I wasn’t initially going to post about this, but the more I continued to think about this poem, the more I realized that I had some thoughts that I wanted to express, and posting seemed to be the best place to do so.

This poem essentially describes the torture of living inside one’s own body. The initial lines are “I am inside someone/ who hates me” (1-2). This quickly made me think of body dysmorphia and depression. There is a dissociation between the body and the soul, which is fascinating. Many people, myself included, sometimes feel that you are merely watching your life progress without any agency. You are essentially a passenger inside yourself. However, upon many rereads, I realized that this may only be the half-truth of the poem. Acknowledging that Baraka is black, I believe that this poem reflects the struggles of a black man to survive in the 1960s; this period comes from the date this poem was published.

There seems to be this description of pain and suffering throughout the poem, both physically and mentally. However, the lines that mainly stuck out to me were “This is the enclosure (flesh, /where innocence is a weapon” (12-13). Black men, even in modern society, are typically viewed as violent, especially when compared to white men. There is this conception of systemic racism that exists in us today; as such, a black man, such as Baraka, may begin to believe these perceptions about himself and view himself as a weapon and no longer as innocent.