Marta Werbanowska University of Warsaw

Muscles and minds, or the work of becoming in Natasha Tretheweys Domestic Work This article examines how the poems collected in Natasha Tretheweys Domestic Work tell the petites histoiries of African American working class men and women of early to mid-20th century. The books epigraph, a quote from W.E.B. Du Bois The Souls of Black Folk I long for work. I pant for a life full of striving aptly introduces the theme which dominates the entire collection: the significance of labor, whatever form it may assume, for the process of shaping ones own consciousness and identity. The characters populating these poems are mostly wage laborers whose occupations seem to be dull, alienating, or even demeaning; nevertheless, Tretheweys poetic stills of their daily lives indicate that there is more to their strivings than survival in the purely economic sense. If we adopt James C. Scotts description of consciousness as the meaning that people give to their acts through the symbols, norms, and ideological forms they create, it can be argued that both paid and unpaid forms of labor may be read as processes during which the working subject defines his or her position in the race-gender-class matrix of consciousness and identity formation. Thus, in Tretheweys poetry labor becomes a major tool in the positive process of constructing and shaping of the self, while seemingly insignificant daily tasks and routines turn out to constitute a site where one produces not only the material effects of his or her work, but also oneself as a subject in both the psychological and social dimensions. By capturing her characters in movement, in the process of both making and becoming, the poet restores to them their voice and agency, at the same time reminding her readers about the role played by working class African Americans in the making of the contemporary American Dreamscape.