Facing It (Critical Overview)

Critical Overview

“Facing It” is included in Komunyakaa’s collection of poems titled Dien Cai Dau, which in Vietnamese means “crazy.” Published in 1988, the book investigates the poet’s experiences in the Vietnam War and his ongoing attempts to come to terms with his memories of the conflict. 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. Reading ... [Komunyakaa’s] work, we accept that physical survival was the order of the day during the war, and understand how serious a challenge it was to remain human afterward.” Reviewing Neon Vernacular: New and Selected Poems, which includes a selection from Dien Cai Dau, Matthew Rothschild assessed, “For Yusef Komunyakaa, the experience that seared him into poetry was serving in Vietnam ... Vietnam stalks Komunyakaa.” Often this stalking takes the form of haunting memories, which Komunyakaa writes about in “Facing It.”

The fact of death permeates Dien Cai Dau. In “We Never Know,” the speaker discovers a corpse, whose hands clutch a photograph: “When I got to him, / a blue halo / of flies had already claimed him.” Toi Derricotte has observantly pointed out that the poems in Dien Cai Dau “are held together by the excruciating tension between memory and forgetting.... This is a book about seeing and not seeing,” Derricotte writes, “about not being there in order to be there. It presents the paradoxes of a psyche, of an art that is compelled to examine itself, and yet is determined to control reality in a way that makes it able to be endured.” The relationship between sight and insight form the central theme of “Facing It,” as the speaker struggles to understand his own responses to the past, just as that past intrudes upon what he sees in the present. Kirkland C. Jones claims that the comparative devices Komunyakaa uses in the poem allow him to “make order of a war that has no moral clarity.” William Baer writes that “Facing It” “demonstrates that combination of sharp, telling images and dialectic complexity that uniquely marks ... [Komunyakaa’s] work,” and R. S. Gwynn calls the poem “the most poignant elegy that has been written about the Vietnam War.”