MONDOmagazine

Jason Kieffer’s latest book, The Rabble of Downtown Toronto has been receiving a lot of heat. We watched the fire spit and spark at the launch party held Thursday, April 22^nd at The Central in Mirvish Village

By Georgia Webber

Everyone loves controversy, there’s no question about it. And no self-published comic book has received so much as Jason Kieffer’s The Rabble of Downtown Toronto, at least not in recent memory. What’s understandable is the inevitable disturbance that writing a book profiling forty homeless and downtrodden individuals will bring. What’s a little more challenging to understand is the intention behind it, who is responsible for the outcome of its circulation, and finally, what we should think of it. If you include yourself among the masses who love controversy, I’m sorry to report that if you weren’t in the room at the recent Toronto launch, you missed your conflict fix of the year.

Kieffer was introduced by the evening’s host Dave Lapp, a fellow cartoonist who has also spent some time chronicling the street dwellers of Toronto’s downtown. After a short presentation, Lapp started in with some prepared interview questions — but he didn’t get far before an audience member got sick of waiting for his turn.

Once the flood gates were opened it was all Lapp could do to hold the audience at bay, and I found myself wishing we had a bouncer in the room. Perhaps I’m too quick to associate yelling with physical harm, but it would have been useful to set up some guidelines for acceptable commenting to stop people from bullying each other too much. There were sensible folks among them, however, with a lot of really intelligent and critical queries. Everything from his literary devices to the social implications of the content was addressed in some way, though Kieffer’s answers were lacking clarity and assuredness until his co-presenters Lapp and the Beguiling’s Peter Birkemoe stepped up to fill in the gaps. The following is a sample of the ethical concerns at the heart of the debate:

What is the artist’s responsibility for the outcome of his or her work? Are we really judging an artist’s morality and worth as a human being based on his or her artwork? How much privacy is entitled to those who spend their lives in public space? Is immortalizing a negative attitude in print a wrongdoing, or a social service?

All night I found myself flushed red with frustration as people posed questions of heavy artistic and social theory upon this small-potatoes comic artist, expecting him to come up with a satisfactory answer to the larger implications of this one small book. And that’s why this event was so strange: it was a tiny venue with a tiny crowd of people talking about a tiny book — forty-eight pages — and the level of drama in the room left all of us gasping for air. It was the kind of drama that one finds themselves gawking at in disbelief, horrified that we haven’t got anything better to say or do than compare unsavoury profiles of homeless people to the treatment of Jews in Europe during the Holocaust. (That absolutely happened and it was the most unifying moment of the night — I felt bad, but really, what did the guy expect?)

Despite the ridiculous comparison, safety is a concern here. The homeless are among the groups most susceptible to violence, and many saw this book as a tool to facilitate that violence being carried out. Sadly, it is their concerns that have given the book enough attention to make this a possibility. In the world of comics and self-publishing in Toronto, there isn’t any expectation that people beyond that community would ever read the book, let alone make a fuss about it. As Kieffer stated, that was a big part of why the content wasn’t more considerate of possible misinterpretations or misuses.

Kieffer also insists that the project was never meant to harm or make fun of anyone. This is something that many people felt the book was doing without pause — labelling vulnerable people with crass, off the cuff observations and not giving them a second thought. If one thing was established Thursday night, it is that Jason never wrote those things thinking that it was an acceptable thing to do. Birkemoe has had many discussions with Kieffer about this very issue, and articulated his thoughts better than Kieffer himself when he said that “this book…is taking the voice not of someone who is sympathetic and trying to raise the issue, but taking the voice of the people who are ignoring the homeless, trying to put that voice on paper.” The work emphasizes the distance we place between ourselves and these people every day by digging up our flash judgements, immortalizing them, and forcing us to swallow our own observations and how shallow they really are. How many of us have taken the time to learn the backstory of every individual on the street, and how many of us have seen them in the way the book portrays, completely at face value, assuming that their unusual behaviours are drug induced or “crazy”?

Kieffer has spent his life watching these people when not many others were looking, talking to them when they engaged him, and recording his experiences. That’s why the argument that he is perpetuating stereotypes is so frustrating; he’s not ignorant of the realities these people face, he’s creating composites of real people whom he has invested time in and is genuinely interested by. Though it has caused pain in some of these individuals, many of the people who identified themselves in the book turned out to be identifying with a character of his own creation.

As tense as the situation was, the event was wholly successful in numbers attended and the value of the discussion being had. The results of these discussions are usually quite difficult to ascertain in the group, but this event held people to the scene, debate continuing well into the timeslot of the following act. People talked as they filtered out of the room, and I myself heard many people change their tune from one song to the other over the course of the event and the overture of leaving.

As valuable as the discussion was, I think it is safe to say that the outcry of angry readers could have been avoided if the book included an introduction or explanation of the voice it assumes to hold the hand of any unsuspecting readers. It is awful to think that this argument should be had over and over and that more people might “find” themselves in the book, only to be hurt and offended by something void of that intention. Clearly, this isn’t over. The discussion must continue, and the life of the artist must go on. I’ve got my hopes resting on the safety of those affected, and whether or not you agree with the prevailing arguments, you should too.