A History of American Literature

818 The American Century: Literature since 1945

think need war.” The relentless series of questions weaves a web of suspicion, a sense

of forces at work below the surface of events that are all the more unnerving for

remaining shadowy, resolutely unnamed. “Somebody Blew Up America” verges on

the paranoid in its conspiratorial reading of 9/11 and its multiple contexts; at times,

it even topples over the edge, as when it appears to implicate the State of Israel in the

terrorist attacks. What rescues the poem, however, is the tidal force of its rhetoric

and that energy of purpose that characterizes so many radical American texts. At the

end, the word “who” on which the poem turns metamorphoses into “whoooo,” the

cry, we are told, of “an Owl exploding / In your life in your brain in your self:” an owl

with the capacity to see in the darkness and hunt down its prey. Rage there is in

“Somebody Blew Up America,” certainly, bewilderment and a sense of betrayal, but

there is also, finally, hope. “We hear the questions rise,” the poem concludes. Those

questions might, the suggestion is, lead to the right answers so that, like the owl, “we”

too can see through the dark – the darkness of history that is blanketing both past

and present crises – and discover just who that “somebody” is.

In “Alabanza: In Praise of Local 100,” Martín Espada, like Bidart and Baraka, uses

a flowing free verse line and idiomatic speech, incremental repetition, and insistent

rhythms. There are further connections with the Baraka poem, in particular. In

“Somebody Blew Up America,” as elsewhere in his poetry, Baraka deploys the

aesthetic tools of the black community, African-American verbal and rhythmic

forms, to embed his voice in a broader tradition and so communicate the sense that

the poet is speaking for more than just himself. Similarly, in “Alabanza,” Espada

rehearses the oral traditions of Hispanic culture, as well as the long line of Whitman,

to pay tribute to “the 43 members of Hotel Employees Local 100, working at the

Windows on the World restaurant who lost their lives in the attack on the World

Trade Center.” Like other poets steeped in the Hispanic tradition, Espada creates a

cultural space in his poem where convergence and mestizaje or mixing can take

place. Within this space, he skillfully walks a tightrope between commemoration

and celebration, honoring all the victims of 9/11 by focusing on one specific loss.

The key word repeated here is “praise,” as the poet honors certain individuals lost on

September 11, 2001: “the cook with the shaven head,” the busboy, “the waitress who

heard the radio in the kitchen / and sang to herself about a man gone.” Weaving

together an intricate network of images, a metaphorical web spun around intimations

of light, craft, and music, Espada realizes what is called, at one point in the poem,

“the chant of nations:” a song dedicated to workers drawn from all over the world to

work at a place where they “could squint and almost see their world.” What is

remarkable about this poem is how its sense of the World Trade Center, and by

implication the United States, as a cultural interface is slowly but relentlessly

globalized: the closing lines shift to the war in Afghanistan but continue the theme

of intercultural dialogue. What is equally remarkable is the oracular tone of the

poem, mixing grief and joy, elegy and prophecy, in a voice that seems to come out of

a community rather than a single person. “When the war began,” the poem concludes,

“two constellations of smoke” drifted toward and spoke to each other. “One said

with an Afghan tongue: / Teach me to dance. We have no music here.” To which, we

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