Questions of Identity and War

Closing the ranks of identity was the first thing I thought as I read many of these poems especially the ones in the Oregon Literary Review. I felt as if all the poems had a level of awareness around identity that linked them. In some of them that identity is named and is the focus of the poem such as with James Welch's Harlem, Montana. Just Off the Reservation and in some others it is implied and never explicitly mentioned as in June Jordan's Love Song about Choosing Your Booze. Overall they are all dealing with connecting identities in a politicized way. Many of the poems make connections to histories of cultures and peoples and draw parallels with modern situations or fully embody the past bringing it into the future and now.

To bring this post in narrower and focus on one poet, I was really taken with Chris Abani's poetry. There's a silence to his poetry, a quietness. Even when the poem is more dense and word heavy such as Dearest Jane, there are these intensely quiet lines that in a quick reading you would just rush over but when going over his work a second and third time you learn to weight the lines in your head. The lines I'm talking about in particular in Dearest Jane, come at the end:

I have decided that I want no more of this war,
and revealed myself to the doctor whose lust

weighed my breasts before discharging me.
I will be home soon. You are my redemption, sweet Jane.

This is the only line break besides the greeting and the sign off within the poem and it's seems meant to draw us in, to create a weighted pause before the revelation that the sex of the writer is female. It seems like it could be a corny twist, a shock ending to a poem but the pause makes it function as so much more. The words there not only reveal the narrator's sex but also reveal the really gendered space she enters by claiming the idea of woman with all the baggage that carries in a patriarchal society. That empty line, the sudden silence of the person whose been so verbose this whole time feels like more than a pause for dramatic effect. It feels like the line more than enforcing silence actually represents the silence inherent in being a woman in this society. The dispassionate recounting of the Doctor's sexualization of her body after he becomes aware of her sex holds a quiet despair and acceptance of this as the societal accepted order. The line immediately after connects Jane and her relationship with Henrietta as a healing one, creating an oppositional tenson with the recently mentioned Doctor and his interaction with Henrietta.

The other poem of Abani's that truly struck me was Say Something about Child's Play because of the specificity of the poem and it's universality. Knowing Abani's personal history as a political prisoner in his native Nigeria would normally cause a reader to assume that the subject for this poem is strife in his native country. However the imagery of a child being mutilated/tortured/attacked by a soldier is endemic to all cases of colonialist regimes. In this way the poet's personal cultural context of the poem takes on a real liminal space, an in-between-ness of being vital and at the same time not at all necessary to the work. That amorphous presence of culture reacts to the very direct language of the poem creating a dialog between the poem's percieved cultural context and the reader's own personal cutural history that I really like.

The other thing that really drew me to this piece was the sense of time as malleable and shifting within the poem. In the first stanza the boy's age is clearly defined in relation to the soldier. The first line of the second stanza seems to imply that the soldier's next question is immediate in following the boy's answer but the boy's age shifts, his age is no longer defined as a number instead it is in relation to something else, something we as the reader cannot possibly know. Is the aging metaphorical, emotional, mental or have we moved physically in time to a new wave of oppression, a new colonialist regime? Then in the third stanza the soldier is no longer asking to maim the boy, instead a body part is offered, a routine, known, expected, disrupted with this offering. And the boy's age is even more indirectly referenced only with the admittance of having seen too much.

Both poems made me think of war in broader contexts of waves of violence not just physical but emotional and societal. The poems seemed to me to share a core question of at what point have we seen too much? And what do we do at that point?

--Naamen Tilahun