SOURCE: Stein, Kevin. “Vietnam and the ‘Voice Within’: Public and Private History in Yusef Komunyakaa's Dien Cai Dau.” Massachusetts Review 36, no. 4 (winter 1995-96): 541-61.

In the following essay, Stein argues that Komunyakaa's Vietnam War poetry creates a dialogue between the official public history of the war, as created by the mass media, and the personal experiences of those who fought in the war. Stein observes that Komunyakaa “creates a soldier's history of Vietnam from an African-American perspective.”

The haunting locale of Yusef Komunyakaa's Dien Cai Dau (1988) is as much the domain of the human heart and mind as the jungles of Southeast Asia. Based on Komunyakaa's Vietnam war experiences, the book details an inward turning, “a way of dealing with the images inside my head,” as Komunyakaa tells an interviewer, a means to put in order a private history that exists as much outside of history as within...