Work

We all hate it: in poems

What You Want by Corey Qureshi

The worst jobs in the world are the worst for fascinating reasons. Reasons worth studying and considering and figuring out. Are the worst jobs the disgusting ones, the physically revolting ones, the ones that even reading about them makes you want to be sick?

Or are they the morally troubling ones, the dubious ones, the ones you wouldn’t want to explain or discuss or think about too deeply? Those jobs you won’t want to describe too closely to your family.

Or the humiliating ones, or the boring ones, the ones whose shifts pass like torment, who imprison you not only doing something tragic but trap you stuck meanwhile in your own tired mind, the mind that keeps on going, dully turning over like an engine on the blink, the jobs that make you resent remaining alive and conscious and make you plan elaborate suicides, using whatever’s to hand?

Or all of the above? For there are jobs that combine many of the worst of them all.

Corey Qureshi’s book of poems is, in a way, a crude song of innocence and experience. Experience because it’s about the experience of labour — the experience of doing awful things for too long for pay. The experience of a numbed mind, boredom unparalleled. And it’s also a petulant complaint of a kind of innocence. I didn’t ask to be told to do these difficult things, the voice of the poems says: I didn’t ask to be left so tired, so strung out, by work that I can’t even take care of the home on my days off, or even sit around and enjoy myself. I didn’t sign up for this — didn’t sign up for any of it. I didn’t ask to be born! If only there was someone to whom I could reasonably complain.

And there’s a strange quality to this innocence and experience: the quality of growing up, of not being a kid any more, but being stuck in the kinds of jobs they used to give to teenagers. Cleaning things up in a customer-facing business. Sitting in a box, theoretically on guard. We do not have, here at least, the short order cookery or waiting of tables or tending bar that many are also made to do during those periods of youth where it’s legal to work and money — what little of it there is — is newly at a premium. But I think we can assume they’re implied.

The humiliation of it, the being ordered about and demeaned. All that’s implied sometimes and sometimes stated. It’s in the reader’s mind when hearing about small works bathrooms with paper-thin walls. Reading about being admonished for drug use, for drinking. It comes with being told about the constant collecting and shifting of refuse. So much of manual work is garbage, in both senses, Qureshi wants us to know. The picture is painted vividly enough, I can say.

A picture of arrested development, maladjustment, the surrounding by tormentors, Vauxhall and I.

Being stuck in a kid’s job at thirty must hurt. I’m not yet thirty but I’ll tell you what it’s like when I am.

And thinking of the next bit of temporary work, the next situation — like a Victorian governess, powerless, hoping to be taken on.

Another thing not present here is the worst part of work — begging to be permitted to work. Trying to think of your good qualities, debating whether to lie or to embroider them, attending interviews or — I have suffered through this — self-taping some audition or interview videos for others, your betters, to peruse at their amused leisure.

Trying desperately to get the attention of a million HR women who throw your applications into basketball hoops hung over wastepaper bins and make a delighted point of never replying timely to an email. Being judged, spat upon, rejected, and judged again. A pig at market. A serf begging his master to be allowed to move from one village to the next.

What Qureshi’s book perhaps lacks is a wider sense of how this kind of awful, dire, miserable work fits into life. It might sap us of our strength and leave us exhausted in our time off, make us old before we reach great age. But does it rob us of all hope, all love? What’s missing most, perhaps, in this collection is family.

Some people don’t have a family, of course, but most of us do. What about them? What does having to take out the rubbish while being a poet mean for your family?

Is it not possible, even as we drudge and drag our way through this disappointing life, to find some solace somewhere? Solace in friendships, in family, in love?

I’m not the man to say. Perhaps all this work — ceaselessly, around the clock, unable to think of anything else — has dimmed the brain. Has made raw, unreflective sentiment replace thought and reason, has turned down the faculties and smashed all that was brain to grey pulpy mass. But I think we mostly work for love. Not for love of what we do, unless we’re lucky. But love of those we go to work to feed. And that might mean tolerating a rough lot in life almost indefinitely, if we’re able to do good for those who love us.