This coming Thursday marks the 40th anniversary of the conclusion of the Vietnamese-American War. For me and for other diasporic Vietnamese like me, this date is especially significant, as it stakes out not just a traumatic event in our family histories but also a turning point: April 30, 1975 was the calendar date on which our families were reborn, redefined, translated, transmuted into English speakers, America dwellers, U.S. citizens.On the back of this book, there is a blurb written by the late American poet William Matthews: "The best writing we've had from the long war in Vietnam has been prose so far. Yusef Komunyakaa's Dien Cai Dau changes that." Presumably, this quotation was elicited from Matthews around the time of Dien Cai Dau's first printing, in 1988. Since that time, it's safe to say the genre of Vietnam-War-related poetry has radically changed, growing broader, deeper, and more complex, to the point where Matthews's quote now seems a relic of a different geological age.When I was growing up in the American Midwest in the '80s and '90s, it seemed that the predominant narrative about the Vietnam War in U.S. media and U.S. literature was one that was firmly centered around a U.S. military perspective: in this collective cultural narrative, Vietnamese people were portrayed rather two-dimensionally as inscrutable yellow-skinned foreigners whose subjectivity either did not exist or could not be accessed. Vietnamese women, in particular, were depicted as either simple-minded rustics or unctuous whores. Englishman Graham Greene's 1955 novel The Quiet American admittedly predates this historical moment, but its introduction of a Vietnamese female character named Phuong -- alluring yet opaque, dim-witted yet unconsciously, tantalizingly sexual, a commodity to be fought over rather than identified with -- was echoed in western writers' portrayals of Vietnamese women for decades to follow. Contrast this erstwhile poverty of imagination with the current state of Vietnam-War-related literature: in both prose and poetry, there is now a wide range of diverse perspectives on the scene, including a whole host of powerful diasporic Vietnamese poetic voices -- voices like Linh Dinh's, Bao Phi's, Cathy Linh Che's, Ocean Vuong's, and Hieu Minh Nguyen's, to name just a few.In the context of this atomically potent, new poetic paradigm, Matthews's quotation is all the more striking. It is striking because it reminds us that, in a way, we have Yusef Komunyakaa to thank for the richness and nuance that now defines the genre of Vietnam War poetry. Komunyakaa's Dien Cai Dau was the forerunner of it all. It is the beginning that we have to thank for today's robust middle.This slim book follows a taut, carefully constructed arc. It begins with poems about military maneuvers, treks, patrols, long periods in which gruff men lived in the company of other gruff men, watching and waiting for the inevitable to happen. The book then moves on to evocations of the non-masculine lives the war touched, the Vietnamese monks and (especially) the Vietnamese women, how some were burned alive or raped, consigned to the role of a military man's two-timed mistress or his saviour symbol. Then we get snapshots of how the military men spent their precious moments of leisure time: playing volleyball, listening to music, seeking sexual release. Then there are poems about POWs (on both sides), the brutalities they faced. This section segues seamlessly into a suite of poems about the unique struggles confronted by African-Americans in the U.S. military, fighting for a country in which racial inequality and segregation were still a reality. In the bleak prose poem "The One-Legged Stool," the speaker, an African-American POW, tells his North Vietnamese captors: "I've been through Georgia. Yeah, been through 'Bama, too.... You eye me worse than those rednecks. They used to look at me in my uniform like I didn't belong in it.... All I have to go back to are faces like yours at the door." Receiving word of Martin Luther King's assassination back home is an additional cause of demoralization in the African-American soldiers Komunyakaa portrays. Finally, the book ends with an elegiac contemplation of the crippled lives the war left in its wake when it ended, forty years ago this week: the boat people, the ostracized mixed-race children, the broken marriages, the bereaved families, the vets grappling with survivors' guilt and PTSD.There is a lamentable typo in the edition of this book that I bought: "dui boi" instead of "bui doi." Hopefully, this error was corrected in later editions. Overall, though, this is a book with an authoritative narrative voice, informed by intimate firsthand knowledge of Vietnam and of the Vietnam War (Komunyakaa even name-drops the 18th-to-19th-century Vietnamese poet Ho Xuan Huong in his poem "Saigon Bar Girls, 1975" -- a demonstration of deep cultural literacy that only the best writers in the field can match). The language is lyrical and imaginative, full of gloriously unexpected yet emotionally and visually precise metaphors: "Like an angel/pushed up against what hurts/his globe-shaped helmet/follows the gold ring his flashlight/casts into the void." This week, as the 40th anniversary of the fall of Saigon is commemorated, take a moment to sample the poems in this book. Read "Toys in a Field"; read "Boat People." Yes, there is much to mourn here, but there is also a birth, a new beginning, to celebrate.
Yusef Komunyakaa‘s Dien Cai Dau is another collection of Vietnam War poetry. The poet, who received the Bronze Star and edited The Southern Cross, dedicates this book to his brother Glenn, “who saw The Nam before” Komunyakaa did. His poems put the reader in the soldiers’ shoes, allowing them to camouflage themselves and skulk around the jungles of Vietnam from the very first lines of “Camouflaging the Chimera.” Beyond skulking in the jungle, hunting the Viet Cong, Komunyakaa discusses the weight of war as soldiers trudge through the landscape with their equipment and what they’ve done and seen. Weaving through the tunnels looking for the enemy or searching the thick forest, soldiers are constantly reminded of their emotional and physical burdens, though they find joy in some of the smallest moments.One of the beautiful aspects of Komunyakaa’s poetry is his vivid sense of how even the most beautiful elements of nature have a darker side. In “Somewhere Near Phu Bai,” Komunyakaa writes “The moon cuts through/the night trees like a circular saw/white hot. . . .” and in “Starlight Scope Myopia,” he suggests, “Viet Cong/move under our eyelids,/lords over loneliness/winding like coral vine through/sandalwood & lotus/.”Read the review: http://savvyverseandwit.com/2010/07/d...
Do You like book Dien Cai Dau (1988)?
Still the best book of poetry to come out of the Vietnam War. Komunyakaa takes the experiences of his personae at an angle, crafting images to reflect the various confrontations, deflections, evasions, blues memories that cycle in and out of focus. The collection's structured to move the reader from the middle of the jungle to the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in the stunning final poem, "Facing It." Each of the voices is so convincing it's tempting to read the collection as autobiographical, but that's true only in the loosest imaginable way. Komunyakaa had written powerful poetry and he's still writing it, but for me Dien Cai Dau remains the high point of a career that's earned him a place in the top rank of American poets, including Whitman, Dickinson, Adrienne Rich, William Carlos Williams, Robert Frost [insert your favorites here].
—Craig Werner
I began reading this book after it was recommended to me by a PhD candidate at UH. He's a published poet and works with my juniors once a week, helping them develop their own writing style and voice. I am blown away by the emotion, depth, and raw descriptive power of this body of work. As the daughter of a Vietnam vet, I have found this collection to be a telling narrative of what my father must have experienced yet cannot talk about in detail more than 30 years later. I weep for the soldiers who never returned, and I weep for those who lived but were still lost.
—Mary Brownfield
Most days, I sit in a Center for Writing, reviewing papers for college students, and clarifying the proper formatting and style required by the Modern Language Association (MLA), as relates to scholastic writing. As I notice varying writing styles, I suggest books for students to read, based on their style. So imagine my surprise when a student comes in and suggests this book for me to read. You have to read this, he said. I nodded and shrugged it off mentally, just like you do when you get a book recommendation from the person on the train who has no idea what types of books you normally read. I should have known better, because students sense everything and if they're always interacting with you, they know you more than you think they do. A few seconds later, I glance over at him and I see the hurt in his eyes. It is then that I realize that to him, this book is survival. This was the week of the Ferguson incident and it was a heartrending time for most. I saw my students come in with heavy hearts, and I heard the tears in their voices as they spoke to me in whispers, as if I was the only person they felt comfortable enough to share their pain with, as if I was the only one who could relate. Maybe I was. One by one, they unburdened themselves. And I listened.I never thought I would like poetry, until I read this man's stuff, my student said. And then I read his [the student's] annotation on the book. I went through his paper line by line, like I always do, looking for grammatical errors and MLA stylistic flaws. I soon forgot about that because I was hooked. It was as if tears bled through the page and formed words; like the formation heartstrings would make if they were placed on paper and given a voice. It was clear, he had found his voice through this book, and as I looked up to tell him this, tears were in his eyes as he said quietly, Please, you have to read it. I needed no further convincing.Dien Cau Dau. Crazy, is how the Vietnamese referred to the American soldiers in Vietnam. This chapbook is Yusef Komunyakaa's reflections on being a black soldier in Vietnam. I've seen attempts at war poems and I've simply flipped through them and put them away, so I tell you, I've never seen anything like this collection. If there was ever an example of a manuscript on the poetics of war, this is it. It is lyrical simplicity whose melancholy is hypnotizing: Something deeper than sadness/litters the alleys like the insides/kicked out of pillows.When I read poetry, I'm usually interested in staccato and syntax, and I dive in for the music of it. Here, there were all of these things, plus imagery that stuns and captivates. Komunyakaa, a Louisiana native, won the Pulitzer Prize for his Neon Vernacular: New and Selected Poems, and now I can't wait to own that collection. Here, he strings together words simply and stunningly:Her perfume still crawled/ my brain like a fire moth.I enjoyed the stylistic stupor of "Facing It;" I was almost in tears at the personification of PTSD in "Losses," the quiet profundity of "Toys in a Field," shocked me; I was moved by the ode to Dr. King in "Report from the Skull's Diorama," and entranced by "Short-timer's Calendar," and I found myself fascinated by how my students all seemed to be drawn to the race discrimination themes embedded in "Tu Do Street" and "Hanoi Hannah." I could go on and on about this collection because this is how you talk about war, survival, and race issues in sensory detail. The themes and setting in this chapbook reminded me of Robert Butler's short story collection, A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain, and I read it in the same way I read that one, in one sitting, my thoughts buried in it as everything else was cast aside. I must say that my favorite was the plain personification of survival in "Night Muse & Mortar Round:" She shows up in every war.Basically the same, maybeher flowing white gown's a little lesserotic & she's more desperate.She's always near a bridge.This time the Perfume River.You trace the curve in the road& there she istrying to flag down your jeep, but you're a quarter-mile awaywhen you slam on the brakes.Sgt. Jackson says, "What the hellyou think you're doing, Jim?"& Lt. Adonis riding shotgunyells, "Court-martial."When you finally drive backshe's gone, just a feelingleft in the night air.Then you hear the blastrock the trees & starswhere you would've been that moment.
—Cheryl
