When I’m up late at night, I think about all the things I should have done, all the things I shouldn’t have, all the things I wished happened and all the things I wished didn’t. Insomniac by Saeed Jones invokes those same thoughts when talking about a mother and her relationship with her child.
After reading this poem, I honed in on the 4th stanza, where the narrator refers to “the only inheritance of worth in your village of synapses”(1). I believe this quote references generational trauma and abuse the mother suffered at the hands of her own mother, and that she is the narrator. In this interpretation, the narrator is her internal thoughts, talking to herself, like many of us do (not just me hopefully) at night. Possibly coping with postpartum depression, she thinks of herself as a “mother of sorrows”(1), and that she tries to hide that side of herself from him. The regret she feels abusing the child manifests in the line, “Check the room you’ve locked him in” as she wants to fix her mistakes and be better.
One can also interpret the narrator as the child, all grown up, and reflecting on his childhood at night wishing he could change the past. Perhaps he’s trying to talk to his mother, begging her to just check on the “sweet little wreck”(1), in the hopes that it would lead to a better, different future. Shifting our focus to the 3rd stanza, the line “When he does not answer your latest call”(1) makes me think of how a mother suffering from PPD might use picturing the child all grown up as a coping mechanism. After begging the child to stop crying with no reply, she must do this to visualize how her child might turn out if she continues this cycle of abuse, or if she breaks it.
Even after writing this post, I’m not entirely sure which interpretation I believe , or if there’s even more interpretations that I am yet to think of. But the one thing I’m sure of is that whether it is the mother or the son speaking, they both want to change her legacy.
I really like how you explored multiple interpretations of the poem. It shows how layered and complex Saeed Jones’s writing is. I agree with your point about generational trauma being central and I think your idea that the narrator could be either the mother’s inner voice or the grown child adds a lot of depth. The way you connect the “inheritance” to cycles of abuse and regret makes the poem feel even more haunting. I also appreciate how you tied it back to the idea of legacy which feels like the heart of the piece.
I find your interpretation of the mother suffering from postpartum depression to be enlightening. When reading this poem, while I did read it as the mother being the narrator, I didn’t really make the connection of the son being a newborn. I mostly thought of him as toddler or at the oldest five years old. Thinking of the “sweet little wreck” at the end of the poem as a way of describing the grueling frustrations a parent feels when their child is going through the “terrible twos.” However, your interpretation of “mother of sorrows” being an analogy for struggling with postpartum changes how the poem is read and when the mother talks about dreaming of him “grown and gone with a vial of your tears on his nightstand” it opens the reader’s mind to a possibly hopeful interpretation of what’s keeping the mother alive.
The concepts of entrapment that you focus on seem to connect to the eerie reality that comes with being different than what is considered “normal” or “acceptable.” I feel as if “Closet of Red” could be seen as an extension of “Insomniac,” as it delves deeper into the isolation the boy feels (how he is punished and conditioned to be ashamed of his identity. The focus on the red in the piece (likely meant to represent blood) could emphasize the boy’s pain or lifelessness at the hands of his family’s abuse.