A dear friend died recently. Our conversations over the last few years were limited to e-mail and snail-mail, since my telephone and travel skills are now fossilized, but we covered a pretty wide range : from literature to Donald Trump. My friend was a poet, and we often discussed her poetry, since she seemed to get some pleasure from defending it against my critiques. I was re-reading some of our correspondence the other evening and I came across a series of exchanges about poetic metaphor.
Dealing with something by using a comparison to something else is a way of calling attention to a relationship that 1) clarifies your meaning and/or 2) calls attention to a connection that may have heretofore gone unnoticed by your reader. In an essay (my game) there is room to make sure the specifics are spelled out sufficiently to make the parallel unmistakable. In a poem, where verbal economy is (or at any rate should be) at a premium, metaphors have to be carefully chosen to prevent them from becoming like the personal icons of idiosyncratic painters like Kandinsky or Miro — meaningless unless the reader has been briefed in advance. In a poem there is (or should be) no space to elaborate or modify. The power of the comparison is in its vivid image.
“The dawn came up like thunder out of China ’cross the bay” is a metaphor. A lot more vivid than “The sun came up.” It did its job by distinguishing the explosive dawn the poet remembered from other possible kinds of dawn — gentle, meek, hardly noticeable — that would not have suited the tone of the The Road to Mandalay. It also helped drive the meter and suggested a martial prequel.
“The dawn came up with a sound like two garbage-can lids rolling across the sidewalk after the sanitation truck has left” is also a metaphor, one that would have perhaps been equally accurate but would have been wildly out of place in a reminiscence about a long-ago Malaysian romance. A poet has to be careful not to destroy the mood by inappropriate imagery.
There is a further requirement. The imagery must evoke the desired emotion in the reader and he will relate it to his own experiences whether you like it or not. It is a reasonable assumption that most listeners know what thunder sounds like. It is not a reasonable assumption that a Punjabi or Inuit listener knows what a garbage-can lid looks like, or would sound like when it hits the pavement.
To be successful a metaphor must be chosen to navigate the elusive territory between triteness and incomprehensibility. My friend and I spent delicious hours debating the effectiveness of our metaphors, since poetry is heavily dependent on them for its power and essays are often in need of graphic spicing up.
Since a poet cannot presume to know the backgrounds of all her possible readers, she must allow for some whose experience doesn’t include the specific allusions she has chosen to use, or some whose interpretation of them will be entirely different from hers. You may welcome thunder as a harbinger of the clear and refreshing day that the passing of the storm will bring. I may mentally cringe at the frightening noise and visions of destruction preceding my silent count-down to it. My understanding of your poem will be colored by my past life, no matter how carefully you have tried to make your message universal.
I bore you with these reflections today because of President Trump’s use of the expression, “shithole countries” to refer to African nations in general and Haiti in particular in a recent cabinet meeting. To most Americans the expression “shithole” has a pretty definite meaning, not ordinarily associated with hih-level government decision-making or international diplomacy.
I will ignore the obvious literal anatomical meaning, since I cannot bring myself to believe that Mr. Trump was asking his listeners to liken an entire Caribbean country, much less an entire continent, to that image. Especially at a formal government gathering of officials supposedly trying to solve international problems.
So I ask myself to what events in Mr. Trump’s own life could he have been relating in his comment, and what inferences he intended to provoke in us, the citizens whose best interests he is sworn to protect and defend?
Perhaps, I think, he was recalling a boyhood like mine that included a once-familiar structure known as a “Chick Sale” — the outhouse — a tiny shelter built for privacy and protection from the weather, positioned over a hole in the ground. The hole, of course, had to be filled and covered over every so often, another one dug, and the little house moved to a new spot. As in “All right, gang, today we are moving the outhouse. Grab a shovel, hold your nose, and let’s go do it.” In that case a “shithole” country could be one that from time to time needed renewing. Perhaps through revolution (like our own or Mr. Putin’s, once). He would simply have been acknowledging the tough road ahead for Haiti and those African countries so plagued by drought, disease, and corruption and intending to encourage them to face the struggle. But no, little Donald grew up in Jamaica Estates, New York, where the last outhouse probably disappeared 200 years ago.
Then perhaps he was harking back to one of the distasteful chores of his army career? If he served in the Infantry, at least, he would have remembered the drill :
first you dig a foxhole for protection, then you (“I want three volunteers — you, you, and you.”) to help dig the squad a latrine. A tough but necessary job of housekeeping in the unlikely event that you might be staying in the same place for more than a day or two. In that case, he might have been acknowledging, in another way, that the countries he had in mind had a difficult job ahead of them, and that we who had already been through a similar process should view their efforts sympathetically, and offer them as much help as possible. But no, thanks to fallen arches (at least according to his daddy’s podiatrist’s affidavits) he was never allowed to serve in the Infantry or any other branch of the military.
So, what else in a boyhood in Jamaica Estates, New York might have corresponded to his choice of “shithole”? According to sources on Wikipedia the median home value there last year was a million dollars. (Well, $983,400, if you want to be nitpicky about it.) The odds of anyone in such a pricey enclave even knowing what a Chick Sale is are, in my estimation, pretty low unless they have recently been reading John Steinbeck or thumbing through an album of Walker Evans’s photographs. I do not have a large picture in my imagination of Mr. Trump doing either of those things.
Could he have been referring to the supposed wasteland he inherited from the Muslim infiltrator Barack Obama? (A dispirited, nearly ruined society, joblessness rampant, and no security for us innocent white settlers against a wave of stubby Mexicans with calves the size of grapefruits from lugging drugs across the Arizona border despite the valiant efforts of our patriotic Joe Arapaios.) Maybe he meant that America was the “shithole” country and we misinterpreted his remark? No, I re-read the reports. He clearly meant that any country not blessed with a 99.99% white citizenry, a North Sea oil field and free education and health care for all its citizens was a shithole and its people should not be permitted to contaminate our nice white community.
Then what are we dealing with here? A poor choice of metaphor or a poor choice of President? I wish my cherished poet friend were still here to kick that one around with me.
Vance Weaver 