By Angela Salas, Ph. D.

In a review of Yusef Komunyakaa’s Magic City, Jennifer Richter notes the volume “illustrates that attempting to know the world and make sense of it is, in fact, a lifelong process.” In “Sunday Afternoons,” from the same volume, the young narrator asks, “Where did we learn to be unkind?” While Magic City takes as its subject a childhood spent in Klan country, the question of where “we learn to be unkind” is central to Komunyakaa’s work.

One crucible in which Komunyakaa’s vision was forged was that of the Vietnam War, where he served as a correspondent from 1969-70. His 1988 volume Dien Cai Dau (meaning crazy in the head) is explicitly about the Vietnam War experience; however, Komunyakaa’s every volume is an assertion about what it is to be an African-American male, what it was to be a military correspondent (hence both witness and participant) during the Vietnam War, what it means to have been raised in the Jim Crow South, and what it has meant to see and know things he ought not. The issues with which Komunyakaa grapples in Dien Cai Dau include: the uneasiness of the soldier of color sent to battle other people of color; empathy for the enemy, whom he nonetheless brutalizes; awareness of women as victims of war and of male aggression; and the certain knowledge that serving alongside whites will not afford him equal regard in the world.

Komunyakaa won the Pulitzer Prize in 1994 for the 1993 volume Neon Vernacular; his work strives mightily toward canonization and, I predict, the Nobel Prize. Influenced by French and Russian literature, powerfully surrealistic, steeped in the work of the Language poets and masterful at intertextual riffs, Komunyakaa’s poetry “approaches the intensity of no less a figure than prototypical canon quester Ralph Ellison in his bid for mainstream American literary status” according to Alvin Aubert. And Vince Gotera, Komunyakaa’s friend, former student, and one of the first to write sustained critical examinations of Komunyakaa’s work, asserts that the poet wishes that his work, including the poems comprising Dien Cai Dau, be “tested with the full rigor applied to all serious literature.”

This dedication to craft does not, however, remove Komunyakaa’s poetry from the political sphere. On the contrary, Komunyakaa himself, in a 1986 interview with Gotera, articulated his discomfort with what he called a “neo-Fugitive” school of poetry, divorced from the political concerns of the world, saying “I believe poetry has always been political, long before poets had to deal with the page and white space. . . .There seems always some human landscape that creates a Paul Celan. Too many contemporary poets would like to dismiss this fact.”

We know that war can create poets. Dien Cai Dau speaks boldly about the Vietnam War as the landscape that helped produce Yusef Komunyakaa’s particular, yet universalizing, poetic vision. Komunyakaa deploys symbolism, surrealism, journalistic language, Vietnamese and African-American idiom, imagism, allusion, and even revivified cliche to give life and voice to those individuals, white, black, Vietnamese, American, women, men, rape victims and rapists, whose human dramas occurred in the midst of the war. In so doing, Komunyakaa refuses to allow the claim that, because his experience and witness are outside the reader’s (as white, as young, as female or draft resister) that they need not grapple with the issues that burn in his poems. Instead, Komunyakaa writes on terms that require a reader’s interaction with his work and with the witness it bears. What he does to stunning effect is, through exquisite craftsmanship, universalize his experience so that even young, white, Northern readers can say “yes, I get it. I can see that Vietnamese woman being consumed by Napalm in ‘You and I Are Disappearing.’ I can see and feel the horror.”

Komunyakaa extends his poetic hand (and his metaphors) too overtly to justify criticism that his vision is too particular for wide consumption. When Komunyakaa spoke at Adrian College on October 3, 1996, an African-American man asked him if he found his work overlooked or resisted by white readers. “No,” Komunyakaa replied, “I write in images. Images are pretty universal. Images invite the reader as a participant in the making of meaning.” Earlier in the discussion, Komunyakaa had declined to answer questions of what individual poems are “about,” saying, “I desire the reader to get to the end and go back to the beginning. I don’t want the reader to just say, ‘OK, it means this’ and throw it away.”

A 1992 interview with Muna Asali, New England Review, puts a fine point on issues of race in Komunyakaa’s poetry: after Asali asked him about how he avoided the “ghettoization” of his work, Komunyakaa replied that “ghettoization is imposed upon certain people, and . . . is a pigeonhole that the artist attempts to traverse by all means. But we cannot crawl out of our skin, even when we try to lie to ourselves or say that race doesn’t matter . . ..” Race matters, particularly when it is race that permits others to question your humanity and to pathologize you. However, writing and being read exclusively on racial grounds (however valid they are) risks being relegated to the ranks of special-interest writer. On the other hand, requiring, through imagery and the deferral of resolution, that readers enter the poem and participate in creating its meaning, is to cross the color line and drag the reader back with you. What could be more political than to confront a young white reader with what the black soldier heard in the field: that while the soldier was fighting for democracy in Vietnam, Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated for fighting for the democratic rights of blacks in America. And what could be more activist and political than making a reader, years after the fact, feel that she too, stands impotent and complicit as another woman burns “like a sack of dry ice,” “like a cattail torch/dipped in gasoline,” “like a shot glass of vodka,” “like a burning bush/driven by a godawful wind”?

The reader’s guide in the trip through Dien Cai Dau is a haunted young African-American soldier. In the interview with Asali, Komunyakaa speaks of his very particular African-American narrative persona in Dien Cai Dau, saying:

This black soldier in Vietnam . . . seems rather uncomfortable with his role. Maybe the agent of free will lurks like a specter in his psyche. Or perhaps he feels guilty, because he has a sense of history and he knows that he’s merely a cog in the whole contradictory machinery some might call democracy or even manifest destiny. Maybe he has singled himself out because he feels responsible. After all, we are condemned to carry the weight of our own hearts. Indeed, this soldier seems limboed in a kind of existential loneliness.

This soldier is alone with his questions. He is tormented by Hanoi Hannah, who asks why a black man would fight the white man’s war; who taunts him with Tina Turner music; who blurts out news of racial unrest in America. He finds, further, that the race rules in effect in Bogalusa have been transplanted to this place so far from home. In “Tu Do Street,” the black soldier still has his “place” when it comes to R&R:

Music divides the evening
I close my eyes & can see
Men drawing lines in the dust.
America pushes through the membrane
of mist & smoke, & I’m a small boy
again in Bogalusa. Whites Only
signs and Hank Snow.

The lines are still drawn in the dust of this combat zone: whites and blacks are to remain separate and unequal. “America pushes through the membrane” when, banned from the club, as from bars back home, the soldier wanders to a place where “black GIs hold to their turf also,” looking for female company to prove that he is not “a small boy/again in Bogalusa”:

An off-limits sign pulls me
deeper into alleys, as I look
for a softness behind these voices
wounded by their beauty and war.
Back in the bush at Dak To
& Khe Sanh, we fought
the brothers of these women
we now hold in our arms.
There’s more than a nation
inside us, as black & white
soldiers touch the same lovers
minutes apart, tasting
each other’s breath,
without knowing these rooms
run into each other like tunnels
leading to the underworld.

Vietnam, like America, is divided in ways meant to humiliate and emasculate the black soldier; yet the soldier, struggling to retain his humanity, empathizes with the prostitutes he uses and whose brothers he may have killed. He has enough humor to realize that, despite the illusion created for the white GIs, the prostitutes traffic in both black and white soldiers, aided by rooms that “run into each other like tunnels.” Jim Crow meets Vietnam and brings along all its ugliness and inherent absurdity.

“Facing It,” the final selection in Dien Cai Dau implies, but refuses to give, resolution to the existential crises of the war. “Facing It” takes place at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, D.C. and is, as Gotera writes, “Literally a reflection about reflections; it is a ‘facing’ of the dualities that govern this everyday life: there and here, America and Vietnam, living and dead…Komunyakaa…presents, practically unmediated, a series of images.” “Facing It” reads this way:

My black face fades,
hiding inside the black granite.
I said I wouldn’t,
dammit: No tears.
I’m stone. I’m flesh.
My clouded reflection eyes me
like a bird of prey, the profile of night
slanted against morning. I turn
this way — the stone lets me go.
I turn that way — I’m inside
the Vietnam Veterans Memorial
again, depending on the light to make a difference.
I go down the 58,022 names,
half-expecting to find
my own in letters like smoke.
I touch the name Andrew Johnson;
I see the booby trap’s white flash.
names shimmer on a woman’s blouse
but when she walks away
the names stay on the wall.
Brushstrokes flash, a red bird’s
wings cutting across my stare.
The sky. A plane in the sky.
A white vet’s image floats
closer to me, then his pale eyes
look through mine. I’m a window.
He’s lost his right arm
inside the stone. In the black mirror
a woman’s trying to erase names:
No, she’s brushing a boy’s hair.

Perhaps the most wrenching lines in the poem are those about the white veteran. “[T]hen his pale eyes/look through mine. I’m a window.” Is this a moment of empathy, when the white vet can see “through” the black’s eyes — really see with him? Or is it, perhaps more probably, a continuation of the racial status quo in America, with the white veteran seeing through the black as if he is not there; as if they have no common ground? And has this veteran, who has “lost his right arm/inside the stone,” been mutilated in the war, or is this loss a momentary trick of the eyes? There are no answers: instead, we have images of past memory and present time. Andrew Johnson is now a name on the Memorial and a white flash the narrator remembers and forces the reader to see. The Memorial itself can absorb the narrator, the other veteran’s arm, much as the war absorbed the lives and blood of the 58,022 Americans whose names are inscribed on Maya Lin’s arresting black wall.

Komunyakaa has spoken of his poetry as an act of witnessing. It is also an act of assertion. He speaks with immediacy, clarity, and force about the violence and cruelty we do to each other. In an age in which poetry is widely considered either threatening or impotent, Komunyakaa’s poems speak with a force that provokes stunned silence in my own classrooms. They do this, I think, because Komunyakaa is so gifted at speaking through the horror of seeing and experiencing the harms people inflict upon people, whether out of anger, despair, hopelessness, carelessness, or ignorance. Komunyakaa confronts Jim Crow, rape, self-hatred and all the things we would rather avoid discussing in mixed company; in so doing, he requires that his readers do so also. We come away from this confrontation emotionally bruised yet oddly relieved of the burden of silence maintained around both the Vietnam War and issues of race in America. We are all “condemned to carry the weight of our own hearts,” and Yusef Komunyakaa provides us with an inventory of the things we carry.