Memorializing Through Poetry

Yusef Komunyakaa (1941-)

I am both captivated and at times confounded by Yusef Komunyakaa’s poem “Facing It.” For the most part, I am able to understand and feel myself sink into the poem and can wrap myself within its stunning and stilling imagery; however, towards the end on the poem, things became a little foggy and unclear for me, but still in an intriguing way.

The opening sentence is perfection and sets the scene for the rest of the poem: “My black face fades, / hiding inside the black granite.” Black fading into black has so many interpretations, the obvious telling us that the poet is both a Vietnam veteran and a black man, and while this may seem, and is, an obtuse observation it sets the reader up to consider the differences, difficulties, and discrimination experienced by racially marginalized groups during the Vietnam war. One brief aside that may not have any intentional meaning to this poem this that the song “Paint it Black” by The Rolling Stones was seen by many to be almost an elegy to the conflict.

The next five lines and part of the sixth remind takes the reader into the personal, human side of this poem and acts as a counterpoint to the slightly depersonalization of a face fading into stone. The theme and imagery remain the same, a man is losing himself within the imposing memorial while telling himself that he will not cry when faced with the thousands of names etched in the stone:

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

The synonymous stone and flesh imagery, coupled with the predatory, entrapping gaze of the reflection demonstrates the eternal and haunting effect the war will have on both the survivors and the families of those who never came home. The final portion of that last line is a bit of clever craftsmanship; as the poem says “I turn” the speaker is turning in the next lines, his reflections escaping the monument, “this way—the stone lets me go,” only to be trapped again within the memorial “depending on the light / to make a difference.”

            Komunyakaa is both exceedingly precise in the lines “I go down the 58,022 names, / half-expecting to find / my own in letters like smoke,” and strategically inaccurate. Upon research, names are still being added to the memorial to this date and there are still over 1500 Americans still unaccounted for. Also, Komunyakaa expecting to see his own name on the wall is a poignant reminder that while many came home in body they have been irrevocably changed and the person they were before the war never returned.

            The two lines “I touch the name Andrew Johnson; / I see the booby trap’s white flash” again hold a multitude of nuances. Following the information from the Poetry Foundation Andrew Johnson was a soldier born in Komunyakaa’s hometown of Bogalusa, Louisiana, and was also the name of the 17^th President. Poetry Foundation notes how President Johnson denied freed enslaved people equal rights during Reconstruction and that these laws, known as The Black Codes, were not rectified until 1964 during the Vietnam War. This gives “the booby trap’s white flash” another insidious meaning as a metaphor for the devastating lies and hidden traps white men laid in place during Reconstruction.

            The second half of the poem begins to lose clarity and while that can be frustrating when reading a piece of poetry, I find it meaningful and impacting in this instance.

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.

These lines bring the reader back to the metaphorically rich remembrance that the monument is highly reflective; those names can reach out and whisper against a passing woman’s blouse but they can never leave, they can only step out of the wall while a person remains before them. In the same thread a flying bird (a classic metaphor for freedom) flits across the stone, briefly cutting the reflections before dashing off with the liberty that once drafted the young men who were sent to Vietnam or who hid from the draft did not experience. The brief and slightly discordant line “The sky. A plane in the sky” may mean different things to different readers, to me, it speaks to how Vietnam was also known as the “Helicopter War” and how Medevac helicopters saved the lives of approximately 390,000 Americans.

            The final few lines of a white veteran and a woman are somewhat muddled, I do find the line of how the vet’s eyes “look through mine” and how the speaker thinks “I’m a window,” wraps the poem back around to where it began where Komunyakaa’s black reflection fades into the black stone and the stories of black service members have also faded from the narrative of the Vietnam War. While the white man’s reflection seems to erase Komunyakaa’s reflection the final two lines: “a woman’s trying to erase names: / No, she’s brushing a boy’s hair” remind us all that this monument, as painful as it is to see, is a tangible remembrance to those who lost their lives, and that woman is not erasing the past, she is stroking the hair of a son, brother, loved one who never came home.