We Are Not Responsible

Mullen’s poem “We Are Not Responsible” is a parody of the warnings issued during air travel. It was published (in her book, Sleeping with the Dictionary) as a prose poem in one paragraph. Other reprintings (such as on the Poetry Foundation website shared in this guide) break the piece into 21 lines and five stanzas. The act of parody is changing key words and phrases in the familiar airline announcements, so they represent systemic racism and demonstrate how people are othered, or made to be lesser than the privileged majority.

The first four sentences of the prose poem, contained in the first stanza of the lineated version, begin with the first-person plural “[w]e” (Lines 1-4). This repetition forms the identity of the speaker: a character of authority, or a system that is more powerful than the individual. Mullen follows the first three instances of “we” with repeated negations, variations of the word “not”: “are not” (Line 1), “cannot” (Line 2), and “do not” (Line 3). This repetition immediately establishes the theme of what authority, or a system, refuses to do.

The audience of this negated action, the “you” of the poem, is identified in the first replacement Mullen makes.