For a soldier coming home from the Vietnam War, and for many years later, it must be a life of constant relief, sadness, and guilt at having survived the dangers of combat. He must feel sadness for the friends and fellow soldiers who lost their lives. He must feel relief to be home to be alive. Finally, and most sadly, he must feel guilt over having lived through the war while other did not. In Yusef Komunyakaa's poem, "Facing It"," the poet uses conflicting images and symbols to express these conflicting feelings.
The speaker of the poem, whom the reader can assume is Komunyakaa himself, faces the Vietnam Veteran's Memorial Wall with all of these feelings. Komunyakaa uses the wall as a backdrop to express these feelings. In the poem, the wall is used as at times a window into the speaker's grief about the war, a reflection of his sadness. At other times, the poet uses the wall as a mirror into his feelings of guilt. The poem begins with the use of color to introduce the speaker and the setting. Komunyakaa, a Vietnam vet himself, describes seeing his black face in the glossy, black granite facade of the wall. The color black is mentioned twice in the first stanza of the poem. The speaker of the poem is introduced as a black man when the reader sees that his "black face fades, hiding inside the black granite "(713). His face fading shows that the former soldier is struggling with guilt over the war. He hides his black face in the unforgiving, rigid substance of the black granite, seemingly ashamed to be alive. .
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Then the speaker in the poem struggles to fight back his grief because he ". . .said I wouldn't, Damnit: no tears." The word "damnit represents the fact that the speaker is crying and he is upset that he is crying (713). This demonstration of emotion shows the reader just how strongly the soldier reacts to both his visit to the memorial and to what happened to him during the war.