This paper examines the representation of the city of Vancouver in two contemporary short stories: Lee Maracle’s “Polka Partners, Uptown Indians and White Folks” (1999) and Shani Mootoo’s “Out on Main Street” (1993). Both stories explore the issue of individual and collective identity in the diasporic space of the multicultural city, pointing towards the impossibility of establishing a fixed, stable identity and a solid sense of belonging. In these stories, the embracement and celebration of a hybrid, diasporic identity (as defined by Brah) is not an alternative for those confined to the margins of the urban socioscape.
Both Maracle’s “Bridge Indians” (Canadian Aboriginals) and Mootoo’s “cultural bastards” (Indo-Trinidadians) experience the urban space as a site of exclusion and alienation, as they are barred from full participation in the life of the city on the grounds of their ethnic origin, gender and sexuality. In telling their own “spatial stories” (what Michel de Certeau defined as the process of appropriating the city and mapping it through everyday practice), the narrators present their navigation through the city as a process of careful negotiation of invisible boundaries. In contrast with the dominant narrative that constructs Vancouver as a proudly multicultural, gay-friendly city, these short stories stand as micronarratives of an alternative urban experience: ultimately, the factors that make Vancouver the “most liveable” city in the world (according to “The Economist”) are of no relevance for the everyday lives of those who inhabit the periphery of the urban space and the margins of urban representation.