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The ESPC Book Club just wrapped up our first book club session, where we discussed homelessness in Edmonton as described in the novel, My Home Street Home.
All in all, it was a great first start for the ESPC book club. For round two, we’ll be reading The Glass Castle by Jeanette Walls. Location and date TBA – but get reading, because we’ll be meeting at the end of the summer!
Val Stevens’ struggle to understand how the homeless survive on the streets is palpable. Errors and inconsistencies plague this Edmonton author’s first novel, but the compassion and commitment that she brings to the telling of this story are compelling enough to make up for it.
Her protagonist, an unnamed, middle-aged woman from small-town Saskatchewan is swept off her feet and living the high life with her new partner in Edmonton when her world comes crashing down around her. Her boyfriend – a caring, loyal provider – dies; his family cuts off her access to their shared apartment, shared bank accounts, and shared social networks. Suddenly, she goes from fancy dinners on Rice Howard Way to the occasional day-old pastry from generous cafe workers and soups cooked over an open fire in the river valley.
Whether it’s by mistake or on purpose, Stevens does a good job of forcing the reader to imagine how they would react in the same situation. Similar to the demographic to whom the book is seemingly targeted, the protagonist is a middle-class, non-racialized individual with – it seems – life skills, financial literacy, and the desire to live a comfortable life. It’s tempting, as a reader, to rationalize why this shouldn’t have happened to her – how it could have been prevented. Why doesn’t she go to a shelter? Why doesn’t she ask for help? The reader wants to rage at this misled, mistaken character: you have rights, pursue them! After all, having volunteered for many Edmonton shelters and agencies for those in poverty, she knows what her options are.
She doesn’t access them, however, and we see the slow, unrelenting dehumanization of hard living: her lack of access to bathrooms, food, shelter, and kindness wear ever more heavily on her. Aside from her small and supportive circle of homeless friends and the occasional compassionate stranger, society treats her in a way she has never been treated before – not as a human being with needs, hopes, dreams, and a history; but as an object, an animal, an icon. She is homeless, and for many, that is all that matters.
But through the author’s portrayal, we see that this character is more than just homeless; she is proud, strong, resilient, dignified, and determined to survive.
It’s too stereotypical to expect that, because she is homeless, she should not be proud. And so it is too simplistic to conclude that it is her pride that prevents her from finding a path out of homelessness, even if it is pride that prevents her from going to a shelter, where she might encounter a friend from her old life.
I doubt that it is a comment on the stupidity of prideful people that Stevens is making here, rather, it is a comment on the inadequacy of preventive mechanisms and of options for those who are homeless. How flawed are our protective systems, if they cannot even prevent those with pride, with courage, with resilience, with dignity from freezing to death because of homelessness?
This is what, as a community, we need to work on.
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Sunday, 05 February 2012 
