Redefining Me

The question of who we are always lingers in the mind of a human being. With the capacity to think about ourselves, to create, to ask ontological questions, one can come to many diverse conclusions. But how do we know if these conclusions are real except that we experiment and to see if they really do equal reality. Can we make ourselves into what we want? Do we have the power to change from our anatomical makeup to another? In our society today many would like to believe that we can.

In Adrienne Rich’s poem “Diving into the Wreck” the speaker recounts it’s own quest for identity. Throughout this poem Rich uses pronouns to reveal the evolution of this character. The speaker begins making reference to “I” as well as to a group similar to itself: “so many who have always/ lived here.” These others are like the speaker, wounded or even dead with their “drowned face.” But these people are emerging into something new, maybe something that has always been underneath the “mask.” It is no longer the singular speaker, but a it is a larger group that wishes to redefine itself since its “names do not appear” in the past “book” of human description. These the speaker incites  are myths about the true identity that has been forsaken for too long. This new androgynous human must be documented with a “camera” and even defended with a “knife” since the past has only seen destruction of such a creature.

Elisa Gabbert also writes about identity in an untitled poem within her book The Self Unstable. This short poem describes the search for identity and even questions if we have the ability to change one’s innate physical qualities to more desirable ones. “I wanted to be pretty, and now I am. Did wishing make/ it so?” the speaker of the poem asks. The speaker recognizes that the “self is universal” and that “there is only one I.” This changes the speaker’s sense of control over the self and the thoughts it maintains as individual. It may be a jump to say the Elisa Gabbert’s poem advocates for the inability for one to change what we are born with, but it does connect that there is a common human bond we cannot escape. This bond is that we do not create ourselves, but something “universal” has already made these choices.