On Refugee Poetics and Exophony

Vietnamese Refugee Records Check Request, 1984.

Please imagine this essay printed in the font above, on stark white paper, with scattered litho/Xerox marks, at least temporarily housed in a beige filing cabinet.

Founded in 2018, the Center for Refugee Poetics (Cf RP) is a mobile literary arts and education project, a Center without a physical home, a roving sanctuary. Sustained in collaboration with refugee diasporas across the US and beyond, with support from the Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Center, it deepens engagements with refugee artmaking and nurtures refugee imagination and memory.

To my knowledge, Cf RP remains the only institutional space in the world, certainly the US, devoted to poetry of the refugee experience.

Why no other devoted institutional spaces? One reason is the transhistorical and deeply seductive understanding of the refugee as passive object, as victim. A distant cousin is the refugee as “Ein Bote des Unglücks,” messenger of ill tidings—Bertolt Brecht’s framing, and one that, like Hannah Arendt, I have come to love.

Object, victim, or messenger, but rarely an agent—rarely a thinking or feeling or acting creator. A refugee might happen to be a poet, and conversely a poet might endure displacement and continue to write poetry—but what is refugee poetry, or a refugee poetics? Can there be an abiding and reciprocal relationship between the refugee condition and artmaking, where each might complicate and open an understanding of the other? For good reason, the prevailing answer has been no.

Other days, your tears sound like “mẹ,” sound like “mệt,” like
“Ngày đó, không một thứ gì là của má.”
In these moments, I know that I have failed you,
that English has failed me.
—From “Judas Regrets His Betrayal” by Khôi Nguyên Trinh, unpublished poem

For the poet and artist Khôi Nguyên Trinh, raised in New Orleans, Louisiana—by a mother who left postwar Vietnam as an immigrant, and a father and stepfather who fled as refugees—both viet and English are native, if not equally so. Or maybe neither language is native, and as the lines above suggest, movement across the two can be a pilgrimage of failure.

I’m reminded of the poet Khaty Xiong, raised in Fresno, California, who has written in Poetry’s pages, in Hmong and English together:

paludal in the folded tongue
two half-shadows thanking tus rab liag
     the gift of a curved bone
carving our way back
          to Zos Phab Nab
     thiab Zos Vib Nais
—From “The Pardoning Hour”

Displacement is always a disruption of what is linguistically and culturally “native” versus what is “adopted”—a catalyst for new pluralities, hybridities. Native language in the country of origin becomes heritage language in the country of resettlement, a fraternal twin, or sometimes a pale shadow. For refugees raised in the US with two (or three or more!) tongues spoken at home, relationships to languages vary; balance between them ranges and tilts; but is English really non-native if it was “there” before you were born, before your family was forced to leave your country of origin, an imperialist language tied up in the circumstances and even mechanics of your displacement? A poet’s political and affective relationships to a country of resettlement—the US for Southeast Asian refugees, among many others, as an invading power, a colonizing power—must shape their exophonic use of its language. Precisely how is tricky to parse.

Poetry itself might be viewed as a “second language” in the sense that the refugee’s first language is always victimhood. Which is to say, the refugee is rendered a victim so absolutely by the popular imagination that the only language they could conceivably produce—the only one legible to a reading public—is one that confirms the refugee’s fundamental need to be saved. How can poetry possibly further the perpetual rendering of that need? The poet who is a refugee, writing about refugee experience, can only reach for poetry as a second language. Their poetry is not a native expression of what it is to be a refugee. Of course, refugees can and do speak poetry as a first language all around us, but we just don’t recognize it as such. Refugee poetry as a collective body is mostly invisibilized, a shared refugee poetics made inconceivable, and any devoted literary infrastructure—reading series, publications, retreats, workshops, a Center—is destined to remain a fantasia.

In this sense, refugee poetry is always exophonic.

For some refugees, often but not always those who were displaced as adults, English remains forever at arm’s length. You will find many of them at Da Màu, a literary website devoted to viet-language poetry, written by US-based viet refugee poets, and almost entirely untranslated into English—a body of work that, as a second generation diasporic viet from a refugee family, like many of my generation and those that follow, I find I cannot read at all.

(Apologies that my references in this essay are all from the Southeast Asian refugee diaspora, limited in scope by my lived experiences and reading practices; I don’t mean to suggest that there isn’t a much, much broader refugee poetic tradition to apprehend.)

Da Màu might seem to be the very antithesis of exophony. And yet! The viet language that Da Màu’s poets use is one at least partially frozen at the point of  time when they left Vietnam—as opposed to the viet used in Vietnam today, which has changed considerably since the 1975 Fall of Saigon, dictated in part by governmental decree. The majority of viet-language readers (living in Vietnam, at least) might recognize some of Da Màu’s poetry as slightly “off,” not-quite-like their native tongue, or somewhat like a dialect—not as strange as Chaucerian English to contemporary Anglophone readers, but not wholly familiar, either.

So what does it say about viet refugee exophony if “non-exophonic” writing, in the supposed mother tongue, is only received as such by a small expatriate wing of the viet-speaking world? And on the other hand, what does it tell us about refugee exophony that a segment of the diaspora refuses to write poems in English?

The “refugee as victim” endures in popular understanding because it is enduringly functional. If refugees are produced by forces of war, nation-making, and colonialism, seeing refugees as singular victims directs our attention away from the deep collective operation of those forces and the nation-states that continually benefit from—and depend upon—those forces. The refugee is not just a waste product of a system WAI (Working As Intended, to translate from institutional language); the refugee plays a necessary rhetorical role in the collective social imagination to keep the system WAI. The refugee turns away, deflects, hides, softens, mollifies, and sometimes bores: they help everyone live inside, and sleep under the sky of, a global system predicated on the exploitation and periodic violent displacement of others’ bodies.

Unlike the poets of Da Màu, many other members of refugee communities in the US speak English as their only language, period. As I alluded to earlier, I myself can’t read a viet book meant for a preschooler. Show me a viet sign to a grocery store and another to a bus station and you might never see me again. Many second and third generations, even some 1.5 (migrants who relocated between the ages of early childhood and full adulthood), of refugee communities are this way. They’ve 
forgotten or never learned a heritage language.

For some subset of this group, there is the possibility of reclamation: the work of learning a heritage language as a second language, as a teen or adult, when language acquisition is, ah, painstaking (and in my personal experience a comic spectator sport for native speakers). Sometimes a different kind of refugee exophony may emerge from this work of reclamation—not poetry in English, but in a heritage language that is stubbornly, sometimes agonizingly non-native.

I think of the Twin Cities–based poet and playwright Saymoukda Duangphouxay Vongsay, born in a refugee camp in Thailand, who is learning Lao language, as we speak, expressly as part of her mid-career writing practice and diasporic artmaking vision.

In a sad irony (one dear to the heart of colonialism), the “refugee as victim” is a paradigm often absorbed, and reproduced, by refugees and children of refugees themselves. This logic of victimhood makes its claim not directly, but inversely: through a compulsory gratitude to America and Americans for what wünderscholar Mimi Thi Nguyen calls the “gift of freedom” in The Gift of Freedom: War, Debt, and Other Refugee Passages, a gratitude that is a passive acceptance of victimhood. A showy gratitude that is nation-bolstering propaganda, and the death of poetry. Or at least a kind of survivalism that is not quite death but a sleep from which poetry has difficulty waking.

Some portion of the work of the refugee poet, whether conscious or unconscious, lies in grappling with displacement, the forces that continually produce it, and the new shapes of humanity that bloom and wither inside it. This grappling necessarily happens via language—or languages. It must be plural: even if conducted singularly by way of one language, refugee poetry willfully refuses some other linguistic option(s) that a refugee always knows to be available. (Every refugee poet feels something—maybe guilt, maybe resentment, maybe release—for not using this “other” language). Maybe every refugee poem in a native language can be viewed as a choice not to write in another—with a phantom exophonic version still suggested, or charted out, by way of a path-not-taken that we can sense if not read or hear.

Refugee exophony: a fluid and complex morass, affectively fraught. Quá đã!

Regarding stark white paper: the enunciation of what it is to be a refugee also happens, crucially, via the language of institutionality. The paper is part of this language.

That is, refugees come into being as refugees by becoming eligible for asylum and aid from “first-world” nations, and through the institutional apparatuses of these nations. This can only happen by way of entering (paper, legal, official) records. For instance, the one that opens this essay.

This process takes place through a precise and scientific, formal and recognizable, reproducible and transmissible system of institutional language. Its trappings bespeak its function: cheap paper, arcane reference numbers, data that in sports lingo might be called counting stats—“subject,” “name,” “date of birth,” “country of origin”—the paper copied and recopied, filed and stored, intended for efficient record-keeping and classification, panoptic surveillance and totalizing management.

Such an institutional language, essential to the birth of every refugee as a refugee, enacts and documents at once the refugee’s incorporation into the US and their integration into the national project. Refugees resettle. They start receiving aid. They start working. Children go to school. They buy stuff. They pay or dodge paying taxes. Recorded, recorded, recorded. They have been asylumed, they have been aided, they have been gifted freedom: the efficacy and value of the national project are affirmed, with receipts. US magnanimity and pity are affirmed. The country’s fundamental white supremacy and xenophobia are “proven” not to exist. The US is a better home—the best home. Whatever sent the refugees tumbling across the world to the US—a “whatever” in which US geopolitics are surely imbricated—is obscured. Refugees play a necessary symbolic role. Their humanity is not just fungible; it’s irrelevant.

When Ocean Vuong and I first started cooking up the idea of Cf RP, sometime in 2017, we began with the question of why no institutional spaces devoted to refugee poetry existed—and we soon arrived at the fraught prospect that no such space might ever exist. Ocean was about to join the University of Massachusetts Amherst as a junior faculty member; this was before the publication of his celebrated novel On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous. I was a junior curator at the Smithsonian. Junior-ness mattered because we realized that our idea would have little support and neither of us had the institutional cachet to claim attention, divert resources, carve out space.

So we decided Cf RP would be just an idea. It wouldn’t be a physical space, homed inside some brick-and-mortar building. It would be a nomadic, pop-up conceptual project, a fantasia—but one that drew upon the legitimizing language of institutions. Cf RP imagined itself as a “center” in order to become legible, viable, sanctioned, fundable and ultimately funded. It would have the trappings of an institutional center (a physical location, if temporary, a visual identity, signage, and advertising collaterals), with most of the functionality (performances, reading groups, workshops, etc.) and little of the overhead. It would align with the systems of institutions and articulate how it could integrate into their workings to serve and advance their institutional aims. This meant that Ocean and I would have to learn to navigate institutionality via language; we learned to listen and speak, write, and, most importantly, fabulate in this language—in pitch sessions, budgetary narratives and spreadsheets, formal presentations and backchannel 
conversations, grant applications, grant reports, and on and on.

This too is refugee poetry, the exophonic poetry of Cf RP, its play and performance with institutional language that is at once native and non-native.

Its deployment is not simply for the sake of existence and survival; it is meant to critique and subvert. To trick institutions into supporting the necessary work of preserving and nurturing refugee artmaking. If refugees are rendered less-than human via institutional language, we have the opportunity to learn and deploy that same language—or perhaps an elevated register of that same language—for purposes of our liberation and humanization.

Cf RP is a mock institution with a manufactured, parodic institutionality. Our agenda is to illuminate the relationship between institutions and the refugee condition. Our mandate is to lay bare the tragicomic dialectic that refugees forever are and are not institutional objects.

Exophony as expropriation, as undercommons-ing.

(Is this a larger truism? Must exophony always contain a whiff of subversion and critique? Always a whiff of expropriation?)

In closing: in the beige filing cabinet, on the stark white paper, imagine this fragment of a poem—the same poem, by the way, that Ocean selected for us to read together to inaugurate the first iteration of the Center for Refugee Poetics, in Philadelphia, at 1219 Vine Street, at the Asian Arts Initiative, in May 2018. Imagine the poem as, at once, an exophonic official record and, also, as a mine that might, upon discovery, detonate the page and cabinet and explode outward through the larger filing system, destabilizing, with any luck, society’s continued performance of institutionality:

If you happen to have watched armed men
beat and drag your father
out the front door of your house
and into the back of an idling truck,
before your mother jerked you from the threshold
and buried your face in her skirt folds,
try not to judge your mother
too harshly. Don’t ask her
what she thought she was doing,
turning a child’s eyes away
from history
and toward that place all human aching starts.

 ...................................................................... 

And I bet you can’t say
what language your father spoke
when he shouted to your mother
from the back of the truck, “Let the boy see!”
—From “Self-Help for Fellow Refugees” by Li-Young Lee