A year after Sarah de Vries—an Aboriginal sex worker and drug addicts from Downtown Eastside—was murdered and her DNA was found in Robert Pinkton’s pig farm in Port Coquitlam, her sister and a renowned author Maggie de Vries published a memoir, “Missing Sarah: A Vancouver Women Remember her Vanishing Sister” in 2003 in the remembrance of Sarah and other missing women. Written in Maggie’s point of view and supplemented with Sarah’s letters, poems, and journal, “Missing Sarah” reveals the Sarah’s struggle of discrimination, self-loathing, lost and unacceptance in her childhood and teenage that led up to her tragedy in 2002.
In the book, Sarah’s writings play out an important role in bringing Sarah to life by manifesting her characters and engaging her into the conversation about sex work, drug addiction, and life of Aboriginal people. They are the windows that allow readers to have a glimpse of Sarah’s personalities as reflected in the content and the style of writing. Letters by Sarah, for example, were written intimately to her sister or other family members. She expressed her emotions openly without having fear of being judged. By reading them, readers get to know more about Sarah’s “personality as it presents itself in [her] letters” (Walker). In one letter, she complained that “I am not happy here (her mum’s home in Ontario) at all” (21) after having to live away from her home where she grew up in Vancouver before her parents separated. She exhibited her distress about her divided family and her longing for family love. It is also worth noticing that she used the word “love” repeatedly when greeting her family in the letters (such as “I really love you a lot…” [55]) and in her signature (for instance “All my love, Sarah” [41] and “LOTS OF LOVE, YOUR SISTER SARAH!!!”[183]). It shows how much she treasured family bonding and that she could find a sense of belonging and recognition in them. Her family is where she wanted to fit in. Thus, these letters are the sources that offer us unique insight into Sarah’s character — as a caring and compassionate person who is devoid of yet willing to give others love.
Furthermore, Sarah’s writings set up a platform for communication between sisters, as well as between Sarah and readers. After mapping Sarah’s painful life with plentiful letters and journals, Maggie iwas able to understand her sister better (De Vries xv). Not only that, in an interview with Allyson Latta, a Canadian literary editor, Maggie mentioned that “[w]hen I read her words when I am speaking, I feel as if she speaks through me. All of this is a joint project between her and me. But it is also a team project.” In engaging Sarah’s writings, it seems as though Sarah and Maggie have genuine contact that enables them to co-write the book (although they may have written their parts in different time periods.) Moreover, her writings are dialogical which “[open] up channels of communication and reciprocity not only between the correspondent parts, but also between the writer of the letter and any reader” (Tamboukou 173). As Maggie pointed out, Sarah imagined readers as she wrote (xv). Sarah is not only telling a personal story in her journals, but also a public issue that requires public attention and action.
An important feature in “Missing Sarah” is that despite having plentiful sources of diary entries, poems, and letters, a significant majority was written by Sarah. It is not to say that her family did not reply to her letters. In fact, Maggie is using the setting of one-way letters and journals from Sarah to shift the power dynamics between the marginalized and dominant group. As Yasmin Jiwani and May Lynn Young argue, aboriginal sex workers are often being narrated under hegemonic discourse which undermine the value of missing women (897). They then follow Debbie Wise Harris in suggesting that Aboriginal women subject to “strategic silences,” which they seldom have the chance to speak for themselves (899). Through incorporating her writing exclusively, Sarah is given the voice and isempowered to defend herself, to express her misery, and to pledge for help. She is an “active agent” (Jiwani and Young 899) seeking out to others. Maggie and readers, however, are put in a powerless and passive position where we are “unable to reach back to her, unable to change one single thing” (De Vries49) What is most distressing and heartbreaking when reading this book, as suggested by Maggie, is that we feel how real Sarah is, when she is “calling out to me [Maggie] from them [letters]and I couldn’t help her.” For instance, when reading Sarah’s journal about her work, we as readers acknowledge that she was impotent to fight back. We hear her berating her clients for they are to blame for making her “dirty ” and “ashamed”. Yet, neither Maggie nor readers are given the opportunity to lend Sarah a helping hand, no matter how willing and eager we are. Sarah’s writing therefore serve to counter the hegemonic discourse.
The appearance of Sarah’s work in Maggie’s memoir also play out the concept of relationality—an auto/biographical term that other people, communities, societies, or political forces interweave with narrator’s story that in turn give form to the identity of the narrator(Smith, and Watson 86). Although Sarah is the subject of the memoir, she is not the protagonist herself. She comes out as Maggie’s relational other, whose image is being constructed through a collective of her own works and interviews with her family and friends. When looking through the Sarah’s life, Maggie connected her own narrative of growing understanding and awareness towards sex workers on Downtown Eastside and her increasing engagement in the advocacy for missing women. Her identity is developed in relations to Sarah.
Every life matters. By integrating Sarah’s poems, journals, and letters in her memoir “Missing Sarah”, Maggie brought Sarah to life and gave her the power to speak for herself. At the same time it urges readers to reflect on the issues in Downtown Eastside and take action before it’s too late.
Works Cited
De Vries, Maggie. Missing Sarah: a memoir of loss. Toronto, Ont.: Penguin Canada, 2008. Print.
Jiwani, Yasmin, and Mary Lynn Young. “Missing and Murdered Women: Reproducing Marginality in News Discourse.” Canadian Journal of Communication 31.4 (2006): 895-917. ProQuest. Web. 26 Feb 2016.
Latta, Allyson. “Maggie de Vries.” Allyson Latta. WordPress, 2004. Web. 26 Feb 2016.
Smith, Sidonie, and Watson, Julia. “Auto biographical Acts.” Reading Autobiography : Interpreting Life Narratives. Feb 2010: 63-102. Project Muse University Press. Web. 26 Feb 2016.
Tamboukou, Maria. “Relational narratives: Auto/biography and the portrait.” Women’s Studies International Forum 33.3 (2010): 170–179. Science Direct. Web. 27 Feb 2016.
Walker, Pierre A. “Seeing a Life Through Biography, Letters, and Fiction.” The Chronicle of Higher Education. The Chronicle of Higher Education, 12 Nov 2004. Web. 26 Feb 2016.