Grapes of Wrath

If there is a creative work that has shaped my moral and social world view, it is John Steinbeck's Grapes of Wrath. Its portrayal, through the deeply proud and human Joad family, of the plight of so many during such a difficult time in America suggests a set of core attitudes by which an honorable people can cope with all sorts of difficulties, including the sort that America and the world struggle with today.

Using scenes of great power and feeling, Steinbeck suggests that a healthy society must nourish and respect a person's sense of dignity and self-reliance. For the Joads and the other tenants and migrants, this meant ownership of land and the right to dignified work at decent pay. As an immigrant from Jamaica, a poor country with less than one-tenth the GDP per capita of the U.S., I have always been conscious of large contrasts in income and wealth--between groups and communities in America, as well as between nations. I was astonished to learn, not so long ago, that conditions for migrant farm workers in the U.S. today are not very much better than during the Great Depression.

The book (and John Ford's beautiful movie version) offers a heartbreaking portrayal of the psychological and physical consequences of uprooting people from their land and their lives. Grampa and Granma Joad die on the road. Pregnant Rosasharn is deserted by her husband, and later loses her child. I cannot, today, read a news story about refugees, such as those in the Darfur region of Sudan (who in addition to starvation and dis-placement, are enduring genocidal violence), without visualizing their suffering in terms laid out so intelligently and touchingly by Steinbeck.

But it is not just a vivid sense of social justice that I absorbed from Grapes