20 pages • 40 minutes read
Kwame DawesDirt
Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 2013A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Background
Historical Context: Slavery and Sharecropping
Since the 1619 arrival of the first slave ship in Port Comfort, Virginia, European Americans regularly kidnapped people from Africa, forcing them into slavery in the United States. They were forced to work the land, growing cotton and other agricultural goods for the enrichment of those who had bought them. Enslaved Africans and their descendants were not compensated for their work, receiving instead torture, rape, and mistreatment in an institution that viewed dark skin as an indication of a lack of humanity.
When slavery was abolished at the end of the Civil War, the population of enslaved workers had few skills or resources with which to survive. They had been forbidden from reading or receiving an education as enslaved people. Plantation owners hired former enslaved people in a new sharecropping system that promised land for work but drove former enslaved people back into forced labor through unpayable debts. Free Black men and women were given an opportunity to “buy their freedom” but ultimately found themselves in a new form of slavery that lasted long after it had officially ended. Many states’ vagrancy laws allowed communities to capture Black people off the streets and force them to work in fields or factories to pay off egregious legal fines. Over the decades, successful African American communities rose up in the United States, creating places where the descendants of enslaved people were able to build economic and social success amongst themselves. Many of these communities were violently destroyed by mobs who burned down their shops and homes and forced survivors off of their land. One of the worst of these was the Tulsa Race Massacre of 1921.
During the 20th century, Jim Crow laws, redlining, and real estate discrimination systemically denied African Americans the right to own homes and other property. This was the basis for Lorraine Hansberry’s 1959 play, A Raisin in the Sun, which takes its title from Langston Hughes’ poem “Harlem”— which asks, “What happens to a dream deferred? Does it dry up like a raisin in the sun?” As home and land ownership—and the inheritance of that commodity—continues to be the largest repository of personal wealth in the United States, historical discrimination against communities of color holds them behind white people in perpetuity. Black people are denied bank loans for any purpose at a rate between 15 and 35% higher than white people.
Dawes’s poem “Dirt” reflects the undying, persistent dream of gaining land and taking ownership of one’s own work and the fruits of one’s labor. The use of “Dirt” has its roots in the legacy of farming, agriculture, and sharecropping that enslaved Africans and their descendants were forced to do. Rather than expressing a desire to change the type of work “we” can do, the poem emphasizes the desire to change who owns the profits. In Wilson’s play, The Piano Lesson, which provides the opening quote for “Dirt,” the character Boy Willie wants to return to the South to plant cotton like his enslaved ancestors, but he wants to be the owner of the farm and not enforced labor.
Literary Context: African Diaspora Literature and the References to Bob Marley and August Wilson
Literature of the African diaspora deals with the concerns of people who came from, or can trace their ancestry back to, the African continent. This includes those who migrated out of Africa in their own lifetimes and those who left or were forced out in previous generations. What binds authors of the African diaspora is an interest in the ways Africa influences them culturally and spiritually, even from a distance, and how they often experience discrimination from the cultures of their adopted countries.
Dawes, born in Ghana and raised in Jamaica, was influenced by writers of African descent, specifically Bob Marley from Jamaica and August Wilson from America. Dawes has written several poems that reference August Wilson, or characters from his plays. The quote that opens “Dirt” comes from Wilson’s play, The Piano Lesson, a drama that centers around a family who are descendants of enslaved people. In previous generations, their ancestor carved a Basque relief onto a piano, and his descendants stole that piano and passed it down to their children. Now one family member, Willie wants to sell the piano, along with watermelons, to raise enough money to buy land in the south so they can grow cotton. Berniece wants to keep the piano. Wilson infers that Willie is only a dreamer who will never achieve the happy ending he desires.
Wilson’s play explores the legacy of slavery. Even after the Emancipation Proclamation, African Americans had little to their name. Gaining ownership of their own land was a difficult battle. They continued to suffer from oppression, racism, and unequal treatment in the United States, yet they continued to strive.
Dawes’s poem retells the struggles of African Americans who had worked the land, bringing forth fruit, literally, and the metaphorical fruits of labor. It expresses a desire and a determination to regain ownership of the land, which is symbolic of regaining ownership of their own destiny, and the dignity of personhood.
Dawes writes “Dirt” in response to, or in conversation with, Wilson’s plays and the themes that concern them both. The references to the past emphasize the importance of history and how history continues to form the present, as the legacy of slavery continues to affect both the characters of Wilson’s plays and the speaker of “Dirt.” Dawes’s poem in particular speaks to the fact that while the effects of oppression have been passed down, generations have also passed down hope, resilience, and a memory of a time when they were free in Africa.
The title of the book in which “Dirt” appears, Duppy Conqueror, is the name of a song by Bob Marley and the Wailers and a term in Rastafarianism. It means, roughly “ghost conqueror” but more accurately “conqueror of evil spirits.” This can be interpreted as the spirits left by the legacies of colonization, slavery, and oppression, as well as the generational traumas and legacies that pass down through history. In “Dirt,” the speaker expresses a tenacity and determination to overcome a history of oppression and reclaim their ability to own the land. The speaker of “Dirt” is therefore a kind of “Duppy Conqueror” or at least strives to be one.
