Who was Joe Fortes? Ladysmith author Ruby Smith Díaz offers layered look into life of Vancouver’s first lifeguard
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“He is in front of his tent on Ayyulshun (Coast Salish First Nations name) English Bay, and the suit that he was wearing and the way that he was standing really pulled me in,” said Smith Díaz of Fortes, whose full name was Seraphim Joseph Fortes. Smith Díaz refers to Fortes as Serafim, not Seraphim as it appears elsewhere, as Fortes spelled his name Serafim on documents.
Smith Díaz then discovered a connection with Fortes, who was born in Port-of-Spain, Trinidad, in 1863 and died in 1922 at age 57 in Vancouver where he had lived since 1885.
“I found out that he was an Afro-Latino man, which was really special to me, because I’m also an Afro-Latina person. And I didn’t realize that there was somebody as prominent of a figure as he was living in Vancouver that was of Afro-Latino heritage,” said Smith Díaz, who is of Jamaican and Chilean descent and grew up in Edmonton, spending 12 years living off-and-on in Vancouver.
“As soon as I found that out about him, I just became obsessed learning more about where he walked, where he lived, what kinds of things that he was involved in, and just knowing that his story, his experiences, mirrored many of mine here.”
In Searching for Serafim, Smith Díaz combines archival materials with her own poetry and perspective to offer a layered dive into the legacy of Vancouver’s first lifeguard, who is officially credited with saving 29 lives, and who taught three generations of Vancouverites how to swim.
Before the book, Smith Díaz took part in a residency at the Contemporary Art Gallery of Vancouver, which invited people to reflect upon a place or a person that had an impact on Vancouver from the last 100 years. Smith Díaz’s contribution was the soundscape called Soliloquy for Serafim, which was performed at English Bay in 2023, with actor Carlos Joe Costa portraying Fortes.
“(I) put myself where he would have stood 100 years ago, which was the Ayyulshun or English Bay,” said Smith Díaz, noting a lot of writing was inspired by standing on those very shores.
Racism is also central to this new book, which is out just in time for Black History Month. From a violent crew member putting a cotton hook through Fortes cheek when he was sailing on a ship out of Glasgow to Panama, to media reports that once he was in Canada Fortes was faced with prejudice.
“I am quite shocked by the prevalence of these comments in almost all of the articles that I read about him, even if they were lifting him up in one way or uplifting his work, the next sentence would constantly be undermined by something about the colour of his skin,” said Smith Díaz.
“(A lot was) taken through the eyes of a journalist that, in many cases, had their own perceptions of him, had their own ideas about him. And had also their own stereotypes that we see present in their writing about Black people at that time.”
Those stereotypes, Smith Díaz said, included speech inflections that inferred a southern American experience.
“The minstrel fantasy of … a plantation enslaved person speaking in this particular cadence that he would not have had,” said Smith Díaz. “This is a man from Trinidad who spent a year or two in Liverpool and the rest of his time in Canada. He never went to the United States, at least in the southern part of the United States.”
Through the new book, Smith Díaz hopes to offer readers a glimpse through a different lens into Fortes’ story, the history of Vancouver and the history of Canada.
“I hope that, through learning about him and through my experiences, that they are able to see the many ways in which history is repeating itself in this current moment,” said Smith Díaz. “I hope it causes people to reflect on their own connection to the land that they’re on, and how we all impact each other in our identities, and in our story, and creating the larger narratives of the places that we live in.
“And how, when any parts of those stories are omitted or erased through the voices of a dominant group, that we are missing a greater part of our history — and who we really are.”