17 pages • 34 minutes read
William Waring CuneyNo Images
Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 1973A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Themes
The Perception of Beauty
The scene depicted in William Waring Cuney’s poem—a woman at the sink toiling away amid stacks of greasy plates in the kitchen of a city diner—hardly promises beauty. That is the thematic thrust of the poem. It is not the beauty of the woman, as the poem offers no physical description of the woman. Rather, the poem reveals how completely unacknowledged that beauty is to that woman. How easy, the speaker cautions, for people to allow themselves to be diminished by their environment.
The poem, then, plays a thematic variation on the adage that beauty is in the eye of the beholder. The speaker sees what the character does not: her beauty. The woman of color washing dishes in the restaurant kitchen “does not know / her beauty” (Lines 1-2). She does not see what the speaker sees.
The tragedy in the poem, then, is the woman’s lack of perception. Beauty is not the issue. Seeing beauty is at the emotional core of the poem. The poem challenges the reader to disregard what so cripples the woman’s perception: the circumstances of her working-class life, the menial work, the dingy kitchen, the crowded streets outside. The speaker challenges the reader to see what the poet sees, the grandeur, the delight, the sheer glory of this immigrant woman washing dishes, a beauty that cannot be limited or defined by the conditions of her life.
The Impact of Racism on Self-Esteem
Critical to the poem’s thematic argument is the woman’s “brown body” (Line 3) and her recollections of life back home. The poem never defines her home—it could be Caribbean or African—but it is a tropical world of palm trees and crystal-clear rivers, a world that is far from the white urban world she lives in now.
That world offers her no positive images of her culture. She is a stranger in an alien world, displaced into a decidedly white world where the images of beauty do not include colored women joyously dancing naked along rivers. The images of white culture do not speak to her, do not elevate her body, do not permit her either self-confidence or self-esteem. She does not see herself in the cultural environment around her. As the speaker notes, the “dish water gives back / no images” (Lines 12-13). She is assimilating into a culture that does not recognize her worth, her beauty, her glory as a woman of color.
“No Images,” then, tackles a subtler, quieter kind of racism, a racism not about denying Black people’s work or a place to live or the right to vote. This racism is nevertheless a violation of Black pride and Black self-esteem. In celebrating the glory of the colored woman washing dishes, Cuney elevates to the poetic sublime the beauty of all women of color, a challenge to extend the images of white beauty that define their culture to include the beauty and glory of those with “brown” (Line 3) bodies.
Alienation and the Effect of Immigration
The poem explores what it means for a person to leave their home, their culture, their world and deal with the loneliness and the anxiety of relocation. Given its interest in celebrating the people of color who came to New York City in the early decades of the 20th century and affirming the rich (and unsuspected) dignity of these peoples, the poem looks at the psychological impact of immigration itself.
The woman at the sink is alone. Even the speaker, who is sympathetic to her and sees her value and worth, is apart from her, watching her, from the street or from the diner. The speaker never addresses the woman directly, never breaks her solitude, never offers her the gentle consolation of his empathetic insight. She is not given a name or a specific homeland or any physical description. The reader stays separated, apart from her.
What the speaker shares, the only thing we learn about the woman save for her job, is that she comes from a tropical world far from this city. In this alien world, she has only memories to comfort her, to give dimension to the grind of her daily routine in the kitchen. It is a world radically different from the world of the city, a world of freedom, warm and sweet, happily in tune with the raw energies of the nature itself. The poem, then, reveals how immigrants must deal with how completely the life they knew and loved has become a nostalgic un-reality, accessible only in bittersweet memories.
