Facing It By Yusef Komunyakaa

In Larry Lankton’s text, “Beyond the Boundaries” we gradually enter an unknown world that is frightening yet filled with immense beauty for miles. Due to the copper mining industry, a gradual increase of working class men and their families start to migrate to the unknown world with unsteady emotion, yet hope for a prosperous new life. In “Beyond the Boundaries”, Lankton takes us on a journey on how the “world below” transformed the upper peninsula into a functional and accepted new part of the world.

He struggles to internalize his emotions, telling himself he is stone, like the granite memorial, a strong and steady reminder of the past, but he fails as he realizes the difference between him and the memorial: he is a living human being. He shares the darkness, the blackness, with the granite memorial, yet he can feel the full impact of this connection whereas a granite memorial cannot itself feel the pain that it directly represents. The overall moral of the poems is fairly up front for the reader. It is that war is not how stories make it sound, it is not honorable and fun and glorious, it is gruesome, deadly, and changes the lives of many young men and women who still had a lot of life and innocence left in front of them, and now all they will have are the memories of death and their friends dying in front of them. As Komuyakaa face becomes clear it now serves as a direct reminder of the emotional impact of his surroundings upon him, through mirroring his own face and also by simultaneously illuminating his surroundings and his silhouetted existence within these surroundings, reminding him that he stands within the Vietnam Memorial. This effect is described within the (lines 8-13) His constant turning and moving from angle to angle also suggests emotion as he cannot view the

Everyday men and women die in the most brutal way possible away from their family either killed from gun shots or landmines and they do come back. But in caskets, as images like these emphasize the destruction of war and these snaps just show the side effects of humankind's worse anger being shown. In the Article “The Stranger in the Photo Is Me”, Donald M. Murray expresses how harsh it really was in the war and how it changed himself forever and not in a good way. Not to mention, that he describes the way he felt ready to go to war, maybe even excited, but he wishes that horror on no one “I would not wish for a child or grandchild of mine to undergo the blood test of war” as the sacrifice these men and women go through is undeniably tremendous

In the middle of the poem, the speaker arrives at the number of casualties from the war. When he reads this number he can’t believe that he is still alive. As he reads down the names he uses the visual imagery and simile to describe how he expected to find his own name in “letters like smoke” (line 16). This helps the reader understand how lucky the speaker felt about somehow escaping the war still alive. As he goes

In 1994, a conflict the US couldn't understand, between clans and tribes it didn't know, in a country where there were no national interests, occurred. The Rwandan War of 1994 did not deserve US intervention. There are four contentions on why the US should not have gotten involved in this Rwandan war. The Black Hawk Down incident, how the UN was there previously there, there being no Possible Gain, and having nothing to do with us. Through the examination of the novel, An Ordinary Man by Paul Rusesabagina, it is Obvious that these key points are valid.

I choose the first image as I believe it implies a stream of emotional values between a physically damaged child and a soldier spiritually broken because of the crushing scene. The pathos conveyed in the picture mixes the tragedy of war, the awfulness of tearing families, and the destruction of civilization. The fighter was holding the child as a mother holding her baby, the warrior forgot the mission he was sent to do and found himself a caring human for the innocent people. The man closed his eyes as a sign of misery and sorrow, hugged the child trying to give him/her love, care, warmth, and safety. I suppose that the man was thinking about how this baby could be his son, daughter, family, or himself and how lack of luck, the unfair life

Have you ever went back to a place that impacted your life or reminded you of something that did? How did it make you feel ? Yusef Komunyakaa's Poem "Facing It" is about exactly that. He tells a story of an African American veteran visiting the Vietnam Veteran Memorial Wall. Throughout the poem, Komunyakaa shows the struggles that black men had to go through, the impact that the reflection of their faces had on the men, and the feelings and emotions that were brought back when visiting the memorial.

Komunyakaa visits the memorial of all the fallen soldiers from the vietnam war, he starts to feel like he is apart of the memorial based off of the emotions that he had, when sculpting the names on the wall. He is overwhelmed at the amount of names that are written on the wall. He is showing his emotional distress when mourning over the names of the fallen soldiers. He told himself he would be strong enough to face the emotions of visiting the memorial, but he shortly

This significance is described in the next line as “the boobys trap’s white flash” which depicts the cause of Andrew Johnson’s death to be because of a bomb set off by the Vietcong. The thousands of names “shimmer on a woman’s blouse” again apply the use of light to describe another reflection off the stone which moves with the movements of the woman’s clothes. Unification is again brought up when the speakers sees the “white vet’s image floating,” the speaker is able to identify with people of another race who have experienced the same trauma he has. The use of floating gives the allusion of a dead body or ghost, but the war has taken his life from him so now he only lives. The “pale eyes” reinforce this because the veteran appears dead inside and almost lifeless when remembering the horrors he witnessed. The veteran “lost his right arm in the stone” refers again to light and how difference perceptions change who we view the world around us, and this depicts the sacrifices the veteran made for his country. Reflection is conveyed again with the “black mirror” when the speaker is watching a woman apparently attempting to efface the memorial of a name but in reality she is merely “brushing a boy’s hair.” The misconception regarding the woman’s actions show the speaker wishing to erase

A breath of fresh air is the first book written by Amulya Malladi. In 1984, when she was nine years old, her father was posted in the city of Bhopal. On the third of December, 1983 the city suffered The Bhopal Gas Tragedy that killed many people. When this gas tragedy occurred, she along with her family was staying at the Army Center which was a few kilometers away from the plant. Due to the wind that blew in a direction opposite to theirs, they remained unaffected by the gas leak. In the last half of the year 1984, she faced the Assassination of the then Prime Minister Indira Gandhi that led the country’s division in the name of religion and made her come to terms with the finality of death.

A person’s heritage and cultural identity may be lost when moving to a new country where the culture is different and other cultures are not easily accepted. In the short story “Hindus”, Bharati Mukherjee uses setting, characters and the plot to discuss what it is like to lose your cultural identity while being a visible minority in America. Mukherjee uses the plot to describe the events that take place in the main characters life that lead her to realize how different the culture and life is in the America’s. She also uses the characters as a way of demonstrating how moving away from one’s culture and heritage can change a person’s perspective and ways of thinking. Mukerjee also uses setting in her story to identity the physical differences in culture between living in India and America. Alike the setting and characters, the plot helps describe the loss of culture with a sequence of events.

I chose the poem “Facing It” to discuss. The first image I got was in the second line when he says hiding inside the black granite. I think that image is important because it lets you know that the person is not human. you can imagine somebody hiding inside something, somebody that is not alive maybe a ghost. Also when the poet says, “I turn this way the stone lets me go, I turned that way I’m inside the Vietnam Veterans Memorial again…” you can imagine the person as a ghost. without this key image you would not know or understand that it is a veteran who has died and is a ghost looking at his own memorial. “I touch the name and Andrew Johnson, I see the booby traps white Flash…”, this image is very important it let you know that he was a

Plot summary: Amir flashbacks to when he was twelve years old in Afghanistan. He lives with his father, Baba, and has two servants, Ali and Hassan, who are also a father and son duo. The latter two are Hazaras, Afghan’s minority, and as such, are subjected to racial slurs and cruelty. Amir and Hassan are playing when Assef, Kamal, and

The essay “The Naked Face” written by Malcom Gladwell is about the ability of recognizing the meaning behind someone’s facial expressions. He starts the essay with a life or death situation between an inner city police officer and a suspect that both are pointing guns at each other. The officer clearly has the right to shoot the suspect, but decided not to base on a hunch that the armed suspect was not a threat (Gladwell 24). Gladwell then demonstrates that the police officer is one out of a thousand people that scored really well on a psychology test to determine if someone is lying or telling the truth based on facial expressions (Gladwell 59). Gladwell’s essay then continues with

She makes an important point when trying to go beyond the female (otherness), by paying careful attention to differences among women themselves, and by putting emphasize on the multiple realties that women faces, and by that trying to uncover universalist interpretations (Parpart and Marchand 1995:6). She reveals the inadequacy of binary categories by showing us how power is defined in binary terms, between the people who have (men) and the people who do not (women). This is a consequence of seeing women as a homogenous group, and contributes to the reinforcement of the binary division between men and women (Mohanty 1991:64). By assuming that women are a already constituted group with the same experiences and interests, gender is looked upon as something that can be applied cross cultures (Mohanty 1991:54), and it also produces an assumption about the “average third world woman” as poor and uneducated, in contrast to the educated, modern Western women (Mohanty 1991:56). Implicit in the binary analytic lies the assumption that the third world woman only can be liberated through western rationality. Mohanty is making an important point when emphasising the need to challenge these objectifications (Udayagiri 1995:163).