Poetic reflection exposes a dark side
Former sex worker tells her intriguing tale in three sections: Outside, Inside and Inward
By Brett Josef Grubisic, Special to The SunApril 19, 2013true
‘Survival may be the most radical thing I ever do,’ says Amber Dawn, a former street worker turned author who reveals her past in the essays and poems of How Poetry Changed My Life.
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Speaking of sex work from an insider’s perspective in the introductory pages of How Poetry Saved My Life, Amber Dawn asks, ‘Why do we so seldom hear the voices of those whose experience is so widespread?’
Prostitution has been the storied occupation for millennia. It remains so, too, to the point that circa 2013 a child may not know what an IT consultant or barista is, but will surely have heard plenty — at the playground, on TV, from Mom and Dad — about the countless pitfalls of streetwalking. In popular culture, “c autionary tale” and “prostitution” are practically synonymous.
Speaking of sex work from an insider’s perspective in the introductory pages of How Poetry Saved My Life, Amber Dawn asks, “Why do we so seldom hear the voices of those whose experience is so widespread?” While positing a few sobering answers, Dawn’s slim memoir — comprising 18 poems and half that many essays that reflect 15 years of writing — also seeks to reveal harrowing and tender scenes from long stretches at jobs (street prostitute, masseuse, adult fetish worker) in Vancouver, and thereby begin to repair a problem her own question identifies.
Dawn, a self-described “kinky, genderqueer femme with a big mouth” positions herself throughout as an unabashed activist, believing that society needs to listen to and include sex workers’ voices in its dialogues, “a skill we have not yet developed, just as we have not learned how to include the voices of anyone who does not conform to accepted behaviours or ideas.” Her immersive word portraits here — elegiac, documentary, queerly nostalgic, politicized — provide a compassionate education as they cover good times (friendship, love, community) and bad (assaults, death, addiction).
“Outside,” the opening section, is “a testament to outdoor or survival street work” that “discusses drug use, suicidal feelings, and the relative isolation of queer youth.” Its poems, which share qualities with those of Elizabeth Bachinsky and Evelyn Lau, are impassioned and poignant, snippets of daily living under duress (“it was a terrifying time to be working outside, and I no longer / wanted to die / four thousand miles / away from a small river-bed town / where I was born”), danger from a variety of sources (“How unprepared we were for Pacific Rim heroin”), and touching, unexpected moments of female bonding (“You tell her that you are living with a man who you hate / She tells you she sleeps on the floor at a punk rock house and all / her possessions / fit into a typewriter case.”)
The essays, such as the incisive “Melhos Place,” acknowledge the brute fact of “bad dates and missing women” while emphasizing the fraught community of women (including the no-nonsense wisdom of veterans like Maria, “a blend of ho innuendo and business rates:” “No kissing, no real names, no sleepovers, no playing house.”) Dawn reveals that street schooling taught her to “listen, witness, pass information forward, be at the ready, and survive. Survival may be the most radical thing I ever do.” She discovers too the regrettable disconnect between her “ghetto feminism” and the middle-class institutional variety.
The switch to the following section, “Inside,” is literal in the sense that an older Dawn has moved from her “old corner by the fish factory” to a safer “rub and tug” massage parlour. The essays and poems here add intriguing details to the portraiture while tracing Dawn’s continuing education.
There are people like tough Caress (“This here is a job. Le-git-i-mate. Not trashy low track. Got it?”) and lovely behind-the-scenes vignettes (the older women knit “booties for their next baby, read distance-ed. textbooks, and braid one another’s weaves between clients”), but discomfiting ones as well (e.g., Dawn’s appetite for cocaine: “I justify a single line — to put this night behind me. A second line — to get me up and out of here. A third. One pain situates itself so close to another pain.”)
Dawn’s rich essays here tackle her conflicted relationship with her grandfather and being a call girl for a violent client she names Mr. Million-dollar-property. A provocative meditation, “How to Bury Our Dead” talks of the need for ritual and tradition within queer culture.
Something of a thematic grab bag, “Inward,” the final and arguably weakest of the sections, includes lyrics on love and closure. A winning, too-brief sketch of Dawn’s hometown (Fort Erie, Ont., “the hellhole of Canada”) concludes with a travelling job at a carnival.
“Silence is the work of people who can’t comprehend that change is possible,” Dawn declares.
Defiant and proud, her memoir categorically refuses silence, daring to imagine a better world while offering hopeful testimony for those subsisting in abject spaces its author has since vacated.
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