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A Book Review -- Missing Sarah: A Vancouver Woman Remembers Her Vanished Sister. In this essay I would like to analyze the recent book by the Canadian author Maggie de Vries Missing Sarah: A Vancouver Woman Remembers Her Vanished Sister. I am going to discuss the problems raised in this book and decide if this book is really worth-reading and useful. The author of the book Maggie de Vries was born in 1961 in state Ontario.
She moved to Vancouver at the age of three and grew up there. Now she lives in Vancouver. Now Maggie is an editor of childrens book in Orca Book Publishers in Victoria. Before Maggie worked for five years as a teacher, and for two years as an assistant of childrens literature author, teaching children the language and literature. Maggie's recent book is Missing Sarah: A Vancouver Woman Remembers Her Vanished Sister. The idea of the book is originated from a very special experience in her life and a private disaster.
This book is not for children, but the author doesnt mind children reading it. At present sixty-three women are considered to be vanished in Vancouver. Almost all of them were used drugs and worked as prostitutes in order to get heroin. A maniac was accused in murders of fifteen of vanished women. Maggie's sister, Sarah, is one of the vanished. Her DNA was found on that killers clothes, but he was not accused in her murder.
Sarah vanished on 14 of April in 1998. Then Maggie did her best working with the media to draw publics attention, trying to make the police to work harder and organizing a memorial for all vanished women. The memorial was held on May 12, 1999, on Maggie's sisters birthday. Sarah was black and she was an adopted child. She had a difficult life, contended against many issues. Sarah was a mother of two children, who are brought up by her mother and aunt: Jeanie of twelve years old and Ben of seven.
Her sister tries to prove that Sarah was an amazing woman. The author tries to explain why her sister, that was good by nature had to turn to the bad life, what made her do that. The main trouble of Sarah was not that she was an orphan. Her main trouble was the fact that she was black.
She was the victim of racist scoffs and unfairness. Showing the example of the tragic life of her sister Maggie de Vries shows different problems of our society. Racism is one of them. For last fifty years after acceptance of the General declaration of human rights in 1948 the international community has achieved significant successes in struggle against racism, a racial discrimination, xenophobia and the intolerance connected with them. National and international normative documents were put into operation and numerous international treaties on human rights were accepted, in particular the contract forbidding racial discrimination. Progress was made; a lot of facts testify that.
However the dream about the world free from racial hatred and prejudices came true only partly. At that time when the technology pulls together nations of the world and political barriers, a racial discrimination, xenophobia and other forms of intolerance continue to destroy our society. Last years there were horrifying phenomena, such, as "ethnic cleaning distributed, and in new mass media, such as the Internet, ideas of the racial superiority are wide-spread. Even globalization is fraught with such dangers which can lead to strengthening of an inequality. Racial discrimination is not wide-spread only among children in schools. Adults suffer even more than children.
More adult Sarah was more troubles she had. But nevertheless she was always loved by people who didnt pay attention on the color of her skin and loved her because she deserved that. She wrote poetry, published them in the journals. She was a bright, funny, charismatic and sensitive woman trapped in a downward spiral of self-loathing, prostitution, drugs and violence. Really in our modern world there is still very little opportunities for black people. They suffer from the scarcity of rights.
Our society makes them use drugs, become prostitutes just because they are black. The other problem that is raised by the author is the problem of the position of the woman in the society. What prevents the woman from being free, breathing with a full breast, growing creatively; developing, meeting each new day with happiness differing from all previous? What makes her suffer, chew a cud of notions of compulsion, speak hasty and muffled, look back on someone all the time? The public idea answered this question unequivocally: "situation" of the woman that is a social role given to her which for long time was limited only by private home life stirs. The western feminism as sociopolitical movement saw the purpose change of this "situation", giving to the woman the output from sphere of family to the public life through the right to work, the suffrage, access to formation, an opportunity to adjust birth rate, an opportunity to hold the state posts, an opportunity to be economically independent, etc.
In our modern world women gained more freedom and now they are almost equal to men. This is a result of the long struggle of feminists, who tried to gain the rights for women. But nevertheless women still suffer offends from men. Annually a lot of women are killed by men; many suffer humiliations, treated as slaves. Unfortunately, men found the perfect excuse: women are guilty of that themselves, because they.
Here we have a range of reasons all of which finally lead to the one common: because they are women! Really usually the victims of homicidal maniacs are those women who use drugs and the prostitutes. But nevertheless they are usual people and this is not a reason to kill them. Unfortunately in our modern society these people are considered to be the dregs of society and their death do not excite much regret. In the book Missing Sarah: A Vancouver Woman Remembers Her Vanished Sister tried to prove that these women are not always dregs of society, but the victims of it. They are usual people and do not deserve death like any other.
Sarah became a prostitute but it was not her own fault, it was the fault of our society. There is a rule: a woman must not work as a prostitute, prostitutes are bad. But I want to ask: what she should do if she is not accepted by the society? If she has nothing to do no opportunities, no hope. As the scientist wrote in the middle of the last century: Giving freedom to woman is not a problem of mass of people, but the process which can be made only through individual transformation." Also it is a pity that the modern women's movement plays mainly on a social field and gives not enough attention to the reference to the person. Feminism is often put into the category of the sociopolitical phenomena.
Such idea is represented too superficial for ideas of feminism are turned directly to the person and is a call to a society in which attitudes between people, attitudes between the person and the nature are built on the principles of violence, hierarchy and submission. The feminism suggests building these attitudes on a principle of partnership and mutual addition; it calls women and men for the fullest self-realization. The next problem raised in the book is the ignorance of the people and government of the problems of drugs and prostitution. The tolerance and ignorance of this problem by society create favorable ground for distribution of narcotics.
As a result more and more people become victims of narcotic dependence. More and more good normal women are trapped by the criminal world of narcotics that very often make then become prostitutes and finally lead to their death. The author was looking for answers. Why did so many women have to disappear before the authorities took notice?
Was there any way Sarah could have been saved from her life on the streets? And what can we do to help those women who are still trapped, by chance or circumstance, in the same bleak world that Sarah de Vries once inhabited? What we can do and how people and government can help the thousands of such women, how we can save them from the trouble, why we didnt do anything before and let them die? The main idea that the author wants us to understand from her book, that notwithstanding that her sister was a prostitute and drug-user, she still was an amazing woman, a mother of two children, who became orphans now because of the mistakes of our society that creates more and more orphans, more and more unhappy people.
Prostitutes were not always such, they have a history, a past that make them earn their life this way. Each of them has troubles, something awful that destroys their lives and makes them unhappy. People very seldom become using drugs because they are just curious, often they do that because they are unhappy. 'Missing Sarah: A Vancouver Woman Remembers her Vanished Sister tells us the real history of one of such people. Here we see the story about wonderful loved person, a mother and a poet, not a story of prostitute, that is a dregs of society and deserves death. I consider the book 'Missing Sarah: A Vancouver Woman Remembers her Vanished Sister to be worth-reading not only by adults, but also by teenagers. It makes us pay attention to a lot of serious problems of our society: the position of woman, racism, the role of government, the relations between people.
It makes us think about the ways to improve the situation, encourages everybody to make the step towards improvement of our life, because it is possible. The book proves that there are no absolutely bad people, even those considered to be dregs of society are really amazing people and they deserve better life like every of us. Bibliography 1. Vries Maggie (de) Missing Sarah: A Vancouver Woman Remembers Her Vanished Sister (Penguin, 2003)
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