politics and poetics 83from South-East Asia. These densely framed lyrics of testimony
form the basis of the volume Dien Cai Dau ( 1984 ).^57 Komunyakaa
describes the experience of writing the volume as cathartic, the
poems surfaced with images that ‘dredged up so much unpleasant
psychic debris. All the guilt and anger coalesced into a confused
stockpile of unresolved confl ict... I hadn’t forgotten a single
thread of evidence against myself.’^58 In his essay on the relationship
between poetry and music, Komunyakaa stresses that ‘the poem
is an action that attempts to defy structure as container or mould.
However it does embrace control (an artist has to know and respect
the instrument) in language.’^59 This element of control can be read
in Komunyakaa’s work as a detailed attempt to approach experi-
ence and history as a revisioning; poetry, the poet stresses, is not
‘a gush but a felt and lived syncopation’.^60 He adds that ‘revision
means to re-see, and at times it seems more accurate to say re-live
... How many ways can this tune be replayed?’^61
In ‘Camoufl aging the Chimera’ the inclusive pronoun ‘we’ is
used to map out shared action and strategy. Komunyakaa describes
the practicalities of jungle warfare as an attempt to weave ‘ourselves
into the terrain’ (p. 3 ). Given that the mythic chimera is often pic-
tured as a lion’s head, goat’s body and serpent’s tail, Komunyakaa’s
title stresses the creation of one body out of a collection of disparate
parts. The poem stresses that the manoeuvres of warfare are ulti-
mately a political enforcing and claiming of land. ‘Camoufl aging the
Chimera’ illustrates the duration of waiting in war and the move-
ment to an intense interiority. The soldiers wait for the enemy until
‘something almost broke inside us’ (p. 3 ). Komunyakaa’s poem
does not present an easily palpable anti-war message; instead the
poem meditates upon the defamiliarisation of the landscape. Before
the ambush the Viet Cong are depicted as ‘black silk’ (p. 3 ) and an
intense subjectivity is framed in the arresting impression of the sol-
dier’s waiting ‘as a world revolved / under each man’s eyelid’ (p. 4 ).
Komunyakaa’s war poetry presents a politically complex tes-
timony of the war. The poet questions the ideological and racial
confl icts that arise from an African-American fi ghting in an Asian
country for the USA at the close of the 1960 s. As Kevin Stein
observes, Dien Cai Dau questions the interrelationship between
domestic and foreign policy which for many Americans ‘remained