The American Century: Literature since 1945 817performed a monstrous act. This is not about possible causes, but actual consequences
and necessary responses. Getting under the skin, in this context, involves a dream of
revenge: imagining an appropriate suffering, what punishment and pain might
begin to be an adequate measure of that monstrosity. “Curse” is a latterday jeremiad.
A long free verse line, incremental repetition, and elaborate verbal music are all
deployed, not just to denounce, but to damn those who reduced the Twin Towers to
rubble. “May what you have made descend upon you,” the poet prays, as he imagines
the terrorists buried under “one hundred and ten / floors,” dreams of the eyes of their
victims eating “like acid” into “the bubble of rectitude” they breathe in, or being
eaten up and spat out (“you are not food”) by the other dead who surround them.
The hell that the poet wishes for them is a disorienting mix of the literal and the
surreal, as the poet slips between the landscapes of twenty-first-century New York
City and a subterranean world where the dead eat the dead, which recalls the
paintings of Hieronymus Bosch. If one of the great functions of poetry is to allow a
voice to victims, then “Curse” memorably performs that function. It does not
attempt to fathom the possible reasons why horror occurs. It simply proclaims, and
declaims against, that horror. Austere, resistant to subtlety, the seeking out of
complex argument or metaphorical elaboration, it suggests that the least inappro-
priate response to trauma is the cry of the traumatized, setting down what they
might feel in starkly simple but deeply rhythmic terms.
In “Somebody Blew Up America” Amiri Baraka uses formal devices that are, in
many ways, similar to those of Bidart: a fluctuating free verse line, incremental
repetition, plain speech, and a pointedly direct address to the reader. This, however,
is a far longer poem – several hundred lines as opposed to seventeen. And the
perspective is radically different, a difference that is caught in the key word in either
poem. Bidart uses the word “may” over and over again, as he prays for what “may,”
he hopes, fall on the heads of the terrorists as punishment. For Baraka, the key,
repeated word, the verbal linchpin of the poem, is “who.” “All thinking people /
oppose terrorism / both domestic / & international,” his poem begins, “But one
should not / be used / To cover the other.” “Somebody Blew Up America” is, in effect,
concerned with the ubiquitous presence of “terror” in American life: not just the acts
of terrorism perpetrated by al-Qaeda and acts of counterterrorism performed by the
American government, but terror as an agency of power. So “terror” becomes a
blanket term for the apparatus of the state, the machinery of corporate control, the
various means by which, according to Baraka, the rich – both individuals and
nations – ensure that it is only they who will inherit the earth. This reading of 9/11
as another chapter in a continuing narrative of oppression does not mitigate its
obscenity. What it does do, however, is situate the events of one day in what looks
like an endless cycle of violence breeding further violence. This is history as a story
authored, which is to say totally controlled by, those in authority: in the United
States and elsewhere in the world, in the present but also the imperial past. That
history is read here, and communicated, as a series of rhetorical questions. “Who
bought the slaves, who sold them,” the poet asks, “Who have the colonies / Who stole
the most land / Who rule the world”; “Who own the oil,” Who need peace / Who youGGray_c05.indd 817ray_c 05 .indd 817 8 8/1/2011 7:31:47 PM/ 1 / 2011 7 : 31 : 47 PM