A Response To Komunyakaa

We, as writers, are always reminded, from one established poet to the next, of the arduous path once forged by those whose writing is simply a completion of prior, established experiences. It is this experience, unique to the individual but attainable by the masses, that fosters the creation of thought, and later, its interpretation. Komunyakaa has established himself among these elite “thinkers” by introducing his own experiences as a soldier in Vietnam to a literary world perhaps unready for such raw images of reality. I suppose the poem that most caught my attention is “Tunnels.”
“Tunnels” takes the reader into the mind of the speaker who is alternately in the mind of the subject of the poem. It’s a strange view to navigate, but ultimately you, as the reader, because of the speaker, are projected into the view of someone burrowing alongside the subject, experiencing his daily routine as the “good soldier.” This maneuvering view is evident in the opening four lines wherein the speaker says, “Crawling down headfirst into the hole, he kicks the air & disappears. I feel like I’m down there with him, moving ahead, pushed.”
From here, and with intricate use of imagery by Komunyakaa, the reader is taken down into the manmade tunnels the North Vietnamese had created to navigate battlefield locations undetected. For instance, the speaker likens the tunnel to “a river of darkness,” which alternately functions to support the ominous overtone the poem implies. He then begins to describe the perils of the man, the “tunnel rat” in his platoon. The speaker says, “He moves as if trying to outdo blind fish easing toward imagined blue, pulled by something greater than life’s ambitions.” Metaphorically speaking, it seems as though the “blind fish” are enemy combatants who are “blind” because they are in complete darkness and are attempting to reach the “imagined blue.” This “imagined blue,” of course, refers to the sky which, for either a tunnel rat or enemy combatant, would be the first thing (color) he would see when exiting a tunnel, when returning to this world. The last part of that thought is interesting as well. The tunnel rat is “pulled by something” acting as a force that strengthens his will to continue, “something greater than life’s ambitions,” which I interpret as possibly adrenaline due to overwhelming fear, or possibly some supernatural essence. It has to be something that supersedes the will when the will is weakened beyond its own self-reliance because the situation seems futile.
Komunyakaa uses a well-placed, thought-conjuring simile that utilizes the predisposed fear and mysticism, historically speaking, of humans towards bats to emphasize the image he’s creating of conquering the unknown. He writes, “He can’t . . . care about bats upside down like gods in the mole’s blackness.” This is so good because on one hand, the reader notices the bravery of the tunnel rat to traverse amidst these, figuratively speaking, demonic beasts. These demonic beasts are representations of the enemy combatants who are also, in a way, demonic beasts so to speak. On the other hand, we are given the image of a mole, blind to the world around it, and therefore having no further concept of that which is greater than itself except for that which its senses allow it to know. It’s a form of preternatural faith which, when combined with the whole image, lends to a faith instilled in the tunnel rat which allows him to tap into that element that is “greater than life’s ambitions.”
Another profound image is created in the mind of the reader when the speaker says, “A web of booby traps waits, ready to spring into broken stars.” Here the reader can picture the tunnel as a different world completely, void of anything really, un-birthed. If the tunnel rat were to trigger a booby trap and it were to explode, then you would see something much like “broken stars” in the form of flying shrapnel. Something designed to literally create death, alternately creates life in this netherworld with a big bang. The concluding two lines basically sum up not only the poem but also the mood surrounding the poem, the mood the reader is to exit feeling. It is written here, “[He is] loving the weight of the shotgun that will someday dig his grave.” Again Komunyakaa provides the reader with a strange duality. The shotgun is both the life-sustaining element and the consummator of death. It is this mood of death that pervades the different elements of this poem and ultimately comes full circle to complete the ominous cycle.