Yusef Komunyakaa’s “Tu Do Street” and “Camouflaging the Chimera”

Both Tu Do passageway and Camouflaging the Chimera express the negotiation of racial boundaries in a new, unfamiliar with(predicate) environment where barriers ar at once more rigid and flexible. sequence the loud speaker addresses the boundaries that exist mingled with low-spirited and s straightaway-clad soldiers, particularly in Tu Do Street, he also explores the relationship between himself and the Viet Cong.As an African-American soldier, the speaker feels isolated from his white counterparts, even in times of leisure. The music that divides the evening, (Tu Do Street, 1) is sung by white singers (Hank Snow, 7, and Hank Williams, 12) and the speaker is passed over at the bar in favor of white faces, (12). While interactions between benighted and white take place in a more illicit state (black & white/soldiers touch the same lovers/minutes apart, 28-30), the speaker also probes the orphic connections between the soldiers and their enemies Back in the bush at Dak To/& Khe Sanh, we fought/the brothers of these women/we now hold in our arms, (23-26).By exploring the dichotomy between loving and killing, to disparate concepts in both action and feeling, the speaker c alls into question the hu opus nature fanny war and labeling the enemy by the color of his flesh.In Camouflaging the Chimera, the connections between the Americans and the VC are further established. While the distinctions between black and white are largely abandoned, as Drew and Tyler mentioned (the narrator is We, not I), the speaker focuses on the similarities between the American soldiers and their Vietnamese enemies. While painting our faces & rifles/with mud (2-3) functions to fit the American soldiers in skin color, it also serves as an equalizing force between the Americans and the VC.Through the poem, the VC are described with terms of darkness, literally as dark-hearted songbirds, (14), rock apes, (16) and black silk (24). This imagery works, on one level, to paint the ene my in a dark, negative light. On another level, however, it aligns the VC with the speaker, a black soldier. The final lines of the poem (as a world revolved/under each mans eyelid, 30-31) distills the speakers understanding of the human aspect of war, as he acknowledges that each man, black or white or Vietnamese, has his confess experience and history, and that each man is as much an individual as part of an army.In agreeing with Kriss assertion that the speaker, at times, tries to cross the bounce of race between black and white soldiers, I think the speaker is more broadly concerned with narrowing the division between all who fight against each other in any arenablack and white in matters of race, American and Vietnamese in matters of warin order to shed light on their shared humanity.