ode to mother(land) ….

I was in the studio just this week with Dylan Magierek, the producer I’ve been recording with (at Type Foundry & Scenic Burrows Studios in Portland, OR). Working with Dylan has been such a positive experience – an astute ear, positive energy, the ability to make spare sound lush, and a just super-nice person who also understands what it’s like to be both an artist and a parent. We mixed down two songs, which I am hoping soon to be able to share. For now, though, I thought I’d just post the lyrics to one of the songs and an old photograph I was thinking of using for artwork (of me and my brother from back in the early days of our immigration – notice the very ’70s attire…). The song is title ‘Ode to Mother(land)’ and it’s an address – as I consider it – to the poets and the poetry (figurative and literal) of the place I came from.

Ode to Mother(land)

Didn’t you once believe in art?
Didn’t you once have a beating heart?
when you told me the story about a poet
and her friends
who went to see a king but he wouldn’t let them in
except for her fine eyes

She told him of the troubles
throughout their country
She told him of her worries
for all their people
She told him this in rhyme & in the rhythm of her song
She told him this in rhyme & with the poetry of her tongue
That’s when he began to see

Mother, you once watched a monk light himself on fire
in 1963 when you thought fire might say
more than a gun or all the bombs over Viet Nam
But his ashes contradicted him
He was burning himself for peace

It was that kind of world

So you took me away to an ivory tower
in the hills where gold lay I grew into a princess
& I never learned to speak in my rightful language
I only learned to choke on all the beautiful English
that burns my throat today

Didn’t you once believe in art?
Didn’t you promise to fight with your words?

Well, fight with words we did
stumbling over our own tongues
Mother, you were the child that I failed to love
and I’m sorry if I did

’cause now you praise the warfare
and the flags of our follies
& I am just an innocent who knows nothing of history
I only know the stories about the old poets
who once you dreamed of following
bringing the world to reason
As I still dream today.
…
It’s not quite complete without the music – but I’ll be sharing that next …

Oregon Arts Commission awards Opportunity Grant to “Origin Tale” chapbook project

Origin Tale - the mixed-media chapbook project I am creating in collaboration with visual artist Christine Nguyen – has received an Opportunity Grant from the Oregon Arts Commission (FY 2012) to help with printing/publication costs!

This was good news for us this fall. Though I had hoped we’d be able to realize this project by fall of 2011, I think it is looking more like we’ll have something to share in 2012. Please stay tuned!

I have been admittedly remiss on posting on this blog…  but to sum up briefly: I had the pleasure of being invited to participate in Marvelous Metaphors: Art As Visual Poetry, an exhibit at the VAALA (Vietnamese American Arts and Letters Association) Cultural Center, this summer/fall. My contribution were some words and music, joined with illustrations by Christine Nguyen. The result of our collaboration has led to a mixed media chapbook project - Origin Tale - which combines text, music, and illustrations.

We plan to make a very small run of fine-art chapbooks, hopefully letterpress-printed, hand-sewn, or in some other way creatively, organically made. More news on this will be coming. From the Marvelous Metaphors exhibit, we’ve already had requests for the book from university arts libraries.

Related, the Marvelous Metaphors exhibit space was shared by several other Viet-American women artists: Trinh Mai, Van Tran, Trinh Ponce, Tammy Nguyen, Christine Nguyen, and myself. The exhibit was curated by Thuy N.D. Tran. It was a very inspiring effort and group of ladies to find myself amidst – carrying on poetic and pioneering traditions of our mother(land) and mother-peoples.

illustration by Christine Nguyen from "Origin Tale"

 

ephemera

I think the real rescue was the one made by the trees.

True Laws (Pt. 2), New Song

In the course of the past couple of years, I have been trying to “accomplish” my work. Writing, music. Trying to get some foothold doing these things in the society where I make my home. The external aspects – actions – I believed were a rudimentary part of this, I have performed, or tried to perform, sometimes reluctantly and sheepishly, sometimes with fumbling, desperate ambition, sometimes sincerely. I have often hated it — the effort of “selling” oneself. I have often tried, also, not to do it, to just carry on with the inner work — me in the rooms I’ve worked in, trying to chase, hear, heed my ghosts. At times I have even hoped someone else would do the work of “selling” for me. In the plainest terms: I have been trying to be an artist in the world, but I disliked the “trying” part. Which for me has meant, presenting and selling one’s work (intangible as it may be) now as product, “merchandise”, using the outlets and means I have learned to use by seeing others use them – clicks, carts, easy imagery. But the result for me has been, in all honesty, often confusing,  nerve-wracking and self-conscious, even disheartening. The satisfying moments have come only in the process of the work itself, and then in those rare moments of contact — when I learn that I have reached someone, communicated something — and the means of measuring those moments is never material or quantifiable, it is only felt. Subtle.

The work I want to mention here – “Origin Tale”, a song – took a long time to record. I began writing it in 2008, in a time of somewhat self-imposed isolation, living in Alaska. There, one day, I received a phone call from out of the blue, from a kind person full of ideas, who had more vision for my work than I myself did: he was the one to suggest to me the possibility of merging both my literary and musical voices, and creating something – a mixed-genre work – having to do with Vietnam. I took in this inspiration. I thought about Vietnam, mythology, war, exodus – all the catch-words of our “story.” I kept writing. The songs becoming longer, also now breaking those rules of format that would usually contain a folk song – verse-chorus-verse-bridge, structure-driven, with predictable repetition of parts and patterns…

But I have to digress here and risk truth-telling, the revealing of some prejudice. To say I have learned a lot from folk music (American), but ultimately not enough. And yet I have sought my place in it for all the years I have dared to call myself a musician.

I was motivated by it, called by it — this music is the reason I began playing music in the first place, the reason I moved to Texas — because of something compelling in its deceptive simplicity and plainspoken-ness, its rigidity and adherence to its own form, at the same time its moments of self-reflexivity, its capacity for self-perpetuation and self-parody, both. There is something grounded, humble yet profound, about folk music. By its very name it suggests itself as a genre of music to be sung in the voices of ordinary people, a music that embodies the underdog, of-the-land, for-the-people character of Americana, of the West — a place where simplicity is chosen over complexity, where instinct is valued over intellect, where the humble and down-trodden uphold virtue better than the striving; also, the structure of this music is very easy to learn – from a certain way of looking at it – it is quite linear and patterned, with emotion/story/revelation easily compartmentalized into certain regions of a song, with chord progressions that circle and resolve quite logically and sensibly, and so are easy to follow. Technique is rewarded; but perhaps even more laudable (at least for the singer) is the earnestness with which you can embody the limits of your technique. All of these elements resonated with me at the time that I found this music. To get in on this ground-level of what it meant to be American, to be ordinary and simple in appearance and expression, yet able to yield surprising wisdoms through that superficial veneer — for some reason, this was a conceptualization of “Americana” that I felt I had to earn my place in. Because it seemed impossible. Because it was in fact so incongruous with my actual story.

Pete Seeger, folk singer who wrote famous anti-war songs of the VN era

I have never in truth had the luxury of seeing myself – or my origins, to be more specific – as ordinary, or as “of the people.” From the standpoint of my Vietnamese emigration story, I was one of the more privileged, who got out early enough to escape the last-day dramas. My mother was educated and we were fairly well-off. We were of the bourgeois, that decadent evil; of the city, not of the country. My mother was not an ordinary woman, not by a long shot. She was a writer (one of the first and few women writers praised as such in her era) as well the publisher of a widely known newspaper. She had fought tooth and nail – for her education, for her status, for her achievements. My birth father, too, was a writer (and soon to endure years in “reeducation” for it). We were always of that class that lauded the intellect and the life of the mind over that of the body (labor) — (we were never – as certain stereotypes would ironically later cast us – “peasants” at all). Rather, we aspired to the privileges of Westernization and modernization, and progressive concepts regarding human freedoms, and the role of governments in securing those freedoms for people, even at the cost of moving us away from those more quaint, more seemingly heart-bound and “simple” values — similar to those sentiments expressed in the American “folk music” I now gravitated toward, was trying vainly – and ironically – to carve my own niche in. But here is the confession I have to make: I was an impostor. From before I even had a choice. I was born into a modern Vietnam – striving to cast off her quaint “folk” qualities – and all those beautiful, virtuous, strong-souled “folk” songs that glorified peace and sensibility did not, in point of fact, address the contradictions of the middle-class, the aspiring, the inbetween-ers. Such as were we.

an Alaska window

This is a long, meandering path toward a slow, very slow-dawning realization that comes to me. It is to say that I have learned a lot from the “forms” I have adopted, and adapted myself to, and yet — in writing and singing to myself in that little house surrounded by trees and eagles (and deer, even the occasional bear, out my windows) — was when I began to understand, even to perceive, that there is, perhaps, a deeper and more resounding vein of “folk” (be it music, voice, story) I have yet to tap: that would be relevant to me, as who and how I truly am & came to be, all-told, all-varied — incongruent and mutable, nuanced and strident, a mix of Asian and Western, both bourgeois and refugee, natural (once-rooted) and displaced (uprooted) – to say, I am of all of these things as much as the other, yes – as much of the humble, grounded class as I have been of the aspiring, ambitious, “decadent” class.

& I must here realize: that in my own ambitions to write and sing American folk music, and to claim myself at home in Texas (my own type-casting of ultimate “Americana”), to embody that stereotype of “root”-ed Americana, I was in fact embodying – yet denying – the very contradictions of my Vietnamese persona: the debauched, slightly modernized Southerner trying to re-embody the virtue – the simple wisdoms and motivations – of that glorified humble “folk” person.

Is this relevant? Is this accurate? Or is this yet another misconception of types, ideals, underlying motivations, self-misperceptions? All I know is that at some point I began to realize that I am not really meant to sing American folk music. That I have been wearing a disguise, trying to own it. Or to eradicate certain convoluted truths about myself in it.

I think (& I think I get glimpses of it) that there is an even deeper, more obscure and lesser-known “folk” voice to heed, to listen to, to represent. Maybe. (Even American folk music has roots and veins that run deeper than the popular context might define it – the banjo was a folk instrument that came over from Africa; the content of folk songs can be traced back to the roving poetry of bards in Europe in the Middle Ages; and what of the Native American beats and rhythms, if we want to really investigate the voices that sincerely belong to this land?) It is hard for me to define “folk” as clearly as I would have a couple of years ago. But I also think that this present, still-undefined interpretation of “folk” voice is a tricky space to inhabit. That we still must figure how to navigate it, hear it, effectively and rightfully recognize it.
In Alaska on the winter solstice I went to a ritual bonfire of some folks in Douglas, on the banks of the Gastineau Channel, where people burn effigies and put things in the fire that they want to be rid of, to move away from — into one of these fires I put some of my own music-related artwork, with the intention of burning “ambition”, as I saw it. By this I meant to let it go — my own ambition to be an artist in the world as I had so far conceived of the role.

I went back to Austin in 2009 and did some recording, some touring. I became ambitious again. There were logistical and personal struggles in this process. My relationships, both personal and professional, were affected by this ambition, some things lost, some gained, some difficultly returned….and this song – “Origin Tale” – played a role, to varying degrees, in those lessons and transitions….

In short: The song is not perfect and its coming into being was not always harmonious. The process and the product both are yet experiments. But it is what it is, for the moment. It is a piece of a journey, a search. And so I would like to share it as such for now.

I am not good at winding stories down to neat conclusions or epiphanic endings. My own tendencies seem to lean toward the ambiguous ending. So…

The song is here :

"Origin Tale" - a song / free download

True Laws ?

I have struggled with how to use these tools – the endeavor of making art and the paradox of trying to share it with others…

Something in my instincts has never been comfortable with turning art into a commodity and all the “shoulds” we are advised to do, to be “successful” as artists, especially in our over-saturated consumer society. The basic philosophy of free market enterprise seems to be built on – foremost – a materialist conception of Nature – that survival is paramount and dependent on consuming, forging ahead, strength, physical superiority… & I can’t say I agree with this as an accurate or even close-to-comprehensive conception of what might be the true laws of Nature.

I was living in Juneau, Alaska in 2008 when the idea first came to me that I might try writing songs that directly – in both form and content – dealt with the issue of “Vietnam.” This word is not just a country or a culture or a geographical location for many of us: it is an event, a debacle, a milestone & a marker….. a chasm & a chaos into which the world (temporarily, some think; still falling, others think) fell and witnessed awful truths about our Nature nearing the end of the 20th century. Vietnam was the first of our television wars. (& the mainstream media has since gained enough command of that mechanism – the eye – to  keep us now better shielded from the realities of present wars, it might seem). For whatever it is worth, though, “Vietnam” is a complex subject, a modern world relevant subject, not easy to articulate, for Americans and Vietnamese alike, I believe.

There is a translation of a line in a Sigur Ros song that I am told means ‘You suffer alone.’ And the line is repeated for much of the vocal part of the song. Of course, the concept of suffering is one I am drawn to – the long-suffering, desire and attachment as source of suffering, the Buddhist knowledge of suffering as a fact of human/material existence….. But what occurred to me was that I would like to write a line that said ‘We will suffer no more.’

In the context of the Vietnamese story (and history) – which is one of long-proud and necessary fighting – I envisioned that these lines – ‘We will suffer no more’ and ‘We will not carry your war’ – should be sung in the voices of the children.

I am a child of wars. To varying degrees of separation, all of us are. For the Vietnamese specifically, war was a fact of daily life for nearly all of the twentieth century. But looking further back in Vietnamese history, if you ask any Vietnamese person, you will learn of how Vietnam since the beginning of the first millennium (and perhaps earlier) repeatedly fought off invasions from other nations – various emperors of China, notably. For over a thousand years, Vietnam had been fighting to call herself her own, to call herself (that other catch-word of modern thought) independent. The Trung sisters fought to their deaths against the invaders: at all costs, we would herald our cause of self-exaltation. You see how we were separatists and fatalists long before the West even arrived on our shores.

But when I try to ask ‘What is the character of Vietnam beyond her historical fighting self?’ — I do not get a clear answer. Even the mythological answer is an old legend of division: the mountain-mother and dragon-father dividing between them their 100 offspring, and each forgoing union (marriage) in order to abide in their separate/opposing territories.

So my answer – in the voice of one of the father’s children’s descendants (who are always depicted moving south – seaward) – is this: I will not carry on your myth. Of the fighting self, of noble suffering, of the efficacy or necessity of wars. Nor of self-definition based (largely) on that long history of wars–fought under the same banner even on different sides: Independence.

But too – I understand there is an idealism to the ‘exaltation of self’ that Independence represents. It is an ideal that can be profoundly human-e – as in: we actualize and exemplify the positive and powerful abilities of being human. But will we really arrive at this ideal through the means of our lower, instinctual – fight-or-flight – enactments of the laws of Nature?

The experiment of freedom – free market, self-invention, the self-made man or woman – that defines America and the West has the potential of that idealism of the “exalted self” behind it. It seems like a good idea. (This can be misconstrued as hubris or solipsism, but I think in a more positive light it can also be interpreted as the true manifestation of realizing “God is within” — we are powerful, self-realizing, and thus responsible for all that we create.) But in an atmosphere where anything is possible, anything becomes possible. The field is open. Some will fare better than others; some will manipulate and take more than they need, and for the wrong reasons. Many will cultivate envy in place of positive action or trust. Success and winning will often become measurable in only concrete – and not subtle – terms.

I am slowly trying to work myself back to where I began – the discomfort I have felt with the “shoulds” of how to sell oneself and one’s work as an artist. I am at soul an Easterner, I suppose, and not authentically a child of the West, just an inheritor of this position by circumstance. I became American, but I was born Vietnamese. I grew up being taught, as American children are, that you can accomplish anything, be anything you want to be, by sheer force of will and hard work (and, also, lesser admitted, possibly by luck, chance, exception/exemption), but that you have to fight for it to make it happen. These are the myths of the American dream and of the American dream-er. But I think that something of the Eastern concept of Nature — anti-materialist, self-annihilating, mind-before-matter? — has also still lived on in me. There is a sense that these things that we strive “to accomplish” do not in fact matter, might even be detrimental, even demeaning to, our survival — our integrity — on another level. (One of truer laws, perhaps?)

There is a part of me that worries, or at least wonders, whether attempting to write/express about “Vietnam” from within the American system of capitalism, using the American philosophy and “rules” and hopes – really – of “free market” success, is not somehow paradoxical to the deeper truth that the whole conundrum of “Vietnam” sought to introduce into the ‘debate’ of what our place/our roles in the world, as modern beings striving toward that ideal of “independence”, really ought to be.

In the most simplistic terms, I am wondering whether we have not unquestioningly entered the belly of the beast, in striving to turn our endeavors (esp. as artists) into sell-able, desired commodity. And if there is a way now that we can still take the tools that exist and use them yet conscientiously.

. .

Bloodletting in Alice Munro

In Alice Munro’s novella-length story “Carried Away,” there is at the center of it an image of a man who loses his head in a factory accident. The blood pools around his body, saturates the sawdust on the factory floor. The man is the story’s initial romantic interest, a man whom the story’s main character, a woman librarian, had only ever encountered through letters – the written word, fantasy, conjecture, hope, projection… In this story, there is also another incident of blood-release — when the woman loses her virginity to a one-night stand with a traveling salesman (it is post WWI, so she is a very liberal woman to be living like this); there is blood on the sheets after their encounter, which she tries to defend by saying she must be having her period.

In a later story, “Chance” (from Runaway) Munro again plays with the juxtaposition of bloodletting – or, since it is not so voluntary nor intentional, perhaps it should be called blood-losing. Juliet is a young teacher traveling on a train. She snubs an awkward, lonely-ish man who tries to befriend her on the train; she tells him she wants to read her book. She is a scholar of classics – the ultimate representation of an inward-directed life: a life of the mind. But once again, here, it is blood-release that alters the course of the woman’s life. There is an accident, the train appears to have run over something. At the very same moment, Juliet realizes she needs to deal with her ‘feminine problem’ – she is menstruating, and she tends to bleed heavily. She goes to the train toilet, but since the train is stopped she does not want to flush (since the toilet contents will empty out into the snow beneath the idle train), so she leaves the toilet bowl full of her menstrual blood. When she returns to her seat, she discovers that a man’s body is being carried past the windows outside. The man whom she had earlier snubbed has thrown himself in front of the train, committing suicide. Some of the other passengers then walk by, whispering about the blood they saw that (they speculate) must’ve splashed up into the train toilet.

What is with all this juxtaposition of blood-release/loss and the course of a woman’s life suddenly altered? Because in each of these stories, what follows the accidental deaths, those witnessings by each woman — and the being secretly, indirectly in connection to the men who die in those bloody ways — is then followed by a next significant encounter: they meet the men they will marry. In “Carried Away,” following the factory accident death, the librarian meets Arthur, the factory boss, who is the one who had picked up the dead man’s head and later had to deal with his left-behind effects (his library books, namely), which consequently lead to Arthur and the librarian meeting, developing a relationship, marrying. She then enters “regular” life; or so it would seem. She becomes a wife and mother.

In “Chance,” it is the same. The next person Juliet encounters on the train is a man whom she had spotted outside, helping to move the body from the train tracks. Juliet and the man begin conversing on the train, at first about the accident, then about other things. Later, Juliet will take a risk to reconnect with this man, who then becomes the father of her child. Again, the events of another type of man’s death (the mental connection eschewed)–his blood-loss, juxtaposed with her blood-release (vaginal/menstrual)–become part of the sequence of events that lead the woman eventually, significantly – even surprisingly – into real sex, marriage, motherhood.

Does this mean that the woman’s “initiation” is necessarily marked by bloodlosing, in some form? There is something ritually aware in these stories, it seems to me, and also something slightly submerged, potentially unconscious. How are we to read these images of blood as archetypal catalysts along the woman’s way into “womanhood”? Must entry into (“regular”) Life always be marked by the woman being suddenly, even unwillingly, sequestered into union/sex, then child-bearing and motherhood? Like Persephone to Hades? Or is this only the story that fits for those of us who did not necessarily “plan” to become mothers, for whom Life – in those terms at least – just Happened, beyond our conscious control or conjecture?

It seems to me to suggest that it is unavoidable, inevitable — the call marked by bloodlosing that happens for a woman. I think this is certainly the myth of woman’s journey that Alice Munro often explores.

mother(land)songs in indian nation

sappho

Went to Austin to do some recording. Drove to Okemah, OK for the Woody Guthrie Folk Festival. 107 degrees in the sun & humid, too. Played songs from the “mother(land)songs” cycle. Watched Jimmy LaFave gather everyone onstage at the end of his set, to sing Woody Guthrie’s Oklahoma songs – this felt truly generous, a salve to the heat, the remoteness, a pocket of folk music and culture being hewn in the midst of the searing summer, in those dusty, harsh hills… Woodyfest (I realized) is an outpost, and something of a musical ritual enacted each summer, in a particular corner of the heart of Indian Nation… & I wondered why I was there, being included in the ritual and in that community of folk music, and felt also grateful and appreciative of it. I listened to Jimmy LaFave sing “This Land is Your Land” and had to wonder.

Back in Austin, recording at Darwin’s place, Sappho the cat looks at me with slight petulance.

Home

1.

At first I thought it was a house
that we did not live in yet,
that was being built
on a hillside carved into
by men & bulldozers
among pine trees
& tall, tall grass.

How those trees seemed
to lean sideways
only because they had to—the slopes
they sprouted from were so steep
as a child I wondered
had the ground tilted like that
concaved & curved
before or after the trees set in
their roots? Or were they so mindless,
those trees, as to be willing to drop
their seeds
just anywhere?

Those slopes we ran up and down
collecting burrs in socks
ticks in hair
lashes from the seeds of grasses
wheat-like—
foxtails,
starthistle,
fox burrs.

Home was a hillside
in a new country
where once gold was discovered
it had called out to millions like us
desperate
to (re)settle.

2.

Then home was the house
my stepfather had built
& within which our family raged
& sometimes laughed or loved
in our ways.

We did the best we could do.

In that house
where the water pressure was never right
& the water in the pipes
froze on cold mornings

there were quirks to the house
you had to explain to guests
accustomed to the more ordinary
working out of things.

There were no windows on the entire east-facing
side, he had placed them all
to look out West
upon the view that faced sunset

& historic valley
old Culluma where ran that famed river
named for the country and the dream
—the American River—

that gold had wrought:
our new historic
ahistoric
anchor.

6.6.10

A few new things, mostly housekeeping….

I have revamped my website, linking this blog as the place I will use for notes, news, & other potential happenings.

In April: I had an inspiring and community-enriching experience at Outspoken: Vietnamese Poets of the Diaspora II, where I read a poem and performed a song (“Origin Tale”), alongside these other Viet-American writers/performers: AnhVu Buchanan, Kim-An Lieberman, Lan Tran, Trinh T. Minh-Ha, and Andrew Lam – all of whom were wonderful and different. I was especially struck by Trinh T. Minh-Ha’s meditations on the Vietnam Memorial as a work ironically created by an artist “indelibly marked” by her gender. Her impressions of the Vietnam Memorial resonated with how I had felt at seeing it and walking beside it – certain juxtapositions that stand out: a low black monument amid towering (and phallic) white ones (the Lincoln Memorial, the Washington Monument); the meditations on polarities this stirs in one’s mind, etc. The SF Viet Poetry event was eye-opening to me also in the very perhaps simple fact that it brought me into contact with other Vietnamese artists and writers and academics I did not previously know. And it felt refreshing, inspiring, enervating to glimpse the work and thought that is stirring amidst us all, and that stems out of a common historical-personal-political set of circumstances about which – I believe – we are now beginning to see and speak ever more lucidly.

Here is a clip from my performance at Outspoken.

I am also now one of the blog contributors at diaCRITICS – a blog of DVAN (Diasporic Vietnamese Artists Network).

4.1.2010

I have poem-songs and a special mixed-media piece published today in Rough Copy, an intrepid and thoughtful online literary journal that I came into touch with just earlier this year. This is a new type of forum for me, and an experiment with form as well — the poems are in fact lyrics from songs I am currently working with; & the “Traveler’s Ode” piece is an arrangement of the song (recorded) presented beside lyrics & an image. You can see these new pieces (along with many other interesting writers’ works) in Rough Copy’s Spring/Summer 2010 Issue. My thanks to Janet Freeman & the other kind folk at Rough Copy for including me!

I feel it is a fitting way to mark this day, which also happens to be my birthday…

Also, I will be doing a brief reading/performance at the SF Vietnamese Poetry Festival on April 24th, 2010. I plan to perform some of the lyrics from the Requiem for the Migration song-cycle there. Please let me know what you think of what you hear!