Louisville, KY: Sarabande, 2019. 98 pages. $15.95.
The speaker of Hai-Dang Phan’s debut book of poems, Reenactments, rarely grieves. Nor does he assume the role of the bereaved, though there is much to grieve for. The Vietnam War. The exodus of the late ’70s and ’80s. The knowledge that is lost between child and parent. In these nimble, cerebral poems, the speaker observes and makes way for other voices to tell their stories. They may belong to a knowing but reticent family member, but most often, the new voice belongs to a historical document that cannily presents the questions that obsess Phan. One gains the sense that Phan has been met with countless stories from his parents’ generation; one more urgent than the next. But most will never be shared; what we read we are given in confidence.
In “At the Vietnam Center and Archive,” the speaker reads the letters of a man seeking his granddaughter. She has disappeared:
First he writes in Vietnamese longhand,
then someone helps translate and revise:
Don’t say the boat was “stopped or encircled,”
say the boat was “surrounded” by the Thai pirates;
it’s true they “took away with them eight girls in our boat,”
but “abducted” captures the situation better.
The frame that Phan constructs around this chilling narrative is so slender one hardly notices the speaker except when the speaker grows desperate as he is told, “The Reading Room will be closing in fifteen minutes.”
A small gesture, a minor mimicry that does not attempt to replicate the man’s pain but pose the questions that poets, immigrants, and immigrant poets must ask when confronted with a history that outweighs the span of fifteen minutes—or an entire lifetime: How well can I understand the history that matters to me? What do I owe it?
Phan’s answer to the first is: Not very well. In “My Father’s Norton Introduction to Literature, Third Edition (1981),” the speaker makes guesses of his father’s grief for a deceased sister, Ðông Xưa. With seemingly few other sources, he turns to his father’s annotations of canonical English poems, recorded in the margins of the “thin translucent pages” of an old Norton anthology. “‘[T]his is how we deal with death,’” the annotation reads, in reply to John Crowe Ransom’s “Bells for John Whiteside’s Daughter.” In Phan’s poem, two texts intersect: Ransom’s and the father’s marginalia. However, neither Ransom’s poem nor the marginalia mediates between the speaker and the father. No intimacy, no revelation springs from this intersection. Rather, the two texts serve as slender reeds of evidence that the speaker has failed: failed in gleaning something of his father’s inner world, and thus the speaker is driven to “[read] the way I discourage my students from reading.”
One senses that no matter how much evidence he accrues, from archives, from the attic, from the mouth of his own mother, this immigrant poet will continue failing to unearth that one kernel of truth, decipher the one hieroglyph, that would make everything clear. His father writes: “Assume there is a reason for everything.” But of course there isn’t.
Phan’s crisscrossing of texts is most ambitious when it is implicit. Multiple texts overlap in “A Brief History of Reenactment,” the first being photographer An-My Lê’s project, called Small Wars, wherein actors in North Carolina restage the commonplace drudgeries and maneuverings of American soldiers in Vietnam. In the poem, the speaker calls the photographer “the sniper girl” and imagines a Hollywood-style romance between them:
“Hello, Tiger! Nice combat boots. Is that thing real?”
pointing to my Special Forces jungle shirt.
“I’m afraid so,” I say nonchalantly, trying to maskmy satisfaction.
Phan stages a reenactment upon Lê’s reenactment—and calls to question the impulse to reenact, relive, or revisit anything considered important.
In Dien Cai Dau, Yusef Komunyakaa poses the same question in the devastating “Re-creating the Scene,” in which a woman must describe her rape with such vividness as to recreate it. All in order to be heard. “Why warfare?” we may ask reenactment actors. “Why photograph them?” Surely Lê’s reasons involve power dynamics and the sheer subversity of staging the Vietnam War on American soil. We may ask Phan why he writes poems that portray reenactment, rather than the war itself. We do not wish to perpetuate violence is a common refrain, but in the case of Phan, the answer seems to surround the same obsession with seeking, even scavenging, the texts available to him.
Sisters, daughters, and granddaughters populate Phan’s collection, some as silent as the women of Komunyakaa’s Dien Cai Dau—but for the mother. Forthcoming and not forthcoming enough, she makes an imperfect key to the past. From poem to poem, she describes what is impossible to imagine, in ways uncomfortable to readers who might consider themselves enlightened. While the family sits through a Brad Pitt zombie flick in “Watching World War Z,” the mother observes “the chaotic scene at the besieged airport [. . .] just like Saigon, April, 1975, / the runway swarming with desperate bodies.” The comparison of political refugees to fictional victims of the zombie apocalypse discomfits. It suggests that historical brutalities are such that no comparison can be made fairly, except to the surreal.
But Phan’s speaker is made of cooler stuff than this; he’s not interested in a fevered comparison. Rather, his puzzlement arises from elsewhere. The flight, he says, “must have happened in ultra-high definition, / those final days before they were Mom and Dad.” What really puzzles him is that there existed a time his parents were once not parents. The poem then closes on a graceful apostrophe to a sister, soon to give birth and become a parent herself. For Phan, what is surreal and fantastical is life. Not the other.
In what might be the frankest poem of the collection, “My Mother Says the Syrian Refugees Look Like Tourists,” the speaker reports:
my mother can’t make room in our story for more people;
because my mother never quite has the right words in English,though to be fair, she said “travelers,” and seemed anxious after;
because she’s not callous you must understand, just protective . . .
Long couplets then recount the family’s dangerous escape from Bà Rịa, of which the most chilling sentence is “I am not harmed.” The mother has saved her child’s life. With the same cool—that does not bely great heart—the speaker argues that his mother’s heroism and her survival do not excuse her inability to include Syrians among those deserving aid and succor. But Phan details how fiercely human this limitation is. It is, he argues, precisely what kept him alive.