The Vietnam Veterans Memorial (Symbol)
The setting of the poem is the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington DC. Memorials are intended to be symbols, and this one represents both the dead soldiers of the Vietnam War through the 58,022 names, and, through its reflective surface, the surviving veterans—the war’s living memorials. The Memorial’s dual symbolism is expanded by the speaker’s personal experience of being caught between memory and the present, the dead and the living, as he confronts the memorial wall.
The Wall’s Reflective Properties (Motif)
In the right conditions, the wall can present as clear a reflection as a mirror. But the quality of the reflected image changes with different angles and lighting, the result being that people can be reflected clearly in one moment, and be ghostlike and distorted in the next. Komunyakaa plays with this unique reflective quality throughout the poem to symbolize the illusory nature of the boundaries between the living and the dead, the past and present, truth and fiction.
The Speaker’s Face (Symbol)
The opening words of the poem, “My black face fades,” underline the importance of race in this encounter. The speaker is standing close to the wall of the Vietnam War Memorial, staring head-on, and his reflection in the polished black granite disappears and reappears depending on his place in relation to it. Several kinds of slippage are gestured to in this disappearing and reappearing: the fragility of his life, how memories of the past coexist with the present moment, and how the unique plight of Black veterans of the Vietnam War is in turn visible and invisible.
Andrew Johnson (Allegory)
At the time the speaker visits the memorial, there are 58,022 names engraved into the wall. Only one of the dead soldiers is mentioned by name: Andrew Johnson. He was a young Black American soldier who served in the 9th Division and died in 1967 at the age of 19 in Vietnam. It is unclear how well, if at all, Yusef Komunyakaa knew Andrew Johnson, but they both grew up in Bogalusa, Louisiana.
None of this biographical detail, however, is relayed in the poem, which allows the name “Andrew Johnson” to also connote President Andrew Johnson. Johnson became president following the assassination of Abraham Lincoln, and his famous racism and mishandling of the immediate post-war Reconstruction period led to his impeachment in 1868, but not before his actions and inactions had wide-reaching negative consequences for the freedom of Black Americans. Thus, the name Andrew Johnson in the poem functions as an allegory for the pernicious legacy of racism in American policy, both domestic and foreign.
The Woman Brushing Her Son’s Hair (Symbol)
The very last image of the poem is that of a woman who is brushing her son’s hair. However, from the perspective of the speaker seeing her reflection, an optical illusion is created in which she looks as though she is trying to erase the names engraved into the stone. So the revelation that she is brushing back her son’s hair—an ordinary, affectionate gesture—embodies the shock of returning to normal life after the war. And the dual gesture of trying to erase names (bringing the dead back to life) and brushing her son’s hair (taking care of the living) points to the struggles and responsibilities of those who live on.
