and stubborn flecks of paint behind. The words that remain are misread or mis-translated because their true shape can no longer be seen. When Rich writes ‘All those dead letters’ she may be referring to unsent letters, which could signify unlived lives, or perhaps she is talking about the alphabet itself, where letters are ‘dead’ because they are ineffective and the words they form are not good enough. When the letters are combined into words, they are used by the ‘oppressor’: ‘rendered into the oppressor’s language.’
The poem changes course abruptly with the disturbing simile of an Algerian man who has been badly burned, but who does not speak the language of the doctor who is the only one with the power to help him: ‘Trying to tell the doctor where it hurts/ like the Algerian/ who has walked from his village, burning// his whole body a cloud of pain’. The only witness to this man’s terrible pain is his own wounded body – ‘and there are no words for this// except himself’ – just as so many women had no words to describe their pain beyond the fact of their existences and, in many cases, the scars they carried on their own bodies.
A quarter of a century after writing this poem, Rich was still preoccupied with the shortcomings of language to encompass the entirety of the human experience, and said that ‘suffering is diagnosed relentlessly as personal’ and that ‘we lack a vocabulary for thinking about pain as communal and public’.
