No Images

“No Images” is an emotional exploration of the tragedy of women of color in the United States’ urban centers in the 1920s. The poem sets up a kind of problem/solution dynamic. As such, “No Images” is a poem of denial, what the woman at the sink is versus what she perceives she is. The title defines the problem. The woman has no images that depict the “beauty” of a “brown body” (Lines 2, 3). Within this white culture, the speaker asks, how would this woman of color even begin to suspect her own beauty, her own glory? It is not that she is not beautiful, rather “she does not know / her beauty” (Line 1-2). Therein lies the tragedy of the poem—what she is (and what the speaker sees she is) against what she believes she is. 

Denied any interaction with her adopted culture, the woman of color accepts a submissive place, accepts that because she is a woman of color, because her skin is brown not white, she possesses no spiritual energy, no dazzling kinetic power, in short “no glory” (Line 4). Her poor self-image, created by the white culture, leaves her certain only of her own diminishment.