William T. Vollmann uses real experiences to talk about poverty. Photo Credit: Amazon.com

Poor People, By William T. Vollmann
Published by Ecco, 2007, 464 pp.

The premise of William T. Vollmann's latest book, Poor People, is simple: Travel the world and interview poor people. Ask them why they think they are poor.

A native of Los Angeles, Vollmann is a prolific writer whose fiction and nonfiction works have ranged wildly in subject—drawing from such disparate sources as medieval Norse sagas and prostitutes in San Francisco's Tenderloin District. He has also worked as a journalist for The New Yorker, Harper's, Spin, and Granta, his assignments taking him around the world, into many war-torn and politically unstable countries.

Using material Vollmann collected in his years of travel, Poor People includes interviews as far back as 1992, set in more than 20 different countries, a few of which are Yemen, Japan, Colombia, Afghanistan, and Kenya. Vollmann is not poor and acknowledges, from the beginning, that he writes about poor people from the outside. He does not wish explain poverty, writing some accompaniment to Marx's Das Kapital, nor does he feel that he could write so thorough a meditation on poverty as Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, by James Agee and Walker Evans. Like Agee and Evans' work, however, Vollmann's book contains numerous photographs he took of his subjects.

Of Poor People, Vollmann writes, "This essay is not written for poor people, or for anyone in particular. All that I dare to do is to note several similarities and differences which I believe pertain to the experience of being poor. I began by asking a few of my fellow human beings: Why are you poor? The answers follow. Although these vary by region, their particularities may well mean nothing. People can be poor in anything and everything, including meaning itself."

The premise of Poor People is simple: Travel the world and interview poor people. Ask them why they think they are poor.

"Why are you poor?" Vollmann asks. An elderly man who lives in a crate-house along Tokyo's Sumida River, replies, "Because I don't have a job."

Annah, a beggar woman in Yemen, says, "Allah chose. For me it's no problem. I am happy."

"Why are some people rich and some people poor?" Vollmann asks.

Vimonrat, an adolescent girl in Thailand, says, "From the life before. If you do a good thing you won't be poor."

Oksana, a beggar woman in Russia answers, "I don't know. Maybe we did something wrong at some point."

Julio, a panhandler just north of the Mexican border, replies: "The rich are rich because they work hard. I am not poor because I am a drunk ... I have enough money to get drunk!"

Vollmann makes his own list of what the United Nations call, "the dimensions of poverty," using his stories to describe each one. They are: Invisibility, Deformity, Unwantedness, Dependence, Accident-Prone-ness, Pain, Numbness, and Estrangement. His subjects illustrate—and live—every aspect of global poverty.

Vollmann's interviews show, in visceral detail, how environmental degradation, migration, political upheaval, and loss of livelihood affect the lives of the world's poor.

Vollmann's interviews show, in visceral detail, how environmental degradation, migration, political upheaval, and loss of livelihood affect the lives of the world's poor.

Nikolai of Petersburg, Russia, was sent to clean up the Chernobyl nuclear meltdown. Ever since he has been unable to hold a job, suffering from a host of health problems.

Wan migrated from rural Thailand to Bangkok to find a job, but found little work. Mentally-ill at 23 years of age, she dozes on the steps of the Central Railroad Station; she is there to beg, but without having found anything to eat that day, she has no energy to do so.

Erica, a young Chinese woman, came to Tokyo on an illegal visa that cost $10,000. To repay the "associate", or pimp, who obtained the visa for her, she works as a prostitute.

These stories are not easy to read.

So often when we read, particularly about the effects of global poverty, we are looking not only to learn but to find solutions. Vollmann doesn't offer solutions. "This book is not ‘practical,'" he writes. "It cannot tell anyone what to do, much less how to do it. For all I know, the normality of our epoch may render resource-sharing substantially impossible. But what is greater or braver than to beat down misfortune, or at least try?"

What Vollmann does offer is what we too might experience if we traveled to Burma, Mexico, or Iraq, and talked with the people there about their lives. Like Vollmann, we would likely conduct our conversations with compassion and sympathy, and yet those conversations would still gape with the holes created through incomplete translation, inarticulateness, and simple unknowns.

Vollmann began this project believing that poor people would be able to tell him, and us, what poverty is and how it happened to them—that they could engage with their situations beyond mere survival.

Vollmann began this project believing that poor people would be able to tell him, and us, what poverty is and how it happened to them—that they could engage with their situations beyond mere survival. He found, however, that those expectations were misguided. "In appropriate contradiction of this book's hopes and aspirations," he writes, "poor people's answers are frequently impoverished as their lives..." This point is driven home when he asks the diseased Wan on the steps of the Central Railroad Station in Bangkok, Why are you poor? Wan replies listlessly, "I think I am rich." That answer echoes in Vollmann's mind. "But what could she have been rich in?" he asks. "Her poverty was ghastly; her awareness maimed."

Even if Vollmann was mistaken in his expectation that he would find coherent answers for why the poor believe they are poor, he has given a voice to a marginalized people who are not often heard—and who need to be heard.

Exploring the world and the subject of poverty through Vollmann is an utterly unique experience. He is matter-of-fact and slow to judge. He appears fearless, even when he is not. There is no mistaking his deep sense of humanity. Through his work, it is obvious that Vollmann has endeavored his entire life to reach out to everyone and anyone, regardless of where they dwell, how they look, and how they choose to make their living. Vollmann's commitment to experiencing the most difficult circumstances of life is courageous, as is his determination to share them.




Contributed by Lisa Hoashi, a freelance writer for Mercy Corps. Hoashi also contributes book reviews to publications that include The Willamette Week and The Missouri Review.

To read another Global Envision article about the experience of those in poverty, see What Poor Means.



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