Nightmare Begins Responsibility by Michael S. Harper

First published: 1974, in Nightmare Begins Responsibility

Type of poem: Lyric

The Poem

Michael S. Harper’s “Nightmare Begins Responsibility” traces the feelings and reflections of a father witnessing, through a glass partition, a team of medical personnel trying to save the life of his newborn son. The setting is a hospital, but the poem’s drama unfolds in the father’s mind as he reports what he sees and the distrust he feels toward the technicians, a distrust that is ultimately muted by understanding and resolution.

At the poem’s outset, the father feels imprisoned by the glass, shut off from his son, and helpless. The infant, is in a “tube-kept/ prison,” completely at the mercy of the medical team, as is the father. The poem’s first line focuses on the father’s anguish, connecting it to his external environment with a pun on “pane”: “I place these numbed wrists to the pane.” Able only to watch, the father is gripped by fear and distrust throughout the poem—Harper uses the words “distrusting” four times and “distrust” once to reinforce the father’s primary emotion. The father distrusts the hospital staff, fearing “what they will do in experiment”; he distrusts them because they are white, clad in white hospital garb and clad in the whiteness of their race, which contrasts with his own dark skin and that of his child.

The father’s anguish stems in part from conflicting feelings, the poem’s principal focus. Seeing the white technicians struggle to save his child, the father is intensely aware that, in a historic sense, white people have tried to snuff out the lives of his people. His ethnic roots continue to tug at him as he watches “distrusting-white-hands-picking-baboon-light/ on this son.” The music from his past runs through his mind like a moving train; the poem’s rhythms and language reflect the stream of his thoughts, “hymns of night-train, train done gone.” The image of the train creates a visual counterpart to the poem’s sounds and rhythms, the lines lengthening, snaking along without pause as memories from his childhood mingle with the details of his son’s struggle beyond the glass partition.

His distrust of the medical staff entwines with memories of his home, his mother, and, finally, his other son who has died, and he realizes that he is responsible for this son’s death and the death of his other son. This night is a nightmare for everyone involved in it, but most of all for the father, who must go on living with the knowledge that two of his sons have died in infancy. The poem is about loss, the loss of one child and then another, the loss of control over what happens to his children, and the loss of freedom.

Forms and Devices

The poem is divided into one stanza of twenty-three lines and a second one of six lines. The lines range in length from one word to eight to ten words—some of the longer lines contain several words fused together. The poem’s rhythms arise often from the expansion and contraction of word lengths. To quicken the pace and highlight meaning, Harper connects words with hyphens: “distrusting-white-hands-picking-baboon-light,” putting them in italics as if to increase their intensity. The fused words in the twentieth line,

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reflect the rhythms of the father’s thoughts and the intensity of his emotion, suggesting that his disparate memories form a single experience and perception. The fusion of words into complex units of thought and feeling is a visual counterpart to the father’s sense of connectedness, of moving forward, of being fused with his past, his son, and himself. Their sinuous shape and unbroken rhythm suggest the train that is one of the poem’s major symbols, representing the ongoing motion of the father’s life, the repetitive rhythms of the heartbeat, and the haunting thought of arrival and departure. His infant’s arrival and imminent departure remind the father of the “night-train,” both the song and the train that is “done gone.” The train, its rhythmic sound and linked units, forms an apt metaphor of the father’s life as well as a metaphor of the poem itself: words forming lines linked by sound as they carry the poet’s meaning to its conclusion.

In addition to rhythm and word fusions, Harper uses sounds to emphasize the symbolic significance of the poem’s three major elements, the color white, light, and night, which form contrasting ideas even as they rhyme, thus giving the poem one of several ironic twists. Each of these words stirs great emotion in the father, and each is associated with other elements in his life. At the beginning of the poem, he is “watching white uniforms whisk”—Harper suggests motion with a deft use of alliteration—a few lines later, “white-pink mending” appears, then “white-hands picking,” and near the end, “white-doctor.” The father has discovered that white represents an inversion of the purity for which it traditionally stands.

The word “light” is used only once in the poem, linked with the word “baboon,” which suggests its opposite. Nevertheless, light is implicit in the hospital’s setting, which imprisons the father with its punishing glare. Of this trio of words, “night” offers the richest meaning and resonance with the father, who associates it with the departing train, with the soul music of his past, and with this night, the night of his ordeal, which turns into an unending nightmare.

Harper further complicates his meaning by shifting points of view. At the beginning, it is not clear who is imprisoned—the father by the glass partition, by his fear, even by his genetic history; his infant son by his disease; or the technicians by their professional duty and white skin. The father’s ambivalence is further registered by the play on the word “pane,” which evokes his pain even as it refers to the glass partition. Harper continues to underscore the father’s ambivalence in his use of the words “distrust” and “distrusting,” whose repetition links many of the lines in a chain of shifting emotions and perspectives. The meaning of lines 7-9, for example, changes according to how “distrusting” functions. The “infirmary tubes,” the child’s shaven head, or the father’s “gasolined hands” may be “distrusting.” When the father speaks of his “infinite distrust of them,” he voices the poem’s complex treatment of certainty and conflict, for the father’s distrust is emphatic, but whom he distrusts is blurred into an unspecified “them.”

Bibliography

Brown, Joseph A. “Their Long Scars Touch Ours: A Reflection on the Poetry of Michael Harper.” Callaloo, no. 26 (Winter, 1986): 209-220.

Cooke, Michael G. Afro-American Literature in the Twentieth Century: The Achievement of Intimacy. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1984.

Harper, Michael S. “The Map and the Territory: An Interview with Michael S. Harper.” Interview by Michael Antonucci. African American Review 34, no. 3 (Autumn, 2000): 501-508.

Henderson, Stephen, ed. Understanding the New Black Poetry. New York: William Morrow, 1973.

Lerner, Ben. ToCutIstoHeal. Providence, R.I.: Paradigm Press, 2000.

Mills, Ralph J. Cry of the Human: Essays on Contemporary American Poetry. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1974.

Moyers, Bill. “Michael S. Harper.” In The Language of Life: A Festival of Poets, edited by James Haba. New York: Doubleday, 1995.

O’Brien, John, ed. “Michael Harper.” In Interviews with Black Writers. New York: Liveright, 1973.

Rowell, Charles H., ed. “Michael S. Harper, American Poet: A Special Section.” Callaloo 13, no. 4 (Autumn, 1990): 748-829.

Stepto, Robert B. “After Modernism, After Hibernation: Michael Harper, Robert Hayden, and Jay Wright.” In Chant of Saints: A Gathering of Afro-American Literature, Art, and Scholarship, edited by Michael S. Harper and Robert B. Stepto. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1979.