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Maggie de Vries, Missing Sarah: A Vancouver Woman Remembers Her
Vanished Sister. Toronto: Penguin, 2004.
Reviewed by Karina Vernon
The Rain 2:5 (September-October 2004): 5
Maggie de Vries’s affecting memoir of her sister’s life, Missing
Sarah, testifies to the
difficulty both of achieving a self-assured blackness in BC, and of
writing, from a critical perspective, about that blackness. In an
effort to understand her sister’s subjectivity, and in particular, the
reasons why Sarah left their middle class home for the Downtown
Eastside in the early 1980s, de Vries agonizes over the role race might
have played in shaping and mis-shaping Sarah’s subjectivity. Although
in the latter part of the book de Vries makes sensitive
connections between Sarah’s life and the social, historical, economic
and political contexts of sex work in the DTES that conditioned her
experiences, the author does not make such connections between Sarah’s
personal experiences of racialization, and the historical place of
blackness in British Columbia.
Rather than make sense of Sarah as a raced subject by connecting her
personal experiences of race and racism with the place blackness has
historically held in BC, de Vries remains concerned with Sarah’s
experience of adoption into a Dutch-Canadian family living in
Vancouver’s almost homogeneously white neighbourhood, West Point
Grey. Yet Sarah herself wrote candidly about her formative
experiences of racialization. In her journal in 1996 Sarah wrote
about schoolyard racism in elementary school. The language the
children use leave little doubt as to the imagined place of blackness
in BC’s racial imaginary:
It was walking home after school that I
had a deep inner fear
for. Some kids used to wait for me to start walking home. They
would then push, shove, kick, punch, yell, throw stones and swing
sticks at me. Chasing me half a block from my house. Nigger,
coon, spook, jungle bunny, moon cricket, spear chucker, spade, and a
few more. (12)
De Vries then registers her response to reading this journal entry:
I want to say that what she says isn’t
true. Could she have been
going through all that and we didn’t know it? She never told any
of us that she was being harassed to the extent that she describes, or
that she was a victim of violence. She goes on to describe being
hit in the head with a rock. But surely that didn’t happen
then. And surely those hurtful names are an accumulation over
years, not ones spilling out of the mouths of the kids of West Point
Grey. (12-13)
That de Vries doubts Sarah’s testimony by implying that those hurtful
names are appropriate to another context, not West Point Grey, is
dismissive of the history of racialization here. Though the names
are drawn from the store of fantasies about blackness produced by the
western imagination, they aren’t imported or foreign to this
context. It’s important to remember the history of segregation in BC,
from 1858 through the 1960s. Unofficial segregation kept
black folks out of churches, theatres, public houses and out of
political power as well. It pressed Vancouver’s black residents
into the Strathcona neighbourhood of Hogan’s Alley, only blocks away
from Sarah’s future Princess Street home.
Given the context of Sarah’s growing up, it’s not surprising that hers
is an un-self-assured, oftentimes repressed, blackness. De Vries
narrates an incident from the early 1980s, around the time Sarah began
running away. Sarah’s face looked “oddly white” (52):
“What have you got on your face?” Bo
asked Sarah.
“Makeup,” Sarah said.
“It doesn’t look like makeup,” Bo replied.
“Well, it is.”
“Are you trying to make your face white?”
“Fuck off and leave me alone!”
[...]
“When I saw Sarah doing what she was doing,” Bo says, I tuned in. [...]
She was whitening her face. Sarah was living in a very, very
white world.” (52-3)
The distance of British Columbia from the large and long-standing black
communities of central- and Maritime-Canada, as well as the operation
of regional discourses, which slide blackness underneath important
Asian-Canadian and South Asian-Canadian histories, means that blackness
has historically not had a strong presence in this regional
imaginary. As Wayde Compton puts it, black history in BC is
not common knowledge, or it wasn’t
three or four years ago. It’s
getting to be now maybe, but it wasn’t common knowledge as to when the
[black] pioneers came here, who Mifflin Gibbs was, or who Sylvia Stark
was, any of those people. It’s not like a tradition that’s passed
on, so it’s not like in the Caribbean. If you’re from Jamaica,
there are certain things you just know about your history, or if you’re
African-American you just know things. You grew up knowing about
the Civil Rights Movement even if you’re fourteen years old. But
it’s not like that in BC if you’re black. (WCL 132)
When Sarah wrote in her journal in 1997 that “I have no people. I
have no nation and I am alone,” (69) her sister understands it as a
criticism of her adoptive family. But it’s possible to read Sarah’s
writing as a bigger statement of how difficult it has been to become
confidently black in BC, where, until very recently, there have been
few archives for historical and cultural black memory. Projects
such as Wayde Compton’s Bluesprint,
which anthologizes a wide variety of black and mixed-race experiences
on the west coast, recovers ontological ground which had previously
been denied by the absenting and repression of blackness in BC’s
regional discourses. It is becoming a little easier to find our
way home.
Works Cited
Compton, Wayde. Bluesprint: Black
British Columbian Literature and Orature. Vancouver:
Arsenal Pulp, 2001.
Wilkinson,
Myler and David Stouck. “The Epic Moment: An Interview with
Wayde Compton”. West Coast Line
38 (2002):131-145.