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African-American war
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Citation: BREWER, M.F., 2015.
African-American war poetry:
from Viet-
nam to Iraq. Presented at the conference Alternate Spaces of War: 1914 to the
Present, Plymouth University, Plymouth, UK, 6th-7th July 2015.
Additional Information:
•
This is a conference paper delivered at the conference Alternate Spaces of
War: 1914 to the Present, Plymouth University, Plymouth, UK, 6th-7th
July 2015.
Metadata Record: https://dspace.lboro.ac.uk/2134/24253
Version: Accepted for publication
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Please cite the published version.
Black Power activist Stokely Carmichael provocatively described the war
in Vietnam as “white people sending black people to make war on yellow
people in order to defend the land they stole from red people”. His assessment
reflects how individual and social group experience in America is lived through
race, a condition that can be at its most extreme when the nation is involved in
military conflict. In an article titled “Black Matter(s),” Toni Morrison traces
how critical response to traditional American literature is often marked by the
assumption that it has been unshaped by the four-hundred-year-old presence of
black people in the United States:” According to Morrison, it assumes that the
black presence—has had no significant place or consequence in the origin and
development of the nation’s literature. Moreover, it assumes that the
characteristics of America’s national literature emanate from a certain
“Americanness” that is separate from and unaccountable to the presence of
black people.
Morrison further develops this thesis in her book Playing in the Dark.
She posits that American literature overwhelmingly has taken as its concern the
“architecture of a new white man”, and that its chief characteristics, a focus on
individuality and masculinity, have in fact been constructed in response to an
unacknowledged black presence. It may be argued that war writing more than
most forms of American literary production concerns itself with defining the
masculine self and Americanness, over and against the dehumanizing processes
1
of military administration and the inhumanity of actual warfare. Hence, war
poetry is ripe for illuminating how threats to selfhood and nationhood, literal
and existential, are moderated by the discourse of race in American thought.
Today I’m going to explore how the poetry of black soldier poets who
served in Vietnam, The Gulf War, and Iraq registers an alternative social,
political and historical perspective on these military conflicts, and how this
body of work illustrates the way in which the individual experience of war and
its aftermath are profoundly shaped by the soldier’s position in the American
ethno-racial hierarchy. Though a vast body of poetry has emerged out of the war
in Vietnam, most published work still represents the voice of white veterans. In
contrast to WWII and the Korean Conflict, there was no reluctance to send
black troops to fight in Vietnam. It was the first major American combat
deployment of fully integrated troops. During the height of the U.S.
involvement, 1965-69, blacks formed 11 percent of the American population
but made up 12.6 percent of soldiers in Vietnam. The majority of these soldiers
were in the infantry, where they were more likely to serve in front-line combat
units and frequently at lower rank than white troops. The disproportionate
participation of African-American men resulted in part from limited economic
opportunities in the civilian sector and from a discriminatory draft system.
Service in Vietnam could be deferred and sometimes avoided by university
students and those working in essential service roles, options that were closed
2
to many young black men. Draftees were primarily urban, blue collar workers
or unemployed men, those who were educationally as well as financially
impoverished, all groups within which black men were represented in
disproportionate numbers due to the legacy of racial discrimination.
Given the numbers of black men who fought in Vietnam, the lack of material
about the War by black writers appears surprising, and suggests that racial bias
continued to have a significant effect in marginalizing the black voice in the
nation’s war history and literature in the 1960s and 1970s.
Among those soldiers whose poetic response to the war has been
published, race and racism are repeatedly cited as crucial factors in their
experience of the conflict. Horace Coleman, who served in Vietnam from 196768 as a weapon’s director and air traffic controller, writes about the war from
the perspective of someone whose blackness shapes his literal and emotional
experience of conflict. [THE ORDER IN WHICH I DISCUSS THE POEMS
MATCHES THE ORDER ON THE HANDOUT, AND WHERE I QUOTE,
I’VE HIGHLIGHTED THE PASSAGE IN BLUE.]Coleman’s conversational
poem “Talking and Toking” underscores how cheaply black life could be
valued in the field:
"Got sent back so many time,
I couldn't decide who was
trying harder to kill me!" says the ‘Somebody who knows America real well’.
3
The poem recounts a white chopper pilot’s reluctance to risk picking up men
after a fire-fight once it becomes clear that there are no white survivors.
Eventually, the brass:
Transferred the blacks out-to keep them alive and
hold down trouble.
That they are kept waiting and rescued only in order to avoid bad publicity for
the military leads to
Ruined morale and made
the "1,000 yard stares" longer.
The poisonous looks exchanged among black and white troops reflect
how, despite the Civil Rights Movement having made considerable gains on the
home front in the 1950s and 60s, these advances did not serve to lessen the
divide among black and white troops on the ground in Vietnam. The intensity of
the animosity is portrayed by Coleman in the poem “OK Corral East Brothers in
the Nam”. Coleman’s reference to the mythology of the American West in the
poem’s title puts the Vietnamese situation and its racial politics into the wider
context of American history. The image of the “wild West” evoked by the fight
at the OK corral, so often glamorised in American film, is cast by the poet as
America’s first Vietnam – another imperialist venture against a divided and
impoverished nation of racial “others,” but this time with more black troops
exploited to kill other people of color.
Coleman locates ‘OK Corral’ in a bar, a space designated as blackowned by the ‘soul sounds’ that provide the backdrop to the soldiers’ nightly
4
“’Hore Inspection Tour”. Tensions rise when the racial integrity of the space is
invaded by a white MP who attempts to enforce curfew:
The grunts in the corner raise undisturbed hell
as the timid MP's freckles pale.
He walks past the dude high in the doorway,
in his lavender jump suit, to ask the mamma-san,
quietly, about curfew.
Coleman exposes the MP’s fear at finding himself a minority among
black fighters: he sees nothing his color here. The power wielded by the black men
in this scenario reverses the history and status quo of race relations in the
military and at home:
But this is not Cleveland or Chicago
he can’t cringe any one here and our
gazes like brown punji stakes impale him.
The comparison between the black gaze and the punji stakes aligns black
troops and the North Vietnamese in combating a common white enemy –for a
punji stick refers to a sharpened piece of bamboo that was used in camouflaged
holes by the North Koreans. The black soldiers’ antipathy is conveyed not
merely by rendering the MP the subject of black scrutiny and control, it is
backed up with the threat of physical retaliation for his trespass, as the poem
ends with the narrator recounting that:
We have all killed something recently,
know who owns the night,
and carry darkness with us.
5
The confrontational tone of “OK Corral East”, with its implicit threat to
lash out against the white enemy ‘other’, reflects the influence of Black Power
ideology upon troops in Vietnam. Black Power comes to the fore as a national
movement in the mid-1960s, by which time some segments of the black
community were losing patience with the methods adopted by civil rights
groups after WWII, particularly Dr King’s emphasis on non-violent resistance.
Coleman’s poem, “A Downed Black Pilot Learns How to Fly” (1975) mirrors
the tenor of the tenor racial conflict that marred US society at the close of the
War in 1974:
“now that the war is over
we’ll have to kill each other again
The poem features a veteran who reflects on the physical trauma he
suffered when his plane was shot down, satirically offering to return his medals
to Hanoi ‘and let them make bullets / if they’ll ship my leg back’, and who
confirms his refusal to ever fight again for any but his own cause:
‘Next time / I’ll wait and see if they’ve declared war on me – or just
America’.
Coleman’s choice to separate his soldier from America by an “em” dash
in the final line reinforces the potent sense of marginalization he feels,
prompting him to disconnect his interests as a black man from any national
ones.
6
In the post-colonial world of late 1960s America, African-Americans were
beginning to see more common cause with other people of colour outside the
nation’s borders. In a “A Black Soldier Remembers” (1977), Coleman treats the
theme of black identification with the Vietnamese by virtue of a shared racial
difference. The narrator reveals that he fathered a daughter with a Vietnamese
woman.
My Saigon daughter I saw only once
standing in the dusty square
across from the Brink’s BOQ/PX
Yet, the second stanza suggests that the girl is not really his child but only
a reminder of her and representative of the generation of mixed-race children
produced by the war. The child, a market trader, survives by selling hats to
Americans, but she does not offer one to the narrator, echoing the dissociation
between blackness and Americanness illustrated in ‘A Downed Black Pilot’.
I have nothing she needs but
the sad smile she already has.
The narrator says. Unable to offer anything of tangible benefit to the child, he
can only acknowledge what they share – which is, sadly, victim status. This idea
is reinforced in the lines:
The amputee beggars watch us.
The same color and the same eyes.
7
Having raised the possibility of a biological connection between the
soldier and the girl, the poem allows for his connection with the amputees as
well, with the “sad smile” now gesturing toward a sense of psychological
mutilation suffered as a result of having injured and killed people like himself.
The poetry of Yusef Komunyukaa, who served a tour of duty in 1969-70,
also highlights black soldier’s divided feelings about their role in a conflict
against people of color. His poem “Hanoi Hannah” refers to an English
speaking broadcaster of North Vietnamese propaganda, who cynically uses
American racism to manipulate black soldiers’ feelings about fighting in
Vietnam. She woos her black audience by programming the music of Ray
Charles and other “soul brothers” in between slanted news reports. She
alternates between claiming sympathetic kinship with black soldiers and
tormenting them with claims that their girlfriends back home are being
unfaithful.
Alongside commonplace attempts to lower troops’ morale, a review of
race relations in the US forms a key part of her script: "Soul Brothers, what you
dying for?" She uses the Dr. King’s murder to predict a similar fate for the
soldiers if they keep fighting the wrong enemy.
"You know you're dead men,
don't you? You're dead
as King today in Memphis.
The men respond with overwhelming and yet ineffectual force, and the
8
poem allows for the possibility that the men prove “lousy shots” because
her message registers, at least unconsciously, as truth:
Her knife-edge song cuts
deep as a sniper's bullet.
The poem ends with ‘Her laughter floats up / as though the airways are /
buried beneath our feet’
As again Komunyukaa leaves open the possibility that Hannah’s
message will remain buried in their unconscious, possibly to float up, like
her laughter, into consciousness at some future time.
How American racism provided a platform for North Vietnamese
psychological warfare against black soldiers is a recurrent motif in
Komunyukaa’s war poetry. In “Report from the Skull’s Diorama”, the poet
speaks of a soldier who comes across a Vietcong propaganda leaflet, against the
backdrop of a platoon of black GIs returning from night patrol during which
five of them were killed. In contrast to the now silent GIs:
‘… the red-bordered
leaflets tell us
VC didn’t kill
Dr. Martin Luther King.
9
By linking the dead soldiers with the murdered King, the poem alludes to the
twin battles being fought by African-American men: one in the jungles of
Vietnam and one on the streets of America. But the connection goes deeper:
Dr. King’s photograph
comes at me from White Nights
like Hoover’s imagination at work,
dissolving into a scenario
at Firebase San Juan Hill:
These lines it suggests the causal agent behind King’s death and the soldier’s
deaths may be the same. The name of the Marine squadron – ‘White Knights’
carries paradoxical racial overtones: the name could connote romantic ideas of
heroic saviour figures. However, in this scenario, the phrasing ‘comes at me’
suggests assault rather than salvation and it calls to mind the kind of attacks
perpetrated upon black people by the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan.
By implying that the image of King, which dissolves into war, could have
descended from the “White Nights” transport aircraft rather than the source
being the Vietcong, the poem also implies that the death of King represents a
staged assault upon the black community. This meaning is reinforced by the
link among “White Nights,” King, and J. Edgar Hoover, for Hoover was noted
for his hostility to King, and many in the Black Power Movement believed that
the FBI was involved in his murder. While never excusing the actions of the
10
Vietcong, “Skulls Diorama” posits the established white order as the more
dangerous source of physical and psychological warfare for black men not only
in Vietnam but also on the home front.
The assassination of King proved a turning point in race relations in the
conflict zones of Vietnam, as it sparked the radicalization of many black troops.
After 1968, ‘racial violence flared in the military’ and ‘black servicemen began
to speak more and more the language of the Black Power manifesto.
The relationship between militancy among troops in Vietnam and
militancy on the home front was reciprocal, because many Black Power
activists, especially Black Panther members, had been politicised when serving
in Vietnam. Reginald ”Malik” Edwards, a rifleman in the U.S. Marines from
1965-66, explains his understanding of how the war against racism and
opposition to the war in Vietnam were intertwined:
For me the thought of being killed in the Black Panther Party by
the police and the thought of being killed by Vietnamese was just a
qualitative difference. I had left one war and came back and got
into another one. Most of the Panthers then were veterans. We
figured if we had been over in Vietnam fighting for our country,
which at that point wasn’t serving us properly, it was only proper
that we had to go out and fight for our own cause. We had already
fought for the white man in Vietnam. It was clearly his war. If it
11
wasn’t, you wouldn’t have seen as many confederate flags as you
saw (14).
Resistance to equality in the military was concentrated particularly among
troops drawn from Southern states, which accounted for 40% of troops. Eulas
C. Mitchell, who served in Vietnam in 1968-69, speaks of his basic training at
Fort Jackson, South Carolina. With few exceptions, he states, ‘Bigotry was
everywhere’. The southern boys ‘ran the place’ and they ‘accepted nobody but
their own’.
In “Tu Do Street”, Komunyukaa’s addresses the continued attempt on the
part of white troops to maintain the kind of segregation that marked earlier
wars, by foregrounding the conflict over relations with women. Historically,
there had always existed violent opposition to the possibility of black/white
sexual relationships in America, but even when the women were non-white,
there was unwillingness to allow black men access to the same group of women.
“Tu Do Street” opens with the speaker remarking how
‘Music divides the evening’.
The country-western music played in the brothel sparks the memory o
apartheid:
I close my eyes & can see
men drawing lines in the dust.
America pushes through the membrane
12
of mist & smoke, & I'm a small boy
again in Bogalusa.White Only
signs & Hank Snow.
As soon as the soldier enters the brothel, the bar girls disappear into the
shadows and the mama-san pretends she does not see him. He has knowingly
violated the unwritten code of segregation by not patronising the establishment
‘Down the street, where black GIs hold to their turf also.’
Alvin Aubert argues that the attempt to share prostitutes between the races
challenges the racial divide by confirming black and white soldier’s “shared
humanity. ” This is underscored by the narrator’s description of rooms that
run into each other like tunnels
leading to the underworld.
With its reminder that all troops face the threat of death and will
ultimately share a common makes the poem into a lament for the reality of
racism that blinds the men to their fellowship beneath the skin, a reality to
which Komunyukaa returns in the poem “Facing It.”
‘Facing It’ is about a man struggling to understand his place in the post-war
order of things and with his guilt at having survived. Philip Metres describes the
poem as a “‘black mirror’” of veteran subjectivity, along with all its traumatised
hauntings, in which the speaker “vigilantly and almost obsessively seeks to
protect the erasure of his comrades, and of history;” (347). What the speaker
faces is the Vietnam Veteran’s Memorial, which Komunyukaa visited one yearprior to writing the poem, which is written in the first-person. The poet relates
how :
My black face fades,
hiding inside the black granite.
13
referring to the buried history of black soldiers’ contributions to the war in
Vietnam. Later he says:
I touch the name Andrew Jackson;
I see the booby trap’s white flash.
Robin Ekiss identifies the “punishing irony” of the name Andrew Johnson,
noting that
As a soldier from the poet’s hometown of Bogalusa, Louisiana,
Johnson represents a personal connection to the public memorial.
But, she points out, he also shares the name of the 17th U.S.
president, who succeeded Lincoln and denied freed slaves equal
protection under the law by vetoing the Civil Rights Bill in 1866. It
didn’t pass until nearly 100 years later, in 1964, just as the war in
Vietnam was getting under way.
After connecting with his memory of Johnson,
A white vet’s images floats
closer to me, then his pale eyes
look through mine. I’m a window.
He’s lost his right arm
inside the stone.
The white veteran is positioned as both victim of the war – by virtue of
having lost his arm, and victimizer –for his whiteness stands in stark contrast to
the black granite and carryies a sense of the ethnic dissonance that formed the
backdrop of the war. The veteran’s failure to register Komunyukaa’s presence
gestures toward the power of the white gaze power of the white gaze to
14
overlook his existence, just as the suffering and loss endured by the black
soldiers is so often overlooked or obscured in white histories of the conflict.
American involvement in Vietnam ended in the spring of 1975. As the
twentieth century drew to a close and America became involved in conflict in
the Gulf, and later in Iraq, the nation’s black soldier poets were making
remarkably similar observations about their experiences. Though conscription
was no longer in force, in 1991, the year of the Gulf War, black Americans were
still substantially over-represented in American conflict zones. Blacks made up
12 percent of the military-age population in 1991, but represented 26 percent of
troops deployed to the Gulf (19). And the over-representation of blacks in
fighting America‘s wars continued into the twenty-first century. At the time of
the Iraq invasion in 2003,blacks made up 25% percent of US military forces,
still nearly twice their proportion of the population,
However, a major difference in the black experience of war in the Persian
Gulf was the presence of blacks among the top military leadership. General
Colin Powell was the chief military strategist during the Gulf War, and
according to Powell, the US military was distinctly more progressive in its
racial politics compared to civilian society: in his autobiography, he recalls how
“[t]he army had always been living the democratic idea ahead of the rest of
America. Beginning in the fifties, less discrimination, a truer merit system, and
leveler playing fields existed inside the gates of our military posts than in city
halls or corporations” (Edgerton 4). In 1987, when Powell was appointed
15
national security advisor, he commented: “I wish that there were other activities
in our society and in our nation that were as open as the military to upward
mobility, to achievement …” for minorities. Whether this ‘leveler playing field’
ever really existed, and indeed whether such iconic figures as Powell influence
black Americans to perceive the military as more racially liberal than the rest of
American society, is open to question.
For high enlistment rates do not necessarily correlate to belief among
black Americans that the military offers a racially equal playing field.
Kimberley L. Phillips maintains that [f]or working-class blacks in the twentyfirst century, the military remains one of the most important – for many the only
– step onto the economic ladder”. Nevertheless, despite a worsening economy,
by the middle of the first decade of the twenty-first century, it became much
harder for recruiters to meet their targets, especially in the Army where blacks
predominately serve, because of the number of black Americans who were
rejecting the military. America’s two “long wars” in Afghanistan and Iraq led to
a sharp dip in black recruitment. One reason for the decrease could be the
reluctance of individuals to become involved in a protracted and bloody
conflict, but another another possible cause is the increased perception among
young blacks that the military discriminates against people of colour ‘to a great
extent’ or ‘to a very great extent’, as evidenced by a number of surveys taking
during the Iraq War.
16
Poetry by black veterans of America’s more recent wars supports the idea
that black troops hold a far less rose-tinted view of race relations in
contemporary military life than elite figures like Powell. Though promotion is
more readily available than during the Vietnam era, William J. Simmons Sr.,
who served as a 1st Lieutenant in the Gulf War, argues that racism continues to
make it difficult for black officers to command the respect and full cooperation
of white troops. In a poem titled “Teamwork is the Key,” Simmons poet queries
the connection between people’s willingness to “step on my toes” and him
being ‘just a little too dark”. Under conditions of stress, it seems, latent feelings
of racism come to the fore. While this covert form of resentment on the part of
white troops lacks the violent aggression expressed in Coleman’s Vietnam War
poetry, nevertheless, there are echoes of this earlier poetry, firstly, in how race
continues to be a dividing factor that can jeopardise the success of American
military missions: “For we must finish as a team or bust”, Simmons concludes.
And secondly, it repeats the idea of the black soldier needing to fight
simultaneously on two fronts: to battle Saddam’s forces and the racism of white
comrades.
Ongoing racial tensions in the military are considered further in
Simmons’ poem: “The Civil War Again?” As implied by the title, the poet
contemplates the extent to which American troops in the Gulf War were still
fighting the same kind of racial battles that constituted this nineteenth-century
conflict against the backdrop of a similar social context. This poem signals a
17
more intransigent form of racism than portrayed in “Teamwork:” ‘Talk and talk
to some people / and they’ll remain the same’. Simmons expresses a sense of
irremediable division between the culture of black and white soldiers:
Yes, I like my grits and collards and sweet potato pie.
You eat your danishes and hoagie sandwiches.
This symbolic separation of black and white soldiers evokes a feeling of
confusion and insecurity with regard to his American identity, similar to that
expressed by Vietnam era poets: “So, are we Americans? / Or is this just
camouflage?” While camouflage signifies skin colour here, it does so in an
ironic sense, for it is the poet’s blackness that precludes him from blending
harmoniously into the white-dominated military order.
The crude brand of racism that formed part of official military discourse
in earlier was, or toleration of overt racist gestures such as flying the
Confederate Flag in Korea and Vietnam, no longer mark the war experience of
black Americans. Simmons’ poem “Black History Month – Saudi Style,” for
instance, recounts a “full house” of soldiers celebrating black culture amid the
conflict, pointing to a more enlightened official attitude toward racial
difference. At the same, his work affords insight into the racially motivated
difficulties black troops do still confront. “Last To Be Served Again” queries
Simmons’ position as a black man in the military by virtue of being the last
officer kept on duty
While I wait, I sense something wrong.
18
All of the officers except me are long gone.
But, why is this?
I try to control my composure and not get pissed.
With no understandable reason given for keeping him back, he surmises that
‘Maybe it is due to my African past.’
The poem is structured according to a series of rhetorical questions,
which constitute an internal poetic dialogue at the same time that they are posed
to the reader. Being last in the queue leads Simmons to question the legacy of
the Civil Rights Movement.
“I often wonder if I really overcame. / Dr. Martin Luther King certainly
did”
The confidence of the assertion about King, however, is undercut when
the speakers say:
I wait here on the cement.
I wonder if African- Americans have really made a dent.
Or has society let a few of us slide through the cracks,
while the rest of us continue to break our backs.
Thereby representing King’s as a figure of white tokenism, whereby some black
men in America are allowed to attain a certain stature, while the majority
continue to suffer the effects of racism.
Simmons’ collection, Gulf War Poetry: From One Who Served, contains
an accompanying illustration for each poem (not by the author), which amplify
the mood and tone of the poems. Directly facing “Last To Be Served” [AND
REPRODUCED ON YOUR HANDOUT] is a pen and ink portrait of a the
19
black speaker, whose sense of alienation is signalled by his being seated alone,
apart from a line of white soldiers who are lined up in front of the exit door that
leads to the safety of home. They are drawn as larger figures that have their
backs to the man seated at the table. Opposite them is a large can with
“TRASH” scrawled across the top in bold capitals, and this symbol adds to the
sense that the black soldier, like the trash, is viewed as something to be disposed
of after use.
Simmons’ addresses how black soldiers feel left out or left behind in
some way during active duty, a theme that is echoed in the poetry of Ike Love,
who served in Operation Enduring Freedom and Operation Iraqi Freedom, but
Love’s writing is concerned even more with the unequal treatment of black and
white veterans on the home front. His poems are remarkable for how they make
little distinction between the war zones of Iraq and the streets of urban America,
portraying the daily experience of a black man in the twenty-first century as an
ongoing war against a host of racially-motivated enemy forces. In “We Need
Better,” Love equates the politics behind corporate backed wars for oil with the
politics of racial and class subordination in America:
The rich man run the country
while the poor man suffer An the
politics smell like war mixed
with sulphur We are at war with other
countries as well as each other
Slavery still exists but we’re to
corrupted to understand
Blinded
20
and controlled by the pictures of
T.V. land
Racial conflict amid a hyper-consumerist culture leads to emotional casualties:
I ask
can we look within ourselves
And realize our life is much
more than what’s on those
shelves
For Love, racial and class oppression create a false consciousness, whereby the
tendency to commodify black life is replicated within the black community; so
often excluded from the larger economy, some people capitalize on the “true
stories/ of our anger’ because this ‘is the thing that sales.’
Love returns to the theme of modern day slavery in ‘For Freedom ’, in
which he considers the reasons black troops fought and how little they gained
from their military service.
we fought
For what we thought was
freedom, and we sought,
Out for a way to make a change.
To make a living, to make a gain,
But rain on our sunny days
drench our hearts.
Doing whatever it takes, playing
our parts.
We lost in the end
Love’s sense that black men gain little as a result of going to war for
America is borne out by the experience of many black veterans. The US
Department of Veteran Affairs report on the living standards of minority
veterans in 2011 showed that 12.4 percent of black veterans live below the
21
poverty line. In the same year, the US Department of Labor reported that blacks
represented 11.9 percent of the veteran labour force, but 17.5 percent of
unemployed veterans. In 2012, Shannon Jones reported that among veterans of
the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars “almost 50 per cent of homeless veterans were
African American”. These statistics, added to the greater prevalence of servicerelated disability, especially susceptibility to mental health problems,
underscores how the military remains difficult cultural terrain for black
Americans.
In ‘For Freedom,’ Love describes African-Americans as still awaiting
genuine emancipation: a twenty-first century “Moses / to free his people”. The
poem is littered with religious references, which serve signal the poets’ reliance
upon faith, and perhaps how religious belief offers a way of coping with the
long social battles faced by returning soldiers. These references also serve to
emphasise the intractable nature of racism in American society, as recourse to
the divine suggests that the situation is so critical it would take supernatural
power to create conditions of real equality in America. Simmons makes a
similar appeal in a poem titled “Tis my eyes to See” when he suggests that only
divine providence could rectify the deformed racial character of the nation.
Appeals to religion mark a departure from the self-empowered and militarist
rhetoric of the Black Power Movement as its filters through Vietnam War
poetry, and they suggest a deeply rooted sense of pessimism and despair about
22
people’s interest in or ability to alter the status quo compared to the greater
optimism of counter-cultural movements during the Vietnam era.
In “Being Black is on the Decline,” Love locates the root of the problem
faced by black men, veterans and otherwise, as people who hold power simply
“Not caring what’s going on in our own country”. The poem catalogues the near
siege conditions to which Love returns after having fought in the Middle East.
My kids now and days can’t even
play in the streets
They have taken our lifestyle
and making all the money
Putting drugs in our
communities and acting all innocent
That the quality of life for black Americans is in a precipitous state of
decline suggests that black men do not so much emerge out of literal combat
situations socially unmoored, but rather they enter into war already in this state
of alienation. Researchers now routinely report the impact of endemic poverty
and violence in America’s inner cities in terms of PTSD. Studies of mainly
black subjects based in Detroit, Baltimore, and Atlanta record people
experiencing regular symptoms of nightmares, obsessive thoughts and a
constant sense of danger:
Two thirds of respondents said they had been violently attacked at
some point in their lives. Half knew someone who had been
murdered. Of the women interviewed, a third had been sexually
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assaulted. Roughly 30 percent of respondents had symptoms
consistent with PTSD—a rate as high or higher than that of
veterans of wars in Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan.
Love submits that although conventional war on a battlefield is
harrowingly difficult, the climate and effects of institutional racism are just as
traumatic and perhaps even more so. In his poem, ‘It’s Hard’, Love defines
being black in the contemporary white American imagination as inhabiting a
range of degrading stereotypes –what Alice Walker has termed “prisons of
image”. America is:
… a place that put you down just
because your black.
You can’t do this work, go play
ball or be a rapper.
Go be a drug dealer, a robber, a
cheater and a slapper.
Stay in and out of jail and don’t
learn a thing
Keep doing it so you can get put in jail again
It’s hard
The poem’s refrain resonates with the keynote of Victor Daly’s 1932
novel Not Only War: A Story of Two Conflicts, the only WWI novel by a black
veteran written more than 70 years before the onset of the Iraq War in which
Love served. In his foreword, Daly attempts to define the alternate meaning and
spaces of war for black Americans. Recalling Sherman’s oft-cited assessment
that “War is Hell,” Daly retorts:
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There is yet another gaping, abysmal Hell into which some of us
are born… The Hell that Sherman knew was a physical one – of
rapine, destruction and death. The other, is a purgatory for the
mind, for the spirit, for the soul of men. Not only War is Hell.
What can the poetry of black veterans such as Love, Simmons,
Komunyukaa, and Coleman tell us about America’s twentieth and twenty-first
century military apparatus? About the nature of conflict in Vietnam, The Gulf
or Iraq and how it has been mediated by race- that we may not be able to
perceive so clearly via the writings of other soldier poets? Lorrie Goldensohn
suggests that Vietnam war poetry by black veterans is distinctive in the way it
makes ‘unapologetic and fresh use of the stance of witness’ – which is
characteristic too, I think, of the poetry being produced by black veterans who
have served in more recent conflicts, as exemplified by Simmons’ and Love’s
poetry. Unsurprisingly, the poems I’ve discussed testify to the discrimination
that has characterized black experience in America’s twentieth and twenty-first
century military conflicts and how this intersects with racial divisions on the
home front. Just as importantly, though, black American war poetry witnesses
to the contributions and sacrifices of black soldiers in American wars,
contributions made in spite of being denied equal opportunities. Thus, these
poets offer a corrective to the literary and historical records in which the
sacrifices of black soldiers have all too frequently been obscured or overlooked.
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