January is Poverty Awareness Month in Canada, so for what’s left of this month (now that I’m back from my blogging holiday) I’m focusing on awareness-raising books. The first is Deborah Dundas’s (class of 2023) slim volume, On Class (Biblioasis, 2023). At just 35,000 words, it’s more like the “pamphlets” that were once distributed to share burgeoning social and political ideas than a book that, given its subject matter, could easily be twice its size.

Poverty is a singular experience. My parents both experienced it as children in single-parent homes during The Great Depression. My mother and her mother worked as maids for a wealthy family in Shaughnessy, Vancouver’s “old money” neighbourhood. When their employers had chicken for supper, the staff had eggs—”chicken in the shell,” they called it. The nights my mom and hers had dinner at home, my Gran would get a free soup bone at the butcher (it was going to go into the garbage) and two day-old muffins at the bakery. Their supper would be a bowl of beef broth with a muffin. 

My father quit school at the age of fifteen to support his mother and younger brother as an errand boy, finishing high school at night. When WWII broke out, he joined the Air Force, dreaming of a career as a commercial pilot that would lift him and his family out of poverty. That dream was shattered along with his left leg when his plane was shot down just after D Day and he was left with a permanent disability that precluded flying. 

My family didn’t have a lot when we were children—second-hand clothes and used cars—but my mother could stretch a dime into a dollar at the grocery store, and my parents managed to buy a house in a suburban community outside of Toronto. Mom bartered with music and dance teachers so we could lessons, and we had home-grown birthdays and Christmases, and camping trips in the summer in a tent trailer my father built. 

My ex-husband and I struggled during our two older children’s early lives when our after-tax income generally left us hovering just above Statistics Canada’s low-income cut-off (LICO). But (for reasons that were far from fortunate but that I won’t go into) we owned a townhouse and a car and my husband had a steady job with benefits. My mother was able to help us out occasionally (my father had died when I was sixteen); after she died, my siblings and I each received a modest inheritance, which also helped.

But while each generation faced hardships, none of this is like the poverty Dundas describes. My parents’ poverty was what literally the whole world was experiencing at the time. As a child growing up in a family of modest means, I never felt singled out among my friends, whose families struggled as ours did. And the main thing that singled my children out from their classmates was that they had life-threatening food allergies and asthma at a time when this was still unusual. 

This is an entirely different experience than the kind of poverty Dundas describes, the kind where you own only two sets of clothes and one of them is always dirty, where you can’t afford shampoo so you wash your hair with dish soap, where it’s not that you hope dinner won’t be hamburger again but that you’ll have dinner. That kind of poverty leaves its imprint well into adult life, when it reminds you over and over that you’re not worthy and you shouldn’t expect much out of life. Only a few, like Dundas, climb out of that deeply entrenched poverty, a climb that’s as much psychological as financial in that it has much less to do with pulling oneself up by one’s bootstraps than believing one is just as deserving of a decent life as anyone else. 

I volunteered with an anti-poverty activist group for a time when my children were young and the most powerful thing I learned is that true poverty exists as much in the mind as in the wallet or the bank. That’s a point that too many middle-class people don’t grasp and one that Dundas talks about candidly and compassionately without ever being maudlin or melodramatic. The following passage exemplifies this (links added):

Eric Walters and I are sitting on a patio in Corso Italia, a neighbourhood just east of Old Weston Road [in Toronto], the poorer part, now gentrifying, the part where Walters grew up with responsibilities no young kid should have to shoulder: his mother died when he was four years old; his father’s mental illness would drive him to disappear for days at a time; his older sister left that toxic situation as soon as she could, and Walters had to fend for himself. 

He became the “King of Jam Sandwiches”—also the title of his Governor General’s Award-winning children’s book. While his books for young people range in topic from math to the space race, it wasn’t until he was older that he was able to write the one that won him that GG. The King of Jam Sandwiches is a novel, but it was his story: A book about class, about growing up in a neighbourhood with economic challenges, working class, without many prospects. About the daily indignities of growing up poor—about counting cans of food to see how long you might be able to feed yourself if your dad didn’t come back and there was no money to buy more. And it was about wanting something more out of life. 

He didn’t write that book while he was young, he says, because “I wanted to get published.” He wrote plenty of stories that editors were willing to publish and did—dozens of them. This story went unwritten as Walters did what most of us who were poor and ambitious do: he tried to fly under the radar and fit in. When he finally wrote a story about poor kids, he was told by the editor that the character wasn’t believable. “He sounds too grown up,” he recalls being told. Walters’ reply? Of course he does—he’d had to grow up fast. To this editor, though, that translated into not being “relatable” for most kids. 

But Walter’s story isn’t unusual. We try to fit in partly out of fear that people will decide we don’t belong, that we’re outsiders, the them to their us—we don’t have the power to influence the decision. When belonging includes people in positions of power who determine whether you’re going to get a job or who determine whether your book is going to get published, then fitting in matters. …

To this day, Walters still counts cans in his pantry. 

This book is an easy read because it’s short and it’s written at a reading level and in a voice most readers can relate to. It’s a difficult read because it’s so stark and so true. Above all, it’s an indispensable read because, to broadly paraphrase Lilla Watson, the Australian Aboriginal activist, only when we recognize that other people’s oppression is tied to our own will we be able to work together to liberate one another.