Bloody Traces on the Sidewalk

Amani Alsheikh

A Syrian writer and journalist currently living in Canada. Amani has written for several Arabic blogs, including Raseef 22, focusing on gender and social justice issues.

(Translated by Sara Hlaibeh)

It is just another day, walking back home. I find myself staring at a red stain on the sidewalk close by the building where I live. It takes a few seconds of astonishment before I start to realize that it was a smear of blood in the shape of a human foot. More stains pave the way towards my place, until we both, the injured foot and I, drift away into a chaotic world. This is not one of the stories I carry with me from back home, this is present day Toronto!

Love and Outrage

I moved to Toronto in October 2020 from Waterloo, where I had lived for around four years. My journey in Canada, however, began in Montreal, where I spent a year and a half before joining my family in Ontario. Montreal, the coldest city in the world, was only made more difficult  when attempting to learn French. However, the shift from a dynamic metropolitan was another culture shock. As someone who works in the writing and translation world with no transitional skills unless they are adjusted to suit the new atmosphere, the small town closed in on my heart. It isolated me from the right opportunities that can only be found in larger, more diverse cities with their lively hubs. The problem with such locations is that they drain you with their expensive demanding life-styles, pricey rent and expensive bills, overwhelming you with the exorbitant cost of living. 

An opportunity came my way, I eventually moved from Waterloo to Toronto through the company I was working with. It was the perfect timing! I was ready to live in a big city again, a new adventure to revive the life in me. And it wasn’t just any city, it was wonderful Toronto, where love, freedom and sailing boats spread out across the lakeshore in the summer. Toronto and its Drom Taberna, Pamenar, Cherry Beach, and Trinity Park, where sunset-soaked slopes are forever accompanied with friends’ laughter. Oh, how many times we sat in those places,  sipping beer, thanking the universe for Toronto’s sun-blessed summers and its green horizons. It was a vicious cycle really of cursing our destinies, persistent feelings of  fear, daily stresses and the continuous battles with our inner selves, then circling back again to counting our blessings, a much-needed constant reminder.

Many young people are with me in the struggle of finding the right opportunities in Toronto. And many cannot afford to try. When I moved into my current place of residence, I was celebrating the ‘reasonable’ rental price of a one-bedroom apartment. The leasing agent, a close friend of mine, told me that the main problem with the building was the intersection where it’s located, that the neighborhood is what was lowering people’s willingness to rent there. I did not give it much thought at the time, blindly trusting that there was no way anything could surmount what we had been through back home. So I would not care about the mere appearance of a neighborhood!   

It takes ten-minutes to walk the distance between Dundas Square, Toronto’s beating-heart, and the Dundas-Sherbourne intersection on the eastern side. Approximately one  kilometer separates the giant screen advertisements and skyscrapers from misery itself. On the aforementioned intersection, you’ll find the various groups of the homeless: drug addicts chatting up dealers, and the disabled who haven’t found proper care and ended up in the area one way or another. And we cannot forget to mention the teenagers in their worn-out clothes, trendy though as if it had not been that long since they left their once warm homes. They sometimes stagger around for a bit and before standing still after taking some kind of drug, God knows what it’s made of, that they bought from this neighborhood. To be more precise, right between the Sherbourne-Dundas intersection and Sherbourne-Queen is a very short spread, where the homeless, the displaced, and  abused women are mercilessly crushed under the monstrous feet of capitalism, patriarchy and above all the supremacy of the“ White man”.

A radius of 500 meters separates two of the city’s largest homeless shelters, and one cannot help but wonder whether it was the municipality’s strategic plan to limit homelessness to certain areas, such as those previously mentioned. This might not be an accurate theory, especially since the City of Toronto website says that they fund 53 shelters run by various civil society organizations, and another 10 are directly managed by them, indicating that the shelters are evenly distributed across the city. However, the idea persists that such sightings of homelessness are intended to be limited  to specific areas. Added to this is the deterioration of these shelters, as well as the racism, homophobia, transphobia, ageism, ableism and sexism against the people who depend on their services.

Let your imagination run wild with what you could witness here. Like a middle-aged man carrying a STOP sign that he uprooted from the street and flapping it in every direction, the “homeless Jesus” as I named him,  inspired by his long blond hair and acutely sorrowful features, did not intend to harm an ant. His body was there, but his soul was absent.

Memory of Horror in Regent Park

The scene extends to the east of these intersections, to Regent Park, where the previous residents had been displaced and demographic and urban changes took place under a development project or process known as  “gentrification”.  This is a process that is essentially an attempt to “improve” a decaying poor area by pumping into it new inhabitants from wealthier social classes and enormous rehabilitation projects that supposedly revitalize the region. However, such plans are highly complex and mostly unfair in that they often obliterate much of the city’s cultural identity.

It seems like we are going to spend our entire lives trying to deconstruct and comprehend the prevailing regimes and how, wherever we go, these various governments are very similar though they utilize different types of resources and media. 

The Regent Park project, situated in the ancient part of Toronto, is both one of the oldest and grandest governmental housing projects in Canada since it’s implementation in 1949. It used to be a green landscape occupied by the Irish and English who had built their own homes. At the time, the government thought of founding affordable residential buildings for the working class. With World War II coming to an end and the growing immigration waves towards Canada, Regent Park witnessed demographic changes in addition to the increase of immigrants in the region. The area was relatively isolated, especially back when housing projects were enclosed behind walls. It was like a small village within Toronto where all the residents knew each other but no one from outside the walls had access to. This isolation was further aggravated with surging numbers of immigrants from all around the world, especially South Asia and some African countries, such as Somalia. 

Gradually as time passed, this isolation led to heightened poverty levels and a lack of interest in education, turning it into a “ghetto”, and one of the most famously terrifying areas in the city; crime spread and kept increasing, as did homelessness. Cultural stereotyping became common in the local media and fuelled rumors. In the 1980s and 90s and almost up until 2010, unless you lived in Regent Park, there was no way you would dare to step foot there after 7 pm. There were multiple stories of kidnappings, murders and drug dealing. So the government decided to interfere again by evacuating tenants from housing projects that had become home to immigrants, and began working again on making “improvements” to Regent Park. Compensation was provided to those affected as much as possible by giving them housing in other nearby neighbourhoods, however, many did not survive this displacement, especially the young generation who mostly ended up on the streets.

At the time of my move to Toronto, the pandemic was at its initial peak when all services and businesses moved online. A lot of people made the decision to leave Toronto to save on rent or mortgages, which drove real estate prices to drop dramatically. The company running the building I live in took advantage of the empty apartments to do some repairs, and in the process, they closed access to the balconies for months since last March. In the summer of 2021, as things became semi-normal again, the company nearly doubled the price of rent, and a campaign began to make the tenants’ lives miserable in order to push us out.   

The monthly rent for my place is 1550 dollars, an amount of money that is not easy to secure, because covering this cost of living in Toronto requires endless hassle, work and anxiety. This kind of anxiety that we, the “newcomers”, live in adds to all the heavy psychological and emotional burdens that we carry with us from back home. Nevertheless, whenever I feel overwhelmed and about to give up, I remember the bleeding foot and force myself to swallow the pain.

So here’s Toronto for you. To suffocate in your home because you’re not allowed to open your own windows. To be terrified by the scenes of your neighbors scattered on the snow-covered sidewalk and wake up from nightmares where you’re one of them. A deeply sorrow-filled stranger in the street telling you “you are beautiful.. Have a good day!” without ever actually feeling harassed. To dance in the streets with tunes blasting out on a friend’s speakers whenever you feel like it. To greet a neighbor and look away as tears fill up your eyes for them. To get lost trying to make sense of it all and then piece together your new self.