Relations of Power in Paul Muldoon's "Cuba"

Paul Muldoon, "Cuba"

My eldest sister arrived home that morning

In her white muslin evening dress,

"Who the hell do you think you are,

Running out to dances in next to nthing?

As though we hadn't enough bother

With the world at war, if not at an end?"

My father was pounding at the breakfast table.

"Those Yankees were touch and go as it was--

If you'd heard Patton at Armagh--

But this Kennedy's nearly an Irishman

So he's not much better than ourselves.

And him with only to say the word.

If you've got anything on your mind

Maybe you should make your peace with God."

I could hear May from beyond the curtain.

"Bless me father for I have sinned.

I told a lie once, I was disobedient once.

And, Father, a boy touched me once."

"Tell me, child. Was this touch immodest?

Did he touch your breast, for example?"

"He brushed against me, Father. Very gently."

Briefly, Paul Muldoon's “Cuba” narrates a domestic scene in Ireland during the Cuban Missile Crisis, centering around the narrator's father and the narrator's sister. The father is unhappy that the daughter, May, had been out dancing all night, and advises her to see a priest, which she does.

The poem is heavy-laden with points of tension. For example: between the appearance of May and the words of the father, the first stanza highlights the tension between young life and the possibility of imminent planetary destruction. Furthermore, in the comparison between Patton and Kennedy, in the second stanza, there is a tension between age and the past, and youth and the present; in the comparison between “Yankees” and the Irish, there is a tension based on racial difference; and in the language used to describe president Kennedy, there is a perceivable latent tension in Irish national identity.

It is perhaps this last, this tension of national identity, that would at first appear to be central to the poem – the lines in which this tension is implied, 10-11, fall appropriately at the exact middle. The father, armed with a conception of what it is to be “Irish,” conveys a sense of almost despairing powerlessness in the face of a crisis in which only Kennedy -- “nearly an Irishman” (10) -- is standing in the way of the end of the world, “and with him only to say the word” (12).

Interestingly, the father reacts to this feeling of powerlessness by exercising power himself, over the only subject of power to which he has access: namely, his daughter, May. We note that the father also has only to “say the word,” -- in this case “maybe you should make your peace with God” (14) – and the very next line finds her doing exactly that.

The father absolutely dominates the discourse of the poem. He is the speaking agent for eleven of the twenty-one lines – and if we read him in the agency of some sort of collective super-ego, which, given that he urges his daughter to confession, seems valid, we can actually claim thirteen of the twenty-one for him, having added in those lines spoken by the priest. In a somewhat Foucauldean sense, the father and the priest are, in fact, two faces of the same coin: both are functions of a system bent on controlling its constitutive members in a certain way; limiting, normalizing, defining. The father does this via a dominating discourse: because nobody else can speak, he is free to construct the matter as he sees fit; the priest does this by producing knowledge, through the confession; knowledge which may subsequently be used to define, in certain terms, the confessing individual.

And it is herein where we discover the actual tension in the poem: not between life and destruction, not between different cultures – not even within national identity. In the end, the tension in this poem revolves around a living being, an agent of flowing desires, in the person of May, and a dominating society that would limit her desire and construct her into an “individual” -- that is, essentially, into something that can be controlled and normalized. And it is possible, in fact, to read the poem as a triumph, on May's part. Instead of resolving the tensions, instead of allowing herself to be defined, allowing herself to become a subject of knowledge, she simply steps out of the dialectic, renders an answer that is neither repentant nor unrepentant. Asked by the priest if the boy's touch had been “immodest” (19), May replies only: “He brushed against me, Father. Very gently” (21). In this she refuses even to recognize the existence of such a binary as “modest/immodest,” and in this the poem is her triumph.