Facing It Literary Elements

The speaker is a Black American man who was a soldier during the Vietnam War. The poem is written in the first-person point of view.

The poem is written in free verse without any regular meter or rhyme scheme.

Similes: “My clouded reflection eyes me / Like a bird of prey” and “letters like smoke.”

Metaphors: “I’m a window” and “I’m stone. I’m flesh.”

Alliterative phrasing in the opening line helps capture the reader’s attention: “My black face fades.”

Assonance is present in the jump from "granite" in the second line to "dammit" in the fourth. Their proximity to each other amplifies the hard, forceful qualities of the words.

War poetry/African-American poetry/Contemporary poetry

The Vietnam Veteran’s Memorial in Washington, D.C., sometime in the early 1980s

Observant, reflective, conflicted

Protagonist: the speaker. Antagonist: the Vietnam War, the devastating toll of which is felt in every line of this poem.

There are several major conflicts at play in this subtly complex poem. We might understand some of them as operative contrasts in the poem between the living and the dead, the past and the present. The speaker is pulled between the names of the dead and his own living reflection, and finds himself suspended between the present, where birds and planes and strangers pass in and out of view, and his memories of the war.

There is also the conflict of his “Black face” and the “white vet” whose reflection he sees in the wall, a black/white contrast represented in a number of ways throughout the poem. These include the bright light on the black granite ("the profile of night / slanted against morning"); the “white flash” of the booby trap in his memory and the “black mirror” in which all the visitors confront themselves; and the dual referents of the name Andrew Johnson, which signifies a dead Black soldier and a dead white racist president.

The climax occurs at the halfway point of the poem when, half-expecting to find his own name among the dead, he comes across Andrew Johnson’s name instead: “I touch the name Andrew Johnson; I see the booby trap's white flash.” Confronted with his life and Johnson's death, he immediately recalls the flash of an explosion, driving home the unlikeness of his survival and the heaviness of what he carries with him.

The highly emotional poem concludes on an understated image that gains power from its simplicity and gentleness, in contrast with his memories of the lurid violence of war: “she’s brushing a boy’s hair.”

The only name on the wall that is mentioned is Andrew Johnson, which carries with it an allusion to the vice president who succeeded to the presidency following the assassination of Abraham Lincoln. A slave-owner before the Civil War, Johnson opposed secession on the basis of its perceived futility, but held white supremacist beliefs and was partly responsible for the unraveling of civil-rights protections promised to Black Americans in the post-Civil War Reconstruction period. Congress overrode President Johnson's veto for the first time in American history to pass the Civil Rights Act of 1866, and impeached him in 1868, but not before Southern states had passed enduring laws restricting the freedom of Black Americans. Ironically, the man actually referred to by the name "Andrew Johnson" was a teenage Black American soldier who died in Vietnam, and who grew up like Komunyakaa in Bogalusa, Louisiana.

The Vietnam Veterans Memorial functions as a kind of metonym for the Vietnam War itself, as we see in the line “I'm inside the Vietnam Veterans Memorial / again,” where confronting his reflection in the memorial elicits memories of being “inside” the war “again,” and the line "He's lost his right arm / inside the stone," where "the stone" alludes to the war.

The mirror-like surface of the wall reflects the speaker's face back to him, and reflects the faces and bodies of those around him. The power of this reflective quality to make the memorial seem alive and human is partially demonstrated through personifying language that attributes agency to the wall: “I turn / this way—the stone lets me go.”

The extent to which the reflective surface can play tricks on the eyes and the mind is achieved in part through hyperbolic descriptions of the optical illusions: “He’s lost his right arm / Inside the stone.”