4.3: Yusef Komunyakaa- "Praising Dark Places”-- A Reflection by Pádraig Ó Tuama

Quote

“But one of the things I began to learn very quickly was that ultimately, in resolving a conflict with a group of people, you’re hoping that a group of people can get to the stage of holding ambivalences and ambiguities with each other, where they can begin to look at things from a different point of view and they can say: We don’t know what to do with this, and we’re not sure; this didn’t work before, but we’re going to try something different in the future. That ambiguity, and the capacity to hold that in public with each other, is one of the arts of being human.”

--Pádraig Ó Tuama

In Pádraig Ó Tuama’s reflection on Yusef Komunyakaa’s poem “Praising Dark Places,” he places ambivalence and ambiguity at the heart of humanity. Instead of aiming for complete agreement, O’ Tuama’s goal is for people to find acceptance with uncertainty in our relationships with others, but to not let that uncertainty lead us to turn away from those we disagree with. He wants them to be comfortable admitting that they aren’t sure about the path forward or about the meaning that they create from experiences.

Before Reading

1) The graphic in the beginning of Ó Tuama’s text says that his first lesson was “Beauty can bite.” What do you think this means? Note your ideas below.

2) As you read/listen to O’Tuama, note the kinds of things he is noticing about Yusef Komunyakaa’s poem and how O'Tuama portrays curiosity.

https://onbeing.org/programs/yusef-komunyakaa-praising-dark-places/

As we learned earlier in this guidebook, reflection can be an effective way to create meaning from the texts we read. By allowing ourselves to pause and think deeper about a text, we might notice aspects of it that we didn’t initially observe. Here are some questions to guide your reflection. We hope that you explore your thoughts in whichever way they take you.

After Reading: Reflection

1. How has your interpretation of the message “beauty can bite” changed?

2. What kinds of things did O’Tuama notice in this text? Why did those things go unnoticed for quite a long time? What enabled him to make these observations?

3. How was curiosity portrayed in this poem and in O’Tuama’s analysis of it? How does this compare with other authors’ perspectives on curiosity?

4. In O’Tuama’s analysis of Komunyakaa’s poem, he notes that “The first thing that comes to my mind when I think of the line ‘Beauty can bite’ is that he’s thinking about how perhaps he might have reached down, out of curiosity, to a scorpion and been bitten back, or almost been bitten back by it. So: beauty can bite. But also, he is lifting something up and exposing these insects to something that they don’t want. So maybe he’s the bite.” Think back to the earlier section of this guidebook on self-reflexive reading. How does O’Tuama’s conjecture that “maybe he’s the bite” demonstrate a self-reflexive reading?