Paper Bells
Phan Nhien Hao
The Song Cave Press: 2020
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Cooking maggot corpses from a busted refrigerator’ gets you to ‘Hope is a gas station / SOLD OUT’. This is the keynote poem with its protractedly ironic title: ‘Regarding the Spiritual and Social Situation of Vietnam Today (Observations that are current but abstract and highly general, typical of the deep, sensitive, and brave soul of poets)’. That parenthesis pinpoints the target: in a corroded culture, the officially accredited national poets have sold out. Maybe it takes a poet from the diaspora—distant and dismayed—to pick up the burden.

That sense of dismay and distance underpins these poems, on a sliding scale from the raw to the reflective. The author, born in 1967 in Kon Tum Province in the central highlands, left in 1991 for the United States, where he works in as a research librarian at Northern Illinois University. These poems have been translated from Vietnamese into English by another Vietnamese American, Hai-Dang Phan, a poet in his own right. Phan Nhien Hao chose to write these poems originally in Vietnamese although his postgraduate education was in American English. That choice is an affirmative, assertive platform for his cultural politics. The decision to write in Vietnamese, to speak directly to his homeland and its diaspora, is all the more to the point because the Vietnamese government refuses official publication of his work. Underlying any polemic within each poem, the choice of language itself has thus become part of the polemic, then getting his poems translated back out of Vietnamese lets the regime know the polemic has gone beyond the diaspora.

Though written across three decades, there’s a continuity of structure, style, imagery—at least in the poems chosen for this edition. Tracking them from first to last might be to read from the impressionistic, anecdotal, descriptive to the more button-holing, rhetorical, polemical, but then you re-read the earlier ones in the light of the later. The opening poem is from the geopolitically historic year 1989, and the last is from thirty years later: ‘History is a series of seizures. / If lucky we live in the meanwhile / in periods of peace.’ Across this stretch, the poems become increasingly direct in their political edge, with less and less peace or even quietude on offer. One of the few quiet poems here, ‘Saigon on a Good Day’, is a reminiscence ten years later of a day in 2001 and a casual encounter with an old woman squatting against the hospital wall in Ngo Thoi Nhiem Street waiting for money to be sent from the countryside. It’s an engaging anecdote told in a nearly prosaic low-key account, though even here there’s the irruptive ‘All you can do / is sit on a helmet with bullet holes and watch the rats eat the corpses’. The last stanza of the last poem in the book hammers a sexual moment in Berlin into political history: ‘a history that ends with the little death / when you scream the scream of someone decapitated / and fall into the black hole of ecstasy’. The penultimate poem in the selection, ‘Vietnamese Horoscopes’, takes off from the national origin myth of a hundred eggs to ‘The truth is we like omelettes / for breakfast / and we’ve been eating each other / through civil wars’, leaving the reader to pick up any allusion to realpolitik mottoes about omelettes needing broken eggs. Along with planes and pissing, eggs and smells are recurring images here.

Some of these poems over-egg it. ‘Vacation’ opens with passengers disembarking from an aircraft ‘like sperm shooting out of a metal penis’, but after that image the poem slides into a tourist cameo—unless we’re meant to infer the vacation beach with its ‘black flag / marking a whirlpool’ is somewhere like Da Nang with its echoes of a US war base, and where his father was born.

By contrast, there’s little left to infer from ‘This Country’. It ends with the speaker’s leaving for the flea markets of America, but only after an excoriating audit of the state of the nation in the SRVN, the bottom line of the audit accounted as ‘a rusty bomb / in a recycling plant owned by China, / a deaf explosive / taken apart and sold for scrap’. The postwar imagery recurs for the political critique: ‘This country crawls left and right / to trenches and underground shelters / no longer a secret but choked and full of eels / escaping from the past’. History is called up frequently in these poems, not as a stable backdrop but as a run of disruptions, with the poet’s present enmeshed in it. It’s also a catch-all: ‘dining at the table of history / littered with leftovers’.

In several poems the critique of the regime and its cultural manoeuvring moves beyond sardonic satire into a direct and savage attack, so you can quite see why the SRVN culture commissars haven’t welcomed his work. Poetry in Vietnam’s cultural politics has long been a contested site: between 1945 and 1965, there were projects for a ‘new culture’, redefining and refashioning the literary tradition, its insertion into the ideological imperatives of the national identity and its revolutionary strategies. An authoritative account—with analytic commentary on primary-sourced documentation—of such strategies for cultural hegemony is Kim N.B. Ninh’s A World Transformed. In this present collection, with titles such as ‘Instructions for Writing’ and ‘Manufacturing Poetry’, the reader might get ready for a wave of proletkult or agitprop in the international tradition from Ho Chi Minh’s ‘Prison Diary’, Mao Zedong’s poems, Mayakovsky’s ‘How Are Verses Made’ and so on. But they’re not programmatic or argumentative; rather they’re mostly photo-montages of images to make their points: a poem starting with the New York 9/11 deaths shifts to the Hue massacre, ending ‘maybe such a story seems unbelievable / for your analytical mind’. So the imagery can be dissonant and disjunctive, building up in a bricolage until a last line’s ‘scrubbing history’s shameful spots’.

The preface records the earlier collections by Phan Nhien Hao, also written initially in Vietnamese, published in 1996, 2004 and 2019. The selection here has picked up poems from across those decades, so it’s perhaps surprising that this selection is so elegantly thin. It may even be that there’s a gently reductive—redactive even—reappraisal going on when it comes to earlier, lyrical, less political poems. The 1996 collection was entitled Paradise of Paper Bells, resurfacing here merely as Paper Bells, though with the particular poem of that title dated 1998 and ending, ‘The paper bells make no sound’. Still, the poems we get do cover a fair range, and if there’s redaction, it’s a patchy palimpsest.

Given this poet’s credentials in biography and bibliography over the decades, it’s somewhat surprising that he’s not represented in the recent and wide-ranging anthology of Asian diaspora poetry To Gather Your Leaving, which was reviewed previously in Mekong Review (Vol. 5 No. 2). The introductory argument for that anthology and the preface for this selection offer grist for the same mill, a political aesthetic for the exiles and emigrants from postcolonial and postrevolutionary cultures. Paper Bells is a characteristic product of an expansive sub-genre, and diaspora poetry, particularly the Asian-American coupling, is well on the way to establishing its international currency.

• Tags: Free to read, Michael Freeman, Phan Nhien Hao, Vietnam