Pantoum for the Broken

How many of us were fingered?
A soft thing with a hole in it,
thing that won't tell, that can't.
I forget how many times I was broken,

a soft thing with a hole in it.
Some remember, grateful it wasn't worse;
forget how many times I was broken.
Someone faceless rolled on me like a horse.

Some remember, grateful it wasn't worse.
Some forget but their bodies do inexplicable things.
Someone faceless rolled on me like a horse.
Sleepwalking. I go back to where it happens.

Some forget but their bodies do inexplicable things.
We don't know when or why or who broke in.
Sleepwalking, we go back to where it happens.
Not wanting to go back, we make it happen.

If we escaped, will we escape again?
I leapt from my body like a burning thing.
Not wanting to go back, I make it happen
until I hold the broken one, hold her and sing.

About this Poem:

In this shocking poem, Derricotte deploys the pantoum form to dramatize sexual abuse, capturing an experience that is extremely difficult to write or talk about. In just five stanzas, twenty lines, she unmasks a horrific brutality and somehow connects to a community of survivors.

The pantoum originated as an oral Malayan form -it first entered written literature in the fifteenth century-and Derricotte retains something of its original spoken quality. The form is highly, perhaps even obsessively repetitive. It consists of interweaving quatrains of indeterminate length. The second and fourth lines of cach stanza repeat as the first and third lines of the following stanza. Every stanza takes four steps forward and two steps back--and thus, as a form, it keeps looking back over its shoulder. The fact that it turns back while moving forward makes it well suited to poems of loss, such as Donald Justice's"Pantoum of the Great Depression," and poems of departure, such as Louis MacNeice's "Leaving Barra." But these pocms are gentle compared to "Pantoum for the Broken." Also, the pantoum started out as a disjunctive form the first rwo lines had no apparent connection to the second set of lines), and here Derricotte employs disjunctive memory in her poem of severe brokenness.

How many of us were hngered?-is there a more appalled or appalling opening line in the history of the pantoum? The word "fingered" does double service here: its primary meaning points to a horrifying sexual violation. But the word also means "targeted" and the sense of bcing fingered by sexual predators also comes into play.
Each end-stopped line in a pantoum tends to present a statement, and Derricotte shocks the reader by showinghow young girls have been reduced to objects: "A soft thing with a hole in it, / a thing that won't tell, that can't." The partial rhyme that connects the small but crucial words "it and "can't" reinforces the feeling of helplessness. The pronouns related to these girls switch from the third-person plural- "How many of us were fingered"- to the first-person singular: "I forget how many times I was broken" The words "fingered" and "broken" emphatically do not rhyme, another disjunction. The first stanza ends not with a period, but a comma, and the double pause of line break and punctuation emphasizes the connection to the beginning of the second stanza: "I forget how many times I was broken, // a soft thing with a hole in it."

In a strong pantoum, every time a line repeats, it accrues a difterent or additional meaning. The first time Derricotte evokes "a soft thing with a hole in it" she is referring to the vagina of a young girl. But the second time, because the line comes after the horrifying confession "I forget how many times I was broken," the image comes also to stand for the speaker's whole self. The wound has grown. She has been broken so many times that she has been hollowed out.
For the rest of the poem, Derricotte moves fluently between the plural and the singular to reflect on memories of sexual abuse: "Some remember, grateful it wasn't worse; / I forget how many times I was broken." Some may be grateful that the violence wasn't even worse, a documented perspective among some survivors of trauma, but the speaker evidently isn't one of them. Derricotte has said that the next image came to her from a recurring childhood dream: "Someone faceless rolled on me like a horse./ Sleepwalking, I go back to where it happens." Each successive statement comes at us like a blow, reenacting the horror as the speaker keeps going back to it, in memory. Thus, the pantoum enacts a series of compulsive returns.
It is purposeful to reduce the abuser, in this case an unnamed man, to "someone faceless. The face is the center of human recognition. If the human face "orders and ordains" us, as the philosopher Emmanuel Lévinas declares, the abuser has been reduced here to something less than human, the animal body and nothing more; hence the simile "Someone faceless rolled on me like a horse" The comparison seems to add on to the action, doubling it, repeating it, worsening it. The mention of the horse also harkens back to the speaker's sense of being broken. To break a horse is to stamp out its spirit and conquer it. That's precisely what the sexual predator is doing to the young girl. The horror is reinforced by the dissonant near rhyme of the words "worse" and "horse, which emphatically reoccurs in the next stanza.

The word "faceless" also evokes the idea of facing or not facing up to something Nonetheless, whether one remembers or forgets, confronting or avoiding the past, the return is inescapable. It turns some women into "sleep walkers" others into people who go through life doing things that they can't understand.
It's worth pausing a moment to focus on the rhyming of this pantoum. In every stanza, Derricotte reinforces connections with a single close or near rhyme. Two lines rhyme, but two others do not. Recall the words "it" and "can't" (stanza 1), "worse" and "horse" (stanzas 2 and 3). "in" and "happen" stanza 4). Throughout the poem, the lines that rhyme reinforce a sense of connectedness; the lines that don't rhyme reinforce a feeling of brokenness.
This pattern also fortifies the poems dialogue between remembering and forgetting.
There is a turn, or change in sound, in the penultimate stanza. Here the lines that don't rhyme are brought into closer relation with the words "things" and "happen." You hear the jangling repetition of the letter n in all four words: "things, "in, "happen, "happens. Something is happeningand the thing that is happening is enacted in the sound.