Summary
Beginning with the words “My black face fades,” the poem immediately locates us in the first-person perspective of its Black narrator. Though the poem doesn’t identify the speaker, we gather from context that it is written from the author’s perspective. The first five lines reveal the high emotional stakes of the speaker’s encounter with his reflection in the “black granite,” as he struggles to hold back tears. A confrontational relationship is established between the speaker and his reflection, which “fades” and “hides” before his eyes. This subtle alienation from his reflection is maintained throughout the poem, as in lines 6-7: “My clouded reflection eyes me / like a bird of prey…”
In the fifth line of the poem, when the speaker vacillates between the metaphors “I’m stone,” and “I’m flesh,” we witness a slippage between his body, its reflection, and the Vietnam Veterans Memorial itself. This three-way conflict is maintained throughout the poem. The speaker attributes a separate power and agency to the memorial, and to the reflections in it. In lines 8-12, depending on which way the speaker turns, the memorial wall either “lets [him] go” or subsumes him “inside” it. The speaker is transfixed by how, moment to moment, changes in light and shadow transform the reflections in the wall. But while his encounter with the memorial has one foot in the present, it has another foot in the past, and the wartime memories constantly threaten to surface.
The past begins to bubble up halfway through the poem in lines 14-16, when the speaker scans the 58,022 names engraved in the memorial wall. His emotional investment in these names—the dead and missing from the Vietnam War—is evident in his attention to their vast number. He admits that he half-expects to find his own name among the listed dead. But he did survive the war, and the name he recognizes on the wall is not his own but that of Andrew Johnson. We know from context that Andrew Johnson must be a dead soldier, but without other biographical information, the name is also familiar as that of President Andrew Johnson.
In lines 17-18, after the speaker reaches out to touch the name Andrew Johnson, he “see[s] the booby trap’s white flash.” This is the first and last direct flashback to the speaker’s memories of the war, and may be considered a climax of the poem. The rest of the poem details different illusory images that he sees reflected in the memorial. Following the recognition of Andrew Johnson’s name, the speaker’s eye is caught by the names of the dead shimmering on a woman’s blouse, merging with her reflection in the wall. The speaker is surprised that “when she walks away / the names stay on the wall,” indicating the power of the wall’s optical illusions which blend and blur the scene. The next three lines deepen this sense of disorientation, moving from abstract impressions to concrete recognition as “brushstrokes” flash into view, coalesce into a bird’s wings, and he finally recognizes what he’s seeing as “the sky. A plane in the sky.”
In lines 25-27, the reflection of a white veteran floats towards the speaker’s own before “his pale eyes / look through mine.” The psychological impact of this visual effect is represented in the following metaphor: “I’m a window.” We understand that the speaker doesn’t feel seen by the white vet’s reflection, feeling instead as if he’s been rendered invisible, clear as the glass of a windowpane. As he watches the white veteran’s reflection, it looks to the speaker as though “he’s lost his right arm / inside the stone,” evocative of the physical toll of war on its survivors. The final lines of the poem offer up one last visual illusion to be dispelled upon closer look. It appears as though a woman reflected in the wall is trying to erase the names of the dead, an alarming and aggrieved gesture. A moment later, he recognizes the truth: “she’s brushing a boy’s hair.”
Analysis
“My black face fades,” the poem begins, establishing in four words three of the poem’s significant themes.
The first is the significance of race to the poem’s narrative, asserting the difference of the author’s experience as a Black veteran of the Vietnam War from his white fellow soldiers. In a 2018 interview, Komunyakaa attested that the racial prejudices of American soldiers were most evident “in the rear,” in the off-hours of “drinking and trying to forget the war.” De-facto segregation outside of the battlefield is recalled by many Black veterans of the war, and discrimination in many guises, from the disproportionate number of Black soldiers sent to the front lines, to those denied support by Veterans Affairs after the war.
The second theme introduced is of “color” more abstractly. “Facing It” is laden with symbolic conflicts between light and dark, lucidity and opacity. Words like “black,” “white,” “night,” “light,” “pale,” “clouded,” and “smoke” comprise the visual language of this poem. The symbolic associations of these words add further layers of drama and meaning. The poem is visually both “black and white” and shades of grey; the speaker’s feelings about the memorial and the war are both clear-cut and opaque.
The last theme emerges with the word “fades,” and introduces us to the poem’s fascination with the instability of the bodily. Though “Facing It” never veers into the grotesque of “body horror,” the mutability of the body is consistently dramatized in the transformations and distortions of people’s reflections in the memorial wall.
The oft-praised musicality of Komunyakaa’s writing is most evident in the assonance and rhythm of the first five lines of the poem. We might consider the metaphorical paradox of “I’m stone. I’m flesh” in the fifth line to exemplify the poem’s operative tension between the speaker and his reflection. The speaker is in conflict with himself, a dynamic visible in his dissociation from his own reflection in the memorial wall. The optical illusions produced in the memorial’s reflective surface seem to give his reflection—and the memorial itself—a mind of its own, as we see in the first 13 lines of the poem. His reflection eyes him dangerously “like a bird of prey”; he is “inside” the memorial and then the stone “lets him go,” only to absorb him “again.”
If we consider his reflection as “reflecting on” his image of himself, and the memorial as representative of the war, then these emotional dynamics become more legible as such. Even his fairly concrete explanation of the wall’s optical effects—it “depend[s] on the light / to make a difference” becomes laden with signification. In what ways does “light make a difference” to this poem? Idiomatically, to shed light on something is to reveal the truth. The changing light throughout the poem, and the illusions it creates and dispels, resonate with ideas of truth-telling. Looking also to the juxtaposition between the speaker’s “black face” and the “white vet’s…pale eyes,” the poem invites us to consider along racial lines how “light[ness] makes a difference.”
Halfway through the poem, themes of mortality and human fragility become overt. As the speaker scans the 58,022 names of the dead engraved in the wall, he admits that he half-expects to find his own name among them. With this admission, we can link the instability of his reflection in the wall to how fragile and unlikely he feels his life to be. There is an evident parallel between the unreality of the images reflected in the wall and the unreal feeling of being one of the survivors.
In lines 17-18, “I touch the name Andrew Johnson; / I see the booby trap’s white flash,” the parallelism of the sentence structure (“I touch the… I see the”) is reinforced by the semi-colon that links the two ideas. Andrew Johnson’s name brings back the speaker’s memory of a wartime explosion. In a way, the flashback may be considered misleading, for the semi-colon suggests that the speaker might have witnessed Andrew Johnson’s death in that “white flash.” Yet from biographical information, we learn that Andrew Johnson served in a different division, and died two years before the author enlisted. This conflation, then, is more emotional than factual; it ties the speaker’s private experiences of the war to the fates of these names on public display. The parallel drawn in these two lines is between Andrew Johnson and the speaker himself; what the two young men share (hometown, age, race) stands in stark contrast to what they don’t (one dead, the other alive). Preserving Andrew Johnson’s name at the center of the poem is a covert act of empathy that transforms the poem itself into a memorial.
The rest of the poem details a series of illusory images reflected on the wall, developing the motif of “reflection” in its multiple meanings through the poem’s conclusion. The names of the dead seem to have inscribed themselves on the blouse of a woman, as though she were herself a tombstone. The speaker observes that when she walks away the names remain on the wall, his faint surprise revealing the persuasiveness of these false reflections. In the next three lines, the speaker's vision widens to take in the natural landscape behind him as it is reflected in the wall: the sky with passing birds and planes. Indirectly and in fragments, the speaker is piecing together an image of the world “outside” the memorial—the world he lives in, and yet from which he feels estranged. The intermingling of the memorial’s disorienting psychological impact and optical effects is one of this poem’s great strengths. The staccato repetition of “The sky. A plane in the sky” reveals how strange and revelatory ordinary life becomes in proximity to war, even when the war has been diluted into memory and memorial.
The image of the white veteran floating closer to the speaker’s image on the wall, and then looking through him as though he were a “window,” is emblematic of how the poem represents emotional truths through visual imagery. Being rendered invisible, unseen, the author points to the willful ignorance of Black soldiers’ struggles on the part of their fellow white soldiers, and how systemic dynamics are replicated in interpersonal relationships. While the speaker doesn’t feel seen by the white veteran, he sees and recognizes the man’s suffering: “He’s lost his right arm / inside the stone.” This evocative image is an example of how the poem personifies the memorial wall as having an agency of its own. The wall functions here as a metonym for the war, and the way that the stone traps and distorts visitors’ images alludes to the way the war damaged peoples’ bodies. However false or exaggerated the image of losing his arm inside the stone may be, it is grounded by the reality of how many soldiers lost their limbs, if not their lives; a reality that isn’t hyperbolic at all.
Like the image of the veteran who lost his arm inside the stone, the fraught encounter between the memorial and its visitors can be extrapolated to the war’s survivors grappling with the war’s legacy. The poem’s narrative is deceptively simple: though grounded in one man’s momentary encounter with the memorial, on another level it functions allegorically as a broader story about survivors confronting loss and grief. The parallelism in the final image of the poem exemplifies this double narrative, as the speaker interprets the gesture of a woman’s reflection as her “trying to erase names,” before he realizes that she’s just “brushing a boy’s hair.” In the figure of this woman, the poem ties together past and present, mourning and moving on. And in the figure of the boy, who belongs to the next generation too young to have experienced the war, the poem at its close gestures to the future.
