These Are Also Living by Carlos Bulosan – Analysis and Commentary

 

THESE ARE ALSO LIVING BY CARLOS BULOSAN – ANALYSIS AND COMMENTARY

THESE ARE ALSO LIVING by Carlos Bulosan

 

After the dreary walk and the tinsel city

That thrusts its tongue hollowly into the night;

After the crowded streets and the tenement houses,

Where the lost and dying flash mocking eyes

With indelicate movements, waiting for death;

After the flight of water-soaked steps and dark halls,

The uneven door and the cold room above the stairs,

The anger in your face settles down—suddenly—

Your lips tremble as we look into the street below,

Where hungry men are passing into the night, moving

Close to the buildings for warmth and comfort.

These are also living men, thrown as we are thrown

Into the troubled room of earth, crying for bread.

Their continuous procession into the dark streets

Lifts a stabbing arrow of pity, striking your eyes,

Pushing a nervous wave through your rain-soaked body.

Why are you sobbing profusely? We too are hungry.

—Poetry (August 1938), page 259

The poem is best understood in the context of Bulosan’s experience of hardship, want, deprivation, and poverty.

The website celebrating his centennial—he was born in 1913—offers us a sufficiently concise account.

“He was the son of a farmer and spent most of his upbringing in the countryside with his family. Like many families in the Philippines, Carlos’s family struggled to survive during times of economic hardship. Many families were impoverished and many more would suffer because of the conditions in the Philippines created by US colonization. Rural farming families like Carlos’ family experienced severe economic disparity due to the growing concentration of wealth and power in the hands of the economic and political elite. Determined to help support his family and further his education, Carlos decided to come to America with the dream to fulfill these goals.

“Traveling by ship, Carlos arrived in Seattle on July 22, 1930 at the age of seventeen. With only three years of education from the Philippines, Carlos spoke little English and had barely any money left. Desperate to survive, he soon began working various low-paying jobs: servicing in hotels, harvesting in the fields, and even embarking to the Alaskan canneries. During his hardships in finding employment, Carlos experienced much economic difficulty and racial brutality that significantly damaged his health and eventually changed his perception of America.

“From several years of racist attacks, starvation, and sickness, Carlos underwent surgery for tuberculosis in Los Angeles. His health condition with tuberculosis forced him to undergo three operations where he lost most of the right side of his ribs and the function of one lung. Yet, he recovered and stayed in the hospital for about two years where he spent much of his time reading and writing.

“The discrimination and unhealthy working conditions Carlos had experienced in many of his workplaces encouraged him to participate in union organizing with other Filipinos and various workers. Carlos become a self-educated and prolific writer determined to voice the struggles he had undergone as a Filipino coming to America and the struggles he had witnessed of other people. Like many of his fellow Filipinos in his time, Carlos never had the opportunity to return to the Philippines. After years of hardship and flight, he passed away in Seattle suffering from an advanced stage of bronchopneumonia.”

https://bulosan.org/

—“Carlos Bulosan Exhibit,” Carlos Bulosan Centennial

All Bulosan’s are marked by his experience of lifelong penury and his heartfelt response to his condition, which he understood took place in the context of colonialism, social injustice, and discrimination.

Notably, Bulosan was commissioned by The Saturday Evening Post to pen the essay accompanying the third of Norman Rockwell’s “Four Freedoms” paintings. “Freedom from Want” was published on March 6, 1943. The Post knew that he would speak according to his deep personal experience.

“…It is a great honor to walk on the American earth.

“If you want to know what we are, look at the men reading books, searching in the dark pages of history for the lost word, the key to the mystery of living peace. We are factory hands, field hands, mill hands, searching, building, and molding structures. We are doctors, scientists, chemists, discovering and eliminating disease, hunger, and antagonism. We are soldiers, Navy men, citizens, guarding the imperishable dream of our fathers to live in freedom. We are the living dream of dead men. We are the living spirit of free men.

“Everywhere we are on the march, passing through darkness into a sphere of economic peace.”

https://www.saturdayeveningpost.com/2017/12/carlos-bulosans-freedom-want/

—“Carlos Bulosan’s ‘Freedom from Want,’” The Saturday Evening Post, December 21, 2017

The essay is classic Carlos Bulosan.

Now to the poem.

“These Also Are Living” is a finely lyrical portrait of destitution. Bulosan’s pointed selection of images and metaphors, his keen diction require little elaboration, if at all. The dying waste away, grimly disconsolate, cold tenement rooms are dark, damp, despondent, while hungry men cry out for bread—it is a scathing social indictment, implicit.

Enigmatically, the poem caps the skillfully constructed scene. “Why are you sobbing profusely? We too are hungry,” reads the closing line. The close is mystifying, in the last analysis, inscrutable.

The speaker (whom we presume is Bulosan himself) joins his wretched companion in misery yet refuses to weep. Maybe his tears have entirely dried up…his heart is hardened…or possibly he is inured, irredeemably, to his chronically desperate straits. We don’t know…we won’t. The mystery itself generates pathos.

Who are “these” in the title of the poem? Plausibly, it refers to everyone in the poem, including and especially the speaker who delivers the closing line. “I, too, like you who weep, belong to the living. I am hungry. But I do not shed tears.”

Carlos Bulosan