AMERICA: BY ALLEN GINSBERG

KAYJATTA

November 16, 2011

Allen Ginsberg’s poem ‘America’ is a classic protest poem. A political and cultural protest. A protest of racial, ideological and sexuality conflict. It is a classic immigrant poem, characterized by an initial great love for America and then followed by a huge disappointment at the injustice and oppression endemic in American foreign and domestic policy. The poem starts out with the narrator, like a betrayed spouse, expressing his disappointment for getting very little in return after giving all he has got to America. The narrator projects a pacifist view point that questions blind patriotism as in John Okada’s “NO-NO Boy”.  Pacifism was gaining momentum during and after World War II. This is indicated in line 4 and 5 with:

              “America when will we end the human war?

               Go fuck yourself with your atom bomb”

This is clearly and anti-war protest, with the narrator asking when America will be “angelic”, suggesting that war is satanic. In lines 9, 10 and 11, the narrator questions the end to American power and the rise of Asia, China and socialism (Trotskyism-revolution by the workers) as thus:

       “When will you take off your clothes?

         When will you look at yourself through the grave?

        When will you be worthy of your million Trotskyites?”

This perhaps is a profound expression of the narrator’s disappointment of what America once offered to him as an immigrant and what America now is. This bears some semblance to the sentiments expressed in Claude McKay’s ‘America’, or Antin’s ‘The Promise Land’, or Yezierska’s ‘America and I’ or even Steinbeck’s ‘Grapes of Wrath’ and Odet’s ‘Waiting for Lefty’ . The draconian American military and corporate power, as illustrated by the atom bomb and Time Magazine and Henry Ford (4th stanza, line 67), is a common source of lamentation.

In the second stanza of the poem, the narrator attempts at reconciliation with America by pointing out their commonalities as the ones “who are perfect not the next world” (line17) and suggests that “There must be some other way to settle this argument” (line 21).

There are several imageries in the third stanza of the poem that lays out the subsurface cultural and political tensions playing out at the time. The “atom bomb” (line5) for example alludes to the divisions over American involvement in World War II and “Burroughs is in Tangiers” (line 22) recalls the exiled William Burroughs and the debate over legalizing drugs, something that Ginsberg favors. The “Wobblies” (line 30) illustrates workers supremacy and Ginsberg’s anti-corporation stance. The narrator’s admission to smoking ‘weed’, “a million genitals” and reading Karl Marx both socially and politically as well as legally controversial at the time points to the cultural tension at play. The references to Tom Mooney and the Scottsboro Boys are critiques of the American legal systems and the institutionalized discrimination.

Ginsberg’s poem is a great indictment of American political, economic, legal, cultural and military powers during and after World War ii.

REFERENCES:

1.      No-NO Boy, John Okada

2.      America, McKay

3.      Waiting for Lefty, Odets

4.      The Promise Land, Antin

5.      John Steinbeck, The Grapes Of Wrath

6.      America and I, Yezierska

7.      Bcwillia.wordpress.com

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