Homelessness Hopelessness

Creative Arts High School (My Mom and I Were Homeless) St. Paul MN from Wing Young Huie's album Homelessness, Accessed 8/31/2014.

Imagine walking past this woman, dressed as she is in this photograph (minus the sign), on a Minnesota street, today. You're focused on that important business meeting coming up on Thursday and the fact that the intern got your coffee order wrong this morning. You might take a few moments outside your own head to notice the nose ring or the multitude of scarves, but after passing by you probably wouldn't think of her again. You most certainly wouldn't know she had been homeless.

Now imagine walking past this woman, a few years ago, on that same Minnesota street you just meandered down in your head. This time, imagine her holding the sign. Maybe it has different words scrawled on it. Something along the lines of "Homeless. Any little bit helps. God Bless." The scene is a little different, but your reaction is probably the same. You walk right past her without a second thought. In the first situation, you didn't notice much. She was just a regular person walking down a street. But this time, she was a homeless person. You noticed her. And you deliberately ignored her.

She once was a person with hopes and dreams. Then she was a homeless person. An "other". Most of the time, not even worth the title of "person". She was, to many of us, simply "homeless". Photographer Wing Huie has given her a platform to stand on. He's changed the words on her sign and given her a voice. He's reminded us that she is a person. A person with dreams. But, looking away from the forward image of the sign...there are no words to describe the hopelessness that rests in her eyes.

Both Huie and Margaret Atwood present their societal "others" in similar ways. They give these people a voice. When allowed to speak, these people show us pieces of their past. They tell us all about their dreams. They explain the situations they've been put in, through no fault of their own. They become "others" through the labels placed on them by their societies. Handmaid. Homeless. In the "othering" process they gain one H-word and lose another. And although both "others" strip themselves of their labels in the end, they are left without hope.