The Body as UnityĪs the speaker looks backward to his past in an effort to understand how he can originate from such a violent place, he also attempts to reconcile his understandings of the past with who he is in the present. Considering the complexity and ambiguity of this past is one thing that gets the speaker thinking about his own ability to act violently and tenderly in the present. The tenderness associated with both the speaker’s grandparents and parents in Vietnam makes it all the more heartbreaking that they were displaced from the country, but the speaker himself never forgets his own roots in violent events. Yikes.” The fact that, even amidst a backdrop of war and destruction, there is tenderness and love that is so personal and significant for the speaker is a central theme that runs throughout the collection insofar as it ties in with the collection’s larger project of exploring duality. For the speaker of this collection, however, the Vietnam War encompasses another quality-it is the event that precipitated the birth of his family line, since his origin lies with a “grandfather fucking / pregnant farmgirl in the back of his army jeep.” Or, as rephrased more explicitly in the later poem “Notebook Fragments,” “An American soldier fucked a Vietnamese farmgirl. The Vietnam War is rightly considered by many, including the speaker of this collection, to have been a time of unimaginable destruction, death, and violence. Buy Study Guide The Many Sides of the Vietnam War
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