“Dui Boi, Dust of Life” is a poem that tells of how a man tries to forget. In finding comfort through the vietnamese women there was a child create. As soon as he was born,he was known as Dui Boi. Meaning the boy was nothing but dust of the earth. A thing deemed nothing important by his father,mother, and their families. Abandoned because of the shame his parents have brought upon by committing the taboo of the war, procreating. The lose of a family and the lose of becoming a man. Komunyakaa says, “Let me see if they castrated you,” further taking away this child's manhood,dignity, and pride.
Through Yusef Komunyakaa’s poems, “Dui Boi, Dust of Life” and “Facing it” The struggle of remembering is painful and easy to want to push back, but the loved ones of the past are in jeopardy of being forgotten along with them. Despite the child having committed no faults, his father does not want to know of his existence. He does not want to be around him or remember him at all. “By what I tried to forget,” more so trying to forget about the war , in turn trying to forget about this child. To forget about the people that were killed left and right. To forget about the lives he has taken away and how innocent families were killed. The graphic lose of being naive to this type of terrorism. One would not want to relive any…show more content… The lose of many innocent people and the ones who fought for their respective countries. The loss of dignity, the loss of pride,the loss of humanity and compassion. They are all memories that everyone involved wants to do away with. There is no dealing with these losses or memories, there is just shading them. Covering them until one tricks their mind into believing that terrible things never occurred. That the Dui Boi has to be on his own, that the woman stroking her loved one’s hair through granite, or that a friend is dead; they are all
