Michelle Phương Hồ
AWARD FOR HYBRID WRITING
To be recognized in this country, I became a defendant.
I was handed an orange bucket with which to ladle the ocean
into the courtroom.
Translation: a shoddy vessel.
After pouring out all the water I’d accumulated for this brief trial, my lawyers only complained. Something about stained oxfords and soggy pantsuits.
Something about insufficient proof, the liability of representing me.
It was a drizzly Thursday.
They threw out the case.
I landed, mouth-down on the pavement.
From Amnesty International’s findings after investigating Vietnam’s re-education camps:
Please state your name.
A tiny gnat slapped dead on my desk
then smeared
A vast, empty plane: foreign letters
The mouth forming
beautiful shapes
Where did you learn to speak like that?
Are you aware of the consequences of treason?
Cold linoleum. Two centimeters between our toes. We weren’t allowed to touch. Half an hour between us. The head of the table was a Communist soldier. The head of a chrysanthemum is cut. We kissed, under the table, with only our feet. I could barely keep count. Nine days and eight nights by fishing boat, I delivered it—her head in my hands. My arms, pathetic. To escape, you had to have a love note. You had to have two. I think I maybe saw a family of angels—fishing, then gone. We slept beside each other like canned sardines. Many died of strange diseases. Many asked not to be named.
So you admit that you tried to escape.
How will you repent?
In the highlands, everything is
hunger. A man waits daily
for 400 grams of manioc
root and rice. At sunset,
minnows dance the desert
horizon, a blazed myth
of water where there
is none. I wait for the
next enviable
hour.
According to my
grandfather, madness
is the distance between
foot and mouth, and
hunger—the body
mere inches from
horizon, catching fire.
Let me ask you again. To whom do you owe your life?
To quote Joan: “The light comes in the name of the voice.”
Torture . . . consists of a primary physical act, the infliction of pain, and the primary verbal act, the interrogation. The verbal act, in turn, consists of two parts, the “‘question”’ and the “‘answer,”’, each with conventional connotations that wholly falsify it. The question is mistakenly understood to be the motive; the answer is mistakenly understood to be the betrayal. The first mistake credits the torturer, providing him with a justification, his cruelty with an explanation. The second discredits the prisoner, making him rather than the torturer, his voice rather than his pain, the cause of his loss of self and the world.
— Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain
I want a room where I can stand before the glaring, graceless sun and not jump to my conclusion. Shimmy and sing and shatter the beveled glass and wrought iron you live so carefully within. My body thrown clear through stucco.
Would I finally register. Your soggy daughter.
Would I be willing to see you, homeless again.
Would we be able to stand, bareheaded, all day, on either side of a trench.
At these impasses, the devil says: Leap.
Sketches:
In re-education camps, prisoners were subjected to mandatory confessions, encouraging false confessions to satisfy their captors. They had to write new confessions many times each day, about 20 pages handwritten. The more “crimes” to which a prisoner confessed, the more he was praised.
A man named Tru, imprisoned in the highlands, was forced to stand bareheaded all day in the hot sun and cool nights, plagued by mosquitoes. He ultimately contracted malaria. He remained in this position—unrepentant—till the end.
After just ten minutes, I am exhausted from explaining.
All this time, I have tried to drag you to my position.
Over the loudspeaker, I hear another line of questioning—
SECRETARY NIELSEN: CAN YOU EXPLAIN A LITTLE MORE WHAT YOU'RE LOOKING FOR?
SENATOR HARRIS: SURE. YOUR AGENCY WILL BE SEPARATING CHILDREN FROM THEIR PARENTS AND—
SECRETARY NIELSEN: NO. WHAT WE'LL BE DOING IS PROSECUTING PARENTS WHO’VE BROKEN THE LAW JUST AS WE DO EVERY DAY IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA.
SENATOR HARRIS: I CAN APPRECIATE THAT. BUT IF THAT PARENT HAS A 4-YEAR-OLD CHILD, WHAT DO YOU PLAN ON DOING WITH THAT CHILD?
SECRETARY NIELSEN: THE CHILD UNDER LAW GOES TO H.H.S. FOR CARE AND CUSTODY.
SENATOR HARRIS: THEY WILL BE SEPARATED FROM THEIR PARENTS. SO MY QUESTION—
SECRETARY NIELSEN: JUST AS WE DO IN THE UNITED STATES EVERY DAY.
SENATOR HARRIS: SO THEY WILL BE SEPARATED FROM THEIR PARENTS, AND MY QUESTION THEN, IS, WHEN YOU ARE SEPARATING CHILDREN FROM THEIR PARENTS, DO YOU HAVE A PROTOCOL IN PLACE ABOUT HOW THAT SHOULD BE DONE? AND ARE YOU TRAINING THE PEOPLE WHO WILL ACTUALLY REMOVE A CHILD FROM THEIR PARENT ON HOW TO DO THAT IN THE LEAST TRAUMATIC WAY?
The conundrum possessed me for some days.
Some days, like daffodils, wandering around
in winter. What are you doing here?
An act of crude translation: To transpose another’s
body to your own body’s position. When I begin losing
my sense of direction, my dance teacher
warns—see the room, see what the
hands are doing. The men who dragged
the adulteress to the center of scrutiny also
removed her dress. Some need to see
a body to believe. I consider leaving
the tomb empty.
limbo (n)
a West Indian dance in which the dancer bends backward to pass under a horizontal bar that is progressively lowered to a position just above the ground.
an uncertain period of waiting for a decision or resolution; an intermediate state or condition.
(in some Christian beliefs) the supposed abode of the souls of unbaptized infants, and of the just who died before Christ’s coming.
a state of neglect or oblivion.
Bố đi đâu đó?
his children held
in abeyance: a prayer
see how the body hangs
see what the hands are doing
A practice in holding tension—a poetics of limbo—an incomplete sentence, left hanging, mid-air, my grandfather loaded into the back of a truck as they drove him to an undisclosed location, legs dangling from the truck bed, his two feet, like commas
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Michelle Phương Hồ (she/her) is a poet based in New Haven, CT. Her work has appeared in or is forthcoming in Apogee, Black Warrior Review, Poetry, Volume, and elsewhere, and has been recognized with the 2020 Frontier Poetry Industry Prize. Born to Vietnamese refugees, she received her MFA in poetry at New York University. She currently curates the comtemplative literary salon, quietly wild.
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