american political poetry in the 21st century - STIBA Malang

Ramirez, / who after years of confinement did not / know what year
it was, how she walked / with help and was forced to shit in public”;
“Jose . . . waving his stumps / in your face, his hands cut off by his /
captors and thrown to the many acres / of cotton”; and “a labor
leader . . . cut to pieces and buried.” The cunning strategy in these
lines simultaneously denounces sensational, ungrounded violence as
perverse entertainment even as Josephine gives readers exactly what
she denounces.
Because these disturbing lines are given to Josephine, Forché is able
to deflect accusations that she has succumbed to sensationalism. But if
the speaker-poet is able to escape blame, Josephine’s authoritative, condemnatory
voice does not allow other Americans to do so. Josephine’s
condemnation suggests a similarity to Rich’s “For the Record”—that
all Americans are complicit in the suffering of Salvadorans and that a
superficial interest in their misfortune is disgraceful. In his essay on
Forché, Larry Levis claims that when art shames its readers, it makes
them “more conscious, more human, more capable of bearing pain
and perceiving the beauty of bearing it” (11). Yet are shame and
guilt unsustainable short-sighted ways of pursuing social change
and justice?
Josephine indirectly chastises North Americans and reserves her
direct attacks for the speaker-poet’s insularity and arrogance. In her
first lines, Josephine tells the poet not to “flatter” herself because all
people suffer. In the last thirty-one lines of the poem—Josephine, it is
important to note, gets the final word—her attack on the speaker-poet
deconstructs American complacency and privilege. Here, Josephine’s
authoritative voice is its most tenacious. She says to the speaker-poet:
Your problem is not your life as it is
in America, not that your hands, as you
tell me, are tied to do something. It is
that you were born to an island of greed
and grace where you have this sense
of yourself as apart from others. It is
not your right to feel powerless.
EMBODIED AGENCY 71
Privilege, according to Josephine, is a cultural convention that makes
Americans believe they have the capacity to live as though any individual
is capable of insulating herself from the well-being of others.
For Josephine, rugged individualism is a myth built on fear and
selfishness. Lee Zimmerman writes that “overcoming” disconnection
and helplessness in this poem requires “opening to voices and visions