"who" manifested from world-building

Lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about the lens we use to write and the lens we use to read. I know that whatever project I am working on impacts how I read work, as well as what I’m reading that week. There is no such thing as a cleansed palate unless it’s done so intentionally. Yet, one of our goals as writers is to carefully take control over our words, perhaps painstakingly so just to make sentences, to make art, that “magically” creates the world we lived or dreamed of inside someone else. Guess that’s just called craft. Although I’m still struggling with the difference between craft for poetry and prose, particularly where they differ, what I’m getting at is that the writer, across the fields, must do the world-making that manifests the “who” in their work.

I know that once our work is out in the world, we technically cannot control interpretation. Yet… Arguably, no one is going to read “History Lessons” by Yusef Komunyakaa and think it’s a story about a trip to the safari. There is control and craft here, an excellent creation of the world that manifests the “who.” You could have jumped straight from reading Annie Dillard or Hemmingway, straight from watching Moonlight or Get Out, straight from reading Toni Morrison or Malcolm X, and then to this piece and still leave with the “point” and the “who” that Yusef edited and re-edited to create.

For me, the broader “who” question is engulfed in the writer’s control of narrative. Particularly, I wanna talk about how Yusef shifts the “who” from the narrator and those experiences of black people in that town historically and generally into the “who” that is broader black America. I want to differentiate between what I’m bringing to the poem and what he brings, though difficult at times since objectivity isn’t real. To start, Yusef uses quite particular language that quickly distinguishes the voice. It’s simple and rooted in moving the camera lens up and around from the narrator’s eyes. That very landscape that is laid before us, this poplar on a pool table lawn, is almost like a photograph of the past (in the way Yusef seamlessly guides us to twenty-five years ago at that very spot). The “who” now has a higher population— it moved from the narrator to all who were in that town in years past, a town that shares a collective memory of racially-charged, violent events.

Here I paused. “Half the town” and “Blonde rope” and “Cain and white trash” and the word “they” were all seeds just to us to that point. Of course we can sit back and say how obvious those seeds were, they weren’t hidden at all, and yet they were still planted just right. The last stanza is our destination, all the craft so far is (supposedly) to get us to land somewhere. And we do. I would argue that “pick-up man” becomes a point of tension, a trigger, because Yusef seeded earlier that the pickup was used to hang a man. Even “armload” felt like one, an intentionally use of a word that would remind us of “armed.” As patterns merge, as the camera moves, as the narrator “hammers in the air” like the black boxer, the reins are released somewhere: the reader makes connections through Yusef’s delicate craft, and our conclusion is that “who” is not just the narrator or those whose necks were adorned with blonde rope or that black boxer. The “who” is not just half the town, not just the “they” who lynched or the white woman or the pickup man. The “who” is black America. The “who” is white America.

I feel like Yusef guides us, in this case, to look at the work historically inherently and THEN to look broader, to look at it politically. I simmer with questions around narrative distribution (how the piece accumulates, builds, the road laid out for us to navigate, etc), over how tight the writer’s reins are and at what point are they given to us (which a good writer will let go), over how direct or suggestive the language is (and especially on what is “seeded” without my knowing until it blooms). I believe this piece really captures for me how to look at the "who."