UN\\MARTYRED: [SELF-]VANISHING PRESENCES IN VIETNAMESE POETRY
by Nhã Thuyên
un\ \martyred: [self-]vanishing presences in Vietnamese poetry by Nhã Thuyên, a Hanoi-based poet and critic, is a collection of essays that offers a cartography of the writing communities that have lived (and died) along the margins of Vietnam’s literary landscape since the Renovation period of the late 1980’s. The collection deftly and delicately navigates the poetry and poetic work of marginalized writers in Vietnam, and their relationship to politics, dissidence, and creative production. un\ \martyred examines expansive modes of aesthetic defiance in essays that themselves glimmer with poetic lyricism and precision. The reader voyages through chronicles of political landscapes and the actors toiling within them. Her explorations of Open Mouth, Womxn’s Poetry, Sidewalk Poetry, and more “nourish an emancipated grammar of poetry.”
Nhã Thuyên situates herself as a reader who insists on challenging ubiquitous frameworks for reading on each page, at every turn. She holds aesthetics and politics in a single hand to examine, interrogate, and explore the entanglement of the two from all angles, asking for an end to outdated binaries of imagining Vietnamese literatures while centering the voices of the marginalized.
Through a relational motion of writing, reading, and being, this collection examines diverse and expansive modes of aesthetic defiance from the margins in essays that themselves glimmer with their own poetics. Here we are challenged to ask anew: how might we envision political writing in this historical moment? Is the category of political writing at all possible or is it unavoidable? Where are the unexpected places it might be found, and where collectivity through individual writing can it aspire to arise?
Nhã Thuyên uniquely evades the all-too-typical and reductive equivalence between the underground and the revolutionary, or the mainstream and the repressive. Instead she reinvigorates pressing questions of political commitment and their relation to the aesthetic where “these analyses try to put underground art and poetry back into a relationship with orthodox art and poetry.” She tackles this necessary task from a fresh perspective by encompassing contemporary political and technological emergences that make their indelible mark on the literary universe of contemporary Vietnam and Vietnamese writers.
Through these studies of poetic movements and techniques, publication strategies, and writers, Nhã Thuyên excavates the ongoing tumult and rigor in her struggle to and not to write, to and not to publish. All the while, she opens up a radical space of play where we can collectively delight in and honor these experiments in language. un/ /martyred is pressingly urgent, devastatingly gorgeous, and deeply compelling in its address of common concerns. un\ \martyred stirs the reader with unparalleled poethical sensitivity.
“Nhã Thuyên is the guide we need to the contemporary edge of Vietnamese poetry. Her passion for, and commitment to, the poets who exist at the margins of Vietnam’s literary scene are inspiring.” ”
– Viet Thanh Nguyen
Nhã Thuyên’s most recent poetry thing words breathe, creatures of elsewhere (tứ thở, những người lạ) was published in Vietnamese (Nhã Nam, 2015) and in English translation by Kaitlin Rees (Vagabond Press, 2016). With Kaitlin Rees, she founded AJAR, a small bilingual literary journal-press, an online, printed space for poetic exchange. She soliloquies some nonsense when having no other emergencies of life to deal with.
Translations by Nguyễn-Hoàng Quyên, Kaitlin Rees, Ngân Nguyễn and David Payne. Afterwords by Trần Ngọc Hiếu.