Yusef Komunyakaa published his works during an era that is characterized by different events. Events of constant change and fast progression, instability of identity and culture, globalization, postcolonialism, and use of virtual reality are eminent during this period. Major occurrences during this era are Civil Rights Movement in 1954, Vietnam War in 1955, and the Watergate Scandal in the 1970s. Post-Modernism is most evident as the literary period during Komunyakaa's works. In Susan Farrell's "Vonnegut and Postmodernism", Farrell explains the postmodernism period as an era that is characterized by de-canonization; blur lines between high and low art., irony, indeterminacy, and metafictional; self-reflexivity. W.E.B. Du Bois "The Souls of Black Folk", and Claude McKay's "If We Must Die" are works noted during Komunyakaa's period.
In the poem "Facing It" by American author Yusef Komunyakaa, the author uses metaphor, imagery, and symbolism in order to express to his audience the close experience of making his journey to the Vietnam War Veteran's Memorial in Washington, DC. Through the use of these various literary devices, the speaker is not only able to draw the audience into the history of the poem, but also shares his involvement in the war, and place the events of the war inside the lives and hearts of his audience. Komunyakaa, the speaker, uses symbolism to help the readers identify a similarity between himself and the color of the memorial. The author uses a very significant choice of word selection to emphasize his ethnicity in the opening line. In these lines the speaker repeats the word "black" twice, "My black face fades,hiding inside the black granite" (1-2), in connection both to his own skin tone and the memorial's color. By this action, Yusef identifies himself as an African American and forges a link between himself and the memorial through similarities of color.