Flashbacks: Echoes of Past Issues
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photograph by kelly wooten; Courtesy of the Sallie Bingham Center for Women’s History and Culture
magic skin mottled and blotched / with strange letters and numbers” appears at the command of a “secret password.” Later, at the “quickie mart,” pondering the hidden alchemy of exchange, she hands over “a paper token, a onepage / book,” that contains “all my comings and goings hidden in it, mystified.” The opaque process of financial translation that Pratt’s poem evokes poses the essential question of a standard of value. In a world where more and more “wealth” is created by using money itself as a commodity, what is our relationship to that medium of exchange, to that fluctuating, intangible commodity and to those who own more and more of it? How does that medium relate to labors that do produce tangible goods and services? And finally, when the transcriptionist’s labors evoke that of the poet, with “words trembling on my tympanum, ten thousand words / pounding on the membrane, how many thousand clacking / between my teeth and tongue,” what magical equivalence machine calculates the value of that labor? Throughout this volume, however, another metaphor, signifying a mystery of another order, challenges the opacity of the money machine – the underground, a concept that does multi-dimensional duty. On the one hand, as in “All That Work No One Knows,” the underground signifies the place of invisible, exploited labor. In that poem, the “pyramids of fruit piled up in supermarkets” serve as more than a metonym for the exploitation of farm workers and
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their “invisible,” migratory lives: “the women packing apples into barrels, into baskets, into wooden lugs,” and after a season, “the people gone, the words between gone to the air.” Those pyramids are a quiet, cautionary symbol: they are the architectural remnants, also erected by slave labor, of a once-great civilization. The implications are obvious. And poem after poem reminds us that the most marginalized workers, those often engaged in what we call subsistence or “menial” labors, are, as Pratt says in “A Pile of Dirt at the Museum,” “the pillars, the foundation, / the unseen / holding up all that is visible.” Other poems, however, remind us how easily the stubborn desire to do something appropriately and well, no matter how “menial,” can be exploited, how this desire can translate into daily acts of self-sacrifice or self-abnegation, like the woman in “Cutting Hair,” who ignores the constant “snips between / her fingers, the torn webbing” as the shorn hair, which pays her bills, accumulates “like a field of scythed hay beneath
her feet.” Or, as the speaker in “Ordering Paperclips” confesses, despite the manifest indignities of sweat-shop conditions, “Fear is what keeps us in our jobs, until there is a bigger fear.” In other poems, the underground evokes not only the marginalized space from which these voices narrate their lives but also the revolutionary potential that Marx identified with the proletariat. In “Looking for Work,” for example, a son ponders what his father, a miner, “like[d] about work under ground? Was it the dark / or was it the breaking through?” The speaker intuits that “[t]he dark line of connection, / the seam of ore” is “a sentence to be read by other miners and him”; it is the literal handwriting on the wall – to seize the community forged in the dark as a weapon with which to challenge their exploitation. “Driving a Subway Train,” one of the few poems in this volume to foreground sexual identity, similarly chronicles actual work underground. Detailing the daily journeys of a subway driver, Pratt offers the underground here as a
above Minnie Bruce Pratt (left) with South Carolina writer Dorothy Allison on the occasion of “Celebrating the Dorothy Allison Papers” at Duke University, Durham, NC, 23 Sept. 2011. During the event, Pratt read from her new collection as a panelist on “Out in the South: Writers in Conversation.”