Yusef Komunyakaa - Hanoi Hannah

I take my poetry before I take my music.  I will follow a poet before I follow a musician.  For me, poetry is more capable of a linguistic rhythm, a natural expression of speech, an attempt to express the human spirit.  I don’t always get that from song lyrics sung.  When I do happen across words to a song that I like, it’s more likely that I will read it or recite it as poetry.  Having said that, there is something about a song and music that can preserve emotional memory so that every time you hear the particular song again, even years later, you’re taken back to being nineteen or whenever, and you recall the smells, the taste, the vision, the history of events that once played out in front of your eyes while you were transitioning with that music.  My favourite poem for this post does some of that.  It centres on the Viet Nam war and offers nostalgia through a weave of popular song titles and artists who would have been well known to American troops at the time, along with typical propaganda lines from ‘Hanoi Hannah’ (real name, Trinh Thi Ngo).  ‘Hanoi Hannah’ who was given her nickname by American troops, was a North Vietnamese radio announcer who broadcast propaganda in English.  The poem is by the American poet, Yusef Komunyakaa, and is titled, Hanoi Hannah.  Komunyakaa himself, served in Viet Nam so writes from experience.  Here it is, Hanoi Hannah.

Hanoi Hannah

(Yusef Komunyakaa,  1947 - )

 

Ray Charles!  His voice

calls from waist-high grass,

& we duck behind gray sandbags.

“Hello, Soul Brothers.  Yeah,

Georgia’s also on my mind.”

Flares bloom over the trees.

“Here’s Hannah again.

Let’s see if we can’t

light her goddamn fuse

this time.”  Artillery

shells carve a white arc

against dusk.  Her voice rises

from a hedgerow on our left.

“It’s Saturday night in the States.

Guess what your woman’s doing tonight.

I think I’ll let Tina Turner

Tell you, you homesick GIs.”

Howitzers buck like a herd

of horses behind concertina.

“You know you’re dead men,

don’t you?  You’re dead

as King today in Memphis.

Boys, you’re surrounded by

General Tran Do’s division.”

Her knife-edge song cuts

Deep as a snipers bullet.

“Soul Brothers, what are you dying for?”

We lay down a white-klieg

trail of tracers.  Phantom jets

fan out over the trees.

Artillery fire zeros in.

Her voice grows flesh

& we can see her falling

into words, a bleeding flower

no one knows the true name for.

“You’re lousy shots, GIs.”

Her laughter floats up

as though the airways are

buried under our feet.

 

You know, I started writing this post more than a week ago now.  I’ve never read anything else by Yusef Komunyakaa – never heard of him until this poem was in a rock and roll and poetry anthology amongst forty poetry books a bloke was selling on Gumtree for twenty dollars the lot down at Budgewoi, but that’s another story ….  So I really like Hanoi Hannah – not only for how it reads, but because it takes me back to a familiar era.  Right, wrong or indifferent, we had a war, we had music and it’s great that somebody captured the memory of that as poetry.  So I’m interested in Komunyakaa, and I decide to do some research before I go and hit the ‘post’ button, and I’m struck by a couple of events in this poet’s life.  First, I feel he’s almost family when I discover Yusef was once married to an Aussie novelist, Mandy Sayer – married for 10 years – a bit of Aussie influence must have rubbed off in that time, surely.  Then I read of tragedy when another wife, Reetika Vazirani (also a poet), murdered her and Yusef’s two year old son before taking her own life – such tragedy.  It stuns me, the stark events that surprise in the lives of successful and public poets.  Here I am, private, not read, and spared such trials of which I doubt I could find the strength to endure.  It causes me to approach the work differently.

Reading Hanoi Hannah, I’m reminded of my own time when the songs had to be played over and over again, burning a track in my memory, accompanied by a video of current events recording in real time, when my emotion was my heart and I burst to express it, not just to tell of it, and it’s the music that relives itself in the poor attempt of my words.
My poem for this post is a piece I wrote many years ago when I was a very young sailor being ferried in an era of special song.

  1972.  Six month ANZUK deployments ‘up top’.  Vietnam was still on but winding down; for us, anyway.  The daily routine at sea was relaxed; shorts and a pair of sandals; lazy days; good days; we looked forward to port visits.

70’s at Sea

 

Those were the days

of suede leather coats

beneath brown fur collars,

wine colored burgundy suits

in a page boy style,

The Carpenters on reel to reel,

‘Such a feeling coming over me,

there’s won-der

in most every-thing I see’

Santana

in a deserted

dark bar

on a road

between Chong Peng & Nee Soon,

lonely,

lonely for companionship,

ceiling fans in nondescript rooms

on sultry

tropical nights,

days of blue at sea,

blue sky

with silent vapour trails of B-52’s

departing, closing VietNam,

hot days,

lifeless in the South China Sea,

asleep on a Burbank fender

X-deck,

Nancy Sinatra & Lee Hazlewood

‘Some velvet morning ……

when I'm straight

I'm gonna open up your gate

and maybe tell you 'bout Phaedra

and how she gave me life

and how she made it in ………’

big tall negroes

dressed

in full length leather coats,

soft grey

black

& wide-brimmed hats

hand slapping

on street corners in Wanchai,

beautiful asian bar-girls,

laughing chatty,

you crazy,

them mens crazy,

spend too long in the jungle,

beer bourbon & coke

sick on sour whiskey

staggering back on board,

dreams of home & white young girls

who care,

The Sandpipers ‘Come Saturday Morning’

to role play with Liza Minelli

over & over again,

hot days in boiler room air-locks,

breath taken away

with the dry steam heat, ‘flowers

growing on the hill,

dragonflies & daffodils,

learn from us

very much,

look at us

but do not touch,

Phaedra is my name ………..’

 

taken away by the dry steam heat.

                                                             J. O. White

 

 

Bruce Dawe - 'homecoming'.

I place Bruce Dawe up there at the top in my list of contemporary Australian poets who I admire.  Like others on the list (e.g. Robert Gray and Les Murray), Dawe comes from a rural, farming background (born 1930).  Each of these poets writes great descriptive verse of the landscape and country life.  How is that?  A childhood spent in idle paddocks, self reflective, talking the ears off corn and cows, maybe?  I’m not much of a descriptive writer myself so stand to learn a lot from reading their work.  Bruce Dawe spent a couple of years in the Royal Australian Air Force (1959 - 1968) and some of his poems reflect his knowledge of the military.  When I look back to how old I was before I heard of Bruce Dawe, I reckon I lived a deprived childhood.  It was a girl I once knew in Melbourne who introduced me to his poetry.  She had studied him at school.  My education was in the Queensland public system.  While we were doing Shakespeare, Dorothea MacKellar and Henry Kendell, it appears down in the Victorian Catholic school system they were being fed modern thought from guys like Bruce Dawe.  I couldn’t believe it.  I can now.  Bruce became a Catholic convert in 1954 (24 years old).  He and I have parallels; the girl was Catholic, but the choice was mine; life leads you.  Back to Bruce – in his early poems I can see why Catholic education included him in their curriculum early in his popularity and before the public system.  At first reading, Bruce’s poetry may appear irreverent if a person’s perception is of a prim and proper devout church goer (especially in the 1950’s, 1960’s).  But on further reading, one finds Bruce Dawe actually renders the subject of working class social life to reflect it exactly as it is.  And in it’s honesty it can’t be anything else but acceptable.  The Catholic laity read the words from their ‘boy’ and say, “ain’t that the truth”.  He deals with life in a way that enfolds it in wry humour, Irish Catholic humour, acceptable social truth for the modern Catholic.  With such a build up I should be giving you ‘Wood-eye’, or ‘Life Cycle’ or ‘At Shagger’s Funeral’, but I’m not (another post).  For now I want to include what is perhaps Bruce Dawe’s most famous and influential poem – ‘Homecoming’.  This was written in 1968 and is seen as an anti-war poem opposed to the war in Vietnam.  It has such a tragic tone to it, a machine, production line beat.  Something I hook up with in the poem’s construction is the lack of full stops, no ending of one sentence, stop, starting another one (enjambment).  The lines proceed in one read from 1 to 26.  No rhyme or standard metre but still flowing and easy to read (and recite).

homecoming

(Bruce Dawe, 1930 -)

 

All day, day after day, they’re bringing them home,

they’re picking them up, those they can find, and bringing them home,

they’re bringing them in piled on the hulls of Grants, in trucks, in convoys,

they’re zipping them up in green plastic bags,

they’re tagging them now in Saigon, in the mortuary coolness

they’re giving them names, they’re rolling them out of

the deep-freeze lockers – on the tarmac at Tan Son Nhut

the noble jets are whining like hounds,

they are bringing them home

- curly heads, kinky-hairs, crew-cuts, balding non-coms

- they’re high, now, high and higher, over the land, the steaming chow mein,

their shadows are tracing the blue curve of the Pacific

with sorrowful quick fingers, heading south, heading east,

home, home, home – and the coasts swing upward, the old ridiculous

                                                                                                                curvatures

of earth, the knuckled hills, the mangrove-swamps, the desert emptiness …

in their sterile housing they tilt towards these like skiers

- taxiing in, on the long runways, the howl of their homecoming rises

surrounding them like their last moments (the mash, the splendour)

then falling at length as they move

on to small towns where dogs in the frozen sunset

raise muzzles in mute salute,

and to the cities in whose wide web of suburbs

telegrams tremble like leaves from a wintering tree

and the spider grief swings in his bitter geometry

-        they’re bringing them home, now, too late, too early.

 

War and the prospect of war is a trembling thing the closer you get to the action.  I don’t know if Bruce Dawe ever intended ‘homecoming’ to be an anti-war poem.  I tend to think that he didn’t.  I think the poem was written at such a time and it resounded with such heavy grief and dulled remorse that those who were keen to find anything anti-war wanted it to be an anti-war poem.  Also, I’ve read some reviews that think the poem refers to Australian dead being brought back home.  I would say no, it’s referring solely to the many American casualties.  Australia just never had the numbers to be ‘bringing them home, day after day’; it’s more likely that Australian transport would have been by RAAF Hercules, a prop driven aircraft, not ‘jets whining like hounds’; I believe Australian casualty evacuation would have been from Vung Tau, not ‘deep freeze lockers in Saigon’; and to me, ‘curly heads, kinky-hairs, crew-cuts, balding non-coms’ epitomises an Australian view of the American serviceman – kinky-hair negro representation, severe marine crew-cut, balding older career soldiers with stripes.

 

My poem for this post is ‘Duty’, somewhat influenced by ‘homecoming’ (I include a dog and I try to project the senselessness of it all).  Now I don’t believe my poem is an anti-war poem.  It’s more an ‘anti-apathy about anything to do with war’ poem.  Our men and women in uniform have little choice when a decision is made to go to war.  Most of them and their families don’t like it either, but they perform their duty in the way they’ve been trained.  So it ticked me off when some people in the public responded to sailors expressing concern about going to the first Gulf war with things like, “It’s part of their job; they knew what to expect when they joined; they chose to do that; it’s a condition of service ……….”

 

1990.  Cardiff, New South Wales.  ANZAC day and we walked down to the local RSL club where they were holding a night remembrance service.  There were dozens of small, white crosses planted in the lawn.  Iraq had invaded Kuwait.  Ships were going over to join forces.  There was some open grumbling from the forces about employment conditions, war and potential sacrifice.  The general public gave no sympathy.

 

Duty

A black dog slopes along,

head hung low, pauses

to sniff and piss on the wall

of the Cardiff RSL,

an act of bored indifference

to his master’s strange struggle,

still

sending other son’s names

to be carved in gold

on a small town cenotaph.

 

The dog moves on to debate the moon

which he doesn’t see,

a silver nail pressed into the night

against the wind,

blowing through coloured plastic ribbons

in a deserted used car parking lot,

but the flags flap urgently,

as if they had been corners of patriotic fervour

waving from tall city windows,

sending other son’s names

to be carried as heroes

through the streets

in a small town vets parade.

 

The men are huddled in the port hangar now,

she’s listing heavily that way

and there’s nobody and nothing to right it

since the chief tiff took two and disappeared

into the smoke,

they haven’t come back

and somewhere in the night

the black dog barks,

other son’s names

who should’ve known,

 

 ………it was a condition of service.

                                                                                                                              JO White