Politics & Power Quote by Alden Nowlan

Nowlan’s line lands like an offhand aside, but it’s a grenade lobbed into the polite mythology of North American letters. The key word is “Offhand”: he performs casualness while making an accusation. If you can only “think of” writers from rural poverty who wrote about it, and they “have been Negroes,” then the silence around white rural poverty starts to look less like coincidence and more like cultural editing.

The intent isn’t to exoticize Black writers; it’s to indict a literary ecosystem that treated class as embarrassing, parochial, or simply unmarketable when it came wrapped in whiteness. Mid-century Canada and the U.S. both sustained a sturdy romance of rural life (pastoral grit, honest labor) that allowed poverty to be aestheticized or skipped entirely. When white writers did emerge from deprivation, the pressure was often to “rise above” it and write in a more sanctioned register. Black writers, denied the luxury of invisibility, were forced by history and readership expectations to be legible about origin: poverty, segregation, labor, constraint. Their testimony was permitted, even demanded, because it fit an existing narrative of “the Negro experience.”

The subtext is also self-accusation. Nowlan, a poet from rural Nova Scotia poverty, is naming the cultural shame that can muzzle a writer: to write the poor world plainly risks being tagged as bitter, small, or insufficiently “literary.” He’s arguing that the canon’s class story isn’t just incomplete; it’s been curated to keep certain kinds of poverty from sounding like literature at all.