The Proletariat Speaks

I love beautiful things:
Great trees, bending green winged branches to a velvet lawn,
Fountains sparkling in white marble basins,
Cool fragrance of lilacs and roses and honeysuckle,
Or exotic blooms, filling the air with heart-contracting odors;
Spacious rooms, cool and gracious with statues and books,
Carven seats and tapestries and old masters
Whose patina shows the wealth of centuries.

And so I work
In a dusty office, whose grimed windows
Look out in an alley of unbelievable squalor,
Where mangy cats, in their degradation, spurn
Swarming bits of meat and bread;
Where odors, vile and breathtaking, rise in fetid waves
Filling my nostrils, scorching my humid, bitter cheeks.

I love beautiful things:
Carven tables laid with lily-hued linen
And fragile china and sparkling iridescent glass;
Pale silver, etched with heraldries,
Where tender bits of regal dainties tempt,
And soft-stepped service anticipates the unspoken wish.

And so I eat
In the food-laden air of a greasy kitchen,
At an oil-clothed table:
Plate piled high with food that turns my head away,
Lest a squeamish stomach reject too soon
The lumpy gobs it never needed.
Or in a smoky cafeteria, balancing a slippery tray
To a table crowded with elbows
Which lately the bus boy wiped with a grimy rag.

I love beautiful things:
Soft linen sheets and silken coverlet,
Sweet cool of chamber opened wide to fragrant breeze;
Rose-shaded lamps and golden atomizers,
Spraying Parisian fragrance over my relaxed limbs,
Fresh from a white marble bath, and sweet cool spray.

And so I sleep
In a hot hall-room whose half opened window,
Unscreened, refuses to budge another inch;
Admits no air, only insects and hot choking gasps,
That make me writhe, nun-like, in sack-cloth sheets and lumps of straw.
And then I rise
To fight my way to a dubious tub,
Whose tiny, tepid stream threatens to make me late;
And hurrying out, dab my unrefreshed face
With bits of toiletry from the ten cent store.

Alice Dunbar-Nelson, the New Orleans-born journalist, essayist, editor, fiction-writer, diarist, teacher, activist, as well as Harlem Renaissance poet, (1875-1935), ironically termed herself a “producer of literature”, the very word “producer” suggesting the class of wage-earners whose only material value is their labour: the “proletariat”. First published in 1929, in the campaigning periodical The Crisis, the poem not only prioritises the female voice, but expresses conflicts Dunbar-Nelson knew firsthand, as a mixed-race writer who worked long and hard for her success, and who initially identified with the middle-class Creole social elite her parents, Patricia Wright and Joseph Moore, represented.

The conflict is implicit in the six-stanza structure, a dichotomy that alternates between a detailed list, headed by the statement “I love beautiful things”, and a self-mocking, more integrated narrative exploring un-beautiful reality, beginning “And so …” (meaning “That’s the reason why …”).

Her style in the “beautiful things” verses tells us she’s writing about them neither from imagination nor disapproval. The “And so” verses are “grittier” because their subject is grittier, earthed by the daily struggle to satisfy basic requirements such as eating, sleeping, washing, even breathing. The kind of work done by the speaker isn’t described: we learn only that it takes place in an office that’s unkempt and looks out on a filthy alley-way. It forges the connection between the speaker and the collective “proletariat”.

Coolness and fragrance are repeatedly associated with luxury. Flowers emit “cool” fragrances in verse one, and a “cool” atmosphere helps preserve the “old masters”, tapestries, and so on of “spacious rooms”. The penultimate verse contrasts “the sweet cool of chamber opened wide to fragrant breeze” and the “golden atomizers / Spraying fragrance over my relaxed limbs”; again, cool air and fragrance are synthesised. Hovering near the cliches of advertising, these terms suggest an easily purchased “lifestyle”. Meanwhile, the alternating stanzas allude to choking humidity, bad smells, the window of an airlessly “hot hall-room” which “refuses to budge an inch”.

Words and images are connected throughout the poem. Sometimes they emphasise the continuity of desire, as when the “white marble basin of the fountains” in the first stanza becomes the “white marble bath” in the fifth. But the repetition is also a means of heightening dichotomy. The word “bits” has various associations in the poem with food. The mangy, hungry cats in stanza two refuse to eat “bits of meat and bread” which are presumably “swarming” with maggots, whereas “tender bits of regal dainties” are probed by the silver forks of the diners in stanza three. In the disgusting meal of stanza 4, the “bits” become “lumpy gobs”. The wholly unanticipated transformation of “bits” in the poem’s last line is a masterstroke, a brilliant swerve into desolate anti-climax: “hurrying out” the speaker must “dab” her “unrefreshed face / With bits of toiletry from the ten cent store”.

Segregation further debases the airless proletarian existence in that fine passage describing the self-service cafeteria where the table has recently been wiped “with a grimy rag” by the bus boy. At other times, the racial inequalities which Dunbar-Nelson tirelessly campaigned against in real life are less visible, and a new reader might suppose her proletariat to be an ethnically heterogeneous concept. The “exotic blooms” of stanza one, with their “heart-contracting odors”, shouldn’t be missed as an early signal of the writer’s deeper estrangement from her origins.

The Proletariat Speaks is a remarkable piece of oratory, poetic in the cohesion achieved by its interwoven images, but vigorously at ease with ordinary speech and its range of simplicities, crudities and polite refinements. Formally, it’s set free and controlled by Dunbar-Nelson’s journalistic talent. There are no direct calls to political action; she illustrates her two key concepts, wealth-bought “beauty” and its inaccessibility to the working poor, via immediate, sense-based experience. Calling to order a multifaceted life at a period of intense social division, her poem speaks to the deep inequality in the rich countries of today.