“A darkness was ripped from my eyes”, or, How can anyone like Mary Oliver’s “Singapore”?

I was discomfited and annoyed to read the discussion of Mary Oliver’s “Singapore” over on the 32 Poems blog. I’ve tried to convince myself that no sensible, sophisticated reader could really like it, but this post–on a blog I follow, by a magazine I admire–has deprived me of this pleasant fantasy.

I started a close reading/fisking of the poem itself, but it didn’t take me long to realise that it simply doesn’t call for that level of attention. You can read the whole thing at the link above, but here’s a summary: The poem’s speaker encounters a woman cleaning a toilet bowl in a public bathroom at Changi Airport. [Edited to add: As Tim Turnbull pointed out in the comments, this was a careless error on my part. She's actually washing ashtrays in the bowl. Tim also offered a few pithy observations on that.] She reacts with disgust, then shame at the expression on the cleaner’s face (on which “Her beauty and her embarrassment struggled together”), but she’s disarmed by the cleaner’s smile and utility as a beauty object (she is compared to a bird, then a river). She is reminded that the cleaner is (OMG!) a human being like herself, who (the speaker is sure) “loves her life”. The poem ends with the speaker marveling at “the light that can shine out of a life” and “the way [the cleaner's] smile was only for my sake”. Along the way, she implicitly congratulates herself for allowing material that is not conventionally “pleasant” or “happy” into her poem.

What reaction might one expect from the reader of such a poem? The 32 Poems blog offers a few. Julie Brooks Barbour, in her essaylet, says:

What I love about this poem is its wide social significance. . . . It was a reminder to not judge others by the jobs they perform. My position, though it may have paid more, did not make me a better person than a custodian or groundskeeper. This poem is a lesson in humility: though the work of another person may disgust her, the speaker realizes that she is no better than the woman because she can flee (“I felt, in my pocket, for my ticket”). The janitor’s smile is only for the speaker’s sake; her hair becomes as beautiful as the wing of a bird because she is human, not because she cleans toilets. The “darkness” that is “ripped” from the speaker’s eyes is the darkness associated with dirtiness, and, more possibly, class distinctions.

So the poem serves as a wake-up call to people who think, and would otherwise carry on thinking, that having better jobs makes them better people, and that menial labourers are not really human beings. (It also encourages them to instead view said labourers as picturesque bits of scenery existing for the moral education of the middle class and up, but hey, win some lose some, right?) In other words, it is a machine for making walking scum that much less scummy. It’s an accurate enough reading of the poem; I just wonder that Barbour thinks it such an admirable effect to achieve!

Barbour goes on:

Though the title is important in defining place and how we, as readers, might visualize the woman in the poem, I think that is where its significance ends. Since the woman we meet through the speaker never utters a word, acting as a silent movie character, she could very well be any woman cleaning any airport anywhere in the world.

Barbour may be right insofar as the speaker’s empathy extends only to recognising “humanity”, not individuality–Oliver’s poem certainly gives us no reason to believe in this cleaner as a real person, a world in herself (as we all are). Barbour is dead wrong, however, when she dismisses the importance of the title. No, it didn’t have to be “Singapore”. It could have been “Hanoi” or “Bangkok” or “Delhi” or “Shanghai”. But it could not have been “New York” or “Paris” or even “Charleston, WV”. Why? I leave that as an exercise for the reader. Not to worry, though: you can still get Barbour’s big picture reading straight from the source:

What is most significant is the way in which the speaker argues against how the larger culture has taught her to treat a janitor or anyone working a job that would make her cringe, and how she accepts this woman as part of the world, as a human among humans, in the only way she knows how: through a poem.

Awfully charitable of Oliver–I’m tired of this “speaker” pretence, to be honest–to accept working class POCs as part of the world. It’s such a comforting construction, too, the working class as “part of the world”, like lichen or wildebeest, loving their simple little lives. With “Singapore” and Barbour’s exegesis in their toolbox, there’s no need for the middle to upper classes to try (and fail) to reconcile the displeasure they’d feel at doing a cleaner’s work for a cleaner’s pay with our collective gentleperson’s agreement that others should go on doing just that.

The comments that follow the essay are even worse. One Mary Sayler praises “the dignity given to work and the respect for human beings shown in this poem”. (See, by the way, this great post by Mimi Thi Nguyen on the specious “dignity of work”.) Mary Hunt adds that “The littlest and simplest person [!!!], has something to offer. It is a real tribute to Mary Oliver that she sees this, we all of us have something to teach. . . . I look at those out of home in this way or at least I try. Beyond the dirt and smell of homelessness lies the infinite beauty of a human heart.” Lyn Hungerford calls Barbour’s piece a “Lovely essay for a lovely poem.”

Am I alone in finding both poem and essay thoroughly unlovely?

Are we really to admire Oliver’s generous spirit in acknowledging that a toilet cleaner is also a human being?

Are we to be impressed at Oliver’s mind-reading–how she just knows that the cleaner is embarrassed to be seen working (must she be?), that she loves life nonetheless (is she not allowed to be miserable?), that the exchange of smiles is some deep communion (rather than a routine application of social lubricant)?

Or at the trope of the unthreatening little brown or yellow woman, glowing with warmth and human dignity, providing the archetypal WIWL speaker with an occasion for a Damascene conversion? (A conversion that makes one wonder: what on earth did the speaker think of foreigners, POCs and the working class before this?)

“Humility” is a sham, and so is this poem. Note how the honours are distributed: Oliver praises the cleaner’s dignity (albeit without using the word); Barbour praises Oliver’s humility. What qualities are really being described? Isn’t it the same quality, that of considering oneself no more or less than a human being? Why does Oliver not praise the cleaner’s humility, and Barbour praise Oliver’s dignity? The unspoken answer is as obvious as it is dismaying.

I struggle to imagine a counterpart to this poem, describing the same encounter and expressing the same message of universal personhood and solidarity, but written in the voice of the cleaner. (“A middle-class white woman stood there, one hand shoved protectively in her pocket. . .”?) I find I cannot.

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