Facing It By Yusef Komunyakaa Summary

The Vietnam Veterans Memorial Photograph + the poem

“Facing It” by Yusef Komunyakaa

Ochsner, J.K. (1997, February). A Space of Loss: The Vietnam Veterans Memorial

On November 11, 1982, 10 years after the end of the Vietnam War which tore the United States apart, the VVM or Vietnam Veterans Memorial was completed. 10 years of battle field with deep bitter emotions of shame, anger and painful fights, finally the heroism and brave sacrifices of the soldiers who fought during that 10 years of nightmare has finally recognized and paid off in some ways. Speaking at the wall for a Veterans Day ceremony, President Reagan declared, “The night is over. We see these men and know them once again and know how much we owe them, how much they’ve given us,

Vietnam Veterans Memorial is one of the most controversial architecture work of all times and also one of the most visited memorial in Washington D.C. There was always the expectation that since the war had been controversial, the memorial might or must be also. The memorial is constructed in three remarkable parts: the black wall cutting into the earth, the names inscribed upon the wall, and the statue of the soldiers. This symbol of the memoirs of some of our heroes not only get flooded with excitement but also been courted with several controversies. Questions like “How will the memorial impact our collective and societal image of the Vietnam War? How effective the VVM will be as a memorial over the life-cycle of memory?” started to loop around the critics after the Vietnam Veterans Memorial was created. Abramson discussed Maya Lin's design of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington. According to Lin the memorial just like the Civil Rights Memorial in Montgomery, Alabama, and of the Women's Table in New Haven, Connecticut used monuments’ features like timeline, factual reality, chronicle-like narrative, and most important, its own vivid, graphic

Yusef Komunyakaa (an African-American writer) emphasized his ethnicity at the very beginning of his poem : "My black face fades,/hiding inside the black granite." In these lines the word "black" has been repeated twice, in reference both to his own skin color and the color of the memorial (black wall cutting of VVM). The author created a connection between him and the memorial through this. For Yusef, the memorial is not only a cold plain stone. He sees it as a photograph of deep pains and memories as also felt on the next lines of the poem: "I said I wouldn't/dammit: No tears./I'm stone. I'm flesh." The past and present struggles are real with the words. The author thinks that VVM does not brought him new emotions, instead it is like pulling him back to the fights and scraps. From 1969 to 1970, Komunyakaa served in Vietnam as a correspondent and managing editor for the military newspaper Southern Cross, work that earned him a Bronze Star (Ekiss, 2015). The poem shows us the struggles of Yusef to suppress his emotions in thinking that he is a stone like the granite memorial. A stone which is a strong and a steady reminder of the past, then he realized that he might be a memory but he is not like the stone because Yusef is a living human being. Through the poem the author shared the darkness, the blackness, with the granite