Harare Review of Books

256 pages.

First published March 5, 2024 (Broadleaf Books).

Non-fiction.

Being human is a complicated endeavour. We live lives or through moments of beauty in the midst of tremendous ugliness, violence, or pain. We are vulnerable, fragile, and mortal. We are also often cruel, often dangerous to ourselves and others, and cause harm to one another. Monroe has managed to capture some of this in this excellent and important book.

My mood while reading Trash was mostly outrage. The US sets itself up as the “richest” and “most powerful” country in the world, but fails so very many of its citizens—mainly non-whites, but also poor white people (33 of the white population of the US, and 20% of the entire US population), all those people considered surplus; people who deserve better simply by reason of their citizenship. Monroe grew up in a working class, almost all-white coastal community in Grays Harbor, Washington. They escaped through education, but moved back to serve as chaplain to this underserved community—particularly the unhoused. One of the main themes of Trash is Monroe’s attempts to promote class solidarity across racial barriers, and the poisonous nature of white supremacy to this. In Moore’s telling, after W. E. B. Du Bois and others, white supremacy (as a capitalist tool) thrives on separating poor and working class white people from those in the same class and situation, thereby achieving its ends.

But Trash is not just theoretical. Monroe has lived out all of these things in their childhood, and as an adult, in service. It’s a beautiful and crucial work among those who are usually silenced. Outsiders and onlookers (as well as politicians and the business class) may not see huge effects, but lives are being changed. It has come at tremendous cost to Monroe and other workers, through resistance from those who should help, through oppressive national (federal) policies, and through actual physical attacks on activists. Monroe had taken a break by the end of the book (after a breakdown); but the work goes on, because it must. Because even though it’s heartbreaking, exhausting work, it’s important work.

There’s much to ponder. As a Black African woman, there are experiences I have no access to, ways of looking at the world that I can’t even imagine until they’re told to me. Monroe has opened up the world of a section of white, working class America to me, and its bare bones don’t look all that different to Black, working class Zimbabwe. In Trash, Monroe addresses unemployment, homelessness, and drug use among the poor; but also capitalism, racism, and settler colonialism, and accepts even their own positionality (and that of all non-Indigenous Americans) as part of the problem.

There are many clear and obvious answers, but clarity doesn’t mean anything in broken systems. Trash is a clear-eyed, piercing, impactful, and very personal presentation of just what poor people in the US, and by extension, across the world, are up against. It’s a hard read, and a profoundly necessary one.

Many thanks to Broadleaf Books and to Edelweiss for early access.

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