Yusef Komunyakaa's Facing It

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Yusef Komunyakaa's poem, “Facing It” is about him visiting the Vietnam Veterans Memorial after been in the war. The poem talks about his heart wrenching experience visiting the wall for presumably the first time. It took him many year to be able to write about his time in Vietnam and once he did it began to permeate throughout his poetry (Jago). This poem uses personal experiences from the author to show people how to face their fears so they can move on.

The title of the poem, “Facing It”, can be read to ways the denotation and connotations. But they ultimately mean the point to the same conclusion which is fear. On one hand you can take the meaning literal and say that Komunyakaa is physically looking at something. The thing that Komunyakaa is looking at is the Vietnam Veterans Memorial but it is also the thing he is most afraid of. Which is referenced in the first line: “My black face fades, hiding inside the …show more content…

In away he shows us how we create our fears in a way. In line 5 he says “I’m stone.” which the monument is made out of. Throughout the poem he gets confused because of the reflectiveness of the monument. He is seeing the reflections as if they are happening in front of him, like the wall would be. It seems as though he is embodying this wall which holds his fear. This makes sense because he is the one holding the memories and the wall is only the name of people that could have been in those memories. The wall isn’t Vietnam nor is it a book written with his specific experiences. Meaning that he is the soul keeper and creator of this fears and the wall is what he is projecting it on. Komunyakaa say near the end of the poem “then his pale eyes looked through mine. I’m a window”. There is a metaphor that the eyes are the windows to the soul. Komunyakaa’s soul is what is harboring his fear and the only way to cleanse his soul is by letting his fear

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