american political poetry in the 21st century - STIBA Malang

70 AMERICAN POLITICAL POETRY
Despite the speaker-poet’s inability to talk to other North
Americans, the poem speaks when the poet cannot. The speakerpoet’s
inability to speak belies the material reality of the poem itself
because the poet’s personal experience in both worlds forms a bridge
between the people of El Salvador and the people of the United
States. Like the oppressed Salvadorans, the “remnants” of the
speaker’s life “continue onward” despite her inability to give sufficient
voice to her experiences. In associating the speaker-poet’s plight with
that of Salvadorans, the poem collapses the gap between two worlds.
Poetry, then, creates The Country Between Us—the poem as bridge
brings together two countries, two friends, and two divergent
experiences. I expand implicitly on this notion of joining different
Americas—south and north, poor and rich, Spanish-speaking and
English-speaking—in chapter 3.
Whereas the speaker-poet’s voice is uncertain and timid,
Josephine’s is authoritative. She speaks directly of the brutal events in
Salvador that the speaker-poet witnessed but largely refrains from
speaking of in “Return.” Josephine mediates between the poet’s experience
and the audience. She speaks of two irreconcilable worlds, not
between the United States and El Salvador, but within El Salvador
that the poet saw first-hand: “the pits where men and women / are
kept the few days it takes without / food and water” and the “cocktail /
conversations on which their release depends.” These contrasting
experiences reveal the violent detachment of those in power from the
people who are the subjects of “torture reports.” The conspicuous
repetition of “men and women”—once in the body pits and once in
the position of detached observers who “read / torture reports with
fascination”—makes explicit the connection between the suffering
and the comfortable, even while those in power imagine themselves as
apart. This strategy makes reading “torture reports with fascination”
grotesque, as if the “men and women” were reading their own torture
reports.
Here the poem explores what Greer calls “the re-representation of
world as spectacle” in the American media. He argues that images of
violence from distant places allow viewers to remain detached from
injustices. Josephine’s later lines interrogate what Greer calls the
“conversion of history into a domestic spectacle” (175). When
Josephine addresses the speaker-poet about North Americans’ taste
for violence, she says to her: “Go try on / Americans your long, dull
story / of corruption, but better to give / them what they want.”
Josephine does not hesitate to tell the speaker-poet in harsh detail
what Americans want, sensational stories and images: “Lil Milagro