48-52. The speaker’s dilemma is knowing with which self to side—knowing, literally, to whom he should turn. 1999 "Facing It" by Yusef Komunyaa is a poem about Vietnam. Through using language to represent our past (both to ourselves and to others), we are building a coherent identity—a sense of who we are in relation to who we’ve been. The speaker is being literal and metaphoric when he says that he is both stone and flesh, as he is referring to both his body and its double as reflected in the granite. whether the sacrifices are just, but rather they are fact. Poetry for Students. The “it” is also richly ambiguous. When the speaker spots a passing bird, it seems confusingly out of place, as if it can't be real anymore. It was years before I could visit the Wall. Especially, when these events are directly related to person, the memory reproduces every second of what happened. Unfortunately, humanity fully cognized the term of "war". By “half-expecting” to find his own name among those listed, the speaker underscores just how alienated from himself he feels—how dead he feels. 1972: The United States conducts the most intensive air attack in military history against the Vietcong. The author uses lines such as “I said I wouldn’t, dammit: No tears.” (Komunyakaa, 1947, line 3-4) and “I’m stone. He expresses his strong emotions towards the Vietnam War because he was a veteran. "Facing It" shows some of that deep personal pain through the complex jumble of emotions of one man visiting the Vietnam Veterans Memorial. 1968: By this date President Johnson has ordered approximately half a million troops to Vietnam. Though opposed to the United States’ participation in the war, Komunyakaa made the best of his circumstances. When we try to make an end to our visit, we are pulled back into the war’s insane middle. Told in the first person, Komunyakaa’s poem draws on the physical properties of the memorial sculpture itself to create a symbolic setting. Does Jerry Seinfeld have Parkinson's disease? Though he pledges to himself to be hard as stone, the speaker is overcome by grief as he looks at the more than 58,000 names of soldiers who died in the war or are missing in action. “Facing It” refers quite literally to the speaker looking at his face. The poem “Facing it” by Yusef Komunyakaa has a tone that will haunt a reader well after they are done reading it. Other thoughts are more complex. Like many of Komunyakaa’s poems, “Facing It” concludes with a surprising turn. Source: Sharon Kraus, in an essay for Poetry for Students, Gale, 1999. Its polished black granite reflects its surroundings—visitors, grass, trees, water, clouds, airplanes taking off overhead, and both the Washington and Lincoln memorials.
Americans were both angry and guilty, and many remained confused as to how to treat veterans. When he touches a name, he relives a moment of witnessing someone's death. However, “facing” something also means to confront it with awareness; and the word “facing” is, of course, a verb form of the noun “face,” which refers to that part of ourselves most visible to others and what we visualize when we think of someone. The emphasis on the word black suggests that a white-faced veteran would have a different experience, one that likely might not be so intrinsically linked with the idea of disappearing or going unseen. search. STYLE “Facing It” is the last piece in Dien Cai Dau, a collection of poems mostly about Vietnam. Instead, the speaker recognizes that the white vet may have been irremediably damaged: “He’s lost his right arm / inside the stone,” an image of the war’s capacity to maim, physically or spiritually. African American soldiers like Johnson fought and died for their country while facing racial discrimination.
Perhaps he doesn't see the speaker as he himself is so lost in the experience of the memorial.
Yet that very self that he desires becomes represented in his reflection in the black granite as a “bird of prey,” turning what he wants against himself. 1968: The Vietcong launch their Tet Offensive, a coordinated attack targeting every major South-Vietnamese city. CRITICISM Source: Chris Semansky, in an essay for Poetry for Students, Gale, 1999. Encyclopedia.com gives you the ability to cite reference entries and articles according to common styles from the Modern Language Association (MLA), The Chicago Manual of Style, and the American Psychological Association (APA). After taking an master’s degree in creative writing from Colorado State University and then an master’s of fine arts from the University of California at Irvine, Komunyakaa began his teaching career at the University of New Orleans, where he met and then married Mandy Sayer, an Australian fiction writer.
Moore, Lenard D., “Book Reviews: Arts & Humanities,” Library Journal,, Vol. Facing the Vietnam War Memorial Read More. The poem takes place at a monument inscribed with the names of the members of the American military who died in the Vietnam War. That’s pretty much how I remember the war—imagery that we sort of internalized, that was informed by the whole vibrations of the body.”. Significantly, the speaker initially misperceives this image to be of a woman “trying to erase names”—a gesture of grieving beyond rationality. We see through the speaker’s eyes that the black surface is so glossy that it functions as a smoke-colored mirror. Poets.org. The poem looks elsewhere, with that knowledge, and offers us a final, generous image, of compassion and nurture. He is pulled into the wall—“I’m stone”—but in the following instant disengages himself from it, reassured that “I’m flesh.” The poet’s identity becomes uncertain in the presence of the wall. Whenever I witness this scene, I can’t help asking myself, “just what kind of legacy is this reification of a purely human construction?”. The poem takes place at a monument inscribed with the names of the members of the American military who died in the Vietnam War. Born in 1947 in Bouglasa, Louisiana, he witnessed firsthand the racial segregation and discrimination of the time. The stone that the speaker wants to be metaphorically (e.g., hardened against memories of the past) when realized literally (e.g., in his reflection in the granite) becomes an enemy whose job it is to destroy the very self who desired it into existence. "Facing it" by Yusef Komunyakaa deals with the themes of memory, war and survival. After he replays the ambush for the final time, ending it with an offcamera soldier, desperately trying to stay alive without squares and rectangles, screaming “Which way?” he displays the kind of graphic missing from Maya Lin’s memorial: “This work is dedicated to the men of the 2nd Platoon Company A 1st Amtrac Battalion and the North Vietnamese soldiers who died on January 20, 1969 along the Cua Viet River.” In a simple yet powerful gesture, Reeves takes the first step in carrying out what Borton called for this nation to do in her editorial: “It seemed to me that stories behind the names etched into that granite must someday press through the earth to Vietnam itself.
“She’s brushing a boy’s hair” points to the next generation, with a hopefulness that the boy will be cared for, rather than damaged. Throughout the poem, the speaker attempts to ward off the overwhelming emotions associated with visiting the memorial. That he represents the vet as seeing through his eyes suggests that the speaker sees himself as transparent, both literally (in his own reflection) and metaphorically (what he feels and what the two of them share is obvious in his expression and eyes). Andrew Johnson also happened to be the name of the 17th American president, who is remembered for vetoing a bill to give freed slaves equal rights in the years after America's Civil War. On the other hand, it also seems symptomatic of the perceptions many Americans hold of the Vietnam War, whether in the 1960s or the 1990s: when we have the name of something, we somehow also possess the thing named. The jolt of seeing one’s own face, and then seeing it disappear, has the effect of locating the speaker in his identity as a black man and as a mortal being, and it simultaneously remarks how impossible it would be for a person to lose those identities. If you are 13 years old when were you born?
8, No. In fact, Komunyakaa has said that it was not until after he had returned from the war and written “Instructions for Building Straw Huts”—another Vietnam poem—that he felt sure of his poetic calling. . In "Facing It" Yusef Komunyakaa presents sensory details, thoughts, and impressions without judgment or contextualizing information.
Therefore, it’s best to use Encyclopedia.com citations as a starting point before checking the style against your school or publication’s requirements and the most-recent information available at these sites: http://www.chicagomanualofstyle.org/tools_citationguide.html. Komunyakaa partly attributes this sudden explosion of memory to the almost-tropical heat that day that reminded him of Vietnam. First, its very location seems “bracketed” by the landscape.
Alternatively, has the vet even registered the speaker’s existence? It also helps prepare the poet to illustrate the importance of the human imagination and to testify that art’s value exceeds its public serviceability. Komunyakaa reco… When the speaker says that he is “inside” the memorial, he means his reflection. 9 Oct. 2020.
Most important, though, is that the speaker perceives and misperceives that series of images. 217-23.
In both cases and throughout the poem, the speaker’s perceptions move between the past and the present, the desired and the real, from what he remembers to what is actually there in front of him. Ultimately, the poet’s ability to translate the terror of his wartime experiences into an aesthetic object speaks to the potentially therapeutic function of poetry, a role that critics often scorn. In her article “A Poet Who Danced with Death,” Susan Baxter argued that the poems in Dien Cai Dau, “more than editorials, movies, or documentaries, make us understand the searing, personal pain that lies beneath the rage that came with the Vietnam War. The red bird’s wings (flying by) are like a brushstroke. The kind of metaphoric imagery that Komunyakaa uses is often described as surrealist.
Encyclopedia.com. The sight of a woman brushing a boy's hair seems like something else, something far more troubling: erasing the names of soldiers from the wall to change (erase) the past. Wherever he turns, he is met with the brute fact of his brutal memories. Perhaps only then, when we reach through with our own wall of sorrow to theirs, can we all be healed.”. Komunyakaa recounts the story of his grandfather’s trip to America in his poem “Mismatched Shoes.” Growing up as a black man in the American South in the 1950s meant that you learned about despair and hope in a very particular way, as segregation and racism formed the background of daily life. In his poem, “Facing It,” Yusef Komunyakaa tells his experience with war and how it has affected him. The final image of a mother brushing a child's hair could be read as a jarring disconnect from the speaker's thoughts of death, or perhaps as an affirmation of life.
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