Followers

Touching the Ocean


Because we were boys, Ocean Vuong writes in “Revelation” from his new book of poetry, Burnings:

I could only touch you in the dark.
Where we pretended the sins
promised by our fathers
could not find us.


There are strong feminist and queer sensibilities throughout this transcendent collection of 24 poems, but the brilliance of the Vietnamese American’s poetry is in how acutely he witnesses tragedy. In particular, Vuong keenly observes how patriarchal pathology damages culture, geography and life itself by outlawing—in insidious, sadistic and frighteningly creative ways—something as indispensable as human touch.

That pathology can even, through a treacherous alchemy, transform touch into something deadly, as seen in “The Photo.” Vuong examines what can be seen (a Vietnamese man shooting another Vietnamese man in the head) and brilliantly illuminates what is unseen in Eddie Adams’s infamous Pulitzer Prize-winning Vietnam photo:

Like all photographs
this one fails
to reveal the picture…

from behind the fool
with blood on his cheek
and the dead dog by his feet,

a white man
was lighting a cigarette.


Poet extraordinaire, Ocean Vuong

There are moments of joy to be found amidst the melancholy of Burnings. But even in the safe spaces, there is danger. Therefore, as in real life, bliss is fleeting and not even the most sacred of relationships can withstand the possibility of assault. “Kissing in Vietnamese” begins with an endearing thought:

My grandmother kisses

but it is immediately undercut by the next line:

as if bombs are bursting in the backyard.

The wages of war make human contact both imperative and risky. This is especially true for the male homosexual. In our current frame of reference, there is a tendency to regard touch between men as something to be avoided, to be viewed with suspicion and disgust. In “Echo,” Vuong exposes the hypocrisy fueling that vantage point:

From the black car’s window,
Someone shouted Nice bike,
Faggot!

Truth is, I only wanted to speak
to them, to say it’s okay, that I too
shouted when silence was unbearable…

That I too was afraid
as I drove away, unable
to shake loose the faggot
twitching
beneath my skin.


Burnings is at its most searing when it places its hand directly on the fire; when it is ironically religious in its cadences; when it blurs the line between cataclysm and psalm. In “The Masturbation of Men," patriarchy renders even self-touch a kind of destruction.  The opening lines read like excerpts from the New Testament:

After he beat my mother,
my father went to kneel in the bathroom
until we heard his muffled cries
bellow through the walls.
And so I learned: when a man
climaxes, it is the closest thing
to surrender.


Ultimately, Burnings is the same courageous, explosive, glorious and rapturous call-to-arms as Ntozake Shange’s For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide When the Rainbow Is Enuf; and it will speak, I wager, just as resolutely to generations of queer and colored people.

Vuong's poems are shots most definitely fired—albeit, subliminally. And they are the burnings only someone named Ocean is qualified to quench.

Burnings is available for purchase at the Sibling Rivalry website.