Larvatus Prodeo

We write to release old justices and abuses, to make sense of them, to contextualize (sic) ourselves. We write to tell the truth, our writings like graffiti on the surface of the moneyed culture at large. We write so that we can finally see our experiences portrayed honestly, in many dimensions. (Michelle Tea)           

It was odd to hear the words “working class” being used on the radio on Saturday during a discussion about American politics.

Until a certain politically-driven controversy surrounding the assertion that some indigent folks can become “bitter” about their lot and turn to insular belief systems in response, working class wasn’t a term you heard much anymore. 

While the comment that started the commotion would’ve been greeted with “tell me something I don’t already know” by a lot of people who grew up poor, it should be noted that the working class are a diverse group.

A few years ago, Michelle Tea, a writer based in San Francisco who authored a graphic novel about working as a prostitute, edited Without a Net: The Female Experience of Growing Up Working Class, a compilation of essays.

Given the working class is often represented, both positively and negatively, as being mostly made up of (white) blue-collar men, Tea’s focus on women comes as something of a relief. 

Even if some of the essays suffer due to the use of sociological language and an interest in queer theory (academic discourses and anecdotes rarely make happy bedfellows), there’s much to learn from Tea’s book.

Joy Castro writes about her mother’s marriage to an abusive Jehovah’s Witness, a situation that led to life in a trailer and Castro enduring the sexual interest of her stepfather. The denouement in which Castro’s exhausted mother talks to her daughter about her husband’s ferocious sexual appetite is devastating:

“I could lose my mind”, she says, her voice breaking. I stop cutting and look up. She’s crying, but her hands don’t stop moving. I can hear the creek. My brother is scything weeds in the distance. “I think it might kill me or something.” She keeps her eyes on her apple, her knife. The trees rise dark up the mountain behind her. “He needs some other kind of – some kind of outlet.” The only sound is her knife hitting the board as the slices separate.  

In the biographies at the end of the book we learn that Castro’s an Associate Professor of English, so it would be interesting to learn how she went from being a runaway at fourteen to academia.

Maria Rivera confirms endless accounts of the harshness of the American health care system, while Tara Hardy backs up her thesis that poor females are often assumed to be sexually impure by medical professionals.

There are essays about growing up in a large Catholic family, of leaving Latin America and ending up in the projects, of having a mother who was a heroin addict and a “whore”, of a mother with a mental illness who advised her daughter that if she was hungry she should eat a dog biscuit, and of a family in which everyone was violent. 

There are also essays about parents who encouraged study because they wanted something more for their offspring, and an account of a loving father who took up a security job at a university so his daughter would get the chance to study due to fees being waived for the children of employees.

Girls who grow up working class grow up tough and clever. There is hope in our lives, whether it’s the pure potential of a Lotto ticket and a bingo card, or the deep faith that things are going to get better (because) they sure as hell can’t get any worse. We know the world is vast and complicated, our responses to our situations are often contradictory, counterintuitive, but we get by. (Michelle Tea)