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Sandy Cameron, Being True to
Ourselves: Downtown Eastside Poems of Resistance. Vancouver:
Swancam, 2004.
Reviewed by Marsha Drake
The Rain 3:1 (January-March 2005): 7
Words that come to mind while reading Sandy Cameron’s poetry include
people’s poet, witness, people’s historian and visionary. His latest
collection is an illustration of his own integrity and resistance to
injustice and in “Lest We Forget” he makes it clear that “we have a
duty
to work for peace and justice”. We have this duty, in part, because
“veterans fought for a decent life for all our citizens, not for the
corporate oligarchy we have now”.
Throughout almost 17 years of volunteer
work on the Carnegie Newsletter
Sandy has helped many other writers
witness and record their own histories. True to form in the poem “We
Need a New Map” he encourages everyone to “Sing your song friend, tell
your story.” The collection is dedicated to the memory of Bruce
Eriksen, a community activist who had the integrity to put his life on
the line in defense of the Downtown Eastside community that he loved.
Reading Cameron’s work you get the impression that he would do the same
for the community.
The poems are intended to remind us of the importance of
preserving the history anchoring the Downtown Eastside. Forgetting that
community’s social justice roots will endanger its survival because
“Memory is the mother of community”. Knowing, remembering and
celebrating that common history keeps citizens connected to each other
and to location. The Downtown Eastside community will need the memory
of an elephant and the roots of an oak to resist today’s pressing tide
of gentrification with subsequent waves of exclusion and displacement.
Past and present history of the Downtown Eastside is recorded
and commemorated in these poems. War veterans and Victory Square are
given their due, as are the “centres of resistance against injustice”
Chinatown and Japantown. We meet the labour hero Ginger Godwin,
murdered in 1919, and learn that the Carnegie Centre was occupied by
the Relief Camp workers in 1935. The
community’s recent history is equally important to remember: the
Valentine’s Day march in honour of the missing women, a thousand
crosses in Oppenheimer Park memorializing those lost to the war on
drugs, and a totem pole commemorating the fight for land claims
settlement and the symbol of First Nations cultural survival. The
richness of this history arises from the variety of people who come
together in the Downtown Eastside and one of the most profound images
of hope is seen in “the intensity of the love that reaches out from the
unendurable loneliness of our separation”.
As a visionary Cameron sees men and women preparing for a future
journey into a place “where no one is excluded” but for now we wait
“like salmon for a change in the tide”. Local and global justice
movements are trying to draw up “a new map” because the old one leads
to “pepper spray gulags death camps and the end of the world”. While
Cameron admits that he doesn’t have a vision of the new map, he waits
with the rest of us for it to materialize. In the meantime he’ll
continue to write stories that “draw lines dig holes and above all,
remember”.