Kamikaze: he came home alive, and his family never spoke to him again

What does the word kamikaze actually mean? The everyday answer is a suicide pilot, someone who crashes his plane on purpose. It means divine wind. It was the name given to the storms that wrecked Kublai Khan's invasion fleets off Japan in the thirteenth century. In the Second World War, the name was handed to pilots sent to crash into enemy ships. So the word was given to the pilots by other people. In Beatrice Garland's Kamikaze, a pilot turns back from his mission and comes home alive, and from then on, other people tell his story too. He never gets to tell it himself. Who does tell it, and why that matters, sits in the poem's frame.

Kamikaze is still in copyright, so this video quotes short pieces of it; have the anthology open if you can. It begins with the pilot setting off at dawn, carrying water and a sword. He has "a shaven head full of powerful incantations". Incantations are chanted words, like spells. What is in his head is language somebody else put there. And he carries "enough fuel for a one-way journey into history". The mission is described as a fuel calculation: the machinery has already decided he will not come back. Halfway there, he looks down and sees "the little fishing boats strung out like bunting" on a bright green-blue sea, with shoals of fish flashing silver underneath. Bunting is the string of little flags you hang up for a celebration. The sea below him looks like a party. Why does the sea make him turn back? Because it is full of life and of home. It reminds him of his childhood on the shore, waiting with his brothers for their father's fishing boat, so the sea pulls him back to being alive.

He turns back, and he comes home. Then the punishment begins, and it is not prison. "my mother never spoke again in his presence". She would not meet his eyes. The neighbours treated him as if he no longer existed, and in time the children learned to be silent too. Notice the word my in my mother. Somebody in the family is speaking. Who is telling this story: the pilot, his daughter, or his wife? His daughter. Years later she tells it to her own children, and the poem's speaker passes on what she said, so the story reaches us through two other people. The proof sits near the start of the poem, where the daughter is "recounting it later to her children". Recounting means telling it again. So the flight itself is a family story, handed down a generation. And the final words belong to her: "he must have wondered which had been the better way to die". Why must have wondered, and not simply wondered?

Because nobody ever asked him what he wondered. You never hear the pilot himself; his story comes to us second hand and third hand, so the silence inside the story is also the shape of the poem. Even its ending is a guess about him.

One clause of history is plenty here. One examiner's report on this poem notes a tendency for a few to become sidetracked into Japanese history, losing focus on the key ideas in the poem itself. Most did better when they focused on wider ideas and themes. The fix is to spend your sentences on the poem's own ideas: duty, shame and silence. The history earns a clause, and no more.

Five short pieces of Kamikaze carry an answer, and each one does its own job. "a shaven head full of powerful incantations": what fills his head is other people's language. "enough fuel for a one-way journey into history": the mission is a sum, and the answer is his death. "the little fishing boats strung out like bunting": the sea looks like a celebration, and that is what pulls him back to life. "my mother never spoke again in his presence": the punishment is silence, delivered by his own family, and it is the daughter's voice saying it. And "he must have wondered which had been the better way to die": must have, because the ending is still a guess. In the cluster, Kamikaze reaches three strands: the reality of conflict, what conflict leaves behind, and identity and belonging, because a family decides he no longer belongs.

Time for the gaps: three of them, one word each, then one last question. He has "a shaven head full of powerful" what? Incantations. Powerful chanted words, put there by other people. Now the sea: "the little fishing boats strung out like" what? Bunting. The boats look like party flags, a pull back towards life. Try the silence: "my mother never spoke again in his" what? Presence. She never spoke again while he was there, and still shut him out. One more, imagined: if the poem ended on the pilot saying I chose to live, what would it lose? The silence. Letting him speak would break the very thing the poem is about: a man nobody ever listened to. Kamikaze means divine wind, a name other people gave the pilots. Garland's pilot is named, judged and remembered by other people too, and the poem never hands him the words.

Count how many people the pilot's story passes through and it clicked: thumbs-up, finished. Not clicked yet, store it, since the strand video setting Kamikaze beside War Photographer makes the frame clearer.

Next in the chapter: Checking Out Me History: taught the nursery rhymes, he had to find his own history alone. Hopefully that's next in your feed, but if not, search for ScholaFly E L four oh, oh nine.

Every other video is on scholafly.com too, easy to search by video code or by keyword. Whatever you're revising, go there and have a look, or, watch the next video.