To smile and cry humbly at our world

Ronald Ruskin

doi:10.1503/cmaj.080690

The Enemy Rafael Campo Duke University Press; 2007 99 pp $17.95 ISBN 978-0-8223-3960-1

Rafael Campo, a physician who teaches and practises internal medicine at Harvard Medical School and Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston, Massachusetts, is also an award-winning writer and poet whose luminous words explore fear's dark interiors. “The Enemy,” the title poem in Campo's fifth collection of poetry not only views 9/11's traumatic losses — the disillusionment of personal and national security in our millennium — but asks the question of whether the enemy resides inside the self.

The buildings' wounds are what I can't forget;
though nothing could absorb my sense of loss
I stared into their blackness, what was not

supposed to be there, billows of soot
and ragged maw of splintered steel, glass.
The buildings' wounds are what I can't forget,
the people dropping past them, fleeting spots
approaching death as if concerned with grace.
I stared into the blackness, what was not

Inhuman, since by men's hands they were wrought;
reflected on the TV's screen, my face
upon the buildings' wounds, I can't forget

this rage, I don't know what to do
With it —
it's in my nightmares, towers, plumes of dust,
a staring in the blackness. What was not

conceivable is now our every thought:
We fear the enemy is all of us,
The buildings' wounds are what I can't forget.
I stared into their blackness, what was not.

Photo by: Duke University Press

Like many physicians, Campo writes about other enemies: the transience, passion and mortality of the body's narrative. The son of immigrant Cuban parents, Campo began writing poetry during his childhood to please his mother. Later, he connected to his cultural heritage through reading the poetry of José Marti and Pablo Neruda. Growing up as a struggling gay American youth, medicine offered Campo a professional identity that encompassed his sensitivity to suffering as a visceral expression of the poet's words and the body's torments.

The book is divided into 4 sections. The Enemy, which expresses the sense of unease, war and loss, hints, in “Night Has Fallen,” at the shadows of the late Cuban poet Reinaldo Areinas, while in “El Viejo y la Mar” Campo expresses his own exile from the island of his ancestors. The following section, Eighteen Days in France, appears on its surface as lighter and beautiful, yet it is preoccupied with mortality, as in “Tachycardia at the Cathedral of Notre Dame” where Campo recounts the bivalent pulse of joy and fever: “I'm here, but I think of them, the ones I've left for colleagues to console about the test that's positive…”. The third section, Towards a Theory of Memory, includes a translation of one of Neruda's haunting “Cien Sonetos de Amor” (“You will know that I do and do not love you just as life is of two minds.”) and, in “A Simple Cuban meal,” wistful hallucinated memories (“We gather at the table, even those who left us long ago.”) In the last section, Dawn, New Age, Campo in “Allegorical” muses on the tranquillity before our sense of time's finitude in writing: “In the beginning, time was animal. Instead of clocks, cocks announced the sunrise… By the seventh day, we had learned to count, when all creation knew peace had run out.” In “Crybaby Haiku” Campo archly writes:

What can we know but
smallest pieces, tiny grains
of truth. Just all that.

Campo has been called a political poet because he writes about life's inequalities of class, power, war, sexual freedom and the tyranny of illness. He does so with a musician's ear and an artist's brush and leads us to smile and cry humbly at our world.