On Close Reading: Yusef Komunyakaa's "White Lady"

In a 1999 review of Yusef Komunyakaa's collection, Thieves of Paradise, Kate Daniels takes the poet to task on an issue steeped in notions of both race and gender. Early on, Daniels picks up on the title's significance, noting that it "alludes not only to the theft of America by white Europeans" but also "to other historical narratives as well." And later, Daniels praises Komunyakaa's poetry for its "psychological demands"—the way that it forces readers to do the necessary work of revisiting traumatic and devastating histories. Referring to some of the imagery that draws readers back, for example, to the destruction caused by the Vietnam War and the ravages of American slavery and racism, she writes: "This distress is useful and humanizing, and I do not resist it."

However, Daniels remains troubled by another aspect of the poet's work—"a weakness in Komunyakaa's aesthetic in the way he represents women"—as manifest in the poem, "White Lady." "When Komunyakaa's gaze settles on white women," she writes, "I find myself represented in ways I can't tolerate." (Emphasis added.) To make her point, Daniels quotes the poem's title and follows it with the first ten lines, printed without line breaks as a prose chunk: "White Lady" is

something to kill songs & burn the guts, to ride & break the hippocampus. Something to subdue the green freedom of crows at Slaughterhouse Creek. Milk mixed with gin or metho—something to finish the job guns & smallpox blankets didn't do.

Placing the poem within the context of Black Arts Movement poetry by likening Komunyakaa's use of the term "White Lady" to Amiri Baraka's use of it in "Babylon Revisited" (even while acknowledging that Komunyakaa's poem "does not go as far as Baraka's"), Daniels tells us that this is "ugly enough to make [her] angry." Reading Komunyakaa's poem, I begin to suspect that this anger is a bit misguided. Though I acknowledge that (within the context of Black Arts Movement poetry, as Daniel's suggests) the title "White Lady" might be read as a provocative label carrying with it the implications that she instantly reads into it, I note also that it is neutral in everyday discourse and is in no way "ugly" when used, for example, to designate the "white lady in the front pew." With a careful, close reading, a more plausible interpretation of the term and the poem arises.

The poem is set up, syntactically, as a list—a sort of litany of definitions—for the substantive that the title suggests: something to kill songs, burn the guts, ride and break the hippocampus. In line seven the poem reveals that white lady is also "Milk mixed with gin or metho," and if readers hadn't paused before to grapple with the poem's references and allusions, this seems like a perfect time to do so. Metho is a word used informally in Australian English to refer to methylated spirits—alcohol—and this definition appears prominently in the Oxford English Dictionary. Slaughterhouse Creek is the site, in Australia, of a mid-nineteenth-century massacre of Aboriginal people. White Lady, the poem says, is a potent substance. It functions in the poem not only to "burn the guts" of those who drink it, but also to "ride & break" their hippocampi as well. That is, since the hippocampus is a part of the brain linked to memory, the poem suggests that the consumption of White Lady makes people both remember and forget the horrors of this particular history. An intoxicating and addictive substance, the alcoholic beverage White Lady is also "something to finish the job / guns & smallpox blankets / didn't do." Here, it is not difficult to understand the reference to the devastation to Native populations through the introduction of alcohol. White Lady, the poem reveals, can also be used to "prod women"—as in, ply them with liquor for devious purposes—and "to seduce gods to dance among trees," or, to say it plainly, to cause hallucinations among its users. By only scratching the surface of the...