Diaspora poetry — or mango poetry, as it’s often called — is sickly sweet. It’s overwrought and heaving with the weight of half-baked metaphor and the same classic, essentially cliche, imagery: my mother cuts up mangos instead of saying I love you…I belong neither here nor there…I don’t speak my mother tongue properly…woe is me. It’s easy to see it as endless self-indulgence masquerading as self-exploration. Critics argue that diaspora poetry exoticises and others non-Western languages and cultures. Edward Said’s Orientalism strikes again.
Ocean Vuong, author of On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous, has recently been lambasted online for the same thing. Vuong writes poetry and prose, often concerned with his experience as a Vietnamese diasporic writer with a mother fluent in Vietnamese and illiterate in English. He laments on the power of language, writing in his poetry collection Time Is a Mother:
In my language, the one I recall now only by closing my eyes, the word for love is Yêu.
And the word for weakness is Yếu.
How you say what you mean changes what you say.
Cultural critic Andrea Long Chu, writing for Vulture, reviews Vuong’s writing as perpetuating the “romance of illiteracy”:
The reader, again presumptively white, is clearly meant to suppose that Vietnamese culture understands love and weakness as two sides of the same poignant coin. But in reality, yêu and yếu are just two words that sound meaningfully different and mean different things; they are no more esoterically linked than live, laugh, and love. The pathos here thus depends largely on the reader’s total ignorance of Vietnamese. To explain the basic facts of tonal languages would break the spell.
Chu deftly explains that Vuong separating language from its meaning, just to exoticise it through trite analysis, fails to be as poetic as he postures; I would argue instead that this illustrates the diaspora dilemma perfectly. The diasporoid lacks native understanding of their mother tongue, but holds a primal, innate connection to it nonetheless. Vuong’s yearning for the fluency — and by extension, love, warmth, and understanding — of his mother is impossible to fulfil. And so, Vietnamese, in his novel and in his mind, exists not as a coherent language but as an object of desire. It doesn’t matter what the words or tones really mean, it matters and it illustrates that Vuong will never quite understand the depth of them the way he does English.
Of course the diaspora writers’ desire for language is exoticised. The same way people feverish with longing put their lovers on a pedestal, Vuong places his mother tongue in a realm of awestruck incomprehensibility. Although not mutually exclusive, he ends up articulating his own alienation from Vietnamese, not just pandering to illiterate non-native speakers. The very criticisms of diaspora poetry are, perhaps unfortunately, inherent and raw elements of articulating the diaspora experience. Chu proclaims that Vuong “mistakes his own naivete for insight”. But to me, Vuong’s naivete, the naivete of all diaspora writers and our Sisyphean attempts at articulating what we can never understand, is the insight itself. Woe is me.
