Living in ‘The Dish With One Spoon’: Transdescendence and Convivance in Daniel Coleman’s Yardwork: A Biography of an Urban Place

Abstract

The subtitle of Daniel Coleman’s third book of non-fiction acknowledges in place the existence of a form of life and agency that the essay explores in exquisite detail. The living under scrutiny begins in the yard at the back of the Colemans’ house in Hamilton, the industrial city on the western tip of Lake Ontario where the Canadian critic and writer has made his home. The plasticity of the essay, a prospective, tentative form by definition, means that it is a most suited genre to try out new propositions regarding the practice of place in a vast area that used to be known as a “Dish With One Spoon” by the Indigenous populations who had agreed to preserve it as a neutral ground for their common use before the onset of colonisation. With the influx of European settlers, and the treaties that caused the morcelization of the region between the lakes, the area underwent profound transformations culminating with the industrial boom that boosted the development of the city of Hamilton in the twentieth century while causing great damage to its environment. The area is presently showing signs of ecological resilience that may lead to a renaissance with the waning of the industrial age. Although the timeline matters, Coleman is not writing a history of Hamilton. His approach is more geographical in spirit, looking at the languages, discourses and practices that have transformed a physical location into a place, i.e. portion of space imbued with signification for its human inhabitants, but also a milieu shared by myriad life-forms. This article will analyse the decentering Yardwork operates from the ego-centered genre of the biography to a form of writing which is eco-centered, by which I mean that it is rooted in an ontology where convivance serves as challenging model to help us rethink the borders that cut across life-giving places.