Tu Do Street By Yusef Komunyakaa Analysis

The title of Yusef Komunyakaa’s poem, “Tu Do [Two Door] Street,” immediately showcases binary oppositions, rigid cultural forces that create powerful racial divisions. Two physical doors, metaphors for the racial binary that creates and perpetuates racial division and inequality in America, separate black and white humanity in a Saigon, Vietnamese red-light district. According to the poem’s text, America exports its racial binary, and its implicit white-superior-to-black, racist axiom, with its GIs to Vietnam. A black American GI, serving in the Vietnam War, narrates “Tu Do Street” and provides his perspective of the exported racism. Because he is black, the narrator inhabits the inferior side of the racial binary in his own country and now, by extension, in Vietnam. …show more content…
He juxtaposes images of doubles – two doors, two bars, two cities, two races, two country music singers named Hank – to emphasize the distinction between binary oppositions, with imagery that suggests their blurring or undermining – nebulous lines drawn in dust, a permeable membrane made of mist and smoke, and a psychedelic jukebox (signifying hallucination or distortion). Additionally, he undermines heterosexual/homosexual and lover/enemy binaries, and he employs them to undermine the racial opposition. In “Tu Do Street[’s]” historical context, the narrator’s undermining of racial, sexual, and war-time binaries in Vietnam mirrors the simultaneous undermining of racial, sexual, and war-time binaries in America during the 1960s and early 1970s. It also mirrors twentieth-century-philosopher Jacques Derrida’s theoretical study of binary oppositions and the undermining of their respective