Questioning Orientalism in Vietnamese Poetry: Nam Le's New Collection

Vietnamese-Australian writer Nam Le's latest poetry collection, "36 Ways of Writing a Vietnamese Poem," delves deeply into the question he has long grappled with: "what it means to write as a writer that will always be described as a Vietnamese writer, or a hyphenated-Vietnamese writer – whatever you want to call that." The experimental and witty collection is intended to be read as a larger whole, with each poem numbered and themed. Early in the collection, Le writes, "Whatever I write is Vietnamese. I can never not —." This statement suggests that the basis for his poems being "Vietnamese" lies solely in the fact that he is himself Vietnamese. However, it also highlights the reality that whatever he writes will inevitably be branded as "Vietnamese," carrying with it certain expectations and baggage. The collection's first poem, "[1. Diasporic]," focuses on the violence of the English language, accompanied by a racist caricature of a Vietnamese (or some Asian) accent: "In English, mind You. You dink I writee Yiknamee? Shame on You. It was Your violence dumbed me." This linguistic violence recurs throughout the collection. In "[10. Reclamatory: 1]," we find similar racist language: "Me chink but not so fast with console or condemn, me chinked, self-chinked in pidgyhole & niche, notch cranny-hole creft crack —." And in the next poem, "[11. Violence: Anglo-linguistic]," Le more explicitly details the abhorrent nature of English: "Appetitive, omnivorous, expansionary. Atonal, with smashed-together consonants, It wants it all. Empire and industry. Science, technology, narratology. Transaction. One language to rule them all. Billions strong." Conversely, Le juxtaposes the violence of English with the liberatory potential of Vietnamese. He states, "English with its mind of closed grids Demands Answers — data, declension, denomination. But Vietnamese answers: ‘I am all these things. Or any. I am openness, manyness at once, entelechy. Your grammar is violence. Your way is narrow Exaction.'" Yet, Le himself also states, "English is my second language, my better language. It’s the language better suited to my way of thinking — which was conditioned by it to think so. (It takes a mongrel, maybe, to know a mongrel…) I’ve never felt unwelcomed in it. Which is more than I can say for every place it’s spoken." This hardly sounds like someone "raging against the English language." Reading this collection as a mere polemic against English overlooks the ways in which many of Le's poems are not meant to be taken at face value—though it is not at all clear, as we will see, which ones exactly. For the reviewer, it was only by the 20th poem in the collection that suspicion began to fully form that this was the case. Titled "[20. Titrative]," the poem consists of three lines: "Unself-consciously? Ha ha! Too late." which forecloses the possibility of self-consciousness. Clearly, the poem possesses a kind of self-consciousness both performative and playful. But if that is the case, might the same be true of other poems in the collection? In this respect, poem "[26. Evasive]" is most interesting. The poem consists of two erasure poems (one of which only semi-blacks out the underlying text), accompanied by a subtitle in capital letters, "ERASURE RHYMES WITH ASIA." With regards to the subtitle, Le makes a peculiar comment in The Guardian: "What I would hope readers would get from the ludicrous rhyme of ‘Asia rhymes with erasure’ as a subtitle for a poem is that there is a tongue firmly in cheek in these moments. [...] I wanted to be able to say: ‘Look at this, this is ridiculous! Look in the mirror!’ to both writer and reader and myself. And at the same time sort of recalibrate, retune that way of writing, that way of reading: to hopefully see it again, anew." It is easy to see the "ludicrousity" of the line upon reading Le’s own thoughts about it. Of course Asia does not rhyme with erasure! But at the same time, without his help, how are we supposed to tell? After all, if poetry consists of, well, poetic language, the reader might as well take “rhyme” to mean something non-literal — the reviewer, for one, certainly did. "ERASURE RHYMES WITH ASIA" is fascinating because to take the line seriously itself constitutes an enactment of the violence described in the very line itself. In other words, the conflation of Asia with erasure itself perpetrates a kind of Orientalist discourse that renders "Asia" inaccessible, obscure, mystic. If Asia is indeed under erasure, for/to whom is it rendered invisible? Certainly not Asians living in Asia? All of this, in an odd way, reminds the reviewer of a story the South African comedian Trevor Noah once told about a friend who was “accidentally racist.” As he tells it, while he was walking on the street with a group of white friends, a stranger yelled in their direction, “hey, you monkey!” Immediately, one of his friends turned to Trevor Noah and apologized. To commit the sin of over-explaining a joke — the crux of the story is of course that, in apologizing to Trevor Noah, his friend already assumed that the term “monkey” was directed at him. One might note that something similar is at play in “ERASURE RHYMES WITH ASIA,” in that the line invites “acciden