Lee, 70 this year, is a relatively quiet presence in his native city these days, but he was anything but that 40 years ago. He helped co-found House of Anansi, a publishing firm that put out half the really good novels and non-fiction that came out in this country between the mid-60s and early 1970s, when nationalism was well entrenched. He was also one of the moving spirits behind Rochdale College, an experiment in cooperative living that became the ground zero of the city’s counter-cultural movement, and by 1971, a constant focus of attention for the drug squad.
Today the building is a senior citizens’ home, but it’s impossible for anyone over 40 to walk past it and not to think “Ah yes, but once….” In my Process days I got into rollicking arguments with Jesus-freaks who lived there, or with practitioners of various half-understood (by the practitioners) eastern mysticisms. It was a centre of anti-Vietnam War protest when thousands of U.S. draft-dodgers lived there, and … and …
Lee’s poems mention Rochdale only fleetingly, but they are deeply evocative of Toronto in the early 1970s. Perhaps because he is so much the Torontonian, his work is little known elsewhere, but works like Sibelius Park or The Death of Harold Ladoo (a novelist Anansi published) bring that time and place rushing back to anyone who was here then.
Toronto is, and has been, many things, but it was a special creature in the 1970s. The fall of the Trudeau government in the 1979 election is the defining end of the period, but it had been losing steam before that. Yet in that period, as a proud bastion of protest of the Vietnam conflict, and a place of social experimentation, it opened something in the young people who lived here that had not been present before, and which is seemingly beyond recapture today. Toronto is too self-aware and simultaneously too self-absorbed, too filled with condominium tower construction sites, to heed demonstrations and similar disturbances for more than a Warholian 15 minutes. Recently, the Tamil community joined thousands of hands in a human chain around major downtown centres to protest Sri Lankan government violence against their people in that country, and it was of little significance. The ear-buds and cellphones drowned out the chanted slogans, and everyone knows how to avoid making eye-contact with beggars so people could transfer that skill to anguished activists.
The 1970s Toronto I experienced welcomed The Process as yet another spiritual gateway, along with the Jesus-freaks, the chanting, saffron-wrapped devotees of the International Society for Krishna Consciousness, the Children of God, the Moonies, and all the rest of the zoo of new faiths that blossomed and contracted through that decade.
But the city was more than its counter-culture. In 1970, you could eat in just five languages in Toronto: you had North American grilled meats, Chinese of the chop-suey kind, Italian of the spaghetti and pizza variety, Greek food on Danforth Avenue, and whatever your mother made, assuming you lived with her or saw her regularly. By 1978 every ethnic group had opened its restaurant doors to people outside its own community, and there were a half-dozen wine-clubs around, including specialist ones for German and Italian wine. The unifying horror of the Vietnam conflict had ended after a dozen years of American involvement, and all of us who had been such avid adventurers in this soup of awakened consciousness had kids, and even mortgages. We had voted for a mayor opposing buildings over 45-feet high as monstrous impositions on urban existence, and seen a by-law to that effect undermined and buried by the vested interests. We had moderated our drug consumption (or taken it too far, into a self-destructive habit), and begun to worry about the nation’s debt and high inflation: two items that we would, at the decade’s start, have considered to be maya, mere temporary illusions used by unhip imperialist governments. AIDS was still a few years away, but the sexual revolution had stalled, except around the gay rights side, where social attitudes were moving glacially, but still moving. The East-Indian minority was experiencing the first Paki-bashings and, without a Harold Ladoo (who was Trinidadian, but the right colour), it had no-one to speak its cause in fine words.
Lee says of the man in his poem:
You had us taped, you knew white / liberals inside out; how to / guilt us; which buttons to push; how hard; how long.”
It’s a searingly honest poem, 22 lucid pages long, recalling all sides of dealing with a proud, brilliant and difficult man whose brief spell of fame and subsequent murder came before anyone even useda term like East Indian. And it’s free of much awareness of an East Indian community, because Anglos, even Lee, only saw our own one, even if we did open up to talented individuals from outside. We spoke of multiculturalism, but it hadn’t yet come about, to shake up our Eurocentric self-images and attitudes. Anglo supremacy was weakening, and wasn’t necessarily concerned about doing so, but it undoubtedly gave a coherence and foundation to the 1970s.
Or, at least, to one very good poem. I’ve tried and failed to find a quote from (I think) George Harrison, who somewhere describes 1967 as having had “that summer that seemed to last a thousand years.” The Summer of Love, a term dismissively sarcastic for something astonishing, had such a quality of time suspended, or of moving at a different pace. The early 1970s in Toronto came close to it: there was a feeling that the city was suspended in a dimensional bubble. Perhaps it was a temporal distortion brought on simply by the youth of so many of us, all experiencing every day as a newness, and not yet used to seeing the seasons appear and slip away so repetitively over the decades. By the end of it, many of us boomers had seen almost 30 winters, and the dreadful expression “world-class city,” with its undisguisably tawdry competitiveness, had arrived. And of course, as that grasping, needy perspective took hold, the unique things that made the city world-class were largely expunged.
But in some of the innocent years before that time, many people were able to experience a suspension of angst and material necessity, and at least half believe in dreams like Rochdale or our various spiritual polities.