Madame Nhu, Woman and Warrior: A Reading of "Le Xuan, Beautiful Spring."

This essay presents a literary criticism of the poem "Le Xuan, Beautiful Spring" by Yusef Komunyakaa. The poem's one obscurity is explained when we know that "Le Xuan, Beautiful Spring" was the given name for Madame Ngo Dinh Nhu, the sister-in-law of South Vietnam's president Ngo Dinh Diem, a very active player in the power politics of the early 1960s both in Vietnam and America. Komunyakaa has said that he often begins his poems by posing a central image that requires extrapolation. Here the image is a photograph of Madame Nhu, a souvenir. For those who have read Komunyakaa's poetry, it hardly needs demonstrating that sex and violence are inextricably linked in his imagination.