Dien Cai Dau by Yusef Komunyakaa

First published: 1988

Type of poem: Poetic sequence

The Poems

The forty-three poems of Dien Cai Dau focus powerfully on familiar Vietnam War-era images, nightmares, and moral dilemmas that the United States at large still mulls over. Yusef Komunyakaa’s subtle lyrical poems also provoke larger questions: When is killing right or wrong in wartime? How does one define a moral act in such chaos? How do “loving” relations (between men and women, between comrades in arms, between combatants) mutate in such conditions? What is the lasting effect on the survivors, the culture, and the land?

Komunyakaa, as a former combatant, chooses not to moralize. Though haunted by his Vietnam experience, he is not brutalized or desensitized. The poems (many of which reappear in the Pulitzer Prize-winning NeonVernacular, 1993) show the poet remembering past battle scenes and grappling with unresolved moral questions that filter the present with ghostlike intensity. The phrase dien cai dau (loosely translatable as “crazy head”) refers to the dizzying effects of war on all participants. Komunyakaa shows soldiers as “crazy heads” reacting “logically” to the illogical chaos of war. The war between cultures (black and white, Asian and American, men and women) is mediated by the observing poet, himself one of those struggling to make sense of the strangely beautiful but horrifying events of a very peculiar war.

Komunyakaa avoids abstractions. Poem after poem provides the voice of the simple soldier, fearful yet fascinated amid killing and destruction. “You and I Are Disappearing” presents a recurring memory of a girl burning to death in a linked series of metaphorical images: “She burns like a cattail torch/ dipped in gasoline./ She glows like the fat tip/ of a banker’s cigar,/ silent as quicksilver./ A tiger under a rainbow/ at nightfall.” The end of the poem carries Komunyakaa’s emotional response: “She burns like a burning bush/ driven by a godawful wind.” The “godawful wind” is the war itself, fueled by ill-defined, largely out-of-control forces.

The poems illustrate the ironies of this confused war. As soldiers view a Bob Hope United Service Organizations (USO) show in “Communiqué,” inflamed lust contrasts with the horrifying “show” of war the soldiers cannot forget. “[W]e want the Gold Diggers,/ want a flash of legs/ through the hemorrhage of vermilion, giving us/ something to kill for.” When the show ends and the music of desire has dissipated, the sitting soldiers hold their helmets “like rain-polished skulls.”

Despite the carnage and destruction, all is not despair—for there are survivors. Those fated to live, even for the moment, cultivate a mystical, eclectic religiosity that borders on superstition. Belief in ghosts and higher beings helps to explain the shocking present. In “Thanks,” the soldier wonders about this ill-defined presence, possibly a god, that has kept him alive: “What made me spot the monarch/ writhing on a single thread/ tied to a farmer’s gate,/ holding the day together/ like an unfingered guitar string,/ is beyond me.” Though he refuses to codify the force into a recognizable theology, he believes fully that “something” protects him while allowing others to die. Intuitively connecting the seen with the unseen is a means of staying alive, of “living right.” When all rules are suspended, new connections freely combine in patterns of thought that do not necessarily disappear when veterans return home. In “Report from the Skull’s Diorama,” the soldier, now at home, relives a battle scene when he sees a photograph used by the enemy as propaganda (“VC didn’t kill/ Dr. Martin Luther King”). He sees again the chopper leaving the battle zone, strewn with bodies and propaganda “leaflets/ clinging to the men & stumps,/ waving to me across the years.” The meaning of the scene and the rightness and wrongness of actions are still somehow superfluous, overwhelmed in the present, at home, by haunting images.

Many poems in Dien Cai Dau depict the hyperalert fear emanating from life-threatening experiences. With lives on the line, the soldiers are open, their pores aware. “Red Pagoda” illustrates how the seemingly indefensible brutality of war can become inherently sane when placed in context. When the soldiers, fresh from a firefight, find they are unscathed, they destroy a pagoda in a real and symbolic frenzy in order to kill the fear and sense of frustration imposed by the war: “in our joy, we kick/ & smash the pagoda/ till it’s dried blood/ covering the ground.”

To stay alive, the soldier must be aware of the environment and all that lives there. Amid snakes, monkeys, and exotic plants live the Vietcong, who are there to kill Americans. In this natural world, insights are needed that cannot be found on linear military maps. In “A Greenness Taller Than Gods,” Komunyakaa asks, “When will we learn/ to move like trees move?” Each plant, each shadow is ominous and fascinating. Even the grass they walk on aims “for the family jewels.” A soldier cries over the death of a boy: “He won’t stay dead, dammit!” Because this intense world produces memories that “won’t stay down,” all of life, both past and present, remains alive.

Forms and Devices

Komunyakaa, a master of the free-verse form and the editor of several volumes of jazz poetry, follows the internal rhythm of the line, “hearing” the power of the image and tailoring the meaning for effect, in terms of both style and tone. In “Please,” a poem from Toys in a Field (1986), he displays the sense of the dance as he describes a fellow soldier running to his death: “You were a greenhorn, so fearless,/ even foolish, & when I said go, Henry,/ you went dancing on a red string/ of bullets from that tree line/ as it moved from a low cloud.”

In Dien Cai Dau, Komunyakaa focuses on narratives composed of imagery-rich scenes filled with color and sensory detail. He is not afraid to intersperse action with matter-of-fact dialogue. In “Fragging,” as five men “pull straws/ under a tree on a hillside,” one says, “Hell,/ the truth is the truth.” The statement is specific to the moment at hand, yet it provokes larger questions that linger through the poem. What is the truth in war? Who counts and who does not? What acts are justifiable? When the fifth soldier “a finger/ into a metal ring, he’s married/ to his devil.” That juxtaposition of “married” to the “devil” is Komunyakaa’s comment on the scene. When the grenade explodes, “Everything/ breaks for green cover,/ like a hundred red birds/ released from a wooden box.” The colorful freshness of the metaphor contrasts with the messiness of the moral dilemmas. The metaphorical phrases function as action photographs, the moment frozen at its most significant stage. The color and beauty mesmerize, the very transparency of the language making the horror of the actions, as well as its peculiar logic, all too clear.

The metaphorical language captures the surreal immediacy of action while also suggesting that larger themes are at work. When Komunyakaa tells the reader, in “Ambush,” that “A tiger circles us, in his broken cage/ between sky & what’s human,” he describes a real creature stalking soldiers in the jungle. On another level, the broken cage functions as a metaphor for the jungled chaos itself, and the tiger stands in as the looming violence the soldiers fight against, both within themselves and without. When Komunyakaa remembers “the cough of a mortar tube,” the weapon is specific and real, and yet it is also a metaphor for the technological horror that threatens to obliterate all semblance of humanity.

Like a jazz composer, Komunyakaa routinely juxtaposes the seemingly incongruous. This coming together of unusual images (of beauty and horror, of nature’s serenity and war’s destruction) forces the reader to make surprising connections and gives the poems a surreal immediacy that reverberates. In “2527th Birthday of the Buddha,” a monk leaps from a motorcycle, very much alive. Within moments, “he burned like a bundle of black joss sticks.” The final line, “Waves of saffron robes bowed to the gasoline can,” links the modern motorcycle and the gasoline can with the “ancient” Buddhist robes, showing, without explication, the crash of cultures as the crass modern world bangs against ancient dignity in an absurd struggle. The strange beauty of the saffron robes combines with a horror beyond words.

Succinct detail shows the soldier’s intimacy with the natural world and past actions. In “Camouflaging the Chimera,” the dreamy peace between actions is illustrated with quiet, fluid pacing. “We hugged bamboo & and leaned/ against a breeze off the river,/ slow-dragging with ghosts.” The originality of the figurative language and the stacking of image upon image carries the meaning of the poem.

The brevity of the lines also conveys movement. Because few lines contain more than five words, imagery is highlighted and never strays far from the moment or strains for effect. Imagery is exact to the moment and yet reveals more beyond the immediate moment, such as the scene of rape in “Re-creating the Scene”: “They hold her down/ with their eyes,/ taking turns, piling stones/ on her father’s grave.” The pacing is immediate, phrased in active verbs and everyday language yet conveying the sacrilege, the desecration of more than simple flesh. Verb acting upon verb produces the compounding image symbolizing the larger rape the war is committing on the soldiers, the Vietnamese people, and the land itself.

Isolating a single scene with photographic clarity reveals the contradictions soldiers faced daily. In “A Break from the Bush,” the linked, dancing fragments of meaning build and confuse even while they demonstrate the irony of a soldier’s fate: “CI, who in three days will trip/ a fragmentation mine, runs after the ball/ into the whitecaps,/ laughing.” Komunyakaa mixes a memory that captures the laughter and the beauty of the ocean waves with the ominous reality of death and war.

A sense of the fantastic pervades the imagery. In “Prisoners,” the captured Vietcong look “like/ marionettes hooked to strings of light.” Those puppets, propped up by an unreal light, at first merely fascinate. Further reflection reveals their real significance, for all the soldiers are mere puppets fighting for autonomy against larger forces. The rhythm of movement at the end of “Jungle Surrender” links a series of images from the story of the moment that ache for later reflection: “Moving toward what waits behind the trees./ the prisoner goes deeper into himself, away/ from how a man’s heart divides him, deeper/ into the jungle’s indigo mystery & beauty.” This later reflection is the reason for the writing of these poems.

Bibliography

Aubert, Alvin. “Yusef Komunyakaa: The Unified Vision, Canonization and Humanity.” African American Review 27, no. 1 (Spring, 1993): 119-123.

Collins, Michael. “Staying Human.” Parnassas: Poetry in Review 18/19, nos. 1/2 (November 1, 1993): 126-149.

Ehrhart, W. D. “Soldier-Poets of the Vietnam War.” In America Rediscovered: Essays on Literature and Film of the Vietnam War, edited by Owen W. Gilman and Lorrie Smith. New York: Garland, 1990.

Gotera, Vicente F. “’Depending on the Light’: Yusef Komunyakaa’s Dien Cai Dau.” In America Rediscovered: Critical Essays on Literature and Film of the VietnamWar, edited by Owen W. Gilman and Lorrie Smith. New York: Garland, 1990.

Salas, Angela. “Race, Human Empathy, and Negative Capability: The Poetry of Yusef Komunyakaa.” College Literature 30, no. 4 (Fall, 2003): 32-53.

Stein, Kevin. “Vietnam and the ’Voice Within’: Public and Private History in Yusef Komunyakaa’s Dien Cai Dau.” Massachusetts Review 36, no. 4 (December 1, 1995): 541-561.