SOURCE: Fabre, Michel. “On Yusef Komunyakaa.” Southern Quarterly 34, no. 2 (winter 1996): 5-8.

[In the following essay, originally broadcast in fall of 1994, Fabre provides a brief overview of central themes and recurring motifs in Komunyakaa's poetry. Fabre praises Komunyakaa for his depth and originality of poetic voice, the broad scope of his poetry, and his ornate, sophisticated style.]

The following is the text of Michel Fabre's introduction of southern poet Yusef Komunyakaa to a French television audience in the fall of 1994 during a conference on southern literature celebrating the establishment of the Faulkner Foundation at the Université de Haute Bretagne in Rennes. Professor Fabre graciously consented to translate his remarks and to allow us to introduce Mr. Komunyakaa and his work to Southern Quarterly readers.—Ed.

I feel greatly honored to have been asked to introduce Yusef Komunyakaa. Preparing this talk was also for me a splendid introduction to his work since I did not know the range of his achievements, which have already won him the Pulitzer Prize. I have only become familiar with his work during the last couple of months. This may be an asset. Today I can speak of the poet—and speak to him—with the enthusiasm of a recent initiate.

You have read, on the program of this symposium, that he has published eight volumes from 1979 to date. Among the first are Dedications and Other Darkhorses, Copacetic, Lost in the Bonewheel Factory and I Apologize for the Eyes in My Head. Then Toys in a Field and Dien Cau Dai which comment upon the war in Vietnam. Magic City celebrates Bogalusa, Louisiana, where he spent his childhood, and February in Sydney was inspired by his stay in Australia. His most recent book, Neon Vernacular, is a compendium of his favorite poems in previous collections plus a number of recent pieces. Although I do not believe it is necessary for me to enumerate all the literary prizes and distinctions he has won, I want to cite the aforementioned titles because they are evidence of the diverse sources of his inspiration. He is at present at work on a book called Thieves of Paradise.

In your writings, Yusef Komunyakaa, critics have mostly focused on two major themes, and rightly so: your experiences as a war correspondent in Vietnam and your passion for jazz. Concerning Vietnam, one mostly thinks, when reading your lines, of the experience of soldiers caught in an absurd war, of your images of horrible bloodshed, of meaningless moments from whose fragments you restore a kind of redemptive meaning. In Toys in a Field and Dien Cau Dai, your poems speak of comrades lost in action, ambushes, “boat people,” water buffalo and monsoons, seasons in the jungle and official reports, though primarily they are meditations about the precariousness of men's lives performing a daily routine of violence. It was most caught up, for instance, in your vision of a dead soldier still holding a photograph of a woman in his hand and your evocation of a Vietnamese girl raped by the GIs, who suddenly disappears before their trial. You exclaim, “I danced with death,” or you proffer thanks to a tree whose trunk stood between you and a sniper's bullet. You even celebrate (in “Hanoi Hannah”) the Vietcong radio propagandist who attempted to break the spirit of the GI's by singing “Georgia on My Mind.” These express a kind of ironic beauty—as in yet another frame of reference—the holocaust of a fragile Vietnamese girl burning like a torch, “like a field of poppies” under napalm.

One must not limit you to this Vietnam ghetto, however. Of course not. As contrast there are your fine means of music and jazz. One finds in your poetry techniques which at time recall Langston Hughes, who alluded to jazz and the blues and sometimes borrowed their rhythms. You do not resort to the mimetic, however. And your frame of reference is not Louis Armstrong, but such later figures as Charlie Parker, Thelonious Monk and Dexter Gordon—another generation. I think of “April in Paris”:

Dexter Gordon's tenor sax
Plays “April in Paris”
inside my head all the way back
on the bus from Double Bay.
Round Midnight, the 50's,
cool cobblestone streets
resound footsteps of bebop
musicians with whiskey-laced voices
from a boundless dream in French …

You write in “Woman, I Got the Blues,” “… we slow drag to little Willie John, / we bebop to Bird LPs.” Parker, Monk, Charlie Mingus—these are your heroes. One need only listen to your “Elegy for Thelonious” or to “Copacetic Mingus” to be persuaded of this. (“Copacetic” won't fail to intrigue the non-initiate. One must look elsewhere in your work, at “Untitled Blues,” to be convinced that the term is not really translatable.)

But you refuse to limit jazz to a single period, to a single place, to a single meaning. Thus one encounters splendid allusions to Buddy Bolden (you are a true Louisianian!) in a composite setting:

Sure I could say
Everything's copacetic,
listen to a Buddy Bolden cornet
cry from one of those coffin-
shaped houses called
shotgun. We could
meet in Storyville
famous for quadroons,
with drunks discussing God
around a honky-tonk piano …

Here, one might reflect, is good old New Orleans style. Such is also the case for “Blues Chant Hoodoo Revival” though not for “Gerry's jazz,”

Cocky and skillful, you go
into a groove and dance the true pivot
playing for jitterbug
contests at Kattomba and the Trocadero
Going deeper into each song,
you rattle keys like Houdini locked in a trunk,
.....Bending within a black echo
“The difference
between the difference
is the difference” you holler.
to a full moon hanging over
the steel mills of Woolongong.

African American music has become for you the language of the Antipodes, a universal language ranging from Storyville to Sydney.

I admire, in April in Sydney, the manner in which you speak with pride about the Aborigines, though you make no attempt to make them wholly admirable. (In sum, you speak of them just as you'd wish people would speak of African Americans.) Yet irony is on their side when, in “Protection of Moveable Cultural Heritage,” the skulls of two heroes of aboriginal resistance kept in a glass case in a London museum call forth a kind of Western barbarism which leads you to think straight to Klaus Barbie.

Desert dreamer, telepathic
sleepwalker over shifting sand
your grandfather's on the last postcard
I airmailed to my mother
Though he sees truer than you
this grog-scented night,
you remain in the skull-white landscape
like a figure burned into volcanic rock.

Through all such travels, itineraries and avatars, your voice becomes difficult to define. It keeps changing, it seems to me. Your early volumes, up to Copacetic reveal a sort of surrealistic liking for hermetism, stemming from the juxtaposition of unexpected sensations and images, the abundance of intertextual allusions, such as references to Paris and Sartre, or the occasional use of French Creole. From the blues to surrealism, you intimate that there is indeed only one short step. Thus it is not by chance that you claim modernistic and traditional cultural roots by acknowledging in “Letter to Bob Kaufman” (the great black and beat “abomunist” poet): “I read Golden Sardine and dance the calinda / to come to myself.”

It is not due to chance, either, that you should celebrate the French poet François Villon and the blues singer Leadbelly as brothers in the same pantheon:

Two bad actors
canonized by ballads
flowering into dusk
crowned with hoarfrost

Your poetry, like that of Pound, makes much use of intertextuality. And yet (and this “yet” is all important, in my opinion) one finds in your verse a deep sense of familial and cultural rootedness, especially in your poems of childhood, in which happy moments spent with your father are repeatedly evoked, in your attraction to black popular beliefs and the occult (with hoodoo and those “goat-footed heretics crying for John the Conquerer root” in “Faith Healer”). Also in the returning presence of Vallejo, in the memories of Robert Lee, who was “more girl than boy” and who inspires a splendid piece.

I insist, indeed, upon this aspect—which is evident well before and beyond the poems in Magic City: there is no doubt that you are a Louisianian in sensibility, culture and openmindedness. You are at one with the Louisiana of Ernest Gaines and Kate Chopin, of Tom Dent and Brenda Maria Osbey. I think of those poems of yours which deal with the thorn merchant, his wife and his mistress. Or of your “Landscape for the Disappeared” which begins thusly:

Lo & behold. Yes, peat bogs
in Louisiana. The dead
stumble home like swamp fog
our lost uncles & granddaddies
come back to us almost healed …

The depth and originality of your poetic voice stem from all these characteristics. In brief, your prodigious scope. At times it is very sophisticated, nearly ornate. I derive deep aesthetic enjoyment from the seven improvisations in “The Beast and Burden,” which recall the allusive and learned variations in Melvin B. Tolson's Harlem Gallery. Like Tolson, you provide portraits—the Vicious, the Esoteric, the Sanctimonious, the Vindictive—but, on top of these, you provide a final Communion after the Exorcism. I also enjoy, and even more so because it touches my heart rather than my mind, your brotherly voice which, through the reverberations and echoes of discrete images seems to speak for each of us. Thus, in “Newport Beach 1979,” I can identify with your remark:

To them I'm just a crazy nigger
out watching the ocean
drag in silvery nets of sunfish …

Or else I appropriate the haiku-like opening in “Black String of Days”:

Tonight I feel the stars are out
to use me for target practice

Or I share the enjoyment of moving halfway between religion and bullfighting:

Veronica passes her cape between breath
and death, rehearsing
the body's old rhyme.

Finally I listen gravely to your variations on “Safe Subjects”:

How can love heal
the mouth shut that way?
.....Say something about pomegranates.
Say something about real love
Yes, true love, more than
parted lips, than parted legs
in sorrow's darkroom of potash
and blues …
Let the brain stumble from its hiding place …

With such words you call our souls to bright daylight, you make them stumble forth from their hiding place into the open, you become the midwife of our more profound humanity. For all of these, here and now, I ask you to accept our grateful thanks.