Author: Tallulah Shark

Thanksgiving 2006

Brooklyn’s too cold tonight

& all my friends are three years away.

My mother said I could be anything

I wanted—but I chose to live.

On the stoop of an old brownstone,

a cigarette flares, then fades.

I walk to it: a razor

sharpened with silence.

His jawline etched in smoke.

The mouth where I reenter

this city. Stranger, palpable

echo, here is my hand, filled with blood thin

as a widow’s tears. I am ready.

I am ready to be every animal

you leave behind.

Ostensibly, an American Thanksgiving is an occasion of family gathering and an occasion to express your gratitude for the people and the things that enable you to be where you are (assuming that where you are is a positive place). “Thanksgiving 2006” by Ocean Vuong is a poem that disrupts such an event and its naive meaning.

The first line situates us, not in an enclosed domestic scene of warmth and kins, but in a vast space of a city, “Brooklyn”, and the “too cold” weather to be comfortable. The speaker is alone; all his friends are “three years away,” which is an odd signification of distance, where distance is not measured by physical length but by an excessive amount of time; have his friends been dead for three years? If not dead, then he hasn’t seen them for three years? and thus the temporal distance is irreversible as he has alienated himself from his friends by leaving for the city? Regardless, it is Thanksgiving and the speaker is in a vast lonesome harsh space, where time prevents his access to a community of support.

To break away from this aloneness (or is it loneliness? does the former mean the latter for him?), he heads towards a man. For a few days as I reread the poem, I kept thinking of this man as the speaker’s lover, just because of the physical fact of his “mouth,” of his carnal flesh that enables the speaker to reexperience the city through the act of kissing. His mouth is the site where the speaker “reenter [the] city,” where the city is no longer unbound but has been reduced to a particular site where the speaker can take refuge. Then, I realize that there doesn’t have to be an emotional aspect to their relationship; in fact, the speaker does not reveal his relationship to this man beyond the fact of the flesh. The man, likely a stranger whom the speaker seeks to quench his aloneness, is nevertheless a warm carnal site that replaces the traditional Thanksgiving.

The passage that the speaker takes towards the man, his very act of “walk[ing]”  is described as analogous to “a razor/ sharpened with silence.” I’m inclined to read this as a sign of danger, that the very act of reaching this stranger man can be dangerous as what stands between them is “silence,” is nothing as the speaker does not know him. This danger is juxtaposed with the pleasure the speaker later gains from his encounter with the man. It is a risk the speaker is willing to take to not be alone.

Interestingly, the speaker’s encounter with the man is only experienced in fragments and in attributes and never in wholes. When heading towards the man, the speaker follows the sight of his cigarette but not the man himself; the cigarette becomes the light, which “flares, then fades,” an attribute of the man, serving as a beacon to guide the speaker’s direction. The speaker zooms in to the man’s body parts and its attributes: his jawline, his mouth, his cigarette; only the fragments of and around his face. Is this because this man is a stranger and therefore cannot be fully experienced whole? Or is it because the speaker is simply fractured psychically? Both?

Even the speaker becomes a fragment: “here is my hand,” he says, offering one hand to the man or to us readers. The hand bears the history of loss as it is described as “filled with blood thin/as a widow’s tears.” Sure, the blood can be read to be on his hand, the blood of loss on par with the loss of a loved one experienced by a widow; but it can also be read as inside his hand, the blood that “fill[s]” him inside, signifying that he carries the loss within; the loss and the trauma of blood and tears that has fractured him and his ongoing experience. All the lines are separated by blank white space. What is it that the poem leaves out? This silence, the blankness; are they the unspeakable of trauma? or empty loneliness?

Early in the poem, the speaker evokes his mother’s encouragement that he “could be anything/[he] wanted”, meaning that: with acute ambition, the speaker can achieve anything, any title that he can eventually become grateful for at the occasion of Thanksgiving; but, the speaker resists; instead, he “chose to live,” to live without having to strive ruthlessly, ambitiously for any social accomplishment. Perhaps at the end of the poem, we have a better glimpse of what that living looks like: the speaker is “ready,” ready “to be every animal/you leave behind.” Is he assuming the position of the subaltern? of the things people leave out when expressing their gratitude at Thanksgiving? …

Sigh, Gone a memoir by Phuc Tran recounts his experience as a Vietnamese American refugee in Carlisle, Pennsylvania after the fall of Saigon. When Tran arrived in America with his family, he was only two years old. In the book, he reflects on his childhood and his formative teenage years in Carlisle. He was to navigate himself between two languages: the Vietnamese spoken only at home and the English pervasive in every other public context, which bleeds into the domestic as well. What I found interesting is how Tran finds diction to narrate communicative processes of himself and the people he is surrounded with; narrate from an adult point of view looking back at his younger self. Close-reading Tran’s choice of diction, as he describes linguistic processes happening around him in Carlisle, reveals the unstable and never-ending activities/performativity of linguistic and identitary subject.

The linguistic act of communication is described often in terms of a nominal language transformed into a verb. People in Sigh, Gone converse like this: “Chi and Chuong Vietnamesed with each other quietly” (40); “She Vietnamesed feebly” (31); “my father did most of the Englishing” (25); “I Vietnamesed quietly, embarrassed not to be speaking English in public” (153).

Tran’s (literary) style is often humoristic, sharp, and profane, so such diction might be interpreted as an excessively creative choice and then quickly glossed over, but I think it means more than it appears. The noun or adjective “Vietnamese” which denotes nationality, cultural identity, and a native tongue is transformed into a verb, a capitalized verb that encompasses all of these three markers in its very ongoing act of communication. “To Vietnamese” is not only to speak the language but also embody the language, the language as alive and in progress; it is not to treat the language as an object as in “to speak Vietnamese” or “to speak English.”

“To Vietnamese” can also be read as to perform the language and to perform the identity attached to that language; an progressively negotiative identity. Tran’s choice of transforming the noun of language into the active hybridity of noun/verb also depends on the context of communication and the person found in that context. The act of displacement from Vietnam to the US has destabilized the Vietnamese refugees’ identity and language since they are found in a foreign landscape and are Othered by the society occupying that context (the American town of Carlisle). So, Tran’s parents despite being geographically Vietnamese by birth into middle adulthood are described in her communication: “[Tran’s parents] Vietnamesed with each other quietly” (40); “[Tran’s mother] Vietnamesed feebly” (31); “[Tran’s] father did most of the Englishing” (25). “Vietnamese” as an identity and a language is a no longer stable object for them, but now is an act, “to Vietnamese” is an act.

In a scene where teenage Tran was shopping in a mall with his mother, he “Vietnamesed quietly [to his mother], embarrassed not to be speaking English in public” (153). It makes ostensible sense that growing up in America, his Vietnamese is unstable and his communication is designated with the verb/noun “to Vietnamese,” but also “to speak English.” English becomes an object for the teenage Tran to homogenize, to assimilate himself into.

(There are other incidents in the memoir, but at the moment, time constraint and exhaustion and the blogpost’s length don’t let me get to them here yet)

So far, I find Tran incredibly apt to transform the nominal language of Vietnamese into a hybrid process of verb and noun: “to Vietnamese”; which encapsulates the process of linguistic negotiation and identity formation of an diasporic subject. | Is the memoir making a case for such choice of diction? Not just to “speak” but to also contextually perform the linguistic act and embody the identity attached to it? But the conundrum here (for Tran and his family too) is that: if you are between two worlds (or more), two languages, is the verb+noun of one language, with its already destabilizing potential as a hybrid, enough to signify for the totality (or fragmentality is the righter word) of all the contexts within the subject?

The Writer Ocean Vuong was born in Saigon, Vietnam in 1988; his family immigrated to Hartford, Connecticut in 1990. His mother was a hapa woman, a daughter of a Vietnamese farm girl and an American G.I during the American war in Vietnam. In the US, his mother became a worker in a nail salon, in which he was substantially raised: his mother was the breadwinner of the house, providing for a household of herself, Vuong, his grandma, and his brother on a 12k salary, yes 12k—Vuong revealed this fact in a recent interview, and even him himself was still amazed at how she managed to raise a family on such an income. She carried the burden, the bodily toll of a physically toxic working condition, which eventually led to her cancer and her death at 51, so that Vuong can have the “luxury” (luxury relative to what she did, in Vuong’s words) of reading, of writing, of literature.

Regarding his educational formation, he first dropped out of business school because it was no place for a poet—he enrolled instead at Brooklyn College and graduated with a B.A. in 19^th century American Poetry. He went on to receive an MFA in Poetry from NYU. He has won numerous prestigious literary prizes for his debuts in two genres: a poetry collection Night Sky with Exit Wounds and a novel On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous—he is also a MacArthur fellow.

Both Night Sky and On Earth are autobiographical; the latter is often categorized as “autofiction,” autobiographical fiction. In his poetry collection, Vuong explores, as Li-Young Lee describes, “his obsessions [with] love, family, violence, the sacred, the erotic, maleness and femininity”, and these are the same subjects he returns to in his novel, and again and again in the futurity of his art. On Earth tells a story that is very close to Vuong’s life, in terms of the setting of his growing-up places, of the condition of life he found himself in, of the matrilineage in Vuong’s family; even the narrator’s mother bears the name of his real mother.

In her CNN interview with Vuong, the journalist Michel Martin, when talking about his poems, does not refer to the speaker of the poem but to Vuong directly, equating him to the speaker–he does not correct her. Somewhere (I am certain, but don’t recall exactly where) Vuong has declared that he has rewritten his poetry collection in the form of a novel, i.e. On Earth. “You don’t need to reinvent yourself,” Vuong said, critiquing the literary tradition of America, imbued with the capitalistic mode of constantly having to reinvent oneself, having something new to say in a second book—for Vuong, it was always about “privileging inexhaustible questions.” In his encounters with renowned Asian American writers (he didn’t name who), Vuong saw these writers’ condescension in their self-proclaimed surpassing beyond the “immigrant novel,” beyond writing about the diaspora, to writing about space and science fiction, so as to successfully extricate themselves from the white gaze/expectations, but as Vuong argues, their art would still be reacting to whiteness in their spite to remove itself from it.

“I never wanted to build a ‘body of work,’” the writer-narrator of On Earth says of his art and his family, “but to preserve these, our bodies, breathing and unaccounted for, inside the work” (175). This is no doubt also Vuong’s intentionality and vision as he insists on again and again, in public and in the construction of his work, the perennial and inexhaustible questions grounded in his body and the bodies of his familial genealogy.

Sources:

1, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9OZIwsk9cAM

2, https://lithub.com/three-takeaways-from-ocean-vuongs-wonderful-conversation-with-alexander-chee/

3, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KSoRF61n0ZQ

4, https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/06/10/ocean-vuongs-life-sentences

Ocean vuong’s On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous is an epistolary novel written from the perspective of a Vietnamese American son to his illiterate mother; the narrator recounts his life together with his mother and grandmother as refugees in America after the American war in Vietnam; it is also a queer coming-of-age story where the narrator negotiates his racialized intimacy with an American whiteboy, Trevor, in suburban Connecticut. In On Earth, the narrator employs the trope of animality (in the evocations of monarch butterflies, dog, cat, bees, macaque/monkey, buffalo/veal/heifer)—as detour, metaphor, analogy—to make sense of his people’s migrating history, of his loved ones’ character, and to evoke the environmental disaster. The narrator aptly claims at the end of the novel: “What we would give to have the ruined lives of animals tell a human story—when our lives are in themselves the story of animals” (242).

The southwards migration of monarch butterflies from Canada or the United States to Mexico for refuge in the winter is juxtaposed next to the recount of Vietnamese refugees’ presence in America. Vuong uses the metaphor of this monarch migration to think of the migration of Vietnamese refugees to the United States as (temporally) precarious and dangerous: “It only takes a single night of frost to kill off a generation [of monarchs]. To live, then, is a matter of time, of timing” (4). In the middle of the novel’s section I, we are told that the men in the village, where the narrator’s grandma is from, enact the custom of splitting live macaques’ skulls wide open and feed directly from the animal in order to enhance their virility; at the same, the narrator’s mother, Hong, is also born in the year of the monkey–she characterizes herself as such: “I’m a monkey,” she says (240); amid the violence of war, bestiality, and the violent American working-condition upon Hong’s body, we cannot help but see the history violence subsumed and embedded into the metaphoric animality.

Beyond evoking the characteristic migration of another species to parallel that of humans, the animal can also merge with or is attached to the human’s character. Once, in the middle of the night, the narrator wakes up to “the sound of an animal in distress”; he traces the sound, speculating that it might be “a cat wounded,” but finds out it is actually his (adopted) grandfather crying in the kitchen; “There are no animals here but us,” the narrators says (45-6). Moreover, Trevor, the narrator’s lover, is characterized as “the hunter,” “the carnivore” but who would never eat veal because “ the difference between veal and beef is the children [; t]he veal are the children”–Trevor’s toxic masculinity embedded in the “carnivore” is offset/destabilized by his (homo)sexuality in his refusal to eat “veal”  (155). The narrator’s real name is never revealed—instead, he is referred to as “Little Dog,” a term of endearment as well as of protection his maternal grandmother fashions for him, so that the evil spirits (who only hunt for pretty and strong children), will hear it and think him diminutive and leave him alone. Thus, the narrator is also characterized by the animal.

Alongside the human history of migration and the human character, the evocation of animality is also the warning for environmental disasters.  The narrator’s grandfather laments that the bees “are dying and how, without them, the country would lose its entire food supply in less than three months” (53). When Trevor and Little Dog first have anal sex, it was outside the barn; amid coitus, hovering above them were moths; however, “[t]he pesticides left over from the fields killed [the moths] soon as they placed their mouths on the leaves” (203). So, the act of human pleasure exists alongside the destruction of animals. In the trope of animality, the narrator doesn’t just use animals to think of humans’ life, but he highlights also the violence humans have enacted upon animals’ life, and subsequently the Earth they inhabit.

Work Cited: Vuong, Ocean. On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous. Penguin Books, 2019.

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

Death, men say, is like a sea
That engulfs mortality,
Treacherous, dreadful, blindingly
—-Full of storm and terror.

Death is like the deep, warm sand
Pleasant when we come to land,
Covering up with tender hand
—-The wave’s drifted error.

Life’s a tortured, booming gurge
Winds of passion strike and urge,
And transmute to broken surge
—-Foam-crests of ambition.

Death’s a couch of golden ground,
Warm, soft, permeable mound,
Where from even memory’s sound
—-We shall have remission.

In the poem “Death, men say, is like a sea,” Michael Field contests the conventional notion of death as the dangerous and dreadful entity to humanity. Grounding life and death alternately in the symbiotic imagery of the sea and its shore, of a body of water and the sand, Field argues that the force of life is more congruous with the conventional notion of death than we think, that death and life converge and reconcile, and that death is, in fact, a safe and final haven. Subsequently, the poem contends, as the writer Hanya Yanagihara would put it, that life is only bearable because it is going to end soon.

There are four stanzas in the poem: three concerning death and one life. Let’s set it up like this: death 1 + death 2 + life 1 + death 2.1 respectively. As the numbers suggest, the kinds of death and life vary, overlap, and evolve.

The first stanza offers the common perception of death, comparing it to the sea, a body of water that is limitless and highly drownable; it is well capable of extinguishing mortality, most notably that of humans. Men depict and conceive death as something negative and defeatist, something to be dreaded like “storm” and “terror.” Death is then described with two adjectives, “treacherous” and “dreadful,” but also with an adverb, “blindingly;” juxtaposing different parts of speech to describe death, Field signifies the inconsistency in the nature of death (death 1) established by men. The rhyme in the first three lines of the first stanza also distinguishes itself from the other stanzas: for we have “sea,” “mortality,” and “blindingly” appearing less visually coherent from the other perfect rhymes: Stanza 2: “sand,” “land,” and “hand” | Stanza 3: “gurge,” “urge,” “surge” | Stanza 4: “ground,” “mound,” “sound.” Already, Field sets the typical perception of death apart from the rest of the poem; death is in fact not what “men say” it is.

The second stanza then offers another perception of death (death 2). In lieu of a dangerous body of water, now, death is the shore, the “deep, warm sand.” Death has metamorphorized from the indeterminate and volatile form of water into the solid and secure form of sand. It is no longer dreadful but something to look forward to: a safe and final shore, that is again a “deep, warm,” and “tender” entity, which will cover the wave’s “drifted error”; Field draws attention again to the erroneous nature of death 1 grounded in the image of water, which is then reconciled by death 2, since the shore of sand and the sea of water are not antithetical from each other; they constantly converge and integrate into each other (sand absorbs seawater; waves erode and carry sand into the sea).

In the third stanza, finally, “life” appears among its death companions. Life, as depicted here, however, is not distinct from death but in fact quite congruous with how death is perceived in stanza one. Life is “tortur[ous]” with the violence of windy passion; life is “a booming gurge,” a whirlpool of turbulent water in constant collision with the winds. The top of the waves are the “foam-crests,” a high point of water where human “passion” and “ambition” meet and fall, and “transmute” into into “broken surge,” into erroneous waves; life 1 becomes on par with death 1. Field puts forth that how men often perceive death (“treacherous” and “dreadful”) is in fact how life itself is. And since death 2 reconciles with death 1, it also reconciles with life 1 as sea and shore, water and sand converge. Life and death are closer than ever.

If in the first two stanzas the perception of death is mediated by simile: “death… is like”; in the latter two, the entities of life and death assume a more direct nature of being, contracted and assertive: “Life’s” and “Death’s” (bold mine). In the last stanza, death has fully evolved and become a true comfort and a safe haven (death 2.1): “a couch of golden ground,” materially and majestically hued. Death is the ultimate place where you are offered respite from “memory’s sound,” from your burdensome weight of living, from the “torture” and the violence of “passion” and “ambition,” from mortality. You have found “remission,” the release from obligation and pain, the forgiveness of sins. Humanity can find refuge in this place that is death; the world stops calling to you–finally–just as the last line of every stanza retreats from the rest, just as you can in death.

Work Consulted: https://www.interviewmagazine.com/culture/hanya-yanagihara-x-adam-leith-gollner