Bar-bellied Pitta with frangipanis and Madagascar periwinkle. Stephanie Sipp, illustrator
By Carol Howard
In his early twenties, the African American poet Yusef Komunyakaa enlisted in the army and was deployed to Vietnam. During his tour of duty in 1969 and 1970, he served as an embedded soldier-journalist, writing for a US military newspaper. After returning home with a Bronze Star, he attended college on the GI Bill and soon began publishing the books of poetry that would ultimately earn him a Pulitzer Prize. His early volumes, from the 1970s, reflect his love for jazz and the blues and draw upon his experiences growing up in Louisiana. For more than a decade, though, he avoided writing about the war.
The poems that finally emerged from Komunyakaa’s wartime experiences are intimate, visceral and anchored in the natural landscape of Vietnam. Of his poetry in general, Komunyakaa has said, “I…sort of lose myself in nature.” Of his war poems specifically, he has noted that he tries to capture within them not only the beauty but also the harshness found in nature: “Nature itself is violent, so it’s not that we celebrate that, but that we respect it.”
Komunyakaa’s book Dien Cai Dau—Vietnamese for “crazy head,” a phrase that locals applied to American soldiers—is among the finest volumes of modern American war poetry. Readers might nonetheless feel as though they are exploring a volume of nature poetry. The techniques of illustrating difficult wartime scenes through exquisite references to nature are as old as Homer’s epic poem the Iliad. Komunyakaa himself acknowledges a debt to Walt Whitman, whose poetic reflections on the Civil War are similarly steeped in his natural surroundings. Nature imagery in war poetry commands one’s attention and makes the unfamiliar realities of war more comprehensible to civilian readers.
Komunyakaa also vividly conveys how the military conflict to which he bears witness occurred in rain forests and grasslands. The volume’s opening poem, “Camouflaging the Chimera,” describes American soldiers hidden amid bamboo groves, their uniforms and weapons strategically covered with mud and branches. The men crouch with such stillness and silence that forest creatures both real and imagined begin to approach them as they wait to ambush the enemy. It is as though, in using the tactics of warfare, the men themselves have become part of the surrounding jungle.
Throughout the volume, Komunyakaa notes the incongruity of having been an African American soldier abroad while the Civil Rights movement continued at home. The famous closing poem, “Facing It,” offers an unsettling closure to this duality through an African American vet’s experience at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, DC. The poem’s title alludes to the courage it takes for the vet to approach a monument that displays the names of all those who did not survive the war. But the poem’s first lines serve as a closing bookend to the camouflage scene of the opening poem: “My black face fades, / hiding inside the black granite,” says the speaker. Through an optical illusion, the speaker is “inside” the memorial to the men he left behind.
Through reading the harrowing poems of Dien Cai Dau, one can see why many veterans of the conflict in Vietnam have avoided describing their experiences. For those who choose to do so, the nightmarish features of battle are reawakened, along with an awareness of the moral ambiguity of the war. Although Komunyakaa deferred revisiting and writing about his own wartime memories for many years, it was surely an act of bravery when he began to do so.
Carol Howard is dean of academics at Warren Wilson College. The collection Dien Cai Dau (1988) is included in Komunyakaa’s Pleasure Dome: New and Collected Poems (2001).
