Nam Le’s ‘36 Ways of Writing a Vietnamese Poem’

When Nam Le’s debut short story collection The Boat landed in 2008 it was so freighted, a big deal, that comparisons to Joyce’s Dubliners felt modest (as did suggestions the book would be read “for as long as people read books” – a little breathless even by blurb standards, of which there are none). A hot minute or two of radio silence followed. Then, in 2019, we got Le’s analysis of David Malouf. Recently, with sightings of Le in bookshops and at literary festivals, signs of something were afoot.

And now, here it is – in no less than 36 forms.

Le is the blind box of Australian writing: you never know what you’re going to get. “[4. Aegic / All-encompassing]” conceives of hurt and resentment being passed down through history. You can detect a combination of something like anger and something like sadness, too, when the poet writes:

Your blood contains it.
What happened to them – 
Your parents, theirs, all their kin –

Who don’t talk about it
Because of what happened to them – 
Is yours to take and tell.

“[3. Ekphrastic] (SELF-PORTRAIT)” is ekphrasis with a difference: the source is a photograph of the poet’s grandmother, clad in her “French ao dai (silk if you like) with off-centered mandarin collar”. These are the imperial and cultural traces of Vietnam’s colonisation by the French and Chinese, but they are more than that. Images, Le suggests, effect a kind of flatness, and a flattening of narrative, investment, affect. “Now write about it what you like”, he concludes, warily (and wearily, too).

Anxieties, scepticism towards the question of how much one can claim histories of colonial/racialised trauma, recur throughout. The last lines of “[Aegic]” seem suspicious of reclaiming blood and inheritance in a way that risks self-imprisonment, repeating colonial obsessions with racial descent, biology, eugenics. We are all penetrable, vulnerable to colonising thoughts, actions, impulses to monetise our wretchedness.

The suggestive “[10. Reclamatory: 1]” ends only with the letters “O O O”. This is Nam Le’s signature, literally and stylistically. (His actual signature, a nearly cursive loop, recalls an ouroboric circle.) Poetry as lasso and spiral, opening, enclosure – as, yes, Buddhism’s full circles, but also vice grips of sex, violence, anger: how they clutch, how they hold on to us, our preoccupations, our alliances, our disavowals too.

When friends asked about the collection, I told them, “It’s zen, and it’s angry.” Like in “[20. Titrative]”: very Buddhist, reflective of the paradoxes of self and consciousness (the title refers to the process of determining the concentration of a substance by having it react with another substance).

Unself-consciously?
Ha ha!
Too late.

But then you have poems such as “[7. Violence: Paedo-affective]”, invoking asylum seekers, “accepted into Western Educated, Industrialised, Rich, Democratic (WEIRD) countries”:

… where, before long, they’re given new,

WEIRD names, and there picked on, picked last, left out,

looked through, looked at, looked at too long,

called slant or chink or nip or ching chong

Legacies of racism, colonisation, slavery, condemnation: these can leave you hanging. You can get hung up on them, too. “Lick the leash or bite it,” Le writes. It’s hard not to. He stretches and pulls the “closed grids” of the English language, tearing away its demands for order, or for what it perceives as such – its insistence upon questions of to and whom and from and where and sex and time and past and causation.

Like Le Van Tai, Lionel Fogarty, π.O., Ouyang Yu and Cathy Park Hong, Le gives space to “racialised” Englishes, playing with the absurdity of the archives, colonisation’s pidgins and creoles. A refusal of ascribed and preassigned identities.

In sum, 36 Ways (Scribner) offers autobiography, imaginative extrapolations, the stories of others, a bit of Heaney (in more than one sense), language play, riddles wrapped in enigmas (37 is the new 36) – or maybe it’s vice versa? Yes and no. Call it all this and more. Call it a comeback.

Here, Le meets the Buddha on the road, and every time – with pleasure, good humour and happiness – he kills them.