Feb 28, 22
With their mind preoccupied by the daily violence in Burma lately, Quác encountered a Facebook post from their (so-long) cousin, probably a high-school senior now (Quác is bad with keeping in touch with relatives - shame on 'em).
The post reads: "What are your opinions, homies? For me, it's for the U Cà (his jocular term for Ukraine) listening to the American that the civilians are now in sufferings. War is also one of the ways to progress and resolve conflicts."
Below the description sits a screenshot of a Wikipedia's definition of "war."
Quác wondered what was the last time they talked to him. Then came a stream of regret.
Mar 2, 22 From Phuong: I came across this poem when I read your post on Instagram, https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cHM6Ly9mZWVkcy5zaW1wbGVjYXN0L mNvbS9wOUpSZ0RFRw/episode/YmMwNjIzYTUtMzA4Ni00NWE5LWI2ODctYjk 4Yjc0NjBhMTU4?ep=14 How Prayer Works or how we grow from and out of each other, from the root of brotherhood and cousinhood. Kaveh Akbar gave me a tender moment to remind myself that, we will end up growing and becoming our own things, but we always used to be one from the same family or from the same environment we were raised. That dearly feeling doesn't assure me that I and my brother might end up become same expected good/decent/moral human beings, but it does assure me that we built our past together and we might cross path again somewhere. Is that the surprising notion of living and becoming? From Quác: Dear Phuong, I cannot express enough how much Kaveh’s works have impacted my writing (and living) practices ever since I’ve come into the decision to articulate myself. I think Kaveh’s latest book - Pilgrim Bell - where “How Prayer Works” locates, is very much about reconnecting with his Iranian identity, with Farsi, with the spiritual background that has been running in along his veins (a pslamic pilgrimage if you may). I find myself sharing a similar recollection with Kaveh, even though our starting points are radically different, both culturally and historically - but the need to articulate about the act of regaining something is apparent for both of us. And yes, I do think that life goes on and we part ways with our childhood folks that we once held dear to our heart. But it does feel like extra excruciating to see your cousin, while winging up on his own, is flying towards a dark pit of man’s intellectuality that I fear the most and cannot really do anything about. The younger generation though not far from mine - never fails to awe, and at the same time, taunt me like never before (also refer to our conversation about generational gaps and memories). Living and becoming are sure strange things to wrap our heads around…
History is sure a strange thing, and through its advancement, our political consciousness shifted along the way. From the first interactions of European empires with the yet-to-become colonies as a suggestion of globalization via marine trades, to the very discovery of nuclear fission that distilled our understanding of morality and the human body before such an instance of mass destruction that we'd never seen before; the understanding the significance of war also slides back and forth on a spectrum of legitimacy; however, there's one single truth that stands out to Quác ever since: war has never been the sole problem-solver to advocate for.
Now in Vietnam, they're a surprisingly high number of pro-Russia social media users making fun of the situation as a whole (namely those so-called Facebook and Tiktok politicians), partially because of the resentment over the gas price surge due to the international call for economic isolation of Russia's gas and oil supply (others had to do with the half-witted alliance with Trump's administration and its soft-power imposed upon China in the past years). Witnessing a far-right sentiment rushed over them as soon as the political turmoil made its way to the Internet's headlines is quite a scene.
As a person who also finds themselves the generation-in-between: a gen Z who is at the same time the child of war parents and a younger brother of a millennial, Quác always gets caught up in streams of memories and trauma: poverty, exile, deserters, bomb craters, a protest where their grandma risked hers and her daughter's life (Quác's mother) - how he couldn't have existed if it hadn’t been for the nearby bunker during the gunfire oppression.
At the same time, Quác has never ceased to reinvestigate their writing practice - what it means to be an author whose subject is predominantly about life in wartime - to what extent it makes an impact on them, and to what extent their writing is considered valid in the vast literary scene.
***
Recently befriended Khai Don, who has also been very vocal about anti-war advocacy on her social media, Quác had a chance to discuss with her what it means to write war poems and understand war poems in our contemporary. Khai Don n began by sending over a transcript of a speech-essay by Paisley Rekdal. From there, the two writers broke down instances where memory had a profound influence on our practices:
"this question of memory, and how to reconcile the competing histories that comprise memory, keeps cropping up. The question behind the reconciliation of historical memory, of course, is finally one of representation. When it comes to imagining momentous personal or historic events—a pandemic, say, or a war—what are we trying to articulate when we turn to poetry versus other types of media, which surely can and have done better at capturing the facts of events, have in fact occasionally changed the course of events for other people in their sharing?
Following the passage, Khai Don asked a fundamental question: "how contested histories can come together in memories and in poetry." Quác responded with a concept that they found most passionate about in the transcript: affect. Quác found poetry the only place where they become the least ambivalent about resolving histories as they are known (apart from their professional disciplines as an art historian). They never write a poem without feeling things, to put it simply, and they would treasure that for dear life. Nevertheless, by no means does it legitimize the ethical value of a written piece and its representations. For Quác personally, they understand that their academic background has soon harnessed in them a sense of responsibility towards facts, stories, and truths. Therefore, in a larger scheme, the affect may also become counterintuitive at times. The idea is illustrated by Rekdal as below:
"But again, I return to my question about poetry and representation. All poems engage the problem of representation, of course, but war poetry raises the ethical stakes. Who represents, who is represented, and just what and why we should feel the way we do about the people depicted in war poems takes on an inevitable moral dimension when the same people who initiate or win wars determine the books that then document them. It’s not just about remembering war, then, it’s about making us feel something about ourselves as we look back on those wars. For some poets, it’s also finally about whether our representations could affect the course of future wars themselves."
Quác recalled the session in Thursday Club the other day, where they invited Pamela N. Corey to talk about her recently published book "The City in Time: Contemporary Art and Urban Form in Vietnam and Cambodia." Coincidentally, Pamela also talked about how "affect theory" played an important part in her visual analyses of the artworks in conversations. She stated that the book itself while generating a solid attempt to diverge from the reading of works through the lenses of postwar trauma, takes on urban form as the point of departure and focuses on investigating the temporal experience of Vietnam's and Cambodia's cities as she entered them, as they entered her, and through the artistic practices that are contained within them.
Nevertheless (and this may be a controversial opinion), in the realm of visual art, as in poetry, we cannot entirely separate ourselves from certain narratives that we hold dear to our hearts, whether or not it’s a lived experience or an anecdotal remnant we inherited in the contemporary spectacle. For the latter, it's a kind of entity that lurks in every corner of the city's livelihood. It's no exaggeration for Quác to say that: war memory as they know it, exists everywhere - it haunts, and at the same time, forges Quác into their understanding of the world. To Quác, there is so much to feel, to the point that they don't think they'd be able to feel it within their one conservative lifetime. Every known theory seems to retreat themselves to the back of the closet. And perhaps, there might be an ultimate affect-fact mediator elsewhere that will potentially eliminate the ambivalence of poets who speak in their poems with honesty about emotions and feelings. But yet, they have just started seeking it then. Quác feels like a beginner all over again.
***
Quác thought, their writing practice does not necessarily come in a straight, consecutive direction. Youthful as they are, Quác has a lot of different concerns in their life that they wish, through poetry, to articulate them all. Poets are at certain points, Quác thought, would be driven by their own ambition to articulate, and that is valid, always.
For the cousin, Quác has been wondering what they could have done differently about their introverted nature, which prevented them from reaching out to him in the past years. Quác used to be there at once, anyway.
***
From Phuong: I pondered your idea of writing practice. These days, I had lots of conversation with a famous Vietnamese poet who told me that she lost all her trust with Vietnamese so she stopped writing all the way. You, on the other hands, wrote that above “Youthful as they are, Quác has a lot of different concerns in their life that they wish, through poetry, to articulate them all.” I have to say that it is interesting to see both you and my fellow poet at the same time at different stages of creativity and embracing life. The other day I listened to a podcast by David Abram, an ecologist and philosopher. David said that the moment human created language they set aside a world of silence. The world of the mute has stepped back for the ability of articulation. https://emergencemagazine.org/interview/the-ecology-of-perception/ (First 30 minutes are good, the last part is boring) “As we take up phonetic literacy, as we learn to read and write with an alphabet, human language begins to close in on itself. Only as the alphabet comes into contact with a previously oral culture, usually carried by Christian missionaries teaching the Good Book, only then does that culture get this odd idea that language is an exclusively human property, and the rest of the sensuous terrain begins to fall mute. It no longer seems to speak with a thousand voices. Rather, humans speak, and the land gradually comes to be felt as a kind of passive or mute backdrop against which human history unfolds.” (David Abram) I feel like I am at the crossroad of my position how to look at language: You trying to master the articulation of life on the path of discovering yourself; my friend who stopped a path to turn to another path, feeling betrayed, and David Abram, acknowledging that there is field beyond this field full of language for us to utter lives as we wish. Personally, I choose to refuse my mother tongue in writing practice, because I am frightened by it, traumatized by it, decided to block all unpleasant memories by blocking the language from creativity process. Such an interesting notion for me to realize that we all choose to step through borders of languages, between languages, or into a void without language to advocate and articulate something we desire. Does language contain so much of our existence? From Quac: Dear Phuong, I almost clutched my own heart reading your closing paragraph. “Does language contain so much of our existence?” It took me years, until now, for me to see somebody asking me the question that I was not able to make, meaning, through the conversations with you, I’d only start somewhere, though what I’m looking for is still far fetched. I honestly wish I had been the one to ask that question, Phuong. Language contains a sense of "belonging." As typical as it sounds, mother’s lullabies fall into this category - at the stage where our minds are relatively infantile, the attachment is, however, stay with us in the form of a tentacled creature - whom we couldn't quite tell the form of, but could feel vividly every time the suckers make their gripping gestures from within later on in life. Wartime memories - as subjects full of trauma and pain as we speak of them, are, however, "forced" into being as we grow up. Vietnamese parents are all but honest about the way they articulate the past. The temporal discrepancy created by the collision of these memories and anecdotes banish the said "belonging" out of our body over time. Mind us that language is the intermediary between all the events that conjure up this entire psychological process, making "belonging" no longer affectionate as it supposed to. And I suffer so hard on that. I have to admit with you that this poem I wrote on MAYDAY is embarrassing. But I determine it to be the very first entry to my disconnection with Vietnamese, and perhaps, my goodwill to intervene this matter: https://maydaymagazine.com/me%cc%a3-thieng-lieng-de%cc%89-trong-bu%cc%a3ng-by-tam-nguyen/ Sometimes I cannot help but wonder: if I am to entirely conceal my identity and origin as a writer who originated from Vietnam for most of my living time - the feeling towards the loss of language and the process of regaining resembles that of a diasporic Vietnamese's. I resent this recognition, but I don't refuse to look into it. For that, thank you for letting me talk about this with integrity, Phuong. Language here brings about the act of associating that is so alienated, and even dumbfounded at certain times. But again, the merit of affect feels right to me, as if I am getting closer and closer to the antidote for this whole confusion. I'm glad I can still raise my head up high after all these ambivalent writings I put out there, somewhere on the other half of the globe. Then, what does it mean to acquire a language? The other day my 2-year-old nephew just made a full count from 1 to 10 in English only from watching YouTube videos daily. The whole family cheered her up like never before, my brother almost broke into tears. I remember this exact ecstasy when I first approached a white male expat in my hometown, following my dad's urge, and talked to him with my broken English when I was younger. I was scared, but the satisfactory smile on my dad's lips somehow obscured that feeling. Here is another fraction of the aftermath of familial history that I cannot quite understand. For that, I will just leave you with the example to ponder. I would like to reiterate my analysis of Erika Tan's A Presentation by Proxy (2014) - a video work that I mentioned several hundred lines earlier in this essay: "Quác thought about Erika Tan's A Presentation by Proxy (2014). A heavily accented-voice speaking the English language is employed to impersonate a Singaporean woman who participated in one of many colonial exhibitions, away from her homeland, displayed, performing her craft in front of the fascinated metropolitan viewers. The woman, who was pretty much absent from big and small archives, initially a small particle of dust in the vast colonial discourse, became the main subject, a soulmate, a personality in the heart of Erika Tan's herself. But the voice was not "mystified," in Quác's opinion. Why? The coordination between archival materials and machine-generated voice, while showing evidently the essence of artistic manipulation, are not excessively deformed or being taken out of (its fictional) context. The voice became an agency to immortalize, to make visible individual presence that usually gets overshadowed in historical academic research. A new representation thus emerged and self-validated in the most logical way an artist could. A voice, so texturized it stayed with Quác's head for days to come; to just simply describe it as something "special," or "unique." A voice so texturized it almost becomes a voice. The mystified tension, thus, canceled out in all possible directions." I approach the English language with cautions, meaning to constantly remind myself that it is loaded with possibilities of erasure, and at the same time, of recollection. After all, we are inevitably the subjects of history. With strong confidence, I'd say people who read my words will be able to tell that my writings are made by a highly accented voice. Perhaps, it's something that I should treasure to be something that retains "our existence" - all the things that built us, and led us here - as writers who bully our ways into the mother tongue with another language most of our parents or relatives do not speak on a daily basis. "Personally, I choose to refuse my mother tongue in writing practice, because I am frightened by it, traumatized by it, and decided to block all unpleasant memories by blocking the language from the creativity process." First, I feel you, dearly. Secondly, perhaps blocking the language turns out to be a democratic approach to the past with newfound perspectives. We will always ask ourselves: what could have been done differently, which is almost an impossible task. That's why I decided to also train in history as one of my academic disciplines. I want to find the answer. My mom, as a dedicated Buddhist, persistently chants every night in our tiny and heat-trapped attic. The sutras that she chants are Vietnamese-transcribed from their original Sanskrit versions, meaning ninety percent of the content she managed to learn by heart, remain encrypted in meaning. How does somebody who practices a language so close yet, so far and obscured from their own understanding, be able to find peace and settlement in such a situation? I can go further into this matter from the perspective of phenomenology, but I think the "texture" of voice can be responsible. Not to even admit that my mother's chanting also brings me peace at some points. In the end, thank you, Phuong, for allowing ourselves to look into languages, to see not only problems, but also resolves.
Mar 11, 2022 - when everything is fresh from violence.
From Phuong:
Dear Quac,
I have listened to Hòa Hảo chanting audio [just for fun] because I am interested in how the religion moved in their mouth-to-mouth poetry. And you mentioned your mother chant Buddhist transcription from the Sanskrit version.
For some reason, it never came to my mind that the people pray the content that they don't actually understand, but they feel calm and assured by the sound, the ritual and the familiarity of the sound they have listened to for generations. Is it because, language, to the core of it, is the sound that brings us to understand each other, or to articulate the world in every sense we have through sound, vibrancy on skin and on our eardrums, or just the feeling that sound reflects some of our past experience recalling emotions?
Last week, I read a book named “Dear Friend, from My Life I Write to You in Your Life” by Yiyun Li. It was some of rare emotional book I have read for a long time. Li wrote the book in her most difficult years, when she fell into deep depression and committed suicide several times before being hospitalized. One essay in the book is so clear and eloquent about her choice of abandon Chinese:
Over the years, my brain has banished Chinese. I dream in English. I talk to myself in English…. To be orphaned from my native language felt, and still feels, like a crucial decision.
It is hard to feel in an adopted language, yet it is impossible in my native language.
“Yet language is capable of sinking a mind. One’s thoughts are slavishly bound to language. I used to think an abyss is a moment of despair becoming interminable, but any moment, even the direst, is bound to end. What is abysmal is that one’s erratic language closes on one as quicksand. Yet what is spoken by others—truth as cliché, cliché as the only truth—is as indisputable as the retreating solid ground, getting further and further beyond reach. The abyss is that time is annulled by language. We can kill time, but language kills us.”
….
“Once in high school, several classmates and I entered an oratory contest. The winner would represent the class in a patriotic event. When I went onstage, for some mischievous reason, I saw to it that many of the listeners were moved to tears by the poetic and insincere lies I had made up; I moved myself to tears, too. That I could become a successful propaganda writer crossed my mind. I was disturbed. A young person wants to be true to herself and to the world. But what did not occur to me then was to ask: Can one’s intelligence rely entirely on the public language; can one form a precise thought, recall an accurate memory, or even feel a genuine feeling, with only the public language?”
…
“WHEN ONE THINKS in an adopted language, one arranges and rearranges words that are neutral, indifferent even, to arrive at a thought that one does not know to be there.
When one remembers in an adopted language, there is a dividing line in that remembrance”
…
“A moment of recognition between two people only highlights the inadequacy of language. What can be spoken does not sustain; what cannot be spoken undermines.”
Li also talked about her father, who is a dedicated Buddhist follower. His fatalism helped him to navigate a hard life with Li's mother, a toxic woman with toxic words, curses and blames toward him and his children. The Buddhist chants and teaching brought them away from the island of pain that the family atmosphere created.
I think how interesting it is that our brains get the perception of happiness, emotion, memories through the structure of language, and at the same time, we don't need it. Your mother doesn't need Sanskrit to understand what Buddha teaches. Li didn't need to understand English when she was young to believe an English song is a reflection of some peaceful and happy place she wanted to go to. I love that you brought up this notion of the value of sound, the beyond of language, or the “texture” of voice as you said.