[In the following essay, Stein argues that Komunyakaa's Vietnam War poetry creates a dialogue between the official public history of the war, as created by the mass media, and the personal experiences of those who fought in the war. Stein observes that Komunyakaa “creates a soldier's history of Vietnam from an African-American perspective.”]

The haunting locale of Yusef Komunyakaa's Dien Cai Dau (1988) is as much the domain of the human heart and mind as the jungles of Southeast Asia. Based on Komunyakaa's Vietnam war experiences, the book details an inward turning, “a way of dealing with the images inside my head,” as Komunyakaa tells an interviewer, a means to put in order a private history that exists as much outside of history as within it (Houghtaling). Komunyakaa abjures the war's “objective” history that flickered in America's living rooms on the nightly news, objectivity figured most shockingly by the daily body count fulgurating behind Walter Cronkite's head like heat lightning on a steamy July evening. Instead, Komunyakaa's Dien Cai Dau operates within an essentially dialogic structure in which he carefully directs a dialogue between such communal history and the more personal accounts of those who took part in these events. As an African-American, Komunyakaa exists on the margins of official war history, grouped with those Wallace Terry has called the forgotten “fact” of the war—the “black Americans who fought there.”¹ His collection provides a perspective on the war that other fine books by Vietnam vets—John Balaban's After Our War and Bruce Weigl's The Monkey Wars come to mind as perhaps the best—simply can't offer.² Komunyakaa creates a soldier's history of Vietnam from an African-American perspective, and not surprisingly, our view of what it was to be an American in Vietnam, particularly a Black American, alters considerably. In particular, Komunyakaa relies on elements of the very media we most closely associate with the war's communal experience—music, television, drama, and film—to reveal how these elements were perceived, often quite differently, by white and African-American soldiers.

Perhaps by virtue of this marginalization, Komunyakaa is acutely aware of the disparity between the history recorded in books and the history one immediately experiences. In fact, Komunyakaa's implicit recognition of the distinction between objective history and a personally felt history resembles Martin Heidegger's distinction between “Historie” and “Geschichte.”³ For Heidegger, in his study of temporality, Being and Time, “Historie” is roughly what is “recorded,” the course of events that chronicles the rise and fall of nations, the wars these nations prosecute, the fate of civilizations on a large scale. It amounts to a “science” of history. On the other hand, “Geschichte” has more to do with the individual's own inward and “authentic” sense of life, the way what is recorded may pale in comparison to the individual's own immediate experience of those very outward events that shape “Historie.” In “Geschichte,” time becomes an ontological category, the historical-being of the individual. Thus, each individual must take responsibility for his/her own life and push ahead into the “possibilities” of a future not bound to historical time. In Komunyakaa's work, these two senses of the individual's place in history are often in dialogue, for while the actual events of history possess a real presence, the speaker nearly always subordinates them to a more intuited, felt, and existential sense of what it meant (and still means) to experience the Vietnam war.

Because his quest is inward and subjective, the war's actual events frequently serve as mere backdrop for Komunyakaa's obdurate, private search for meaning. As a result, time collapses and expands within the journey as the speaker moves from past to present to a tentative future. Thus time itself attains a kind of mutability in Komunyakaa's work, for what we assume to be past, and therefore gone, feverishly reasserts itself in the speaker's mind. The past simply will not stay put. And neither will the dead—as the speaker of “The Dead at Quang Tri” laments when the Buddhist boy whose head he'd rubbed “for luck” comes floating by “like a white moon” one dark night, “He won't stay dead, dammit!” Komunyakaa's goal is a careful thinking and rethinking that will simultaneously revivify such events and enable him to come to peace with them. He does so, as Heidegger believes all poets must, through the natural agent of memory, through the second “coming of what has been”:

          … thinking holds to the
coming of what has been, and
is rememberance.(4)

This amalgam of public and private history, hauntingly persistent and deeply pooled in Komunyakaa's memory, spills out in these poems in sometimes unexpected effluences. Komunyakaa says as much when, in an interview, he describes his brain as “sort of like a reservoir,” containing “all the frightening images and what have you” associated with the war (Houghtaling). The book, he realizes, was an actual process of “letting go” of those images, a release of the perilous waters of memory (Houghtaling). In the poetic process, Komunyakaa combines actual history and his own inward response to historical events, then subjects both to the filter of his artistic sensibility. What results is a different kind of history that makes use of external, historical events to produce an inward, aestheticized history flushed with personal values and interpretations. Jeffrey Walsh rather succinctly summarizes this process for any veteran who attempts to present an artistic “vision of Vietnam”: “the writer needs to order and recreate his own memories, and then to communicate an aesthetic ‘version’ of the realities he faced” (203). Still, Komunyakaa's Dien Cai Dau differs considerably from earlier poetic texts devoted to the war. Because the book comes thirteen years after the war's close, its manner is more retrospective and ruminative than collections published while the war raged in Southeast Asia, volumes such as Michael Casey's Obscenities (1972) and D. C. Berry's saigon cemetery (1972) and the anthology of poems by Vietnam veterans, Hearts and Minds (1972).⁵ It is less a book “against” the Vietnam war, the claimed purpose of much poetry published during the war, and more a book about the Vietnam war and the experiences it held for soldiers and innocents alike.⁶

Like revenants returned from death, these ghostly images conspire in Komunyakaa's work to make the past discomfitingly present. A good example of the collapse and expansion of time in these poems is “Starlight Scope Myopia,” which opens with a nearly surreal memory of an ambush aided by the nightscope's deft technology of death:

Gray-blue shadows lift
shadows onto an oxcart.
Making night work for us,
the starlight scope brings
men into killing range.

Not only does the scope make the enemy visible in the dark night of that distant past, but it also serves as the agent of their return to the speaker in the present, as the ironic use of “[m]yopic” in the title indicates. If anything, the speaker's vision is farsighted, stretching from the past to the evanescent moment of his present.

Even though the speaker tells the story in past tense, he acknowledges, later in the poem, the event's continuing presence in his life “years after” the war. In this way, the speaker alters the poem's radical of presentation, rhetorically shifting himself and his reader from the past into the present. Moreover, he calls attention to himself as speaker and storyteller, and thus breaks the willing suspension of disbelief many poems demand of their readers:

Viet Cong
move under our eyelids,
lords over loneliness
winding like coral vine through
sandalwood & lotus
inside our lowered heads
years after this scene
ends.

The distance between poet and poem and between poet and reader further collapses when the speaker suddenly begins to identify with these “shadows” and begins painfully to see them as human beings it is his job to kill. The essential dialogic structure of the poem, and of much of the book, first manifests itself here, enabling the speaker not only to address his past “self” but also to engage his reader in the chilling scene. In the selection quoted below, the speaker's dialogue between duty and a kind of moral humanism is expressed in his choice of the pronoun “you,” which enables the speaker to distance the self who is speaking from the self who years ago experienced this incident in Vietnam. At the same time, the pronoun “you” collapses the reader's distance from the poem and entwines that reader in the scene's moral ambivalence:

You try reading ghost talk
on their lips. They say
‘up-up we go,’ lifting as one.
This one, old, bowlegged,
you feel you could reach out
& take him into your arms. You
peer down the sights of your M-16,
seeing the full moon
loaded on an oxcart.

If violence against combatants brings moral questions to the fore, it's no wonder that the speaker finds violence against innocents especially disturbing. In “Recreating the Scene” the speaker details the circumstances surrounding the rape of a Vietnamese woman by three American soldiers. Komunyakaa, who served as a journalist in Vietnam, uses those skills to narrate the incident with ostensibly detached, journalistic precision. This rhetorical strategy helps the reader understand that, while the speaker did not actually witness the incident firsthand, he recounts it much like a journalist whose job is to recreate “the scene” of a crime for his readers. The poem's speaker seems to understand, as must Komunyakaa, that the incident inheres with the potential for exploitative use of language as disturbing in its own way as were the government's obfuscations regarding “kill ratio,” “protective reaction strikes,” and “pacification.” Such an understanding issues from what James Mersmann describes as the poet's “awareness that war (the ultimate insensibility and untruth) is itself an abuse of language (the ultimate vehicle of sensibility and truth), or at least an occasion for its abuse” (207). Here, the speaker pieces together a narrative replete with careful details that enlarge the context of the incident:

The metal door groans
& folds shut like an ancient turtle
that won't let go
of a finger till it thunders.
The Confederate flag
flaps from a radio antenna,
& the woman's clothes
come apart in their hands.
Their mouths find hers
in the titanic darkness
of the steel grotto,
as she counts the names of dead
ancestors, shielding a baby
in her arms.

The language, though restrained and measured, strikingly contrasts the relative condition of the empowered and disempowered characters it describes. Torn from her largely agrarian society, the woman is pulled through the “metal door” of an armored vehicle representing at once the best and worst of a powerfully mechanized culture. Not only is the woman desecrated by the men's actions, but so too are her past, in the figure of the ancestors she recalls, and her future, embodied by the child she protects in her arms—all of them simultaneously wounded inside “a machine / where men are gods.” One subtle but telling detail enlarges the context of the woman's fate: the “Confederate flag” that flies above the vehicle. Given that the poem's speaker, one assumes, is African-American, this one enumeration evokes the implicit racism of the incident and makes it more than a discrete, if obscene, aspect of the spoils of war. Surely the speaker recognizes in the woman's plight a version of his own struggle for respect and equality, and just as surely he sees that skin color—black, white, yellow—silently undergirds much of the politics of this war.

As with “Starlight Scope Myopia,” here time shrinks and swells, both for the woman whose story has been told and for the speaker who tells it. Once released from the APC, the woman turns her attention to filing a complaint, and she's momentarily filled with a sense of promise for justice as “for a moment the world's future tense.” Here too the speaker enters the poem in his position as journalist, interrupting the narrative to claim his role in the incident he's retelling, “I inform The Overseas Weekly.” Although he tells the story in present tense to increase the immediacy of the incident, the speaker, of course, knows the story's ending as well as he knows the previous events he's already related to his readers. Again the past- and present-self implicitly engage in dialogue, in this instance pitting the soldier-self's belief in justice against the present day speaker's knowledge of what has become of such innocence. At the poem's close, he conflates time as a means to emphasize this dialogue between temporal versions of the self, both his and hers, in which a difference in time demarcates the line between innocence and experience:

on the trial's second day
she turns into mist—
someone says money
changes hands,
& someone else swears
she's buried at LZ Gator.
But for now, the baby
makes a fist & grabs at the air,
searching for a breast.

Komunyakaa's poem makes disconcertingly apparent that the Vietnam war involved more than the all too familiar arguments about Communist expansionism that characterized America's “objective” history of the conflict. In fact, as early as 1968, political commentators such as George Liska haggled over the salient “domestic implications” of the war, asserting that the domino theory had real and pertinent influence over issues in the United States (87). In War and Order: Reflections on Vietnam and History (1968), Liska asserts that the “key” domestic issue affected by the war at that time is quite simply America's “racial” turmoil, a situation he succinctly describes as a “crisis” (87). Liska explains at length why opposing camps of “interventionists” and “anti-interventionists” disagree vehemently on what is at stake domestically through America's foreign policy initiatives in Vietnam. He then offers this summary of the interventionist or “imperial” viewpoint, one which he shares:

There is an interdependence between affirmation of American prestige and power vis-a-vis Hanoi and its allies and the prospect for semi-orderly integration of American society in the face of Black Power. In the last resort, whatever order exists in the United States depends on the government's known will and ability to deal firmly with hostile force. A collapse of this reputation abroad would strengthen the appeal and increase the credibility of domestic advocates of violence as a safe and profitable way to “racial equality.” Any administration conspicuously threatened abroad would be bound to have the greatest difficulty in dealing with domestic crises. The consequence of default in the exercise of the imperial role might very well be a Second American Revolution for the “independence” of a hitherto “colonized” group.⁷

Liska's War and Order overtly defends, as the chilling oxymoron of its title implies, a relationship between the judicious prosecution of war and the maintenance of amenable social order. If America doesn't show the Viet Cong who's boss, Liska argues, America will never squash the Black Power movement for equality at home. Perhaps the “hostile force” Liska has fearfully in mind is the Black Panthers, but it's not difficult to see such an argument as a means both to justify the war and to maintain the then-current distribution of power at home, or to alter it only so much as not to disrupt its imbalance. Even the phrase “semi-orderly integration” implies the kind of glacial progress toward equal rights that contributed largely to the civil unrest Liska sought to forestall. For most Americans, this interrelationship between domestic and foreign policy remained well beyond the horizon of their attention, and equally beyond the periphery of their knowledge. Many of Komunyakaa's poems, to the contrary, address these larger ideological issues and their effects on black Americans, whom Liska sarcastically refers to above as an internally “colonized” group seeking “independence.” As a result, the social situation back in the States in the late Sixties insistently reappears in the text of these poems, and as one would expect, the issue often revolves around race. True enough, these poems refuse the racial and political anger of work by poets such as Amiri Baraka. Alvin Aubert, in fact, regards Komunyakaa as “cautious in dealing with his ethnicity” (Epoch 67). But these poems' resolute will is the source of their rhetorical power. Komunyakaa's speaker looks his readers in the eye and does not blink. When Vicente Gotera argues, in an otherwise cogent essay, that the fact “Komunyakaa is black hardly matters in many of the poems in Dien Cai Dau” (296), he diminishes a substantial number of poems that gain their ability to scald and instruct from the fact of Komunyakaa's being African-American (296). Those poems proffer a viewpoint attainable best, and perhaps only, from a source conversant with the politics of race and disempowerment in America.

In fact, Komunyakaa takes some of our easy assumptions about the war, oftentimes garnered from film and music, and turns them on ear. How frequently in films devoted to the war, for example, is music shown as a kind of unifying force among American soldiers? How many scenes out of a film such as Good Morning, Vietnam, for instance, use music as the common denominator linking our troops in a shared cultural heritage? While it's difficult to deny that music itself was a crucial part of the experience of the war, both in Vietnam and at home, notice how Komunyakaa's African-American experience illuminates incidents in the poem “Tu Do Street” where music is not the unifying element we might have thought it to be:

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. But tonight
I walk into a place where bar girls
fade like tropical birds. When
I order a beer, the mama-san
behind the counter acts as if she
can't understand, while her eyes
skirt each white face, as Hank Williams
calls from the psychedelic jukebox.

In this instance music, instead of unifying, “divides” as surely as those “lines” drawn in the dust by men behaving like bullies in the schoolyard. The lines are racial and political, separating one country from another, and likewise dividing one country into separate and unequal parts. The irony proves to be trenchant, especially for America, a country founded on the doctrine of equal rights to all, and especially poignant when that country has called its citizens, both black and white, to offer themselves in sacrifice at war. The speaker gives the betrayal of these political and moral dogma a Biblical context:

We have played Judas where
only machine gun fire brings us
together.

And lest the reader miss the careful choice of the pronoun “we” above, the speaker clarifies and broadens the culpability for such racism:

                    Down the street
blacks GIs hold to their turf also.

Racism is answered, not surprisingly, by racism, though it's unarguable that one of these groups holds more power to act upon this prejudice. Still, and this illustrates Komunyakaa's tenacious will and intellectual honesty, the poem does not stop here, at this ironic sense of brothers-in-arms at war amongst themselves. To his credit, Komunyakaa pushes the poem further into the darkened recesses of human relationships, discovering in the Saigon brothel neighborhood an even greater irony:

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

In this brothel scene, hardly the most promising site for such revelations, the poem's black speaker comes to an epiphanic understanding of “shared humanity” that, for the American combatants, runs deeper than their skin color, as Aubert has noted (African American Review 122). More importantly, the speaker recognizes a common humanity whose roots cross the superficial boundaries of nations, connecting those of black, white, and yellow skin. Surely the Vietnamese women these soldiers “run to hold,” as well as their brothers who fought the Americans, understand what it is to be human upon this green globe and what sentence awaits each of us in death's “underworld.” However, this revelation does not come without its share of ominous undertones, for the figurative “tunnels” that link these men and women in their humanity also have a literal reality in the deadly maze of tunnels the Viet Cong used to ferry supplies, to fight and quickly disappear, and into which many American soldiers ventured never to return (as “Tunnels,” the book's second poem, memorably describes). Such ironies did not escape the attention of the Viet Cong, who employed every tactic available to them to undermine the morale of the American troops. Vietnam's version of Tokyo Rose is the spritely “Hanoi Hannah,” who in a poem bearing her name strives to induce homesickness among the American troops by playing their music and reminding them of women left behind:

Ray Charles! His voice
calls from waist-high grass,
& we duck behind gray sandbags.
“Hello, Soul Brothers. Yeah,
Georgia's also on my mind.” …
“It's Saturday night in the States.
Guess what your woman's doing tonight.
I think I'll let Tina Turner
tell you, you homesick GIs.”

Hannah's tactics are predictable, as predictable as the American soldiers' reaction to them: they unleash “a white arc” of artillery fire in vain attempt to silence her. The poem might easily fall prey to cliché if it ended here, but Komunyakaa surprises his readers by presenting an account of these tactics that has, for the most part, gone unnoticed in other poetic descriptions of the war. His poems become politically charged, though always understated, as he offers a black American's perspective on psychological warfare strategies that accentuate racial division. Here the racial undercurrents of the war produce the unpleasant, dull shock of nine volt batteries held to the tongue, as Hannah, having used Ray Charles and Tina Turner to attract the black soldiers' attention, then spews forth her brutally cynical punch line while attempting to mimic black dialect:

“You know you're dead men,
don't you? You're dead
as King today in Memphis.” …
“Soul Brothers, what you dying for?”

The question, of course, preys upon African-American soldiers' ambiguous position in the war. It also calls to mind Muhammed Ali's curt retort when asked his reasons, other than religious, for not fighting in Vietnam: “No Viet Cong ever called me nigger.”

Komunyakaa seizes this issue and examines it via a wide variety of media, employing television, drama, and even painting as portals to the human psyche. What's most interesting about each of these examples is the location where these events take place—inside an individual soldier's, or ex-soldier's, mind. The paradoxical effect of this existential mode, rather surprisingly, is to interrogate the reader's own assumptions about the interplay of this war and racial politics, and its results are startling. One piece in particular, “One-legged Stool,” makes clear that the Viet Cong realized the potential value of America's own latent racism and used it with terrifying results. A rambling dramatic monologue set in prose and prefaced by stage directions, the poem reads like a one-man play invoking all of the racial politics and psychological warfare tactics the book alludes to elsewhere. Forced to squat all day on a one-legged stool and “partly hallucinating,” as the stage directions indicate, a black soldier bravely attempts to subvert his captors' tactics by standing up, literally and figuratively, for himself and America:

Don't you know I'll never cooperate? No, don't care what you whisper into the darkness of this cage like it came out of my own head, I won't believe a word. Lies, lies, lies. You're lying. Those white prisoners didn't say what you say they said. They ain't laughing. Ain't cooperating. They ain't putting me down, calling me names like you say. Lies. Lies. It ain't the way you say it is. I'm American. (Pause.) Doctor King, he ain't dead like you say. Lies. … You didn't see that. I'm still sitting on my stool.

The piece moves at a frenetic pace, as the speaker himself lurches from reality to fantasy, from the present to the past, from Vietnam to home—all of it punctuated by the periodic appearance of a shadowy-faced Viet Cong at a peephole in the hut's only door. Near the breaking point, reduced to eating “dung beetles” pinched from the floor, the man repeats his name, rank, and serial number as if they are a mantra, a way to pull back so far inside of the self as to become unassailable. Defiantly, the speaker refuses to give in to the enemy's psychological manipulation, and in the end he sees it as a kind of racism even worse than that he experienced in the American South:

                                                            Yeah, VC. I've been through
Georgia. Yeah, been through 'Bama too. Mississippi,
yeah. You know what? You eye me worse than those
rednecks.

This sense of the perilous nature of racial and national identity pervades the book. It appears in one form in “Communique,” where African-American soldiers quickly tire of the dominant culture's offering of Bob Hope's shopworn routines and the Gold Diggers' “[w]hite legs.” (They wait instead for “Aretha” Franklin, who never appears.) These black soldiers “don't wanna see no Miss America,” no doubt because in the Sixties she was sure to be white, and even reject “Lola” Falana because she “looks awful white” to them. Elsewhere, it serves as fulcrum in “Report from the Skull's Diorama,” through which the poem's black GIs, back from night patrol “with five dead,” confront both the reality of their loss and “red bordered / leaflets” printed with the reminder, “VC didn't kill / Dr. Martin Luther King.”

Balancing these expressions of ethnic isolation, several poems stitched throughout the collection insist that a shared cultural heritage does exist for the American soldier and that this heritage can bind rather than divide. A good example is “Eyeball Television,” in which a captured soldier, whose race is never an issue, conjures up images from American television's more or less universal popular culture, lurching from “Spike Jones” to “Marilyn Monroe” as a way to endure his fate:

He sits crouched in a hole
covered with slats of bamboo,
recalling hundreds of faces
from I Love Lucy, Dragnet,
I Spy, & The Ed Sullivan Show. …
When he can't stop laughing
at Roadrunner on Channel 6
the sharp pain goes away.

In the same fashion, these soldiers, once removed from the battlefield, are shown to share interests that cross lines of color, age, class. In “A Break from the Bush,” for instance, a mixed-race platoon of men with names like “Clem,” “Johnny,” and “Frenchie” relax as a group on R & R. The men play volleyball together, get “high on Buddha grass,” and jam to the great black guitarist Jimmie Hendrix's anthem to LSD, “Purple Haze.” Another poem, “Seeing in the Dark,” plays upon the service man's long-standing appreciation of “skin / flicks.” Regardless of race, a randy mob of infantry men “just back from the boonies” gathers together to watch “washed-out images / thrown against a bed sheet.” The image of the bed sheet provides a ghostly means to join two things that surely dominate these soldiers' thoughts: the poetic, figurative death found on the sex bed and the literal death had on the battlefield.

The core of this loose series and a key to its structure, as well as the clue to the existential mode of the entire book, lies in “Jungle Surrender,” a poem based on Don Cooper's painting of the same name. In the poem the speaker imagines himself in the place of the captured American soldier the painting portrays, and he wonders how he would have fared under such interrogation. Would he tell them of the ambush he sprung while “plugged into the Grateful Dead?” Would he suffer and break, only to return “almost whole?” In Cooper's painting, as within the human mind, the speaker recognizes:

                                                                                Love & hate
flesh out the real man, how he wrestles
himself through a hallucination of blues
& deep purples that set the day on fire.
He sleep walks a labyrinth of violet,
measuring footsteps from one tree to the next,
knowing somehow we're all connected.
What would I have said?
The real interrogater is a voice within.

Yeats once said that while rhetoric involves an argument with another person, true poetry requires an argument with—or perhaps, against—the self. Throughout the book, the poem's speaker has engaged in a lively debate with the self involving complex issues of morality and race and politics and basic humanity. In the process, the reader, because “we're all connected” (a line which echoes the epiphany of “Tu Do Street”), has necessarily been drawn into this dialogue between public and private history.

The book has at its core the quest for a personal and authentically meaningful sense of history that, while acknowledging the presence of “Historie,” is not burdened by it. Perhaps the book seeks a concrete instance of Heidegger's “Geschichte” that enables an African-American poet to deal with his past, accept the present, and forge ahead into the possibilities of the future opening before him. It's arguable that such a sense of history, once achieved, is actually ahistorical, bound more to an immediate experience of time than that provided by objective history. One final poem in Dien Cai Dau best delineates the dialogic process in Komunyakaa's work in which “Historie” and “Geschichte” come to be juxtaposed. As such, the poem serves as a good illustration of the Russian theorist M. M. Bakhtin's contention that an individual can indeed hold a “dialogic relationship” with his/her own words:

… dialogic relationships are also possible toward one's own utterance as a whole, toward its separate parts and toward an individual word within it, if we somehow detach ourselves from them, speak with an inner reservation, if we observe a certain distance from them, as if limiting our own authorship or dividing it in two.

(184)

In “Facing It” the speaker appears to be very much in dialogue with himself, intensely divided “in two.” The speaker is torn between the dialectics of power and powerlessness, racial difference and human universality. Given the context of the book, its melding of personal and collective history, it's difficult to see the speaker as anyone but Komunyakaa himself. Here, the science of recorded history confronts the poet's inward experience of “what happens,” as the opening lines reveal:

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.

The terms of Komunyakaa's dialectic are many and obvious: stone vs. flesh, night vs. morning, release from memory's cold cell vs. imprisonment inside the Memorial which represents it. The most compelling expression of this dialogue, of course, is figured in the racial dialectic of the speaker's “black face,” a “profile of night,” fading and reappearing in the recurrent white “light” of “morning.” It is a version of the argument which animates the book as a whole, extending beyond the mere question of race to larger and more fundamental questions of basic humanity that seek to know what we share, why, and to what end? Which ask what it means to be human and therefore intellectually capable of carrying forward a past, and yet willing to seize one's future? The poem demonstrates what the speaker of “Jungle Surrender” has already come to know, namely that the “real interrogator” is always the “voice within.” Komunyakaa seems to understand, as does Heidegger, that our past is never truly gone until our future is complete, until the future has exhausted its endless possibilities to alter and realign the way we view the past which has led us to this present moment. That past, thus, must stay with him, ineluctably present. As such, the book represents the poet's way of coming to terms with it, “a way of dealing with” its horrific images.

Curiously enough, “Facing It,” the final poem in the collection, was the first poem written for this book, and it became the “standard” by which he judged those that followed (Houghtaling). It's not difficult to see why. The poem enacts the kind of transformations sought throughout the book and then coldly denies them, as when Komunyakaa touches the “name of Andrew Johnson,” hoping to conjure up a vision of the man's face, his life, but instead sees only “the booby trap's white flash” of death. And later, when the names of the dead “shimmer on a woman's blouse,” releasing them from the role of dead inscribed there, this release is short-lived, for “when she walks away / the names stay on the wall.”

Near the poem's close, this same disenchanting pattern of promise and disappointment appears again:

A white vet's image floats
closer to me, then his pale eyes
look through mine. I'm a window.

These lines promise the kind of mingling and transformation that the speaker has fervently sought through the book's interior dialogues. When the white vet comes “closer,” his eyes momentarily “look through” those of the black speaker, unifying their presence and value. This, an uncautious reader might conclude, is just the point of the book, its ultimate achievement. Note, though, how Komunyakaa problematizes this scene of racial unity by following it immediately with the realization, “I'm a window.” Two powerfully conflicting interpretations, held in juxtapose, result: that the white vet has indeed learned to see things empathetically “through” the black speaker's eyes, or more discomfitingly, that the white vet simply “looks through” the black speaker as if he were merely a window, an inhuman object hardly worth noticing.

If the poem were to end here, mired in ambivalence, the quest would barely seem worth the trouble, either for poet or reader. The speaker's dialogue with himself, with his reader, and with “Historie” is splendidly realized in the image of the window. He looks silently backward and forward in time, both toward his reader and away. He is at once visible and invisible, colorless as glass, neither black nor white. He serves as both sign and signified of the essential dialogic structure of the book, a window to history nailed in place, immovable and unmoved, both outside and inside of its margins—all of which, of course, refuses resolution in its ambiguity, in its very muteness.

However, the poem's (and the book's) closing image reverses the usual pattern and frees the speaker from his static, nearly death-like trance:

                                        In the black mirror
a woman is trying to erase names:
No, she's brushing a boy's hair.

The woman's thoughtful, nurturing, thoroughly quotidian act of love closes the book on perhaps the most redemptive note imaginable for such a text. Her gesture focuses the book's ending on the future that young boy embodies, a future outside of the glass-like surface of the Memorial and ahead of the faceless window the speaker has imagined himself to be. What's more, the question of whether this mother and son are black or white matters not at all. The touch of her hands is a kind of blessing, a simple but profound sacramental act enriching the lives of mother, son, and the poet who observes them. Komunyakaa's speaker comes to understand the existentialist Heidegger's concept of Dasein, the “givenness” of human existence from which we cannot stand apart and of which the fabric of our lives is spun. His speaker discovers human existence is always founded on being-in-the-world, bound up with others in the beautiful and frightening relations that constitute our very lives. Dasein places the individual out in the world, connects his/her being to others' being. In such a view there is no retreat, no escape into the separate realms of “subject” and “object,” for these categories overlap and contain each other. Thus immutably bound up with others and the material world through which he moves, Komunyakaa closes his dialogue between private and public history. In the end the recognition that issues from this dialogue and enables him to move resolutely forward, neither erasing the “names” of the past nor failing to seize his future, proves to be fittingly “authentic” and revivifying.

Notes

1. Terry provocatively suggests that, much like the contribution of black soldiers in WW II, African-American soldiers' role in Vietnam will be diminished to the point of invisibility by the year 2000. See Reading the Wind: The Literature of the Vietnam War, an interpretive critique by Timothy J. Lomperis, with bibliographic commentary by John Clark Pratt (Durham: Duke University Press, 1987).

2. These books represent the broad range of soldier-poets' interpretations of their experiences in Vietnam, at least they represent my favorites. Other texts, bearing to some extent on Vietnam and written by these same authors, are listed among the Works Cited. For a helpful appraisal of these and other collections by soldier-poets, as well as a measured reading of Hearts and Minds, see W. D. Ehrhart, “Soldier-Poets of the Vietnam War,” in America Rediscovered: Critical Essays on Literature and Film of the Vietnam War, eds. Owen W. Gilman, Jr. and Lorrie Smith (New York: Garland, 1990), pp. 313-331.

3. The distinction is crucial to Heidegger's discussions and it appears, in various forms, throughout the text. As usual with Heidegger, he makes much of small distinctions in word choice and etymology, and he carries through the distinction with the corresponding adjectives “historich” and “geschichtlich.” “Historie” seems to refer to what Heidegger considers a “science of history.” See pages 375, 378, in Heidegger's pagination. For discussion of “Geschichte,” the kind of history that “happens” and is authentically felt, see especially Sections 6 and 76 of Being and Time.

4. Heidegger, “The Poet as Thinker,” in Poetry, Language, Thought, trans. and intro. Albert Hofstadter (New York: Harper & Row, 1971), p. 10. The piece, itself a poetic rumination on the why and how and what of a poet's thinking, elsewhere describes the process of this interior dialogue: “We never come to thoughts. They come / to us. // That is the proper hour of discourse” (6).

5. Winning Hearts and Minds: War Poems by Vietnam Veterans, edited by Larry Rottmann, Jan Barry, and Basil Paquet, drew a fair amount of attention in the United States. Although the work was honest and often poignant, critics have noted its lack of aesthetic sophistication (a consideration surely not paramount for most of the poets whose work was gathered there). Negative critical views of Hearts and Minds are offered, for example, by John Felsteiner in “American Poetry and the War in Vietnam,” Stand, 19.2 (1978): 4-11, and Jeffrey Walsh, American War Literature 1914 to Vietnam. Walsh's somewhat brutal judgment is fairly summarized by these remarks: “… the war is, in general, presented in a rather repetitive, stereotyped, ahistorical and conventionally ‘realistic’ way. … What clearly is lacking is an available artistic mode of a sustained kind, an extended formal utterance or discourse in which the war's distinctive technical nature as well as its moral nature can be realised” (204).

6. I have in mind here the slew of protest poetry published during the war by a plethora of well-known poets. Their goal, admirable in most views, was to alert the American public to the senselessness of the war and to hasten its end. A partial list would surely include poets such as Robert Bly, James Wright, Denise Levertov, Robert Duncan, Allen Ginsburg, Galway Kinnell, William Stafford, and Marge Piercy. Although not meant to be inclusive, the list gives indication of the widespread vitality of a movement which came to be known as “Poets and Writers against the Vietnam War.”

7. Liska, p. 87. Liska's War and Order, according to its foreword by Robert E. Osgood, then Director of the Washington Center of Foreign Policy Research, “elaborates the imperial conception, refines the scope and limits of its practical application, and relates it more specifically to America's involvement in the Vietnamese war” (vii). Liska's work appeared as Number 11 in the Studies in International Affairs series published by Johns Hopkins University Press. For a view opposing Liska's, see Number 10 in the same series, Robert W. Tucker, Nation or Empire? The Debate over American Foreign Policy, which Mr. Osgood characterizes, quite correctly, as reaching “fundamentally different conclusions” from those reached in Liska's War and Order (vii).

Works Cited

Aubert, Alvin. “Yusef Komunyakaa: The Unified Vision, Canonization and Humanity.” African American Review 27, No. 1 (Spring 1993): 119-123.

———. “Rare Instances of Reconciliation.” Epoch 38 (Spring 1989): 67-72.

Bakhtin, M. M. Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics. Ed. and trans. Caryl Emerson. Intro. Wayne C. Booth. Theory and History of Literature, Volume 8. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984.

Balaban, John. After Our War. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1972.

———. Blue Mountain. Greensboro, NC: Unicorn Press, 1982.

———. Ca Dao Viet Nam. Greensboro, NC: Unicorn Press, 1980.

———. Vietnamese Folk Poetry. Greensboro, NC: Unicorn Press, 1974.

Berry, D. C. saigon cemetery. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1972.

Casey, Michael. Obscenities. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1972.

Ehrhart, W. D. “Soldier-Poets of the Vietnam War.” In America Rediscovered: Critical Essays on Literature and Film of the Vietnam War. Eds. Owen W. Gilman, Jr. and Lorrie Smith. New York: Garland, 1990: 313-331.

Gotera, Vicente F. “‘Depending on the Light’”: Yusef Komunyakaa's Dien Cai Dau.” America Rediscovered: Critical Essays on Literature and Film of the Vietnam War. Eds. Owen W. Gilman, Jr. and Lorrie Smith. New York: Garland, 1990: 282-300.

Heidegger, Martin. Being and Time. Trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson. New York: Harper & Row, 1962.

———. Poetry, Language, Thought. Trans. and Intro. Albert Hofstadter. New York: Harper & Row, 1971.

Houghtaling, David. Radio interview with Yusef Komunyakaa. WCBU, Peoria, IL: 24 February 1989.

Komunyakaa, Yusef. Dien Cai Dau. Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 1988.

Liska, George. War and Order: Reflections on Vietnam and History. Studies in International Affairs Number 11. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1968.

Mersmann, James F. Out of the Vietnam Vortex: A Study of Poets and Poetry against the War. Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas, 1974.

Rottmann, Larry, Jan Barry, and Basil T. Paquet. Winning Hearts and Minds: War Poems by Vietnam Veterans. Brooklyn: 1st Casualty Press, 1972.

Walsh, Jeffrey. American War Literature: 1914 to Vietnam. New York: St. Martin's, 1982.

Weigl, Bruce. A Romance. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1979.

———. The Monkey Wars. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1985.

———. Song of Napalm. Boston: Atlantic Press, 1988.