Witness Poetry as an Ethnographic Account

This essay seeks to analyze the value of considering witness poetry as an ethnographic account, specifically identifying the value and implications of reading Amber Dawn’s book How Poetry Saved My Life: A Hustler’s Memoir as an ethnographic account of sex work in Vancouver. As I read Dawn’s narrative and poems, I was struck with how much the book reminded me of ethnographic accounts I read while participating in an ethnographic research program in the summer of 2021 as part of my Sociology undergraduate degree. Similarly to ethnographic researchers, Dawn comments on her positionality within the world of sex work and on the various kinds of intersectionality it entails. In her poems, she situates herself within the Downtown Eastside much like an ethnographer would and constructs the world which she inhabits as an insider with detail that would rival many ethnographic accounts. She achieves this, I realized as I read on, not only through the craft of her persuasive prose sections, but also through working with the ability of poems to produce specific tones, detailed settings, and powerful subjectivities that prose might be incapable of producing to the same extent.

In writing this essay I hope to engage with the conversation of what poetry can or can’t do. Maria Damon and Ira Livingston, in the introduction to Poetry and Cultural Studies: A Reader state that “[i[f we defer asking how good a poem is, we can begin to ascertain what it is good for, and how and for whom” (Damon and Livingston, 2), shifting the debate of the quality of poetry to one centering around what poems can achieve. They explain that “[c]ultural studies rewrites the category of the aesthetic to place it in active engagement with political, social, and economic realms, displacing aesthetic judgment as the centerpiece in analyses of expressive culture” (Damon and Livingston, 2), essentially pointing out that cultural studies aims to displace such practices as poetry appreciation, which focus merely on analyzing the poem’s quality, and explore how poetry engages with complex and tangible realms of public life. Ethnographic poetry, as I will show later on, similarly places a poem in a position of engagement with experiences of individuals that, in turn, are affected by specific cultural, social, or economic circumstances. Witness poetry, it seems, is a uniquely advantageous type of poetry to use in ethnographic accounts, as it is produced by and speaks to precisely the types of people and groups that ethnographic research might be concerned with. Thus, a lot might be gained from reading Dawn’s book as an ethnographic account.

In this essay I will firstly define witness poetry and identify Dawn’s poems as those of witness. I will then briefly speak about ethnography and then about ethnographic poetry, finally diving into Dawn’s text, though it will be referenced throughout the entire essay. I aim to explore the value of reading Dawn’s witness poetry as an ethnographic account of Vancouver’s sex work industry and engage in the conversation of what witness poetry can do when it is viewed as an ethnographic account. Finally, I believe it is important to address the possibility that Dawn herself, as the author of the book, might not necessarily be equated to the speaker of the poems she writes. Though I believe it is almost always wise to make this distinction, for the sake of this essay I will consider Dawn herself to be the speaker. I believe it is appropriate to do this due to her statements regarding the personal nature of these poems in the introduction section of the book, indicating that they are indeed true to her experiences. Not only that, but she also refers to her book as a memoir (Dawn, 16), and mentions struggling with maintaining privacy for her friends and coworkers whom she includes in the book (Dawn, 16), which indicates that the poems indeed result from her real-life experiences. As such, I will refer to Dawn as the speaker throughout the essay.

WITNESS POETRY

It is firstly important to identify Dawn’s poetry as poetry of witness. In this essay I will rely on Carolyn Forché’s definition of witness poetry. Forché defines witness poetry as poetry written by “poets who endured conditions of historical and social extremity” (Forché, 29). Though Forché focuses primarily on extremity relating to war and political prosecution (Forché, 29), Dawn’s poetry falls under the definition of poetry of social extremity, as it deals with the subject matter of marginalized and dangerous experiences. The benefits of reading a poem as a poem of witness, according to Forché, are the opportunities to “illuminate the experience of extremity” (Forché, 30) and have “trace … [and] evidence” (Forché, 31) of the occurrence of the extremity that the poem is concerned with.

It is important here to turn to Dawn’s text and explore the ways in which she presents herself as vulnerable to dangers associated with her identity and as a marginalized person, so that it can be concluded that her poetry is poetry of witness. Dawn points out that there are various dangers associated with being a sex worker, in particular, the likelihood of abduction. “I’ve seen an alarming number of women from the Downtown Eastside go missing” (Dawn, 53), she writes, referring to her fellow sex workers. She also mentions missing women in a number of her poems, writing in “How Poetry Saved My Life” “There was a missing women poster/ wrapped around a telephone pole/ on the corner of Pandora and Victoria” (Dawn, 58). By providing such specific details of where this poster is located, she situates the posters of them firmly in the Downtown Eastside, pointing out the close proximity of the issue of missing women, and, as she has situated herself within this landscape, signals that she is in danger of an analogous fate. In the anthology Hustling Verse: An Anthology of Sex Workers Poetry, Dawn also mentions the way in which regular everyday tasks are dangerous for people in her position - “sex workers are denied personal agency and expression in nearly every aspect of our lives. The erasure of and stigma surrounding sex work means that routine activities – such as going to a doctor’s appointment or making new friends – are risky. Self-censorship or complete silence are the only guaranteed means to mitigate the risks” (Dawn and Ducharme, lecture), she writes. The dangers Dawn is likely to experience due to her identity as a sex worker, therefore, are situated in a specific and tangible setting she inhabits, and apply to her everyday life, both of which mark her as a person living through extremities.

Dawn’s narrative also presents her as a marginalized person in that she constructs herself as a sort of outcast from regular life. She recalls her experience of attending college, trying to fit in with other students, writing “I’m trying hard to look like them, and most of the time I believe I belong until Introduction to Non-Fiction class and it’s time for one of my stories to be workshopped and the room grows very quiet. … The other students tell me that I’m ‘brave’. They keep their eyes on the page when they speak to me” (Dawn, 64-65). Dawn’s felt alienation from the other students highlights her marginalized position and struggle to fit in due to her identity. Thus, Dawn’s narrative and poems illuminate the dangers she is at risk of experiencing as a sex worker and the details of her alienation present her as a marginalized person, from which it follows that she is indeed a poet of witness.

ETHNOGRAPHIC RESEARCH

Before moving on to the exploration of ethnographic poetry, it is important to briefly talk about ethnography itself. In this section I will define ethnography and discuss the importance of centering individuals’ experience and highlighting members’ meanings in ethnographic studies. Ethnography is an anthropological practice, which involves researching communities from their insiders’ perspectives. The researcher typically spends time within the community she studies and collects insider knowledge, shedding light on the complexities of the culture and networks of this community.

In the fifth chapter of Writing Ethnographic Fieldnotes, Robert M. Emerson, Rachel I. Fretz, and Linda L. Shaw highlight the importance of pursuing members’ meanings in ethnographies. “All too frequently ethnographic fieldnotes fail to attend consistently to members’ meanings, instead importing outside or exogenous categories and meanings. Imposition of outside categories produces fieldnote descriptions that fail to appreciate local meanings and concerns” (109). They warn against the imposition of outside meanings onto studied groups, as this tendency reproduces dangerous stereotypes about such groups and reinstates their marginalization. A similar thing seems to happen to sex workers in Vancouver, and, as Dawn points out, is done so systematically. She writes that she can “name the elected officials who seem content to let us die or go missing in the streets” (Dawn, 123), demonstrating how power-holding individuals perpetuate this issue. She also points out her concern about the imposition of these meanings in Hustling Verse: An Anthology of Sex Workers Poetry by asking “[a]nd what subjugates a population even further? Having their ‘stories’ told through power-holding outsiders. Stories in quotation marks, as these narratives and portrayals are largely inaccurate.” (Dawn and Ducharme, lecture), further highlighting the systemic nature of impositions of false meanings by outsiders.

Inaccurate outside meanings are thus systematically imposed on the group she belongs to, which has disastrous consequences for this group. Witness poets, Dawn among them, seem to be uniquely positioned here, since their works provide direct insight into the experiences of marginalized groups and people experiencing dangerous situations. Indeed, Dawn seems to be free of the trap that readily awaits “outsider” ethnographers, as she is an “insider” and is thus much less likely to accurately represent members’ meanings in her poems. Though, of course, Dawn’s perspective might not be perfectly representative of all of her group’s members’ meanings, she is much more likely to provide a well-rounded and accurate account of those meanings than an outsider is.

ETHNOGRAPHIC POETRY

Before considering how Dawn produces these valuable insider interpretations, it is necessarily to take a look at the concept of ethnographic poetry. In their article Anthropology at the Edge of Words: Where Poetry and Ethnography Meet, Kent Maynard and Melisa Cahnmann-Taylor define ethnographic poetry, examine its origin, and explain how poetry fits into and adds depth to ethnographic accounts. Maynard and Cahnmann-Taylor write that “Since the 1990s, experimental approaches to ethnography have proliferated, with no one form claiming a new orthodoxy; these days we might see ethnographic novels, memoirs, biographies, or a pastiche of multiple forms” (Maynard and Cahnmann-Taylor, 3), pointing out a recent development of form within ethnographic accounts. A similar development, they explain, has recently occurred within poetry. “This shift in ethnography is similar to the earlier poetic movement often thought to originate with Walt Whitman in Leaves of Grass—first published in 1885 (1998)—which moved American poetry decisively away from strictly closed forms (e.g., the sonnet, sestina, villanelle, etc.) to more free and open verse” (Maynard and Cahnmann-Taylor, 4), they write. Following these two parallel shifts in form, “poetry appears more regularly in scholarly venues alongside ethnographic prose” (Maynard and Cahnmann-Taylor, 3), “and ethnographic poetry has become … more accepted” (Maynard and Cahnmann-Taylor, 3).

Poetry, thus, originally entered ethnographic accounts due to both fields experiencing similar and coinciding shifts in form. Next, Maynard and Cahnmann-Taylor explore the benefits of including poetry in ethnographic accounts. They write that ethnographic poetry “provides important access into specific ‘cultures,’ and helps to give us words for the slippery concept of ‘culture’” (Maynard and Cahnmann-Taylor, 6), for which regular prose might be insufficient. The descriptive language and specific tone of poetry, thus, can achieve what prose might not - it can elucidate the complexities of a particular studied culture or group. In addition to that, Maynard and Cahnmann-Taylor explain that “[b]ecause a successful narrative or lyric poem can echo or resonate so powerfully with the emotional experience and sense of identity of cultural insiders, it allows us to see the nuances and complexities of culture” (Maynard and Cahnmann-Taylor, 6). They thus point out that poetry’s capacity of resonating with the identities of cultural insiders is unmatched by prose, as is poetry’s ability to point out nuances that prose can leave unexposed. “Like culture, poetry is allusive, not susceptible to the sort of old scientism in anthropology that viewed culture as a “how-to” manual of instructions. Poetry and culture brim with indirection, ambiguity, lacunae, indeed, with downright silence” (6), they write.

It can therefore be concluded that poetry enhances ethnographic accounts in that its eloquent language can help construct the lived realities of a group studied through ethnographic research. The complicated nuances of culture are in some cases best described by using poems as opposed to prose, since poetic language helps illuminate complex subjectivities, settings, and tone. Witness poetry such as Dawn’s seems to be a type of poetry perfectly suited for inclusion in or interpretation as an ethnographic account, particularly because it is inevitably, as per Forché’s definition, concerned with “conditions of historical and social extremity” (Forché, 29), which regular prose might not do justice to describing.

AMBER DAWN

So far, I have demonstrated that Dawn’s poems are poems of witness and that witness poetry is uniquely advantageous for inclusion in ethnographic accounts or being considered as an ethnographic account itself. Now, it is finally time to turn to Dawn’s poems and take a closer look at some of them to explore how Dawn highlights and centers members’ meanings, provides insight into the community, and even counters stereotypes and illuminates intersectional oppression - all of which are common aims of ethnographic research.

In her poem “Chevron Restroom 1212 East Hastings”, Dawn provides insight into the inner-workings and interactions between members of the sex work community. As the poem is set in a bathroom, and depicts sex workers’ preparations for work, it creates a record of knowledge that a regular researcher is very unlikely to have access to. She writes of one girl named Eve “She runs the faucet until she is faceless/ then paints her cheekbones back in/ valentine pink, her eyebrows/ an impossible arc” (Dawn, 42), calling attention to the tendency of some of these girls to avoid ever being without make-up, using the word “faceless” almost to signify that Eve’s identity is lost without it. Such details emerge from her close proximity to the everyday routines of this community, and which might have been lost to outsiders. In the same poem, and, once again, due to her access to these insider moments, Dawn also points out a tension between herself and another red-haired sex worker named Cherri Sherri. “I’m the only ginger/ on Franklin, she warns me” (Dawn, 42), writes Dawn, “I better not see your ratty/ fake/ red head tonight” (Dawn, 42). These lines depict a tension between her and Cherri Sherri, apparently stemming from their similar appearance and self-identification. What such a tension might result in is one of these workers, presumably Dawn, altering her route and locations while working, so as to avoid a confrontation with Cherri Sherri, or, on the other hand, might explain a confrontation that, it would seem, is likely to occur between the two if both work on Franklin Street. To an ethnographer without this insider knowledge, such route alterations or confrontations would not make as much sense as to Dawn, who can shine light on the most detailed interactions within this community. In the same poem Dawn is able to center a member’s story of experiencing abuse that this member might have been reluctant to share to an outsider. A sex worker named Sissy recalls that “a man took a piss on her/ while she nodded off in an alley” (Dawn, 42). Dawn occupies the valuable position of being trustworthy enough for her co-workers to confide these abuses in her, while also being able to maintain their anonymity (Dawn, 16), and thus highlights members’ meanings in a way that an outsider could not. Her poems are thus an invaluable insight for the understanding of the sex worker community of Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside.

In her writing Dawn also achieves a key goal of many ethnographic accounts - she shines light on intersectional experiences within the community. The term “intersectionality” was coined by Kimberlé Crenshaw, who used it “to describe how systems of oppression overlap to create distinct experiences for people with multiple identity categories” (JSTOR Daily, 2020). Intersectional thinking has since been crucial for a well-rounded ethnographic account of a community, and Dawn, due to her access to members’ meanings, is able to shine light on intersectional experiences within the sex work industry in Vancouver. She recalls arriving at a workplace one day to discover other girls looking grief-stricken. With an immediacy that signals her awareness of the dangers faced by sex workers every day, Dawn asks “[w]ho died?” (Dawn, 99), to which a sex worker named Summer replies “Shelby, fuck. You remember Shelby. Chinese. Tranny. Worked by the name of Ling. You know, that Asian girl” (Dawn, 99-100). Though Summer, like the other girls, is grieving for the loss of Shelby, the transphobic slur she uses to describe her to Dawn indicates discrimination even within close-knit sex workers and points out the intersectional hardships transgender sex workers of colour experience. Furthermore, Summer uses “Chinese” as the first descriptor of Shelby, indicating an acute focus on her racial background, which, it would seem, Shelby herself highlights by choosing to work under the name of Ling, which is more stereotypically Asian sounding than Shelby is. This exchange between Summer and Dawn, albeit one of mourning, demonstrates the discrimination that transgender sex workers of colour face from their fellow sex workers. Though statistics on disappearances and deaths of sex workers could show us that workers with these intersecting identities are more at risk of tragic fates, this interaction demonstrates that not only are they more likely to die, but that there are tensions and discriminations against them within the community itself, which is valuable information that emerged directly from Dawn’s access to insider knowledge. “One pain situates itself so close to another pain” (Dawn, 67), she thinks at one point, demonstrating her awareness of intersectional hardships.

Another key goal of ethnographic accounts is replacing common stereotypes about a studied community with insider knowledge and truths. Dawn encourages readers to see beyond common stereotypes about sex workers in her poem “Sex Worker’s Feet”. In it, she seems to be writing about a female sex worker, whose “feet/ are the same colour as old paper or the sand at CRAB/ Park” (Dawn, 41), and whose “legs [are] spread so far across the theater, her toes almost/ touch/ the exit sign” (Dawn, 41). She provides this girl with detailed characteristics before writing “She is not the girl in the aisle/ on her knees. Feet bandaged. Blisters/ weeping through the gauze” (Dawn, 41), making the distinction between the girl she writes about and the girl that others might perceive her to be. One interpretation of this juxtaposition that results in a sort of liminal figure of a sex worker is that Dawn wishes to counter a falsely constructed version of her, reclaiming and constructing her true identity and experience. In this case, Dawn defiantly replaces the commonly perceived version of a sex worker with her own, true version, thus encouraging her reader to “[f]orget about hooker-with-a-heart-of-gold stereotypes” (Dawn, 123). She highlights her community’s members’ meanings and real identities, achieving what many ethnographic accounts strive toward.

Finally, it is important to take a look at how Dawn describes and constructs the settings of the world she occupies and writes about, and how this is similar to and different from an ethnographic account written in prose. Like many ethnographic accounts, Dawn grounds some of her poems firmly in a tangible setting of the community she writes about. The title of the poem “Chevron Restroom 1212 East Hastings” uses a distinct address linked to a specific location, much like an ethnographic field note would. Another poem mentions “the corner of Victoria and Pandora” (Dawn, 58), similarly situating the reader directly in the tangible setting she writes about. Where her writing differs from some ethnographic accounts, and, arguably, improves on them, is in that she is able to describe a setting through poetry in a way that prose might not be able to in the same way. The poem “Sex Worker’s Feet” begins with a description of a room that is similar to how an ethnographic account might describe it; “Again, this little room. Ash on the pillow,/ the walls licked by smoke. … beer caps and used condoms under each step” (Dawn, 41). What stands out is the word choice of walls that are “licked” by smoke, which, through its somewhat sexual connotation, adds to a sultry and suggestive tone of the poem, and thereby presents a very specific description of the room. Here, “affect as well as form … convey meaning” (Maynard and Cahnmann-Taylor, 5) in a way that regular ethnographic writing might not have achieved to the same effect by describing the room using field notes written in prose. The poem also differs from an ethnographic account in its later descriptive language and metaphors. “Again, this filthy place, these flickering mirages./ Hardcore. Triple X./ Lips fixed in a perfect ‘o’” (Dawn, 41), writes Dawn. The reader is able to use the poem to perceive this room from her point of view and ponder why she sees the room the way that she does. The metaphor of a mirage signifies a deceiving image created by a state of delirium, which might suggest that she is inebriated, or her view of this room is otherwise impacted by something. Whatever the reason might be, it allows the reader to experience the room from the viewpoint of a member of the community, as opposed to the viewpoint of a researcher that might be studying it, adding significant information to our understanding of the community.

CONCLUSION

Dawn concludes her book with a kind of call to action that warns her reader against “passively reading about or otherwise witnessing injustice [since it] injures us - it widens the disconnect” (Dawn, 123). With this, Dawn invites the reader to locate herself “within the bigger, puzzling, and sometimes hazardous world” (Dawn, 124) the reader inhabits, and it might also be understood as expressing concern at the consumption of injustice through the mediums we have consumed it through until now. This might speak to ethnographic accounts of communities such as the one Dawn belongs to, and can thus be understood as suggesting the reader engages directly with members’ experiences, as opposed to with outsiders’ interpretations of them. Considering Dawn’s poetry and narrative as an ethnographic account might thus be precisely the kind of action and work Dawn invites us to engage in. Since “ethnographic poetry is becoming increasingly a visible and viable form for trying to achieve and convey cultural understanding” (Maynard and Cahnmann-Taylor, 4), it might be valuable to expand the conversation of what poetry can do to include ethnographic poetry. Dawn’s poetry, as I have demonstrated in this essay, through its form, tone, setting construction, and subjectivities, illuminates her community’s insider truths and members’ experiences in a way that regular ethnographic research, with its more formal writing, does not to the same extent. We therefore see the integral role poetry plays within our understanding of the world around us, and what poetry does to aid us in constructing this understanding in a way that is most true to those who inhabit marginalized positions within it.

Works Cited

Damon, Maria, and Ira Livingston. “Introduction” Poetry and Cultural Studies: A Reader, University of Illinois Press, Urbana, 2009, pp. 1–17.

Dawn, Amber. How Poetry Saved My Life: A Hustler's Memoir. Arsenal Pulp Press, 2013.

Dawn, Amber, and Justin Ducharme, editors. Hustling Verse: An Anthology of Sex Workers' Poetry. Arsenal Pulp Press, 2019.

Emerson, Robert M., et al. “Chapter Five: Pursuing Members' Meanings.” Writing Ethnographic Fieldnotes, The University of Chicago Press, Chicago, IL, 1995, pp. 108–141.

Forché Carolyn. Against Forgetting: Twentieth-Century Poetry of Witness, W.W. Norton & Company, New York, NY, 1993, pp. 29–47.

“Kimberlé Crenshaw's Intersectional Feminism - JSTOR Daily.” JSTOR Daily, 1 Aug. 2020, https://daily.jstor.org/kimberle-crenshaws-intersectional-feminism/.

Maynard, Kent, and Melisa Cahnmann‐Taylor. “Anthropology at the Edge of Words: Where Poetry and Ethnography Meet.” Anthropology and Humanism, vol. 35, no. 1, 2010, pp. 2–19., https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1548-1409.2010.01049.x.