[In the following essay, Aubert argues that Komunyakaa successfully combines his African-American and Euro-American cultural heritage to express a unified vision in his poetry. Aubert observes that Komunyakaa's Vietnam War poetry expresses the shared humanity of the black and white soldiers who fought in Vietnam.]

In an interview in the journal Callaloo, Yusef Komunyakaa, author of seven collections of poems, expresses his admiration for poets whom he considers to have achieved a “unified vision” in their poetry, an achievement he apparently strives for in his own work. A closely associated, if not identical, goal and a source of tension in Komunyakaa's poetry is his desire to gain admittance into the American literary canon, but not at the expense of surrendering his African American cultural identity.

At the core of Komunyakaa's pursuit of a unified vision and literary canonization is his stern resistance, textualized formalistically as well as thematically in his poems, to those forces in the hegemonous counterculture aimed at excluding him as an African American from the ranks of humanity. Indeed, in the singularity of his perseverance and in both the high quality and quantity of his poetic output, Komunyakaa approaches the intensity of no less a figure than prototypical canonization quester Ralph Ellison in his bid for mainstream American literary status. Komunyakaa, however, lacks the irritability Ellison sometimes displays in his attitude toward other African American writers, in particular the young black writers of the culturally insurrectionary 1970s.

The unified vision Komunyakaa seeks involves the integration and aesthetic instillation in his poetry of cultural material from both his African American and his European American sources. A useful sampling of Komunyakaa's artistry at work—including his quest for a unified vision, his bid for literary canonization, and his push for the completion of his humanity—can be found in two poems from his ironically titled fourth collection, I Apologize for the Eyes in My Head (1986): “When in Rome—Apologia,” the last two lines of which supply the title of the book, and “I Apologize.” I will also refer briefly to “The Music That Hurts.”

A particularly illustrative passage appears in “I Apologize,” a dramatic monologue that intertextualizes Robert Browning's prototypical dramatic monologue “My Last Duchess”: “I'm just like the rest of the world: / No comment; no way, Jose …” (37). After staking his claim for unqualified status in the human race and issuing his somewhat tongue-in-cheek declaration of no comment (ironically noting the extent to which further comment might implicate him in the negatives as well as the positives of the humanity he holds in common with his white auditor), the persona comments anyway. Addressing the person designated as “sir,” who occupies the position of the implicit, silent auditor of the traditional dramatic monologue, the persona observes that he “want[s] spring always / dancing with the pepper trees,” etc. (37).

Like most of Komunyakaa's poems, “I Apologize” is markedly obscure. On first reading, the persona might be the typical, racially or ethnically unspecified, Peeping Tom, but we soon realize that he is the archetypal reckless eyeballer, the fated African American male in the U.S. South of not too many years ago who is accused of looking too long, and by implication with sexual intent, at some white woman, a tabooistic infringement for which he is likely to be lynched. The accused's only defense, his only recourse in such a predicament, is a desperate and futile excuse. This is typified in the poem's opening lines, which also encapsulate the kind of redemptive humor black people engage in among themselves: “My mind wasn't even there. / Mirage, sir. I didn't see / what I thought I saw. / … I was miles away, I saw nothing!” (37). Then there is the sheer desperation of the poem's concluding line and a half—“This morning / I can't even remember who I am” (37)—an apparent plea of insanity.

“When in Rome—Apologia” aptly intertextualizes Browning's monologue as well. Both of Komunyakaa's poems allude to the fate of the wife of Browning's jealous persona, the Duke who had his spouse killed for smiling excessively at other men. In Komunyakaa's poems, however, an ironic readjustment of roles takes place, for it is the would-be suitor whose life is at stake, prompting his desperate plea:

Please forgive me, sir,
for getting involved
in the music—
it's my innate weakness
for the cello: so human.
Please forgive me
for the attention
I've given your wife
tonight, sir.

(23)

We note the gap posited by the interstanzaic enjambment between “involved” and its complement “in the music,” suggesting a deliberate, playful withholding of the right information from the “sir” of the poem—the sense being I won't say it but it's not music I'm talking about, it's life: Excuse me, just a dumb nigger, for insisting on being involved on an equal basis with you in life. Ironically, the speaker's “innate weakness” is the humanity he has in common with his auditor, as expressed in the phrase “so human.” And the use of a highly prized wife to epitomize the cultural exclusion that diminishes the persona's human status is an appropriate choice in view of the idea that enjoys considerable currency among African American artists and intellectuals that, not only are women co-creators with men of culture, they are singularly carriers and dispensers of it as well. Furthermore, the irony informing the speaker's plea borders on sarcasm, thus implying that irony may be too exalted a sentiment to spend on the insensitive “sirs” of this world.

The petitioner's final, desperate plea evidences a loss of control which is due to intoxication: “I don't know / what came over me, sir. / After three Jack Daniel's / you must overlook / my candor, my lack of / sequitur” (23). In a statement that engenders the title of the book, the poem concludes: “I apologize for / the eyes in my head” (24), an ambiguously metonymical reference to the outer (physical) and inner (intuitive) facilities of sight that interact in the process of creating poems. Forgive me, the implication goes, not only for insisting on seeing all that there is humanly possible to see in the world but also for being so presumptuous in my reputed inhumanity as a person of African descent to aspire to write poetry of a quality and comprehensiveness equal to your own.

Who is the forbidden woman in these poems? Is she the same as the “white wife” of the surrealistic poem “The Music That Hurts,” personified there as “Silence”? Although Komunyakaa's poems incline toward non-referentiality, they are not characterized by the non-figurativeness non-referential poetry reputedly strives for. Thus, viewed in the context of Komunyakaa's work as a whole, music in these three poems is metaphorical of life; its opposite, “Silence,” signifies outsiderness, comprehending an absence of humanity. Add to this the act of seeing as literally and figuratively a means for fulfilling one's humanity, and Komunyakaa's ironic apology may be stated as Sorry, but have I not eyes to see all that there is to be seen in the world, which accords with my right as an American citizen and, preeminently, as a human being? In the very act of laying claim to and pursuing canonical status in his poems, Komunyakaa demonstrates his “qualification” for it in rhetorical and aesthetic maneuvers that include a repudiation of racial or ethnically based limitations or boundaries. He comes across as a person who is well-versed in the poetic traditions of Anglo-Europe and Anglo-America, and who is also aware of the abundant technical and material properties that are available for the advancement of the art of poetry in America, especially the rich resources that abound in African American life and culture.

Not all of Komunyakaa's poems contain African American cultural material, and in some of those that do, the material is not always easily recognizable, possibly identifying these poems as exemplary achievements of Komunyakaa's unified vision. These are among the numerous poems by Komunyakaa that occupy the right end of an accessibility continuum that ranges from obscure on the right to clear on the left, and they provide a unique glimpse into Komunyakaa's artistry, especially in the extraordinary challenge the poems present to the reader who must work to discover, process, and integrate the works' African American cultural material into the fabric of meaning of the poems. The poem “I Apologize” is a case in point, with its subtle inscription of the persona's African Americanness in a poem not easily identifiable as the work of an African American author. Clues to the persona's identity appear in one of a sequence of desperate alibis he concocts in his apologetic response to the person he addresses as “sir,” who implicitly has accused him of reckless eyeballing. “I was in my woman's bedroom / removing her red shoes & dress” (37), he pleads, adding in cadences reminiscent of Browning's poem and in mildly contradictory terms as he attempts to extricate himself, that he could not have committed the “crime” because

I was miles away, I saw nothing!
Did I say their diamond rings
blinded me & I nearly lost my head?
I think it was how the North
Star fell through plate glass.
I don't remember what they wore.

(37)

The “sir,” as indicated earlier, is a white man; the “they” of the last line quoted above are white women, the reputed objects of the defensively comedic African American male persona's reckless eyeballing. The white women, whom he denies having seen at all, yet whose attire he contradictorily indicates he cannot “remember,” are identified with diamonds and refined attire, in contrast with the “red shoes & dress” worn by the person whom we justifiably assume to be the persona's African American woman, with whom he was supposedly, and perhaps actually, too preoccupied in her bedroom to be paying attention to anyone else. The red shoes and dress allude ironically to the reputed fondness of black women for the color red and to the disparagement to which they were subjected in white society's stereotyping of them as sexually promiscuous, as scarlet women.

Another, possibly less obscure, allusion is to the North Star, a symbol of freedom derived from its use as a guide by fugitive slaves on their journeys out of slavery. The persona claims he was more concerned with the star than the white women's diamond rings. Throughout the poem the persona is portrayed as a ludicrously bumbling trickster figure, offering one lame excuse after another in his effort to escape the lynching he is likely to receive for his reckless eyeballing. For all its comedic trappings, however, “I Apologize” is a serious dramatization of the obstacles confronting the African American poet who wants his humanity acknowledged—and a rightful place in the American literary canon.

Also of particular interest are some of Komunyakaa's Vietnam war poems, which appear in the chapbook Toys in a Field (1987) and the full-length Dien Cai Dau (1988). In my review of the latter work for Epoch magazine, I noted the appropriateness of Komunyakaa's use of surrealism for depicting the absurdity of Vietnam combat experiences, especially as they involved black and white American GIs together in situations where, despite the combat survival value of camaraderie, the African American soldier had to contend with the differential burden of racial, and ofttimes racist, inequities (which is not to say that one should overlook the absurdity that frequently surfaces in relations between whites and blacks generally).

Especially relevant to the present discussion is the poem “Tu Do Street,” from Dien Cai Dau, with its titular punning on “two door.” The persona is an African American GI and is immediately identifiable as such, but he also has a penchant for invisibility. He is a quester of sorts for whom invisibility, or at least a certain neutrality, is prerequisite, since he is intent on testing out the waters of racial interfacing along a Saigon bar strip frequented by black and white GIs who enter the area, as it were, through separate doors as they seek relief from the stress and strain of combat among the mama-sans and their attendant bar girls.

An implicit distinction is drawn in the poem between the GIs' quest for sexless or pre-sexual socialization in the bars and their quest for sex in other rooms, for although the black GIs are shunned by the mama-sans and bar girls in the bars frequented by the white GIs, “deeper into alleys” (29), in off-limits areas, the black soldiers have access to prostitutes whose services are available on a nondiscriminatory basis. These assignations take place in “rooms” that invoke a transformational combat landscape: They “run into each other like tunnels / leading to the underworld” (29). Implicit in these conduits is a common humanity, linked to a common death, figuratively in sex and literally in war, for black and white GIs alike:

There's more than a nation
inside us, as black & white
soldiers touch the same lovers
minutes apart, tasting
each other's breath …

(29)

What's “more than a nation / inside” the GIs, black and white, is of course their shared humanity.

The persona knows about the two doors, but impelled by purposes of the persona behind the persona—the poet in quest of a poem and, consequently, of his equalization and literary canonization—he goes in through the opposite door anyway, purposefully and perhaps ritualistically subjecting himself to the rejection on racial grounds he knows he is sure to get. When he enters the bar frequented by the white GIs, where the music is different from that in the bars where the black GIs go, the bar girls “fade like tropical birds” in their evasiveness (29). The experience triggers a memory involving an ironic representation of music that separates rather than unites by virtue of its inherent harmony:

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. White Only
signs & Hank Snow.

(29)

The impulse that motivated Komunyakaa as a small boy in his Louisiana hometown of Bogalusa impels him now as a GI in Vietnam, both personae laying claim to their humanity. And as it was at home, so it is on the war front—at least in the rear echelon in Saigon where the soldiers go for rest and recuperation. In the combat zone, where “only machine gun fire brings us / together,” where interracial camaraderie has immediate survival value, a different code of behavior prevails:

Back in the bush at Dak To
& Khe Sanh, we fought
the brothers of these women
we now run to hold in our arms.

(29)

The surface implications of the last two lines quoted are apparent, but just as we should not miss their function in expressing the common humanity that is the object of the persona's quest, we should not overlook the note of respect the passage affords women in its emphasis on the humanistic aspect of the embrace, virtually annulling the sexual import of the situation and betokening the generally humanistic portrayal of women we find in Komunyakaa's work as a whole.

The bar girls and prostitutes of Saigon are metonymically depicted in “Tu Do Street” as victims, their “voices / wounded by their beauty and war” (29). These women are also a part of the “nation / inside us” quoted and commented on above, for it is they—“the same lovers” touched by black GIs and white GIs alike, implicitly by virtue of their capacity for motherhood, for bringing life into the world, and as the primary sources of nurturing—who are the conferers and common denominators of the universal, of the common humanity that populates Komunyakaa's projected socio-literary commonwealth and makes material his “unified vision.”

Works Cited

Aubert, Alvin. “Rare Instances of Reconciliation.” Rev. of Dien Cai Dau, by Yusef Komunyakaa. Epoch 38.1 (1989): 67-72.

Gotera, Vincente F. “‘Lines of Tempered Steel’: An Interview with Yusef Komunyakaa.” Callaloo 13.2 (1991): 215-28.

Komunyakaa, Yusef. Dien Cai Dau. Middletown: Wesleyan UP, 1988.

—. I Apologize for the Eyes In My Head. Middletown: Wesleyan UP, 1986.