A Study Guide for Yusef Komunyakaa's "Facing It"

By Gale and Cengage

A Study Guide for Yusef Komunyakaa's "Facing It," excerpted from Gale's acclaimed Poetry for Students. This concise study guide includes plot summary; character analysis; author biography; study questions; historical context; suggestions for further reading; and much more. For any literature project, trust Poetry for Students for all of your research needs.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Cengage Learning - Gale
• Release date: Aug 19, 2016
• ISBN: 9781535823036

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Facing It

Yusef Komunyakaa

1988

Introduction

Yusef Komunyakaa’s poem Facing It describes a Vietnam War veteran’s painful experience of visiting the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, D.C. From interviews and biographical details, we can assume the speaker of the poem is Komunyakaa himself. Komunyakaa served in Vietnam from 1965 to 1967, and his memories of those years haunt him when he visits the memorial, causing him to question his own identity as a black, Vietnam War veteran and the kind of survivor he has become.

Told in the first person, Komunyakaa’s poem draws on the physical properties of the memorial sculpture itself to create a symbolic setting. He uses the capacity for the memorial’s mirror-like surface to create ghostly reflections of all that surround it to underline his own incapacity to reach emotional resolution concerning his war experience. Ironically, the memorial is popularly referred to as the wall because it is shaped like a wall; however, its nickname also signifies the emotional dead end many survivors of the war come up against when visiting the site. Throughout the poem, the speaker does double takes, thinking he has seen one thing but then seeing something else. His perceptual mistakes are actually memories from the war that get in his way of experiencing present time and space. Though he pledges to himself to be hard as stone, the speaker is overcome by grief as he looks at the more than 58,000 names of soldiers who died in the war or are missing in