Book Review

The Enemy

N Engl J Med 2008; 358:437-438January 24, 2008

Article

The Enemy
By Rafael Campo. 99 pp. Durham, NC, Duke University Press, 2007. $59.95 (cloth); $17.95 (paper). ISBN: 978-0-8223-3862-8 (cloth); 978-0-8223-3960-1 (paper).

For a poet whose work as both a doctor and a poet is about striving to make things whole, it is interesting that Rafael Campo's latest collection of poetry has such a divisive title. But without an enemy we would not know war and separation, and without war and separation we would not know peace and connection.

Rafael Campo is a clinician specializing in internal medicine, and an author of poetry and prose. In his nonfiction (The Desire to Heal: A Doctor's Education in Empathy, Identity, and Poetry. New York: W.W. Norton, 1998; The Healing Art: A Doctor's Black Bag of Poetry. New York: W.W. Norton, 2003), we come to see that for him, writing a poem is an act of humility and service, just as healing is. Both practices rely on the power of narrative itself; no poem or story is owned by one person. Campo's lines about the immigrant's experience of his broken homeland, or about a young gay man trying to conform to the standards of American teenage masculinity, need not match our lives detail for detail. Haven't we all felt afraid or ashamed of who we are?

That's him, the little faggot I remember . . .

. . . That damn queer,

I can't forgive his innocence, as if

he might just be like anyone, his love

weak armies crushed in this heart lost to fear.

(“Personal Mythology”)

In The Enemy, Campo's autobiographical gay youth knows that poetry has power, but it holds little macho appeal. So he chooses medicine — the white coat helps him to be whiter, and the profession makes him more masculine. In retrospect, the speaker finds that medicine and poetry go hand in hand. Poetry's native vocabulary is honesty, and the body has its secrets, but it cannot lie.

For readers who are new to Campo's poetry, this collection is a good introduction. He writes of music and celebrates the erotic. He has awe for the mysterious and a familiarity with despair, and he catches frequent hints of God's presence. In this book, there are tiresome days in the clinic and patients who are near death but who will not die. There are poems in which our fragments all fall into place perfectly.

Along with self-hatred and war, the enemy also seems to be fate. Campo knows he is not necessarily exempt from the fate of a kindred spirit, the Cuban poet Reinaldo Arenas, who contracted HIV and committed suicide years later in 1990. In his memoir, Before Night Falls (New York: Viking, 1993), Arenas tells about growing up poor in rural Cuba and about his political rebelliousness and homosexuality as well as the suppression and persecution he experiences. In Campo's poem, “Night Has Fallen,” the Cuban poet's life returns as metaphor. Perhaps the best homage comes from a survivor; Campo's speaker works on an AIDS ward and has plenty of his own “black memories.”

In poetry as in palliative care, much is made today of the idea of “witnessing.” Caregivers closely witness times of the most elemental and profound suffering. Campo's poems of witnessing raise the question of whether it is truly possible to honor another person's suffering — even through the empathetic medium of poetry. Mutual understanding and concern are important virtues in medicine. The seemingly quick fixes that patients love and that doctors often enable — just get the sign language interpreter or adjust the hearing aids and move on — is in one sense the opposite of poetry. Campo's poems show how medicine can best be of service in the absence of cures or quick fixes, and how medical professionals can best be present, mindfully and emotionally, during moments of human suffering.

Heather A. Burns
University of Virginia, Charlottesville, VA 22904
hab3f@virginia.edu