Meran Paul
Features Editor
Obscenities used.
Ocean Vuong is a 36-year-old Vietnamese poet, novelist, and essayist. His debut collection Night Sky with Exit Wounds won the T.S. Eliot Prize in 2016, which made him the youngest winner of the award at the time at 29 years old, as well as the second-ever debut poet to receive it. His second book, On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous, an epistolary novel from a Vietnamese American son to his illiterate mother, was longlisted for the National Book Award for fiction.
Vuong’s latest collection Time Is a Mother, published in 2022, was shortlisted for the 2023 Griffin Poetry Prize. The collection is about the loss of Vuong’s mother who passed away in November of 2019 and also about the suffering of the poet through the COVID pandemic. Vuong called the book his “proudest work” and compared it to On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous. For those who have read Vuong’s novel, Time Is a Mother might feel like a continuation of the preceding book with overlapping themes of violence, the displacement it led to, torn families and relationships, and childhood. All of this was traumatic for a young Vuong, who was queer and an immigrant far removed from the war-torn place he was born in. Finally, the human body and Vuong’s mother are constantly explored in both books.
The first poem of Time is a Mother is titled “The Bull.” On seeing a bull, Vuong asks it what it wants, forgetting that he “had no language.” “I was a boy – which meant I was a murderer of my childhood & like all murderers my God was stillness,” suggesting the violence we commit against ourselves is often silent and unnoticed. Vuong ends the poem by reaching for the bull and telling us, “I reached – not the bull – but the depths./ Not an answer but/ an entrance the shape of/ an animal. Like me.” This unsettling ending is Vuong taking us right into the intricate workings of his mind, expressed in the most visceral voice that few writers of the English language have achieved in the 21st century.
Right from the beginning there is a turn, away from the other and towards the self in this book. This is clearly evident in the next poem titled “Snow Theory.” Vuong has dog-eared a book, is now thinking of masturbation, and tells us, “How else do we return to ourselves but to fold/The page so it points to the good part/Another country burning on TV/ What we’ll always have something we lost.” Vuong can smoothly connect the personal with the universal, developing an effortless relationship of his personal loss and grief with the suffering of the wider world.
Violence and the act of writing about it are themes that are always present in his poetry. Regarding the poem “Old Glory”, one can argue it is all about those themes. Some excerpts from the poem to give the reader an idea of his unique approach to this matter are presented: “Knock’em dead big guy. Go in there/guns blazing…/, buddy…a massacre. Total overkill/ straight shooter…/… A bombshell blonde…/ That girl is a grenade…/ For real though, I’m dead.” Vuong is experimenting with making the language of creativity the language for destruction and is hinting towards the idea that perhaps a certain level of loss and trauma must be felt to be able to be good at the act of writing poetry and creating art itself.
He carries this idea a step further by talking about the perception that parts of white America have about his works. In a poem titled “Not Even This,” he writes, “Once, at a party set on a rooftop in Brooklyn/ for an ‘artsy vibe’, a young woman said,/ sipping her drink, You’re so lucky. You’re gay/ plus you get to write about war and stuff. I’m/ just white [Pause] I got nothing. [Laughter,/ glasses clinking]…Because everyone knows yellow pain, pressed/ into American letters, turns to gold,” he says next lamenting that he is “trying to be real but it costs too much.”
“Time is a mother,” he goes on to say in the poem. “Lest we forget, a morgue is also a community/ center.” Going back to language or the lack thereof for Vuong, he tells us the words for love and weakness are the same in the Vietnamese language. “How you say what you mean changes/ what you say,” he writes before telling us, “Some call it prayer, I call it watch your/ mouth.” In the same poem his mother’s dead body appears, zipped in a bag, and in a moment of both angst and grief, Vuong writes, “Enough is Enough/ Time is a motherfucker, I said to the gravestones, alive, absurd.”
The last poem of the collection titled “Wood Working at the End of the World” deals with all the themes that are discussed in the preceding poems individually. Various elements important to Vuong’s journey with grief appear: the boy (or lover); an old man (or Vuong’s father); language; violence; and Vuong’s mother. In the end, Vuong is standing as still as his mother’s corpse, and he tells the reader “Then it came to me, my life. I remembered my/ life/ the way an ax handle, mid-swing, remembers/ the tree./ & I was free./”It’s essential to note that the collection ends on a very hopeful note. It informs us that Vuong is navigating through trauma and grief, which is something he is not new to. Before his mother died, he lost friends to the opioid epidemic; his uncle to suicide; his grandmother. In an interview with Time Magazine, Vuong said, “Not all my poems are mournful, but they’re haunted by the inevitability of death, and so the urgency and even the joys that come out of them are through the knowledge of our own end.” In the end, it is because his grief is real that his optimism is not naive. It is an optimism that comes not only despite reason but goes against it and can only be found when one turns the gaze away from the world and into one’s self.