Incendiary Lit

I was writing a paper on Yusef Komunyakaa recently, and thought I came up with a pretty good reading of his awesome poem “You and I are disappearing” and it’s a really good poem, deceptively simple, so I figured I’d share, in case anyone cares, or needs to write an essay on this and searches for the poem. If so: Jackpot! Also, here is Yusef Komunyakaa reading the poem. So if you’re interested in a possible narrative progression through the poem, then this is the place for you.

“You and I Are Disappearing” is an anaphoric poem riddled with similes. It is free verse in its purest essence., holding no syllabic, metric, or rhyming patterns. The poem is about a young Vietnamese woman wronged. In this case she is burned alive in a fire set by the American soldiers, and the narrator carries the memory of her screaming like shackles. The sequence of similes used by Komunyakaa is very specific, and through these sidelong glances into the narrator’s guilt we see his true feelings about the war.

The poem’s first simile is “she burns like a piece of paper.” (L4) This indicates the quick burn of something small, inconsequential. But yet, he still hears it, the cry “still burning / inside my head.” (L2) The narrator is trying to think of the screaming as something small. It continues to “She burns like foxfire” (L5) which is the narrator trying to see the death as something natural, like foxfire. Then she burns “like a sack of dry ice” (L13) meaning that there was a false sense of smoke. Here the narrator’s trying to convince himself that it wasn’t as painful as it sounded, wasn’t as horrible. Immediately following that thought the narrator contradicts that defensive image with the next when “She burns like oil on water.” (L14) A distinct burning. This image is the narrator reminding himself that there is a stark difference between burning a section of field and burning a village. The human cost is intentionally called to mind, in a way, to remain human. That return to humanity returns the narrator to a familiar image from home, “a cattail torch / dipped in gasoline.” (L15) Yet, the narrator is still in Vietnam, and this fact draws out the next simile where she “glows like the fat tip / of a banker’s cigar.” (L16) The war is not one of the narrator’s choosing. He was stolen from his home to fight a war to keep the rich rich, and the poor, like himself, poor. That glowing tip, the real movement behind the war is “silent as quicksilver.” (L17) Komunyakaa then takes a brief respite from similes to lay on the beautiful and misleading image of a tiger under a rainbow at night. The tiger is a pretty, but deadly animal. The girl, whether only in the narrator’s mind or actuality, is a Viet Cong agent. A beautiful saboteur. But still, she is a real girl that died, and that thought “burns like a shot glass of vodka.” (L20) When vodka was not enough, the next step taken to forget the human cost: opiates from poppy fields. But still “she rises like dragonsmoke / to my nostrils.” (L21) He is still unable to forget her, to lose that cry. It has set in motion a major change in the narrator’s sense of humanity that is a very lengthy and painful process, a forced exodus, “a burning bush / driven by a godawful wind.” (L23)

Posted: Wednesday, December 19th, 2007 at 1:14 pm
Category: Poems, Essays.