Primo Levi's "Buna": A Reflection on Transformation

Surviving the Holocaust, Primo Levi wrote the poem ‘Buna’ as a means of self reflection on the transformation he experienced after his tragic time at Auschwitz. Levi faced what some consider the most horrific act committed by humanity, and he survived. However, he did not leave the death camp gates unscathed. He experienced an inner transformation which his poem ‘Buna’ reveals by painting an image of the horrors of Auschwitz and Levi’s metamorphosis from an excited youth to a war weathered adult through his scientific writing style and address to a rhetorical other and his past self. For Levi, “Buna” functioned as a tool of visualizing inner turmoil and as a means of drawing attention to social atrocity. 

According to Kelly Cefalu, a scholar on Holocaust history, Primo Levi was a successful man, and he had the world ahead of him before his capture and sentence to Auschwitz. His study of chemistry would have opened many opportunities for him. Primo Levi was born July 31, 1919 in Turin, Italy to a liberal Jewish family. He was bullied as a child, for he was small, intelligent and one of the few Jewish people to attend the Massimo d’Azeglio Royal Gymnasium(Cefalu). He finished primary school and went on to secondary school to study chemistry(Cefalu). In 1941, Levi graduated from the University of Turin in Italy and then pursued his doctorate thesis in chemistry, but because of the Manifesto of Race, the Italian race laws of that time, he had difficulty finding a position for his research(Primo Michele Levi). Luckily, he was approached by a fellow student of Turin University and could finish his graduate research by riding off the privileges of this other, non-jewish student, and thus obtain his doctorate. Unfortunately, the status of the Jewish people in Italy declined in 1943 when Benito Mussolini was installed as the leader by the Germans and Levi was forced to return home (Primo Michele Levi). 

Levi returned home to his family in Turin, who at that time were hiding in their holiday home in La Saccarello, outside of Turin. Levi then joined the Italian resistance movement, an organization consisting of untrained and unprepared Italian men whose goal was to resist Nazi progress. It was not long before he and the other men were captured and sent to the Nazi death camps, specifically Auschwitz(Cefalu). This Primo Levi is the one whom the latter half of his poem describes. This was an individual who was “a strong man,” who had a woman who “walked at your side,” who had a name. Peter Balakian, writer for The American Poetry Review, calls the pre-Auschwitz Levi lovestruck, and ambitious, but soon transformed  by his exposure to Auschwitz(Balakian). 

‘Buna’ stems from two words: Butadiene and Natrium, and the name of the camp(Cefalu). Both are chemical ingredients for synthetic rubber, the product of the lab in which Levi worked during his imprisonment at Auschwitz. This poem brings to mind images of the camp, and then it transitions to a section of address to a changed man, the man who walked with a woman by his side, a man who was confident. I interpret this individual to be Levi’s pre-Auschwitz self.  There exist three Primo Levis: the proud, promising pre-Holocaust Levi, the empty, tortured and captive Levi, and the haunted and guilty post-Holocaust Levi. ‘Buna’ connects those three facets of Levi by recognizing the way he once was, how the camp treated and changed him, and the response of his current self to meeting his old self. 

The style that Primo Levi implemented to write ‘Buna’ was quite interesting.  I think Levi saw life through the eyes of a chemist, and he used this perspective to write(Losey). What I know of chemistry helped me to see that Levi wrote ‘Buna’ much like a chemical reaction; he described the reactants, his former self and Auschwitz, the reaction, Auschwitz’s processes and the way it affected him, and the products, his retrospective current self.  

Levi also uses his characteristic style of address to develop an atmosphere of separation from the subject of the poem.  He continually uses the ambiguously beautiful ‘you.’ It can mean both, an individual or a group of individuals. In “Shema,” another of his poems, ‘you’ begins addressing many persons, but then it focuses down to the level of one person: “Or may your house crumble” and “Disease render you powerless.” ‘You functions similarly in ‘Buna.’ “You multitudes with dead faces” clearly means many groups of people suffering in the camps, but the shift to “You have broken what’s left of the courage within you./Colorless one, you were a strong man” expresses a shift to a singular ‘you’, which I believe is the Auschwitz Levi. This shift from a collective subject to a singular subject embodies a facet of ‘Buna’ that makes it an amazing poem. The poem starts by bringing the reader into a scene of many individuals, then it narrows the group down until it is the reader who is “so tired” that he can “no longer grieve.” Gil Anidjar, writer for Tikkun Magazine, says that this is a perfect technique for pulling the reader into a sense of emptiness and pain (Anidjar). 

Primo Levi’s “Buna” had multiple roles.  According to Anidjar, it served as a means of dealing with inner emotional turmoil(Anidjar). As mentioned earlier, Levi did not leave Auschwitz unmarred. His body was physically decrepit, but the emotional and mental strain struck him much deeper. The instances which led to Levi’s survival were lucky to say the least; he happened to be at a camp where a chemist was needed to help produce synthetic rubber, so he gained the luxury of working in a sheltered laboratory, helping him avoid more physically demanding and draining labor that many others experienced. Also, he contracted Scarlet Fever and was sent to the infirmary, which prevented him from going on the Death March. That allowed for his rescue by Russian forces when the camp was liberated in 1945. The fact that he survived when so many died left him with survivor’s guilt. Jay Losey states that, unsurprisingly, Levi also suffered from depression (Losey). A year later, he wrote ‘Buna.’ ‘Buna’ was a medium through which he could address the transformation he experienced. For him, it was a tool of healing, as can be seen from his move toward being advocate against inhumane action(Losey).

‘Buna’ further functioned as means of bringing social awareness to readers(Losey). As mentioned above, readers emerge into a scene of death and oppression, and eventually they reach the end of the poem where Levi questions what they have become. Unlike prose and other forms of writing, poetry reaches to the depths of the soul, awakening raw emotion. Levi used this to drag readers through the emotional pain that he felt during his time at Auschwitz. One who reads this poem walks away with a sense of what unchallenged monstrosity can do to individuals. 

Levi used his style of addressing a collective, yet personal, ‘you’ and his distinct “chemical reaction” type of writing to create ‘Buna.’ Through this poem, he sifted through his inner turmoil left to him by Auschwitz; he tried to make sense of what it did to him. He also used ‘Buna’ as a tool for social awareness by bringing the reader into a unique experience of group suffering and then focusing down to individual transformation when met with conflict. 

References

Anidjar, Gil. "Reluctant memory." Tikkun Jan.-Feb. 2006: 71+. Gale Biography In Context. Web. 24 Oct. 2011

Balakian, Peter. "Poetry in Hell: Primo Levi and Dante at Auschwitz." The American Poetry Review Jan.-Feb. 2008: 3+. Gale Biography In Context. Web. 24 Oct. 2011. 

Cefalu, Kelly. "Primo Levi’s Survival in Auschwitz: A story of what it really means to be human."University of South Carolina Beaufort History Department. University of South Carolina Beaufort, 14 March 2008. Web. 31 Oct 2011. 

Losey, Jay. "From savage elements: epiphany in Primo Levi's Holocaust writings."Journal of European Studies 24.93 (1994): 1+. Gale Biography In Context. Web. 24 Oct. 2011.7 >

"Primo Michele Levi." 2011. Biography.com 31 Oct 2011, 08:57

http://www.biography.com /people/primo-levi-9380562

A Dance Between Expression and Form

Trying to place a definition on poetry is much like trying to catch someone in a race who always seems to stay one step ahead of you. Right when you think you have the runner pinned down, he shoots beyond your grasp. Poetry is the same. Every time I think I have a concrete definition, I see some new poem or hear another’s perspective that opens a whole new array of possible definitions. At the beginning of the year I thought that poetry was a form of written expression that just did not fit into any other category. At this moment in time, however, I believe that poetry is type of expression that balances form and and creativity in such a way that it connects with the reader and works for the writer.

Coming into this class I had all of the presuppositions of an advanced placement English student. I thought poetry was the form of art that deals with the lofty imagery that says a lot about everything and even more about nothing in specific. In other words, poetry was not for me. However, the semester that I have spent in this class has taken my view of poetry and molded it into a entirely different perspective. I now appreciate poetry.

The way that a poet uses every word, line, period, comma, dash, rhyme, and rhythm is important in poetry. Each poem uses these structures and embellishments in a different way to accomplish the goal of the poet. Emily Dickinson is known for her interesting way of using punctuation. Dickinson often ends lines of poetry with a long dash, which often indicates a pause. Dickinson also used hymn meter in her poems paired with slant rhymes and other variable inflections unique to her style, to give an almost mysterious song like feel to her poems. Other poets rely on different types of form to meet their objective. Walt Whitman used long lined poems of free verse to describe the American way of life in the mid 1800s. As Dickinson and Whitman show, form is important to the overall function of their work, but their work is not defined by this form. I think of form as the backbone from which a poem is built. For example, when we had to write sonnets, I thought that the form would be limiting, but I found that the form helped my to organize my thoughts in a more powerful and emotive way. Form and structure, when balanced with emotion and expression, make a poem more expressive. 

Poetry draws on emotion and expression to compliment form and to connect with the reader. I consider a poet a good poet when I can feel what they are describing. Primo Levi wrote about his time in Auschwitz in his poem “Buna.” He described the way that his time transformed him from a once proud, ambitious adult to the world-weary, and emotional scarred man. By his sensual description of the camp and its conditions, I could imagine myself trudging through the mud through which he trudged. Brian Turner, in his book Here, Bullet, described the atrocities of the Iraq war and his experience there through vivid imagery. Turner’s poem “2000 lbs.” describes the event of a car bomb through the perspectives of seven different people present at the explosion. Each perspective provides a different raw emotion, ranging from longing of a lover to the nervousness of detonating a bomb. Turner makes the reader feel all of these. 

The use of emotion in poetry is not hindered by form, it is enhanced by it. According to Mary Oliver’s book The Rules of the Dance, line length is directly proportional to the amount of breath needed to speak that line, and depending on that amount the reader feels something different. If the line is short, the breath is short and concise, thus the poem moves quickly. However, if the line is long to the point of expending the last gasp of breath, the reader basks in that line, taking in everything that it has to offer. Rhyme provides a connection between lines, stanzas, or poems depending on how it is used. 

Peter Fallon called poetry a composition, and I completely agree. A poet must work at a poem until it conveys exactly what he or she desires. Not only does a poem need to express what the writer wants, it must also evoke a response from the audience. Carolyn Forche created an anthology of the poetry of witness in her book Against Forgetting. Her introduction to the text tells of the struggles of the poets against violence in the past one hundred years, and how many of them died during their respective struggles. The poets featured in her anthology successfully convey their situations through their poetry. They constructed their thoughts into a form that is both accessible and relatable to readers. 

I also define poetry by what it does for the poet. Kate’s individual poetry project author, Anne Sexton, was prescribed poetry by her doctor to help deal with her depression. It successful kept her from suicide for fifteens some years, but eventually her mental illness was too overpowering.  After taking this class, I see how poetry can be a prescription. For example, after listening to the convocation about the Invisible Children in Africa, I was filled with concern for humanity’s role in social justice, so I wrote a poem to sort my thoughts:

Shame

Shame is knowing

through action

or not-

the bodies we're reaping

I modeled this poem after Emily Dickinson’s style of writing definitions in short, concise poems. It helped me to express my feelings on how our actions, are always affecting others, even when we do not realize it. 

Poetry goes beyond the poet to function in the world by filling the social space. Poets have used poetry to raise awareness for social issues, to pinpoint the atrocities of humanity, and even to bring readers into their plights. The book Against Forgetting is filled with poetry of witness. The poems fill all of the roles that I just mentioned. Specifically, Primo Levi wrote “Buna” and brought readers into Auschwitz and into the transformative situation into which it brought him. 

Before this class, my definition of poetry was limited. I had no real experience with poetry, so I did not understand how powerful of a tool it can be. Now, however, I feel confident in picking up a modern book of poetry and understanding the message it has, or at least forming my own understanding. The art of poetry uses both expression and form to work for the reader and the poet.