Susan Nguyen, Dear Diaspora

 

What did you leave when crossing the bridge? From what materials was the
  bridge constructed?

        When did you first recoil

               from your mouth?          Do you feel safe wrecking language? 

What movie theatre did you travel through? What apple? (“The Body as a Series of Questions”)

American poet Susan Nguyen’s full-length poetry debut is Dear Diaspora (Lincoln NE: University of Nebraska Press, 2021), winner of The Raz/Shumaker Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Poetry. As the back cover offers: “Through a collage of lyric, documentary, and epistolary poems, we follow Suzi as she untangles intergenerational grief and her father’s disappearance while climbing trees to stare at the color green and wishing that she wore Lucy Liu’s freckles.” Nguyen writes through the character Suzi, and the way through which Nguyen writes her main character (who may or may not be a stand-in for the author herself) is slightly reminiscent of Toronto poet Shannon Bramer writing through Vera, who sold scarves, through her collection scarf (Toronto ON: Exile Editions, 2001), or even how Robert Kroetsch wrote the fictional archivist Raymond, as he sought out, through her poems, the disappeared Rita Kleinhart via The Hornbooks of Rita K. (Edmonton AB: University of Alberta Press, 2001), composing a poetry within a fiction within a poetry. “no one told me grief could be so ordinary,” Nguyen offers, to close the poem “Grief as a Question:.” Composed as a collaged structure of descriptive power and nostalgia, Nguyen’s Suzi seeks a language for a situation she cannot fathom, and a distance she hasn’t manage to reconcile, writing the distance of a history of the Vietnamese diaspora from her character’s American upbringing, via parents who landed as new immigrants. As she writes as part of one of multiple poems underneath the title “Letter to the Diaspora”:

Language cannot express all memory, those that are not wholly present, that exist at the edges, so that you only recall in small moments of brilliance, when someone shows you a picture, a place where you were present and your body took up space, acted and moved and was acted upon and you realize you would never remember your body there if it weren’t for this other to unlock this small part living in you but separate from you. How can this be?

There is an interesting way she assembles the epistolary poems alongside more descriptive pieces, grouping almost as a call-and-response, writing the external against the internal; writing to the nebulous “diaspora” her character’s frustration around a collision of cultures, language and approach, racist responses to her very existence, and the eventual loss of a father who simply leaves and does not return. “Nothing existed during the war times or before or / now,” she writes, to close the poem “She Doesn’t Know about the War Times,” “in its aftermath: there is only her father. He is somewhere unknown.” She writes a distance, including one that increases the further she loses the ties to her parents’ language and culture, as she herself rests between two, and writing to others through the diaspora to ask how such distances need not be so distant. She seeks a language that might not exist, one that seeks to include the fractured elements of Suzi’s self and history, and family dynamics, layered upon the normal divide any child feels from parents and larger connections of family and culture. There is such an openness to these pieces, one that seeks to understand, connect and become part of something larger, reaching further into a complete unknown that refuses to not keep reaching further, and reaching out. To open a further “Letter to the Diaspora,” she offers:

Dear Diaspora,

every day I am impatient with language    how slowly it bends to my ear

     one day I hope to speak to my mother     my father

how will I tell them I am falling in love     I am happy     I am becoming someone

                   how to speak about language where there is no language

    they speak with their tongues