american political poetry in the 21st century - STIBA Malang

EQUIVOCAL AGENCY 87
suggests an aspect of all social relations. Giddens writes: “All social
reproduction is grounded in the knowledgeable application and
reapplication of rules and resources by actors in situated social
contexts . . . social systems are chronically produced and reproduced
by their constituent participants” (114). In Simic’s poem, the speaker
disturbingly applies the rules of the refugee in the “situated social
context” of a burning city, and he ironically and sadly reproduces the
refugee’s nameless, placeless suffering. Within this “epic”
the speaker’s place is so miniscule and insignificant that he vanishes
before his own eyes.
The overarching conceit of the poem, over and above the speaker’s
role as refugee, is the speaker’s viewing of the fleeing refugees on
videotape. He is showing the videotape of the incident “to the kiddies,”
but even after rewinding the tape a “hundred times” the kids
cannot “catch sight” of the speaker/refugee. Despite the speaker’s
certainty (“I know I was there”), in the words of “honest” Iago, the
villain of Othello, there is no “ocular proof ” to confirm that the
speaker was actually present. Throughout the poem Simic parodies
the American media’s tendency to play and replay film clips of distant
disasters. In his criticism of the media’s “re-representation of world as
spectacle”—as discussed earlier with regard to Forché’s “Return”—
Michael Greer suggests that the American media’s penchant for continually
broadcasting sensational images of violence desensitizes
viewers (175). In “Cameo Appearance” these disturbing, violent
images are archetypes of poor, suffering indigenous people; refugees
and victims of war or famine, they plead to the camera, to their god,
or to a rich country halfway across the world. In looking for himself
on the videotape, the speaker thinks he is “squeezed between the man /
With two bandaged hands raised / And the old woman with her
mouth open / As if she were showing us a tooth / That hurts badly.”
Everyone who watches network news in the United States has seen
these two people. Their poses and ministrations are well known, but
the people themselves are not. They are simply images of suffering,
abstractions in services of an idea: compassion for residents of East
Timor, Rwanda, Niger, Guatemala, or Bangladesh, people whom
Americans will never see face-to-face. 6
In the final calculation, for all of its disturbing strangeness, the
poem’s Theater of the Absurd stages a world not unlike our own.
The “great leader” may or may not be who he purports to be. When
the speaker sees the great leader “in the distance,” he wonders if it is
indeed the great leader, or “a great actor / Impersonating our great
leader.” As in the referential world, it is difficult to sort out what is