Like Shel, I've been sitting with this piece by Perez-Wendt for a few days, wondering how it is we are meant to access the poem. “We Are Not the Crime / We Are the Evidence” is such a pointed title that it took me many reads to even begin absorbing what was going on inside the frame. I think perhaps the title is supposed to have that effect, the proverbial “stick ‘em up” moment of having a gun pointed in your direction. When I read it, I froze. I couldn’t remember anything that happened afterwards. I couldn’t really tell you any specifics about the initial encounter of the title, either, except to say that I sucked in my breath. Perez-Wendt turns the tables here, puts us (the general, the canon, the capital-u Us) on defense for once.
What’s interesting about the beginning of the poem is that without the title, it would be an easy access point. Like Shel mentioned, there is an intuitive understanding of a nursery rhyme here, or at the very least, a sing-song sway between punctuation. “They’ve dusted us / From toe to top / Well nigh / Two hundred years;” and we breathe, then begin again. She accomplishes this by shortening that third line and accenting in a way that drives forward motion. “Well nigh” (as well as “All over us” in the next section) has a forward lean to it, a momentum that helps us through “Two hundred years;” (and through “Uncontroverted, clear;”). Perez-Wendt is a master in these moments, truly schooling the form and working it for her benefit.
What’s happening while she’s linguistically manipulating us? The dusting of a people, specifically Hawaiian I think, over the entire period of the missionary occupation leading up to and through the (unconsensual) annexing by the United States in 1898. The searching for blame, even today, as Hawaiian is still rapidly eaten up and swallowed away by the imperialist language that, while no longer “required” there, has injected its colonial venom and is slowly wiping out history. “They’ve dusted us,” the speaker says, only to find “their fingerprints / All over us / Uncontroverted, clear.”
This is not a new story – the searching for a group or people or person or culture or whatever to blame for “substandard” or “uncivilized” or “urban” or “inner-city” living, only to find that the ones trying to point the finger are, in fact, the ones to blame.
“They’ve kicked the chair / From under us,” the speaker continues, “Acquitted themselves well.” The repetition that follows supports this recycling of history. The powerful and imperialistic repeatedly pull out the chair from under an area or people they have invited to “sit down,” if you will, and then look the other way when the area or people fall on their asses.
Perez-Wendt goes on, using the same imagery, but changing the metaphor of the chair. It goes from representing bailing on some kind of assistance, to stealing the chair (& thereby appropriating, like the US appropriates so many cultures for monetary gain). She doesn’t bother with the rest; there is too much to list. In the last two repetitions of this impacted triplet, we finally get the emotion. “Ignored the tolling bell,” whether that is a warning bell or an alarm bell, it doesn’t matter because both apply to the US, who has both continued to take from a country well past the point of subsistence, and continued to disregard requests (or rulings or laws or peace treaties) to stop its abuse after they’ve been made. They’ve “Consigned themselves to hell,” she writes, before volunteering “Etc. etc.” The poem doesn’t need more examples at this point, but including the “etc” really drives home that she would need more pages than available to really get into the wrongdoings. What’s important here, though, is that she has made her point that “We Are Not the Crime / We Are the Evidence.”
Just as a final note, there’s an interesting juxtaposition here of Us & Them. The “They”s aren’t clear and I’m not sure they have to be. Who is on Hawaii’s side except Hawaii? The United States (post-annexation) is what made Hawaii into a tourist destination, crowding its islands with vacationers and co-opting its culture for profit. The title infuses us with the idea of cause and effect and it would seem that Perez-Wendt is arguing that the only effects are visible in Hawaii, making everything else a cause. I only mention this because the “They” has multiple identities in this poem, showing up in a variety of faces and roles, while the “Us” stays the same. Even within the repetition, the Us never changes, but the lines including They are always different. Great technique, I think, for showing the tally marks building against Us.
