Themes of illusion and perspective underlie Yusef Komunyakaa’s “Facing It,” a poem that emerges out of his experience as a war correspondent in the Vietnam War. During the Vietnam War, Komunyakaa was a writer and managing editor of The Southern Cross, a military newspaper published by and for the Americal Division of the US Army. Unlike other war correspondents for independent newspapers, which were often highly critical of the war, Komunyakaa occupied the relatively unique position of being a journalist for the military.
In a 1990 interview with Vicente F. Gotera, Komunyakaa explains that his job as a war correspondent in 1969-70 was when he first started writing, and that he began writing poetry a few years later in 1973 at the University of Colorado. It took him 14 years after the war, however, to begin writing poetry about his time in Vietnam. Considering these different influences on Komunyakaa’s evolution as a writer—a war correspondent first, and a poet second—we may consider his war poems as uniquely positioned to comment on the differences in language, intention, and perspective in different kinds of war-writing. How might this poem’s attention to the slippage between illusion and truth reflect on his wartime experience? How is language used in this poem to spin illusions, and how is it used to divulge truth(s)?
