Working in the Space of Disaster: Yusef Komunyakaa's Dialogues with America

There is disaster only because, ceaselessly, it falls short of disaster. The end of nature, the end of culture.

—Maurice Blanchot, L'Ecriture du désastre

Yusef Komunyakaa claims in American Poetry Review that "poetry is an action" that also "reconnects us to the act of dreaming ourselves into existence." His poetry is an engagement of this potential for "dreaming ourselves into existence" both as responsive imaginative action and living political action. As his poems rearticulate the possibilities for developing human communities, they illustrate instances in which individuals outstrip invasive societal partitions to imagine and create meaningful self/other relationships. Komunyakaa's Vietnam War poems form the context that connects these possibilities with an America divided by racism and violence. These poems interrogate the invidious social problems of America as they reappear on the streets of Saigon and in the swaying grass and rice fields of America's longest war. In addition to Dien Cai Dau, his 1988 volume of Vietnam poems, many other poems collected in 1993's Neon Vernacular examine the possibilities for community in America. Because of Komunyakaa's perceptions of the relationship between daily living and war, his treatment of the Vietnam War is a way to begin a conversation rather than a way to converse about the possibilities for future human communities. As Kevin Stein notes in his essay on Dien Cai Dau: "The war's actual events frequently serve as mere backdrop for Komunyakaa's obdurate, private search for meaning" (542).

In Dispatches, a Vietnam War memoir, Michael Herr writes that soldiers' performances in Vietnam and demonstrations in America (San Francisco, specifically) are extremes "of the same theater" (5). Komunyakaa's Vietnam War is, indeed, little different from his poetic rendering of America. Both are chaotic, disordered, and often surreal. But, the poetry that bridges both countries exists in a communally rendered space where individual and collective actions contain the potential for positive change and vital connections between people. Maurice Blanchot's meditations on disaster and responsibility illuminate this often elusive space where disaster fails to end human culture: "There is disaster only because, ceaselessly, it falls short of disaster" (41). Komunyakaa uses this space to draw from the potential for transformation that marks each disaster's failure to absolutely sap human spirit and hope. However, much of the power of Komunyakaa's poetry resides in what Blanchot describes as disaster redefining the limits of the ultimate because disaster actually "bears the ultimate away" (28). Disaster pushes individuals and communities to the point of destruction but leaves them space to rebuild relationships and exercise responsibility. For Blanchot and Komunyakaa, even in the midst of disaster and misfortune, individuals are not relieved of their responsibility to others and in this way, "responsibility is itself disastrous" (Blanchot 27).

Komunyakaa's America is divided by social and cultural partitions. His poetry considers questions inescapable in an exploration of American society. Is community possible in a society still absorbed and entrenched in a history of racism and oppression? How do the diverse cultures of America circumvent or subvert the obstacles to establishing meaningful self/other relationships? Komunyakaa's poetry both witnesses and reimagines the culturally inscribed forces that constitute difference as conflict in American society, forces that prevent individuals from building human communities because of ideologies that sanction only certain forms of behavior. For Komunyakaa, disaster, whether it manifests itself as war or racism, is complicated by divisive cultural values; his poems reveal that what is cultural is not inevitable and natural but rather a product of human institutions. In the process, his poetry explores and interrogates a nature/culture divide. These same poems imply that if we cannot imagine a human community beyond cultural difference inscribed as conflict, the Blanchot epigraph may soon come to fruition: "The end of nature. The end of culture."

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