Sunday Afternoons by Yusef Komunyakaa

First published: 1991; collected in Magic City, 1992

Type of poem: Lyric

The Poem

Written in free verse, “Sunday Afternoons” is a relatively short poem of thirty-five lines divided into seven stanzas. The title refers to the day and time of the week when the poet’s parents excluded their children from the family house and locked the doors to ensure their privacy while they had sex. This poem is just one of a number of verse compositions, most of them collected in the volume Magic City, wherein Yusef Komunyakaa explores his and, by extension, the readers’ shared childhood. In this regard, most children have memories of coping with the mystery of forbidden access, of engaging in the frustrated attempt to decode the parental sounds heard on the other side of closed doors.

Using the first-person plural pronoun “we,” the poem is told from the perspective of the poet and his siblings when they are excluded from the monitoring parental presence and left to their own devices. Even in the confines of the family yard, however, the children discover their own innate animal nature by identifying, in the second and third stanzas, with the sometimes wild creatures that cross their field of experience. They become “drunk” on mayhaw juice and terrorize nesting birds. After this exercise of animal spirits and animal cruelty, the children, in the fourth stanza, refocus their attention on the house and their shared realization that there is something going on inside, something to be interpreted solely by auditory evidence. What they hear are the parental cries of passion and anger. With the words “We were born between Oh Yeah/ and Goddammit,” the poet summarizes the trajectory of his parents’ marriage.

It is at this point that the first-person perspective shifts from the plural to the singular, “we” becoming “I.” For the last three stanzas, the collective experience is replaced by the personal vision of the dreamer-child who will one day become the poet-adult. While his brothers heed the parental stricture to stay away from the house, Komunyakaa remains at the screen door, persisting in his attempts to discover the truths of the bedroom and of the adult world. Yet despite his stubborn and ultimately transfiguring refusal to abandon his need to find answers, his quest is marked by a quiet sadness. This is in keeping with the general climate of all the poems contained in Magic City. Magic is a two-sided coin, and the poet reinforces that contention by presenting the reader with enchanted childhood memories that combine the elements of delight and horror.

Forms and Devices

In both the poems about his childhood in rural Louisiana and his celebrated compositions on his Vietnam War experience (Dien Cai Dau, 1988), Komunyakaa displays the Romantic trait of finding correspondences between humanity and the natural world. Set free in the yard, for example, the children mimic, in their engagement with the landscape, the pattern of many adult relationships. First, they are intoxicated by the juice of the mayhaw and the crabapple. The ripe fruit embodies that period of sexual fertility that adolescence will bring. Then, the children feel “brave/ As birds diving through saw vines.” Similarly, future hormonal urges may lead to the potentially painful risk-taking that is also a component of adolescent experimentation. Finally, they observe dogs in heat, and this image of feverish intensity is followed by the children holding speckled eggs in their hands as a hawk circles overhead. Thus, natural images of puberty and fecundity foretell the end of the state of sexual latency the children now experience. Most of the poems in Magic City explore this engagement with the natural world. In a 1994 New York Times interview, Komunyakaa recalled his hometown of Bogalusa, Louisiana, as a “place where there was vegetation all over. There was a chemistry going on in the landscape and I identified with it, so I kind of look for that wherever I go.”

In the second half of the poem, when the poet refocuses on what may be taking place inside the house, there is an acknowledgment of the consequences of sexual union, the recrimination that sometimes follows procreation and the enforced union of the partners. Gospel music can be heard playing on the radio, as “Loud as shattered glass/ in a Saturday-night argument/ About trust and money.” In this instance, the music is intended to camouflage the sounds of passion, but, to the children, the music recalls parental arguments about infidelity and finances that have sometimes turned violent. Komunyakaa has written elsewhere about his parents’ troubled marriage and his father’s anger and propensity for abuse. The poem “My Father’s Love Letter,” also collected in Magic City, recounts the poet’s memory of writing a letter for his father to his estranged wife, promising that he would never beat her again. The boys, in their yard gambols, prefigure their father’s inability to understand the full ramifications of his nature as a sexual being, the fact that the consequence of just one episode of sexual congress may be the often-unanticipated responsibilities of being a husband and a father.

To enhance the realism of his message, Komunyakaa uses the vernacular. This poem, for example, uses the Southern names for various flora: The poet writes “mayhaw” instead of “hawthorne” and “saw vines” instead of “green briars.” The use of these regionalisms enforces the sense of a localized landscape rendered through the filter of the poet’s memory. Also characteristic of Komunyakaa’s work is the layering of simile upon simile. Some critics have accused the poet of overusing this device while others have praised him for his inventiveness in this regard. In the last poetic sentence of “Sunday Afternoons,” for example, there are two similes. The first one is rather hackneyed: “Like a gambler’s visor”; the second is nothing short of inspired: “like a moon/ Held prisoner in the house.” Komunyakaa is also fond of enjambment, or the use of run-on lines. Sometimes, in fact, the lines in this particular poem run on not only within stanzas but also between stanzas. The poet is quoted as saying that for him enjambment, represents “extended possibilities.” For this reason, the device is most appropriate when used in poems without narrative closure, such as “Sunday Afternoons,” wherein the identity of the child protagonist is not fixed but is in the open-ended process of becoming.

Bibliography

Aubert, Alvin. “Yusef Komunyakaa: The Unified Vision, Canonization and Humanity.” African American Review 27, no. 1 (Spring, 1993): 119-123.

Collins, Michael. “Staying Human.” Parnassas: Poetry in Review 18/19, nos. 1/2 (November 1, 1993): 126-149.

Ehrhart, W. D. “Soldier-Poets of the Vietnam War.” In America Rediscovered: Essays on Literature and Film of the Vietnam War, edited by Owen W. Gilman and Lorrie Smith. New York: Garland, 1990.

Gotera, Vicente F. “’Depending on the Light’: Yusef Komunyakaa’s Dien Cai Dau.” In America Rediscovered: Critical Essays on Literature and Film of the VietnamWar, edited by Owen W. Gilman and Lorrie Smith. New York: Garland, 1990.

Salas, Angela. “Race, Human Empathy, and Negative Capability: The Poetry of Yusef Komunyakaa.” College Literature 30, no. 4 (Fall, 2003): 32-53.

Stein, Kevin. “Vietnam and the ’Voice Within’: Public and Private History in Yusef Komunyakaa’s Dien Cai Dau.” Massachusetts Review 36, no. 4 (December 1, 1995): 541-561.