On Using Cliche In Dien Cai Dau

in the long Vietnam nightmare. That an American is wondering whether the Vietcong are

using this phrase demonstrates both discomfort and a certain muted triumph at having them

in his sights. Even a battlefield is a society with rules and language games.)

It also crystallizes a point Komunyakaa suggests in his interviews with [Vincente]

Gotera, that societies of strangers, or even of traditional enemies, can be ever sod

elicately held together by infinitely recycled bits of language, by clich?s: "[Among

American] soldiers, for some reason — individuals coming from so many backgrounds: the

deep South, the North, different educational levels – clich?s are used many times as

efforts to communicate, as bridges perhaps. And soldiers often speak in clich?s

…" Clich?s, like tatoos on the bodies of languages, are useful decorations of

places where a common vision is hidden, or being brought to light. The clich? "Beaucoup

dien cai dau"is Komunyakaa’s assessment of the war itself and perhaps of

America’s role in it. True, his Vietnam lyrics display none of the sense of outrage,

of being pierced by betrayal, so evident in the testimony of some black Vietnam veterans.

Gene Woodley … told journalist Wallace Terry of being transformed into an

"animal" by his boot camp training, and by the brutality of Vietnam and insisted

that in shipping him and other "bloods" off to its rice paddy war, America

befell upon us as one big atrocity. It lied. They had us na?ve, young, dumb-ass

niggers believin’ that this war was for democracy and independence. It was fought for

money. All those big corporations made billions on the war, and then America left.

On the other hand, Komunyakaa is no indestructible patriot like the blood Terry

interviewed who narrated the following anecdotes about his experience as a prisoner of war

in Vietnam:

They would read things in their behalf about the Communist way and downgrading the

United States, blah, blah, blah, all the time. … When Dr. King was assassinated they

called me in for interrogation to see if I would make a statement critical of the United

States. I said no, I don’t know enough about it. … My personal feeling is that

black people have problems and still have problems in America. But I never told them that,

because I had no intention of helping them defeat us. We deal with our problems within our

own country. Some people just do not live up to the great ideals our country stands for

…

Komunyakaa’s poetry conveys the pain and grace involved in maintaining not so much

the middle ground between these two positions as the shifting ground of

possibilities that lies under them both. He illuminates these and other positions in part

by creating a "tension between levels of diction," as Gotera has said, by

deploying what he himself calls a "neon vernacular" in which argots and forms of

life blink on and off like those neon signs in which a cityscape expands and contracts,

caressing and reshaping the night.

from Michael Collins, "Staying Human" (a review of Neon Vernacular and

Magic City), Parnassus 18:2/19:1 (1993), 134-135