A voice from the street corner

Concordia student Sachiko Murakami used to live in Vancouver’s Downtown East Side. She moved there out of curiosity. She wrote about it. Her words reach down its dark alleys to look the neighbourhood’s tragedies right in the eyes, to see how “they” feel. “They” are the forgotten women, the emptied bodies of which we hold a stereotyped idea of prostitution that we seldom choose to think about.
In The Invisibility Exhibit, her first poetry collective, Murakami shows how much time and thought she’s concentrated towards exploring the Downtown East Side’s ethos and image.
Murakami exhibits a control over her emotions and displays a sensitivity she transmits with ease. It would be much easier to write a spite-filled diatribe that points an accusing finger towards society’s hypocritical savagery, but her empathetic tone proves through contrast that anger would only be reactionary. It wouldn’t help develop a true sense of understanding for the women who work the streets, have disappeared and have been forgotten.
Instead, Murakami seeks to understand the situation through an only slightly removed poetic vantage. She leaves any reactionary response to the reader. She offers much to react to: telling allusions, interesting comparisons, abrupt shifts in tone, bloody details, hidden metaphors.
Robert Pickton is alluded to, but never given the spotlight. Perhaps Murakami thought he already had his fair share of attention since his farm came under investigation in 2002. It did seem that with Pickton’s gruesome tale, we were beginning to care about the people who fade out of the picture. But in hindsight, perhaps we really only cared about Pickton, not the victims. They were just a necessary part of the equation. He was someone who had gone far enough to shock us, and once his trial was done, so was the story, and nothing had changed beyond his Port Coquitlam farm.
In The Invisibility Exhibit, Murakami proves that greater understanding and truer compassion for another’s tragedy doesn’t come through the news and its trivial stream, but rather the details that reflect up through a murky puddle in a back lane, that echo down a cold hallway or stain a bruised cheek.
In one of her poems titled “you think it’s safe to talk about the weather,” Murakami writes “I’ve dug deeper, to the distant heart/ we do not call it a heart/ thrumming on its own,/ a chamber that feels/ like home. Rain falls there too.” This type of involvement is shown throughout: a compassion for those exposed to the elements, not simply a romantic idea of misery that appeases our best humanitarian wishes, but rather a tactile involvement that is just as much taxing as it is gratifying.
Murakami seems to point out something very telling throughout the 70-plus pages of short poetry: that we don’t look at a situation like the state of the Downtown East side straight on. We’d rather pass by these stereotyped and vaguely understood people, giving them the type of depth we’d give two-dimensional cartoon characters. Murakami forces us to look and get beyond the type of absurdity our idea of a prostitute takes on, as displayed in her poem, “Portrait of It as a Missing Women”:

And now what you’ve been looking for,
it leaning against the back door of the Victory cafe.
Stroking its cheek with a dirtier hand
Head to-toe red and redder where scabs haven’t healed,
or would be if the photo weren’t so black and white
Its body empty of the expected contents
purse spilled on the road before it.
It did this for money to feed itself
Look at it. Like its about to cry
or crack. Don’t concern yourself.
It can’t look up to find your gaze.

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