Charles Demers - Vancouver Special

This book was inspired to an enormous degree by the wonderful Vancouver authors, artists, activists, advocates, pizza vendors, et al., whove been mentioned throughout. Although I cant list you all again here, if you find your name in the book (and you arent a serial killer or a right-wing billionaire or something), please know how much I appreciate what youve done to make this city what it is, as well as what youve done to enrich my understanding of it.

Thank you to all the Vancouver comics who let me use their brilliant, hilarious bits; they are among the sharpest observations of Vancouvers absurdity that I could have shared with readers. I strongly encourage those same readers to support the art form by going to see these comedians, and the other fine stand-ups the city has to offer, live.

I want to thank Shyla Seller, Susan Safyan, Michelle Simms, Brian Lam, Robert Ballantyne, and Janice Beley at Arsenal Pulp, a publisher whose books and authors I have long admired and am humbled to be included alongside. Derek Barnetts artful and exciting design ideas prompted me to try and write a book worthy of them, and I also have nothing but gratitude for Emmanuel Buenviaje for his tremendous photography.

Derrick OKeefe was a patient, insightful reader of panicked first drafts; Tejpal Singh Swatch, Alexandra Zabjek, Dwayne Finlayson, and Andrea Pinochet-Escudero also offered helpful and encouraging notes along the way. Thanks to each of you. Thanks to Kevin Chong and David Beers. Thanks as well to my family members, especially Dad, Nick, and Auntie Heather, for the personal memories and family histories that you shared with me. Finally, for her unending patience, her encouraging (but always critical and intelligent) feedback, and her love (of both her adoptive city and her husband, of which at least the latter is deeply reciprocated), thank you to my Toronto-born-and-raised wife, Cara Ng, to whom this book is dedicated.

Every August, Cates Park, on a beautiful piece of Tsleil-Waututh land just off the waters of Indian Arm, is the home of Under the Volcano, Vancouvers annual day-long festival of music and left-wing politics, named in honour of Malcolm Lowrys book. Always a big draw, the festival invites artists, performers, and speakers from all over. In the summer of 2003, the organizers invited David Hilliard, one of the founding members of the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense; that summer, Hilliard was travelling with the Black Panther Fugitives, a hip hop act that included his son, and both Hilliard and the group were appearing on the main stage at UTV.

In the counter-hegemonic spirit of the festival, Hilliard and the Fugitives were given a chauffeur in the inversed-Driving-Miss-Daisy tradition: me. I had decided to break up the monotony of my summer (I was working as a groundskeeper for a housing complex in Port Moody) by volunteering for the festival, and the job I was given was to pick up the Fugitives from the house they were staying at in Strathcona, pick up David Hilliard from his hotel downtown, take them wherever they wanted to go for a few hours (the younger men wanted desperately to see Vansterdam; the elder was patient), then drive them out to the North Shore in time for their events. We had a great day.

At one point, one of the rappers took a cell phone call from his girlfriend, and I could piece together everything she was asking about Vancouver from listening to his half of the conversation, like a Bob Newhart telephone sketch. I could tell exactly when their relatively mundane chat about the flight, the groups sleeping arrangements, and how pretty the city was turned to demographics: Huh? Oh. Like, none, he laughed. I mean none. Its like, one percent of the population. In a way, he wasnt that far off. In fact, 1.1 percent of Metro Vancouverites identify as ethnically African (when allowed to claim more than one ethnic origin), and 5.6 percent identify as Caribbean. But Vancouvers famous lack of blacknessthe subject of countless punchlines and the first observation offered by any politically incorrect visitor from Toronto or Montral or the Statesis generally overstated. Of the nearly half of Vancouver that is non-white, 2.4 percent is black, as compared with the 2.6 percent that is Latin American and the 2.9 percent that is Japanese; [] And yet, if you were to ask people inside or outside the city, they would likely identify Vancouver as being very Japanese and not black at all (despite, for one example, the long string of Afro Hair Salons, and Caribbean and Ethiopian restaurants along Commercial Drive). Admittedly, the city hosts a lot of Japanese exchange students who wouldnt be a part of the census, and Im sure a lot of Korean and Chinese and Filipinos have been entered into the inexpert, anecdotal censuses conducted by white Vancouverites observing the city. Even still, to paraphrase a writer who knew something about the ironies of race, it seems that the reports of the citys Afro-anemia are greatly exaggerated.

My friend Adam Rudder, an academic whose thesis examined this very invisibility of Vancouvers black population, opened his study with this paradox: In a population dominated by white immigrants of British descent, the small black population was hard to miss on the streets or in the places of work or recreation where they might be encountered. And yet, this community so visibly marked by their skin colour is almost entirely invisible in the histories and historical records of the city. []

He goes on to argue that that invisibility was not an accident, or a result of the small numbers of black residents, but, rather, a predictable outcome of settler colonial histories and a tactic used by black residents in order to avoid aggressive white hostility. []

Invisibility is a poignant choice of words: think how many times you hear Joe Fortes in Vancouverin the names of West End restaurants, libraries, community buildingsversus the number of times that you see the mans picture. I was in my early twenties before I learned that Joe Fortes wasnt a Mediterranean or a Romantic (the mental picture I had of Joe Fortes was a hawk-nosed man with thick, straight white hair combed back) but was, in fact, a barrel-chested, moustachioed, dark-skinned Barbadian. And for a city full of people who cant wait to tell you what buildings