The scope of William T. Vollmann’s provocative Poor People is impressive: Thailand, Russia, China, Japan, the Philippines, and many other places, even the USA and his own backyard. Our scribe travels and through interpreters in foreign places asks those chosen souls why they think they are poor. The replies are unsurprising but poignant against the squalid backgrounds drawn very bleakly in monochromes. We hear it from the mouths of the suffering persons: Fate, a tick bite when I was an infant, a gypsies curse, God’s will because I failed in a prior life, bad luck and on and on. But I could not help thinking that, although our inquisitor is sensitive and moral, even humble, he maybe guilt-ridden. He is compelled to do his part to add to the grand narrative. He is very well spoken, an intellectual for sure, and he acknowledges this – that the exercise is somehow vain and unduly intrusive.
He catches his subjects in contradictions, lies, exaggerations, admissions of failure, and self-defeating behavior. Their embarrassment spins him confusedly as he visits them for information while paying them exorbitant funds compared to their meager earnings. He offends me by his intrusiveness while I realize that great observer DeTouqueville was indeed a grande voyeur. He is also self-labeled rich in comparison to those he’s chosen to visit. In his journalistic ability to review the lives of a cross section of hominoids tossed about in the throes of the Global Economy, he does a wonderful service. The old Industrial Age, in retrospect, fueled the conquering of the New World with all the evils of that passage. The Global Age now infects the remainder of the so-called developing world for better or for worse. Vollmann examines the worse in the face of a population explosion.
As I read more, I became increasingly curious because I was not aware of the scope, the intended degradation and the designed denigration of peoples in the billions. Or, rather, aware on an intellectual level, perhaps because of the degree I am with the poverty of my city, which is on the surface generally rich, as cities go, compared to the poor ones our author describes. Yesterday I saw a pitiful white man sitting with his plastic bundles along Arch Street, Philly USA, a prosperous neighborhood now, adjacent to the Pennsylvania Convention Center. He was a thoroughly burned out man in his early forties, an alcoholic misfit, a scrawny bum with a big red nose. He was even aware of me on that pit in the sidewalk as I quickly glanced at him in my new car about to accelerate quickly from that spot into the secure suburbs. Though close for an instant, we could have been on different planets.
I also see the poverty in the eyes of my Middle School students who flock to me expectantly each day. Some are already stamped too impressively in failure; they’re too far-gone. They’ll drop out of high school and get pregnant or father a child. Or hang out on drug-selling corners. There are those who will be ensconced with mom well into their adulthood. Many are the progeny of poor parenting begetting more of the same. In my city alone, around four hundred killings will soon round out the year 2008. The same will occur in 2009. Few will escape, having arisen to the class above.
Most of Philadelphia’s citizens will survive, if even in respectable poverty. Some shall perish of drugs, (not just a lower class phenomenon), or to the circumstances to which they’re sentenced, or slowly of the rot that inhabits the dregs of sorrow. A not insubstantial segment shall be imprisoned justly by law but falsely by reason of expediency according to our customs, objectively arbitrary. Many shall simply be poor by degrees as we were after The War and feel relatively content as they eye the bill collector or get the eviction notice. Most will erode slowly or quickly, stomped out and degenerated to a lower order, the rules and practices harsh and absolute. A few shall emerge from the fire of poverty stronger than most and rise above, to the clouds themselves.
It is in the comparisons that the muckraking occurs. The author’s exposures and insights are on the mark because it is necessary to rid the earth of such suffering. He visits an oil city called Atyrau in Kazakhstan and with great difficulty discovers thousands in the old city, residents and workers, dying and sick of the burned off impurities of the sulpher-laden oil. Similarly he visits a few victims of Chernobyl. Perhaps 100,000 deaths are attributed to the radiation poisoning among the residents and Liquidators or workers forced to work at the site. Government secrecy, collusion with industrialists out-for-profit, and the demoralization of the impoverished produces hidden away worlds of secrecy, suffering and death. Criminals like the Snakeheads in Japan are never illumined. All the villains are hidden.
The realities described are so far away and so far out of our sensibilities, at least those in the rich world. Most of us are benignly ignorant. There are those that are willfully Darwinistic about inequity. And perhaps Vollmann’s book will spur increased efforts to bring about change. But the despair conveyed belies his Celinian quote in the preface: Poor people never, or hardly ever, ask for an explanation of all they have to put up with. They hate one another, and content themselves with that. Or, perhaps, it’s worse than that. They simply accept their fate and don’t care. Or maybe that is a better alternative than hate. But such resignation is fatal to the amelioration of injustice and poverty. The hatred is rather that of the Rich towards the Poor, who embarrass and offend them. Celine missed that one. But then he identified with the bourgeois, and proudly so, a deceit quite popular in that period in France. The poor were either impoverished by the victors who required what remaining wealth they harbored, or Semitic inferiors, like the Jews, who wandered the lands sucking the pure race dry. Classic scapegoating.
And our well-traveled hero’s report on The Poor is impressive. Quite an accomplishment! But why do I think somehow he missed the mark? Perhaps because I missed the mark somehow in my life in missing that reality or denying it? Or even justifying it, short of accepting it? Worse, accepting the impoverishment of most men as a given, classifying it as on-going and impossible to address therefore categorizing it as something to be dismissed. Ignore it and it will go away like the rabid dog. Or perhaps the matter is a simple one, as Buddha realized: simply a fact – not to be ignored, condemned, justified or accepted. A fact that requires response, not reaction. But the reality of world-wide poverty is compartmentalized in the West. It is blissfully ignored under the guise of recognition or it is largely condemned.
Or perhaps it is the fact of my high school friend, who devoted himself to God, has resided for decades in Haiti and its horrible poverty in the shadow of USA. He’s a priest, a missionary to those folk, African culture mostly, in an environmentally ruined land. The French drained it of resources long ago. My friend cares for those soul in his wide circle and I bet they’d never touch him in their worst outbursts. He is, like Mother Theresa, a servant to the Poor. The belief of old Catholics is that such service can and does excuse one of Hell, if not Purgatory. My friend is in Hell and taking his moments one at a time, like Christ.
I experienced something of poverty after The War, in the early Fifties, when my family lived at the end of a runway in a military barracks-style shack and watched mosquitoes breed in the cesspools and Polio jump around devastatingly. We depended on a great deal in those old days, hoping for a better life and, even as a young child, I saw that my parents worried their way. Union busting and the flight of textile jobs south were also in process. My father worked piecework at Yale and Towne and was grateful for the work. But that anxiety and constant awareness of The Rich above us sixty years ago was a mild irritation compared to the awful conditions in Guatemala, or in East LA, along the back roads of Columbia, along the Nile, around the Tigris as it meanders through the desert at Baghdad where countless humans are now impoverished by war.
Mr. Vollmann, you did a splendid job! But the scope of the problem is so over-determined as to despair of a description, or of a solution. There isn’t one. Unless men recognize that a total revolution is required, the greater mass of mankind will suffer. That revolution is not a political or ideological one. Rather it is a kind of psychological or, if you want, spiritual one. Our hearts must empty resolutely or instantaneously of greed, selfishness, envy, hatred, pride. Our lives must extend to the poor. Their reality is ours. Their suffering is ours. It is not identification but truth. Action, not discussion and delaying tactics. Even Orwell couldn’t grasp it.
Our poverty in the West is one of spirit. That fact cannot be denied. And this disillusionment enables the suffering of so many. Recognized, the fact can be enlightening. In that recognition, one’s individual poverty is extinguished. To the degree that The Rich deny this realization, to that degree the Earth shall diminish as our home. To the degree that we all realize this harmony, to that degree we shall be free of the Limitations of History, beliefs to which we are conditioned religiously. To that degree we undo the propaganda, the so-called traditions and stuff of centuries and conformity jammed into our minds. So be it. But seeing it as false can be an awakening, an instant one!
You may think me a crackpot or a preacher of some strange heresy but I confess I tried all the approaches and concluded I didn’t know shit about The Poor. I don’t know it via Mr. Vollmann but he prodded me to investigate the matter. And for this effort I am grateful. Perhaps we would both do well to attend to the poverty in our own neighborhoods, as does the author, albeit with danger to himself and his daughter. That effort is a very hard one. Expecting it world-wide is a vain pursuit. Mr. Vollmann agonizes with the poverty of those who encamp in his yard. He finally shuts his big steel door in their faces. It’s self-defensive. It’s the way of most men. Me thinks he strives to be Mother Theresa, albeit a literary version. I’d rather see him more sensible and disciplined toward the poor on his property. Perhaps then he’d be more effective. It is necessary to cleanse the world of poverty but equally so to be alert to how it can offend and pollute one’s own home. It’s a shame he didn’t make it into a novel.
Jim Murphy
