Bag of Bones

Dunya MikhailFiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 2005

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Summary

Background

Poem Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Literary Devices

Symbols & Motifs

The Mass Grave

The mass graveyard is both the setting of the poem and its most powerful symbol: It embodies the crimes that the dictator has been committing against his people and the human cost of this tragedy. Just as the mass grave represents the deaths of countless victims, so too do the bones the unnamed woman is retrieving represent the bones of all the other nameless victims: “His bones, like thousands of bones / in the mass graveyard” (Lines 7-8). The fact that these bones all look the same speaks to the erasure these victims have undergone: They have been erased from society and their ordinary lives through an act of mass violence, and are now reduced to anonymity.

The surreal and unnatural nature of a mass grave is further highlighted by the speaker’s description of the grave site as “noisy with skulls and bones and dust” (Line 19), the allusion to sound suggesting that the dead do not and cannot rest in peace in such a place. In an interesting reversal, the speaker chooses to describe a scene from past life with her loved one as quiet, while the grave is what is loud: “when he kissed her / there, quietly / not in this place” (Lines 16-17). The peace and quiet of life and love glimpsed in these lines reinforces the cruelty of a unique, individual life ending in such grotesque circumstances.

The Bag of Bones

The unnamed woman’s bag of bones is a symbol of both tragedy and of resilience. On one hand, the bag of bones is a symbol of the mass violence the people have suffered under the dictatorship. Instead of a respectful burial ritual, the woman has no choice but to collect her loved one’s remains in an unceremoniously prosaic bag. The speaker dwells at length on the significance of the bones, using them to ask sharp questions about what has happened here and why: “What does it mean to meet your loved ones now / with all of these hollow places?” (Lines 23-24). The “handful of bones” (Line 27) grieving mothers receive as the only remains of their children also alludes to the violation of the usual cycle of life, with the bones representing the tragedy of parents outliving their children.

However, the bag of bones is also a symbol of resilience and of love’s power. While the bones in the mass grave may appear anonymous at first, the woman can recognize her loved one’s remains, and is relieved to have found him: “his skull not like any other skull” (Line 9). The woman’s recognition of her loved one—as well as her determination to find him in the first place—is an act of resistance against the dictatorship and its crimes. Through her love, the woman has refused to accept the anonymity of her loved one’s death and has instead restored to him some semblance of his identity and dignity: When she gazes upon his skull, she reconstructs his living face and remembers the life he lived.

Death

Death haunts “Bag of Bones” from beginning to end as an overriding motif, creating a foreboding sense of the sheer enormity of the dictator’s crimes. The setting of the mass graveyard and the symbolism of the bones are the most literal representations of death in the poem, but death also appears in more subtle guises. When the speaker describes how the dictator treats death like “a math problem / That multiplied the one death by millions” (Lines 37-38), the speaker is creating a powerful contrast between how death is viewed by grieving family members and how it is viewed by the dictator. For the grieving, death is a deeply personal experience, one that involves memorializing a person known and loved as unique. For the dictator, death is an abstraction that means nothing in pursuit of his own power. In the same vein, the imagery of the ominous “clap[ping]” (Line 42) of the dictator’s “audience” (Line 41) of supporters before the poem shifts back to the grave site suggests that the causes of death take many forms. It is not only the dictator’s cruelty that causes death, or the literal violence carried out against victims, but also the unthinking support of others.