The Rain Review of Books

Box 2684 Station Terminal, Vancouver, Coast Salish Territory BC/CA V6B 3W8 | 604-682-3269 ext 7326 | books@rainreview.net


Maggie de Vries, Missing Sarah: A Vancouver Woman Remembers Her Vanished Sister. Toronto: Penguin, 2004.

Reviewed by Margot Leigh Butler
The Rain 2:5 (September-October 2004): 4


“Lately, Sarah has been speaking a great deal.” (Epilogue, 269)

Through Sarah Jean de Vries’ poems, letters, journals and drawings; her frank responses to journalists’ questions; through her friends’ and her daughter’s words; and through her family’s writing, Maggie de Vries invites readers to know her sister, to get a sense of the fullness of her life instead of the distancing stereotypes usually on offer. Sarah was amongst the many—at time of writing, sixty-nine—women missing from Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside (DTES) until her DNA was found at a farm in Port Coquitlam; now one man will be charged with killing twenty-two women, though earlier police research turned up over six hundred local men they believed capable of murdering many women (219).

How could it be, and how can this be written about? Sarah, in 1995, wrote “I’ll try to begin. Just try to remember this is not a story with a plot. This is me, my thoughts, emotions, opinions, and just plain ‘Sarah’ and situations I’ve found myself in.” Maggie carries on: “Throughout her journals, she addresses a readership. When she wrote, she imagined readers. She imagined you” (xiii).

Sarah wrote poems and journal entries about her experiences as a woman of mixed-race—black, Aboriginal, Mexican Indian, white—who was adopted, as was then the practice, into a white family; of racism and of isolation. As a child she wrote letters to her family—often expressing her love of animals and affection for those addressed, absent and missed—at a time when they experienced painful separation and divorce. Later, she wrote about her friends and family and her two children, whose photos she kept in her clutch purse, who are being raised by her mother Pat de Vries.

She wrote about her experiences with drug addiction and her withdrawal while in the Burnaby Correctional Centre for Women:

Try to imagine hot and cold flashed like from sauna to igloo, sauna to igloo and then add sweating bullets non-stop, then go to a little tickle in the back of your throat, along with an itchy feeling in all your joints along with a little tickling with a feather that can’t be scratched or stopped for seven days. Now the little tickle has become a cough which is making you heave which is making you convulse. Itchy, tickling in every joint heaving up nothing but yellow mucus that burns your throat. Then, oh joy, come the seizures. (135)

A few years later, local reporter Margo Harper interviewed Sarah on camera while she was shooting up, while she responded to Harper’s question as to whether she wanted to stop (142). In this situation of journalistic hawkishness and voyeurism, etc., Sarah takes this opportunity, amongst others, to implicate herself and to encourage others: “I’m not the one to tell you not to do it because I’m sitting here doing it myself. I’m definitely not proud of it. It may sound strange or stupid coming from me, but just stay away from it.” (143).

Writing about her experiences doing sex work to pay for the drugs that kept her from being dope sick, and also kept her addicted, Sarah wrote this poem:

You may find the prostitute sleazy and easy
But I know for a fact they don’t find it pleasing.
They’re alive and breathing
With a functioning mind
And a heart that ticks in perfect time.
There is the odd one who wants it all
And will use everything, even her claws.
But if you’re friends, you’re friends for life
And fight side by side to prove your right.
In this business, you lose a lot of friends
And that’s where the terror begins. (112)

Sarah wrote about her views on pimps and johns, her experiences with violent johns, her fears of death and of becoming closed-off and unfeeling. She saw herself as part of the group who would later be referred to through the figure of “the missing women”, and in 1995 wrote powerfully about it:

Warmer than it was a couple of days ago, thank you, God. It’s hard standing out there in the cold. My toes get so cold they actually make me cry when they start warming up again. My hands aren’t much better. The tips of my fingers, yikes: ouchie ouchie ouchie. Business has been okay. Can’t really complain. I’ve done better. I’ve done worse.

I can’t shake it. It’s this feeling that creeps over me all the time. Loneliness, emptiness. Lost in a vast void of nothingness. Groping my way through life like a blind woman with no cane, crawling on my hands and knees afraid to stand, unsteady upon my feet. No sense of direction, balance or time. Drifting endlessly through these icy cold nights trying to hide my pathetic growing fear that maybe just maybe my time draws near.

Am I next? Is he watching me now? Stalking me like a predator and its prey. Waiting, waiting for some perfect spot, time or my stupid mistake. How does one choose a victim? Good question, isn’t it? If I knew that, I would never get snuffed.

So many women, so many that I never even knew about, are missing in action. It’s getting to be a daily part of life. That’s sad. Somebody dies and it’s like somebody just did something normal. I can’t find the right words. It’s strange. A woman who works the Hastings Street area gets murdered, and nothing.

Yet if she were some square john’s little girl, shit would hit the goddamn fan. Front page news for weeks, people protesting in the streets. Everybody makes a stink. While the happy hooker just starts to decay, like she didn’t matter, expendable, dishonourable. It’s a shame that society is that unfeeling. She was some woman’s baby girl, gone astray, lost from the right path.

She was a person. (159)

Like Sarah, Maggie also imagines us, the readers of this book on whose cover we see a picture of a MISSING poster bearing a photo of Sarah with details on where and when she was “last seen”, and her Vancouver Police Department file number and contact information; these last two are partly obscured by security bars over the DTES shop window. In this photo, taken by her cousin, Sarah is wearing the clothes she was last seen in on April 14, 1998; Sarah’s daughter Jeanie, when aged seven, saw it on a walk through the Downtown Eastside on a visit to Vancouver when she insisted on seeing evidence that people were looking for her mother (196). Anyone seeing Missing Sarah may also have seen this poster, or may have seen Sarah on the night she disappeared; so though these posters are no longer up, through the book’s cover they are still working, still seeking crucial information.

Near the middle of the book, before the section of family photos of Sarah from all through her life—and later photos of the memorials to the missing women—one of Sarah’s sketches is reprinted: a black figure’s head rests upon her hands which cup her bent knees; the figure is seated on the ground with her ankles apart, and the work is titled “Must I endure this each time”. This sketch follows a passage by Maggie which states:

On the Vancouver Police Department’s website, I found two lists on opposite sides of the screen of the missing persons page. Missing persons were listed on the right, missing sex workers on the left. Sex workers were excluded from the “persons” category. Historically, women have fought long and hard to be defined as persons, yet certain women are excluded from that category all the time. As things stand, we have left those women working on the street, with few resources beyond one another. (104)

The recent history, context, laws and community support for and against sex workers in Vancouver (chapter five), and the implications of changes in drug availability, quality, practices and price on the DTES all contribute to increased violence against sex workers (chapter seven). Maggie’s strong experiences with the police investigation and with the media are taken up in the last two chapters of the book. Regarding the “early”’ police investigation, Maggie states that:

No one was taking leadership; no one was willing to say, in the face of that lack of evidence [of crimes], that more than twenty missing women was sufficient evidence in and of itself that something was wrong. They were willing to let that number continue to climb, to take the chance that someone was murdering women and hiding all evidence. ... So women continued to disappear through the rest of 1999, 2000 and 2001. ... Women could continue to disappear without much public awareness or public outcry because the women were considered lost to begin with. Their disappearances did not create fear in the rest of us. (225)

Each chapter of Missing Sarah begins with a legend of the many women “last seen” or “identified” between 1978 and 2003, corresponding in time to Maggie’s narration of Sarah’s life and the last times her friends and family saw her alive. In this way, readers can see what Sarah was part of, and may want to know more about the named women’s lives and the police and media investigations into their disappearances and deaths. Learning more about Sarah’s life, and perhaps extending this toward the other women, readers might refigure who we take them and ourselves to be—perhaps now less able and willing to accept the ideologically normative representations of the women which are florescent in the mainstream and in some populist literature, artwork and photography on and from the DTES. Now, when I see Sarah Jean de Vries’ name and photograph—likely a mug shot or cropped to resemble a mug shot—in amongst a grid of photos of many missing and murdered women, she won’t be a depersonalized figure anymore; and the sense I’ve gained of the fullness of her life will repercuss into the other women nearby.

In my view, Missing Sarah provides a kind of antidote alternative to everyday distancing, stereotyping, sensationalizing, simplistic, dismissive, uninformed, dualizing practices in many ways: by putting Sarah’s work and life into context, and by giving a sense of the kind of support, loyalty and difficulties in Sarah’s community and family; by addressing its readers as Sarah’s readership “She imagined you”; through Maggie’s continual awareness that she is telling Sarah’s life with and from her own and her family’s and friends’, with Sarah’s life as their guide; and by asserting both her own and her sister’s implicatedness, not innocence, as a strong perspective from which to speak—“Lately, Sarah has been speaking a great deal”. For readers, this practice of implicatedness in felt, involving, lived politics may open up their own, and possibly reconstrue what counts as political engagement.

Missing Sarah has made a difference: widely read, discussed, excerpted, reported on, reviewed and acclaimed—last year the winner of the George Ryga Award for Social Awareness in Canadian Literature, and a finalist for the Governor General’s Award and the City of Vancouver Book Award—it has generated public awareness, engagement and change. As well, it’s sought after by the DTES women’s book club Beyond Words which is asking for donations of copies of Missing Sarah to go to 32 Books, 3185 Edgemont Blvd, North Vancouver, V7R 2N8 or PACE (Prostitution Alternatives Counselling and Education) P.O. Box 73537, 1014 Robson Street, Vancouver, V6E 1A7.