel has been monumental in shaping my understanding of cities as narratives. From the gravel that lines the roads to the corporate towers that dominate the city’s skyline, I can’t help but wonder about all the lives living, lives lost, lives loved, leaving invisible impressions all over the city.
In the Skin of a Lion left me wanting more Toronto stories–better stories–stories that actually resonate with the lives of the individuals that tread the city’s streets. And perhaps I could write one of these stories someday, but until then I’m going to keep on living my own.
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Safa Jinje lives and writes in Toronto (except when she goes on vacation). Follow her on Twitter at @safajinje.
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