Celebrating impoverished joy

The U.S. Census Bureau recently announced its 2022 poverty statistics. According to The New York Times, poverty in America had seen its highest annual increase on record. By the bureau’s Supplemental Poverty Measure, one in eight Americans doesn’t have enough money to pay rent, to buy groceries, to survive, let alone live.

One in eight Americans. Nearly forty million people.

With so many Americans affected by poverty, in theory, we should see it all around us. When you think of poverty, what do you see?

Do you see it in San Francisco and New York City’s increasing unhoused populations? Do you see it in your Uber driver who started gig-working as a second and sometimes third job? Do you see it in the increased number of people running GoFundMes on social media or seeking out the local food pantry? Do you even see it at all?

When you see poverty depicted by the media, there are two overwhelming themes: Either it’s not great and it continues not to be great (think the Netflix Series Shameless) or it is something that is not great but can and will eventually be overcome and left behind (think The Glass Castle). These are narratives of suffering and of triumph. Like the U.S. Census Bureau’s poverty statistics, they follow a line, and that line implies a teleological narrative: Poverty is bad, no poverty is good. Who can disagree?

But poverty for 38 million Americans isn’t going away; in fact, poverty and income inequality in America are statistically getting worse. If they’re not eradicating poverty, what are these narratives of “overcoming” functionally doing in mass culture?

You’ve thought about your own image of poverty. Let me share mine.

Photo courtesy Lydia Burleson

This is a photo of me, circa 2006, having the time of my life. I’m playing with my dog. I’m smiling. It’s golden hour. In the background, the empty pastures are glimmering. You can see the joy on my face. You can see the joy in my dog Jake, who’s wagging his tail.

I cherish this picture because it complicates poverty for me. This picture highlights my childhood happiness, but if you look closer, the poverty becomes apparent: the falling-apart shed with broken windows and a tarp in the background; the toy I’m playing with my dog is a piece of trash. My shoes are hand-me-downs, and they’re too big; my feet are slipping in them. What makes this picture in some ways idyllic is also what so drastically shaped my personal experience with poverty. When this picture was taken, my family lived in a farmhouse in a town that had a population of fewer than 100 people. There was nothing around us. The nearest grocery store was 30 miles away. My family’s poverty was not defined by overcrowded housing conditions, unclean air, or a wealth inequality so intense that million-dollar homes bump up against low-income housing developments. Rather, our poverty was defined by a lack of access to most things. As a child, I left the house only to ride the bus to school.

By highlighting the joy of this moment, I complicate America’s poverty narrative: Yes, it was hard growing up watching my parents overdraft their bank account and take out predatory loans and still not have enough money for food, even while living in one of the lowest cost-of-living spaces in America. But focusing only on the difficulties or what my upbringing lacked further siloes my identity away from those who do not share that experience. It validates understanding poverty as a negative stereotype. It prioritizes the belief that I should overcome, and if I don’t, I fail. This image of poverty as something bad and something to escape was not made for me, the poor, happy girl in rural Texas playing with her dog. It was made for the seven out of eight other Americans who commodify my experience and tell me to work harder to escape.

Escape is rarely an option. My parents are almost 50 years old. Neither owns a home. My mom’s husband works 12 to 16 hours every day. They are drowning in debt, “robbing Peter to pay Paul,” as she told me on a recent phone call. My childhood and my parents’ lives today are the reality of 38 million Americans. Sometimes, when you look into the foreseeable future, you don’t see overcoming. At least not in the conventional sense.

Choosing impoverished joy is not accepting defeat. If overcoming poverty isn’t an option, and wallowing in despair isn’t what you choose, we must examine what is left.

Cultural theorist Stuart Hall has a term for the alternative: He calls it constructing a culture of resistance. Writing about Black Caribbean identity and its relationship to the African diaspora and empire, Hall defines cultures of resistance as the ways in which cultural identities “preserve, borrow, alter and transpose elements in order that … the masses and classes in struggle can find articulation.”

If we accept that poverty narratives are usually constructed as stories of overcoming or despair and if we don’t like those alternatives, then we must share cultural power by allowing impoverished communities to shape their own narrative in the ways that they choose, taking familiar narrative elements like the “American Dream” and transposing them in a way that more fully suits the community experience.

Celebrating impoverished joy over impoverished despair doesn’t change the fact that poverty in America is on the rise. It doesn’t pay the bills. But it does resist reinforcing the binary separation between a “good” life and an abject one.

Recently, I asked my mother what brought her joy every day. She said, “Clean sheets. Cooking a good meal, especially if it’s appreciated by others. Singing along with a favorite song on the radio, or at church. Looking at pictures connected to happy memories.”

These are the narratives we should seek out, ones that celebrate people against a categorial grain. Let’s tell the stories that not only reflect a complicated reality but cause us to question our own part in reinforcing impoverished despair.

Lydia Burleson is a Knight-Hennessy scholar and PhD candidate in the Stanford English Department. She is a literary and media studies scholar and writer researching identity formation and the narrative function of failure in American literature.