ABSTRACT
The experience of war for Americans has been mediated by race since the nations’ earliest colonial battles. The battlefield has been an arena in which black men could lay claim to “manhood,” and war service offered black Americans the opportunity to demonstrate, despite extremely poor treatment, their loyalty to the nation. Military service thus formed part of the long struggle to be recognised as full citizens, able to enjoy the legal rights and privileges that had always been attendant upon whiteness. Although black Americans were allowed to play a fuller—although far from an equal role—in the nation’s battles beginning with the Civil War, the contributions of black veterans remain insufficiently acknowledged in the historical record. Their marginalisation is mirrored in the literary record. Although literary output increases with the war in Vietnam, war stories told by African-Americans in poetic form in particular have received scant treatment. This essay focuses on war poetry by black male soldiers who served in the Second World War, Vietnam, The Gulf War, and Iraq. Personal accounts of war experience by poets such as Horace Coleman, Yusef Komunyakaa, and Isaac Wade, et. al., capture the ontological complexities of being a black American in wartime. These poems, some written in the immediacy of conflict and some in reflective mode, interrogate how individual and social group experience in America is lived through race, a condition shown to be at its most extreme when the nation is involved in war. I explore how the poetry of black soldier-poets illuminates the way in which threats to selfhood and nationhood, literal and existential, are moderated by the discourse of race in American thought, thereby reflecting key changes over time in the nation’s cultural perception of race. My aim is to demonstrate how the experience of war and its aftermath is shaped by the individual poet’s position in the American ethno-racial hierarchy and how the story of America’s twentieth- and twenty-first century wars—as told by its black war poets—reflects the continuing potency of racial subordination on and off America’s battlefields.
