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

Both Tu Do Street and Camouflaging the Chimera express the negotiation of racial boundaries in a new, unfamiliar environment where barriers argon at once more than rigid and flexible. While the speaker system addresses the boundaries that exist between black and whitened soldiers, particularly in Tu Do Street, he in like manner 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 black and white take place in a more illicit realm (black & white/soldiers touch the same lovers/minutes apart, 28-30), the speaker also probes the hidden connections between the soldiers and their enemies Back in the bush at dhak To/& Khe Sanh, we fought/the brothers of t hese 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 onlys into question the human nature screwing 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 aband championd, 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 equalize 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 enemy in a dark, negative lig ht. On another level, however, it aligns the VC with the speaker, a black soldier. The final lines of the poem (as a world revolve/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 own 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 evade the boundary 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 assign to shed light on their shared humanity.