Cliché or Parody? Orientalist Readings of Nam Le’s ‘36 Ways of Writing a Vietnamese Poem’

One may be surprised to learn that Viet Thanh Nguyen’s Pulitzer-winning novel The Sympathizer was rejected by 13 out of 14 publishers before its eventual publication. He describes in an interview why he believes his novel was rejected by all but one publisher he submitted to: “I knew in writing the novel that I was deliberately not doing what I was supposed to do as an Asian American writer, which is [...that] you have to end on a note of Americanization. You have to end on an embrace of the American dream, explicitly or implicitly. And the novel does not do that.” He comments elsewhere along similar lines, “I refuse[d] to subscribe to dominant American narratives and mythologies that allow someone like me a very narrow space to speak.” 

Such a “narrow space” is precisely what Vietnamese-Australian writer Nam Le, known for his widely received short story collection The Boat, seeks to question and subvert in 36 Ways of Writing a Vietnamese Poem. The book — witty and experimental, each poem numbered and themed, meant to be read as constitutive of a larger whole — engages with a question that he has long grappled with, namely, “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.” Early on in the collection, he writes:

Whatever I write is
Vietnamese. I can never not —

The statement, at once a liberatory realization and a curse, neatly encapsulates the book’s premise. There is nothing that makes his poems “Vietnamese” other than the fact that he is himself Vietnamese — ultimately, “Vietnameseness” does not lie in some kind of essence. Yet at the same time, this does not prevent the fact that whatever he writes will inevitably be branded as “Vietnamese,” a label that carries with it certain expectations and baggage — that is, at least in English.

Nam Le. Photo via Simon & Schuster.

The collection’s first poem, titled [1. Diasporic], opens with the following lines. 

In English, mind You. 
You dink I writee Yiknamee?
Shame on You.
It was Your violence dumbed me.

In these opening lines, Le centers the disabling violence of the English language, accompanied by its racist caricature of a Vietnamese (or some Asian) accent. Such violence of English recurs throughout the book. 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.

Later, he juxtaposes the violence of English against the liberatory potential of Vietnamese.

[...]
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.

English demands, while Vietnamese opens space for refusal, freedom. It is along such lines that Nirmala Devi titles her review in ArtReview of Le’s book as “Rage Against the English Language.” She writes, “this collection is driven by rage and violence. Anger against the violence of the English language with its rules that, in effect, force users to make categorisations.” 

Yet, if Devi’s characterization of Le’s collection is correct, why, then, in a different essay of his does Le write the following? “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.” Safe to say that this does not sound like a man “raging against the English language.” What went amiss?

The problem is that to read 36 Ways of Writing a Vietnamese Poem as a polemic against English is reductive, and overlooks the ways in which many of Le’s poems are not meant to be read at face value — though it is not at all clear, as we will see, which ones exactly. For me, it was only by the 20^th poem in the collection that I began to fully suspect this was the case. Titled [20. Titrative], the poem consists of three lines.

Unself-consciously?
Ha ha!
Too late.

And too late indeed. In raising the question of unself-consciousness, the poem forecloses its possibility. 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 — I, 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 me 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 “accidentally” orientalist readings. Such capacity to produce (mis-)readings is arguably one of the most distinctive features of Le’s poems.

In a much-circulated essay titled “Blunt-Force Ethnic Credibility” from Astra Magazine, Som-Mai Nguyen critiques a kind of linguistic fetishization commonly found amongst Vietnamese diasporic writers.

There’s a jazz-hands half-nelson device I dislike in diasporic literature and criticism. Writers extrapolate from orthographic coincidence and sprinkle in non-English words to assert unearned authority. I tire of variants on: in Vietnamese, a tonal language, ma can mean many things. The author rattles off ghost, mother, tomb, horse, code, accompanied by the suggestion that this phrenologically means something. These claims are in-group sleights of hand, smugly announcing, without real evidence, that the author has exotic cultural knowledge the outsider cannot fathom. If you know, you know.

Som-Mai Nguyen’s point is that diasporic writers’ invocations of Vietnamese tonality and diacritics often function as a mechanism for producing “blunt-force ethnic credibility,” a kind of automatic authority granted to ethnic authors on the basis of identity alone. Funnily enough, in [15. Dire critical], Le appears guilty of exactly the thing that Som-Mai Nguyen critiques above.

Here, we find Le too invoking the hackneyed example of the tonal variations of ma to imbue Vietnamese with a kind of mystic quality inaccessible to English. Though perhaps not. Is it that the poem is simply another instantiation of the object of Som-Mai Nguyen’s critique — or is it self-consciously parodying it? Earlier in the same poem, Le writes, 

All in the tone.
Give us each day our diacritics — our low and high, fall and rise, our horns and holds:
Flat we are without.
(You like that, no doubt.)

He continues:

Give us our dấu sắc, huyền, ngã, hỏi, nặng:
For ours is not your flat euphony
Your squeezed, frictioned speech
But full mouth music.

Here, again, assimilation to English is presented as a kind of violence that flattens, that which deadens the fullness of Vietnamese and its tonality. But what follows after prompts us to question such a reading, for in the “full mouth music” of Vietnamese we find: “Tripping of water over stone-carved lingas // Rising tang of early season mango in the mouth // Trill of moonlight and wind on silk curtains / or reflected sunlight, prismatic, on rice paddies along the Baie d’Along.” Mangoes, moonlight, silk curtains, and rice paddies. Are these objects not almost too clichéd, too perfectly oriental, to be read as “unself-conscious”?

Perhaps. But in [35. Reclamatory: 2], Le complicates our reading once more. 

As the poem points out, “moon and jade and silk” have been deployed millennia before the advent of French colonialism, and thus cannot be merely reduced to "orientalist" tropes. Perhaps, then, what was actually orientalist (accidentally so) was none other than to have read “Rising tang of early season mango in the mouth / Trill of moonlight and wind on silk curtains” as a parody of orientalism in the first place.

Though, yet again, perhaps not. After all, that the images now associated with orientalism have existed “millennia before” does not annul the fact that, well, those images have indeed been appropriated into orientalist imaginaries. In the end, it remains impossible to tell with full certainty what is meant to be taken as tongue-in-cheek and what is not — and that appears to be precisely the point. 36 Ways of Writing a Vietnamese Poem is arguably best understood as a staging of the seeming inescapability of clichés, stereotypes, and tropes, in which parody and the parodied become indiscernible. As writer and translator Lina Mounzer writes of clichés that seem to ever-lurk “at the edge of one’s awareness”: “[Y]ou write towards them, or against them; you write to subvert them or mock them or indulge them or skirt around them altogether, but they are always there.”

Surprisingly, the collection contains 37, rather than 36 poems, contrary to what the title suggests. In the last stanza of the final poem of the book, titled [37. Post-racial / -glacial], Le writes. 

In this ecopoetic imagining of a post-racial world, words do not “need mean more than itself”: things just simply are — and there, perhaps, “Vietnamese” too need not signify anything more than “Vietnamese,” whatever that may mean. Yet, in utter contradiction with the poem, for me at least, Le’s use of the word “escape” already signifies more than it need mean: namely, Le’s own background of having come to Australia after having “escaped” Vietnam. Is it I who, in this last instance, collapsed the poem’s utopic vision for a post-racial world? Perhaps. But if the word “escape” has already escaped, it is also because the landscape of racist, orientalist, ethnic clichés and tropes has already escaped me — us — too, its edges always just in sight, just out of reach.