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.
Symbols & Motifs
Dirty Dish Water
The dish water symbolizes the woman’s adopted world and its inability to allow her even a modest sense of self-esteem. The speaker notes that the woman cannot see her beauty in the dingy dish water over which she toils. The dirty water and the poor lighting in the restaurant’s kitchen, unlike the crystalline waters of the rivers back home that the speaker imagines, reflect nothing but drab darkness.
The woman that so entrances the speaker is employed as a dish washer in some unnamed restaurant in New York City. That employment is the version of the American Dream that she departed her tropical world to discover. However, the poem implies that hers is a life of soul-crushing routine, backbreaking work, and minimum pay. Her work denies her the dignity of self-worth and destroys her self-esteem.
The woman then can see nothing of herself in the dish water, not merely her reflection but her authentic self, her soul, and her beauty. The scullery work that she is doing denies her any self-esteem save that the speaker, happening to pass by, sees the beauty in her that her work and her world denies her. Thus, the speaker does what the dish water does not. The speaker provides a reflection of the woman as she is rather than what her adopted world has made her.
Palm Trees
Ironically one of the poem’s most poignant symbols is not in the poem at all. The poet, watching the woman of color washing dishes in the restaurant, understands what the woman has lost: “There are no palm trees / on the street” (Lines 10-11). The palm trees symbolize for the speaker the lush tropical world that the woman has lost, most likely forever, in the city with its concrete and asphalt environment.
More than the tropical world that is now only a memory, the palm trees denied to the woman symbolize her connections to nature now severed by virtue of her exile to the city. In this, William Waring Cuney draws on the cultural definition of immigrants who are people of color, whether Caribbean or African, as closer to the natural world, more in tune with its rhythms and its energy than the white European cultures.
Thus, the palm trees symbolize not only the world the woman has lost but also the cost of that loss to her self-esteem and her perception of her own worth. She has lost the world in which she could feel beautiful. The palm trees symbolize the very environment that, could she return to it, would give her an uplifting sense of her own beauty and her own glory lost in the Eurocentric world of the city.
Images
Images in the poem, or more precisely the lack of images, symbolize the distance that separates the woman from her native culture. The immigrant woman doing dishes in the restaurant does not see her beauty, because in her immediate world of New York City, there are no images of women of color to give her inspiration, motivation, or pride. She lives in a world that defines beauty through images of white women, white culture, white refinement, white fashion (See: Background).
There in her world, the tropical world of palm trees and beaches, evidence of the beauty and “glory” (Line 4) of women of color would surround her. More than a century before the explosion of visual media that now defines contemporary culture—films, television, advertising, social media platforms—Cuney explores the relationship between self-perception and self-esteem and the cultural environment in which women (and men for that matter) live.
Return the woman to her native environment, allow her to dance once again amid swaying palm trees and shimmering rivers, and she would see all around her women of color, beautiful and stunning. She could be her beautiful, powerful self. The speaker sees this; the tragedy is that the woman herself does not see it.
