Scarborough Village festival set for weekend
YOUnited Neighbourhoods events aim to bring communities together
For her T-shirt design, Sumayyah Siddiqa, 11, painted a shy bride drawing a ghomta head covering over her face, an image that reminds her of aunts in Bangladesh.
Manar Hossain, 15, who like Sumayyah lives in Scarborough Village, drew an alpona, the type of simple, repetitive design she once saw on every floor of her Bengali grandparents' house.
"When you see it on a shirt it's like taking a piece of the country with you," she said last week.
But for the same community art project her friend Annesha Bhowmik, also 15, painted a canvass with the Dominion, parking lots and high-rises she sees from her window at Markham Road and Eglinton Avenue, the centre of her neighbourhood.
Scarborough Village will be celebrated Saturday at the third of this season's YOUnited Neighbourhoods festivals, from noon to 7 p.m. at Scarborough Village Park, near the intersection and behind Cedar Drive School.
The art, part of a project by the local Bengali Social Club, will be sold or auctioned at the event, which includes a community marketplace, free food, a talent showcase and headline acts performing for less pay than they'd normally make.
The festival (the only one of the three that's been done in past years) is bringing people together in a community where "everyone's always working because they have to," Manar said.
There's tension between people from different parts of Scarborough, a feeling "you need to stick to your boundaries" and a stigma attached to those who don't, said Nadia Thompson, one of the YOUnited organizers.
But the group, working with "amazingly hard-working youth" has succeeded this summer - in Kingston-Galloway and Eglinton East-Kennedy Park - in getting people to mix and drawing people from across Scarborough and beyond, she said this week.
Organizers have confirmed a fourth festival, Sept. 20 at the Scarborough Civic Centre.
"You never know the kind of connections that can be made," added Thompson, a young poet from Kingston-Galloway who added the key to knocking down barriers between neighbourhoods and groups living in them is to work on what residents have in common.
For so-called priority neighbourhoods such as Scarborough Village and Kingston-Galloway, that means standing up to say, "let's find a way to fix it."
Scarborough Village is critically short of public space, at least space local people can afford to use, said Nayla Rahman, co-chairperson of the Scarborough Village Neighbourhood Association. When her Bengali club started its art project in June, 150 people showed up and the sessions were held wherever possible, "in a house sometimes, maybe my basement sometimes," she said.
