Transit Spaces and the Mobility Poor in Marilyn Dumont's Vancouver Poems

Transit Spaces and the Mobility Poor in Marilyn Dumont's Vancouver Poems Deena Rymhs (bio) I am now Hastings and Main, tattooed, pierced, shaved anddyed; the rain and rhododendrons and the Lion's Gate Bridge;I am now the panhandlers, the junkies, the hookers, the homeless,all of them, the Vancouver city transit, crowded and crabby, "the Drive,"Film festival and umbrellas, the lights of GrouseMountain; I am now more city than I thought… — Dumont, "Broadway," 1–5 These opening lines of "Broadway," the concluding poem of Cree-Métis poet Marilyn Dumont's poetic sequence about Vancouver, initially read as an exuberant communion between the speaker and her urban environment. Boldly describing herself as "Hastings and Main," a crossroads typically associated with the city's largest homeless population, the speaker proceeds to give a blazoned description of this area's dwellers, whose identities she subsumes into her own. The focal conceit of this poem is not, however, the substitution of Dumont's speaker for the socially disprized residents of Hastings and Main. The poem pans to a broader mapping of Vancouver that extends beyond Hastings and Main, and I wish to focus my analysis on the city's various transit spaces, which figure as sites of encounter and subjection throughout the "City View" sequence. All ten "City View" poems take their titles from specific streets in Vancouver. The sequence follows a journey through Vancouver's inner city and its commercial and suburban districts with the following titles as coordinates: "Main & Hastings," "Powell," "the drive," "Robson," "Napier," "Salsbury," "Oak," "Hastings," "Terminal avenue," and "Broadway." Signifying more than their indexical relation to specific locations in the city, these titular streets run through the poetic cycle and through one another to suggest [End Page 102] a fluid social geography, a view of urban space as interconnected. Indeed, the entire "City View" sequence is an exercise in remapping space, both in the speaker's reterritorialization of the city, which is accomplished in large part by her movement through it, and in the sequence's poetic geography of Vancouver, which parses the city into its discrete yet ultimately connected parts. In setting these poems almost exclusively in transit spaces such as streets, buses, and sidewalks, Dumont proposes to offer a social imaginary of connectivity that takes its cue from the urban environment. Despite this desire to traverse spatial and social boundaries, Dumont's "City View" sequence ultimately depicts a failed connection between the speaker and other urban subjects in these poems. In the nine poems that precede "Broadway," encounter leads not to empathy but to affective distance: the speaker moves yet is not moved. This disconnection signals the ways in which driving, walking, and bus riding—each of which represents varying entitlements to mobility—condition different affective relationships and capacities of seeing. While these poems endeavor to present a unified lyrical representation of Vancouver, they also reveal the ways in which mobility mediates social relations, subjectivity, and agency in the urban environment. Together, the poems invite deeper consideration of the relationship between mobility and forms of seeing, mobility and affect, and mobility and subjectivity—considerations that dovetail with Indigenous urban presence and processes of recognition. My analysis focuses on the uneven mobilities and variant optical geometries that structure encounter in these poems, encounters that reveal, in both palpable and concealed ways, Vancouver's race/space politics. This essay models a reading that puts critical mobility studies and literary criticism into conversation with analyses of urban space and Vancouver's settler and neocolonial spatial politics specifically. The insights generated by this mode of inquiry extend beyond thinking about mobility in terms of its representation in literature. Approaching literature as more than representative, I am interested in literature's capacity to reveal what we often cannot see of our built environments and how such environments make us as subjects. "City View" renders in subtle and unexpected ways this co-constitutive relationship between spatiality and sociality. By making transit spaces its site of reflection, Dumont's sequence points to something further, however, [End Page 103] and this is mobility's triangulating presence in the social-spatial dialectic. The poems in "City View" evidence the often...

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