Keyword: “Diasporic Queer Asian American”
This term is impossibly loaded–though it is not impossible, only barely possible. Each word can be a keyword on its own, but because the subject that I always seem to be interested in is at the crux and intersection of this encompassing term. I am looking at Ocean Vuong’s collection of poetry Night Sky with Exit Wounds whose speaker at large is a Vietnamese refugee who becomes Vietnamese American through the geographical act of refuge in the US; the speaker’s queer body and linguistic journey is spun/torn around in the web of imperialism, colonialism, familial (and other kinds of) kinship. So, to bear all these markers of reality at once is to be fragmented in the living experience: the body is fragmented, the language is fragmented, the subjectivity is fragmented. (And this hasn’t considered yet other markers of gender, disability, class, religion, etc.).
To think of Vietnam and the Vietnamese language is not to think of a pure language and unified country because the history of Vietnam is the history of colonization and imperialism: prominently by the Chinese, the French, the American. So, the language (romanized by French missionaries) and the body (subjugated continually to ideological regimes) have been hybridized, altered to the point where there is no such thing as the original.
For now, I believe these markers have to be examined simultaneously because Vuong’s poem asks me to; he has found a way to express a diasporic queer Vietnam American subject in his poetics (or so I think) (the works I’m thinking of are listed below). So, the questions arise: how to write linearly about the form and content of such intertwined and inextricable experiences? How does the diasporic queer Asian American subject process their intertwined experiences? How can one find belonging, kinship, and home when the word home is so fraught? How can one heal from the violence that has been wrought upon one’s body and language? Can one aim towards unity from such bodily and linguistic fragmentation? Is it possible to heal?
Vuong’s work:
Poem 1: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/152940/not-even-this
Poem 2: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1u3o615KRog
Novel 1: On Earth We Are Briefly Gorgeous