Keep Your Dying to Yourself

During the Secret War, which the United States waged to stifle communism during the Vietnam War (or the American War as it is known to the Vietnamese), the CIA covertly recruited tens of thousands of Hmong men and boys as proxy fighters for its agenda in Laos, a country that a peace conference in Geneva had determined would remain neutral. The devastation in Laos belied that position: between 1964 and 1973, the United States reportedly dropped more than two million tons of cluster bombs on Laos, making it the most heavily bombed nation in history. Named or not, and no matter its name, a war is a war is a war. And in the aftermath of war, brutal repercussions meet those left behind. When US troops pulled out of Laos in 1973, thousands of Hmong fled with their families on foot toward Thailand to avoid certain death for siding with the CIA. Many Hmong died from starvation and disease on this perilous journey; during this time, there were also refugee accounts of a mysterious substance that fell from the sky as planes flew overhead, a “yellow rain” that caused severe illnesses and thousands more deaths.

Yellow Rain (Graywolf Press, 2021), Mai Der Vang’s second collection, continues her exploration of the Hmong experience after the Secret War. Central to these poems is not only a reckoning with American accountability for chemical weapons (US scientists claimed that yellow rain was merely the fecal matter of honeybees), but an uninterrupted journey through witness accounts, archival research, and declassified documents. Where Afterland (2017), Vang’s debut, weaves stories of Hmong American and Hmong American refugee experiences through leaping, numinous imagery, Yellow Rain erupts from the fissures and fault lines of Hmong history to voice what has been erased or neglected. Vang’s new work draws power from documentary poetics, a mode of engagement often loosely defined as poetry that captures a historical moment through assemblage of varying media; Philip Metres, a contemporary practitioner of the form whose Shrapnel Maps (2020) is a recent exemplar, writes that documentary “poems will not ‘stand up’ in a court of law,” but nonetheless “testify to the often unheard voices of people struggling to survive in the face of unspeakable violence. … [These poems] ride the ambiguity ... between a 'nothing' and a something that could be used. Their power comes from their negotiation between the language of evidence and the language of transcendence.”

Vang moves dexterously in this “nothing,” the space of violent Hmong silencing in US media, scientific scholarship, and government documents, to lay bare the many layers of empire’s crimes against humanity. In the vein of Charles Reznikoff, Muriel Rukeyser, Mark Nowak, C.D. Wright, and so many others, Vang boldly continues what Metres hails as the “tradition of poet as journalist, poet as documentarian, poet as historian, poet as agitator.”

***

By the time Vang was born in 1981, her parents had only recently arrived in the United States as refugees, carrying with them the family practices of shamanism, which Vang describes in an interview with The Normal School as “a very ancient and very primitive way of seeing the world but also a very wise way of thinking about the body and the spirit and the relationship between the two.” In this same interview, Vang acknowledges that under other circumstances she might have been born in the refugee camps herself instead of escaping “the atrocities of war and the running” that her parents experienced. Because Vang’s “body was never there” in these experiences of her parents, she thinks and writes about the body (hers and others) in this gap between those who fled and the children of “the fled”; as a child of refugees myself, I know this gap well. In her previous book, Vang imagines her body in historical and spiritual spaces: in “I Am the Whole Defense,” for example, she writes from the perspective of a widow standing her ground in mid-1700s Southwestern China, while in “Transmigration” her speaker communes with a spirit. In these poems and others, Vang uses the first person. In Yellow Rain, she moves through archival research and lyric documentary mode in second person; here, you indicts those who failed the Hmong or did them harm even as it opens a liminal space in which Vang records the historic experiences of the Hmong.

Each of the four sections of “When the Poison Fell, Before 1979” centers on a different Hmong refugee or medic with first- or secondhand experiences of yellow rain. Contextual quotes from a declassified US Army medical report preface Vang’s own voice, which begins with an imperative: “Bring up your eyelids.” She simultaneously guides the reader’s body and line of sight while tracing and attending to the 35-year-old witness, also addressed as you in this passage:

Hmong Refugee, Age 35, witnessed attack
September 1979, Ban Pha Lu
 
Bombs landed ten meters from him, gray and yellow smoke, some of them did not go off (dark green artillery shell-like, dark green cylindrical canister, unable to identify lettering because he is illiterate); saw two people exposed who died within two days, coughing up blood, runny noses, severe bloody diarrhea, an additional twenty more people were killed in this attack; he himself got sick: chest pain, cough, pain in the eyes, stung like hot peppers when he tried to breathe
 
           Bring up your eyelids
       To meet the horizon’s climb,
 
           Even as the carcinogen of a
       Dire spice cauterizes you
 
           To remember.

Vang takes care not to step into the experience of the Hmong refugee (and thus appropriate his experience), but asks instead that the reader engage in radical empathy: How can readers remain unchanged after seeing what this witness saw? About her use of pronouns in Afterland, Vang has said, “There was a way in which I saw myself as [the] ‘you,’” and in her new work, Vang’s you serves both as vehicle for tender epistolary, as well as a non-appropriating pronoun (supplanting the I of traditional persona poems). Vang’s second-person pronoun transports readers behind the mask of each Hmong experience represented here; in this way, neither she nor the reader embodies the perspective of another, but each is able to witness with intimate proximity the events that transpired.

Fiona Templeton’s You: The City, first produced in New York City in 1988, was a groundbreaking piece of immersive theater: a play performed one audience member at a time, by appointment, in Times Square. At each scheduled time, an audience member, directly addressed over and over again as “you,” was at the receiving end of a series of various stock social situations (job interview, street harangue, etc.); the audience member, accustomed to passive theater watching, was physically in the play, interacting with imagined city scenes. Part of what made the performances so compelling was the disorientation these unwitting “actors” experienced: they were thrust into situations for which they were unprepared and had to gather contextual cues in real-time about who or what they were supposed to represent. Vang’s “Malediction” operates in a similarly disorienting fashion. While it begins without pronouns, it arrives at a pivotal moment of clarification in its final movement: readers comprehend not only who and what they represent, but the ramifications of their position:

           Let everything speak to the
privilege of your station,
 
                    as man,
                    as west,
                    as science,
                    as crooked law

In “Syndrome Sleep Death Sudden,” the reader becomes a surrogate for the healthy, young Hmong men who died abruptly and inexplicably after emigrating to the United States:

Perhaps you left it all      behind         your spirit
     in mid-flee      crawling         chaotic among
the perished.              Perhaps it was the
 
                 calamity of mountains          maybe dream
     becoming memory        becoming electricity
serrated    out of your sleep.   No cause of why     you
 
        are no longer here      insults your    dying.

In an interview with Writing on the Edge, Vang expresses her belief that shamans engage in the “process of art-making” in addition to being healers and “mediums between worlds.” Vang’s tender use of second person in “Syndrome Sleep Death Sudden” bridges the worlds of historical account and living reader, between a refugee afflicted by a weapon he cannot identify and a child of refugees in possession of stories from the collective, and of documents and studies. Through the use of you, Vang is akin to a shaman mending the gaps of distance, time, and knowledge; she writes into these government documents to be with, and to be beside, the suffering and experience of the refugees. And in this space, she reframes how to see the past and invites readers to participate in this lyric revision as a form of healing.

On the subject of documentary poetics, Mark Nowak describes the range he sees “along a continuum from the first person auto-ethnographic mode of inscription to a more objective third person documentarian tendency.” Like markers on a trail, Vang opens each unnumbered section of her book with a page or two of untitled auto-ethnographic prose that provides context for the poems that follow. At the beginning of the book’s third section, she catalogues specimens the Hmong refugees provided for laboratory testing in connection with yellow rain (“blood, urine, vomit, sputum, breast milk, leaves, twigs, rock scrapings, clothing, and a two-month old aborted fetus”) in a list of powerful, cumulative effect before unveiling the US government’s negligence via

shipping delays, specimens lost in transit, broken vials, backlogs of samples, and a lack of agency coordination. In this manmade confusion, the samples began to deteriorate. The government lacked the ability to fully test some of the specimens, so they rerouted samples to academic scientists.

What then follows are various findings with evidence supporting the fact that chemical weapons were used against refugees in Southeast Asia (a violation of the Biological Weapons Convention treaty and the Geneva Protocol of 1925), although the United States concludes in a final report that there is "not enough information to make a case for or against yellow rain," Vang writes, and the United Nations “could not confirm nor deny whether anything happened to the Hmong.” Vang structures this ethnography through a pattern of potential hope of justice for the Hmong that’s quickly squashed by the “manmade” errors and failures of institutions. When Vang’s first-person (plural) speaker surfaces in the final line of this piece—“As if to say to us: we don’t really know if you died”—readers can only feel rage at the absurdity of this travesty.

In “Blood Cooperation,” Vang continues the first-person plural thread to talk back to the United States:

This is our state
 
Of frozen knowing, the taking that
Happens in spite of all you’ve already
 
Spent. Blighted of our earliest silt, there
Is no more believing to give, not another
 
Cracked container to cast your claims.
We’ve no more tempers to shed for your
 
Pretense of goodwill, no more gloom
For the survival of your grander good.

This intimate, radical, and empathetic use of Vang’s you and I is a conscious act of resistance to the problematic narrative structures of “us” versus “them,” the rhetoric of which alienates both sides, and also the audience; it represents events as in a diorama, or takes a drone’s view of history. Eschewing this gap, Vang achieves an uncomfortable proximity that forces readers to confront the emotional and physical experiences of the Hmong, as well as the infuriating processes of US government agencies. Fueled by grief, rage, and exasperation, she seeks to restore vital narratives previously lost (or classified) in the archives, assembling them in such a way that one can’t help but think: Isn’t this government malfeasance familiar? How can people stand by as use of biological and chemical weapons goes unacknowledged and undetected despite survivor accounts?

Many poems in Yellow Rain use epigraphs culled from media or archival documents. These quotations function less as thematic signposts than as testimonies from the archive; the poems that follow are rebuttals, or lyric cross-examinations of these records. Take, for instance, the epigraph of “The Fact of the Matter Is the Consequence of Ugly Deaths,” in which Robert Krulwich of the WNYC program Radiolab is self-implicated: “It’s not fair … to not consider … other stories … other frames of the story.” While Krulwich advocated for multiple perspectives on yellow rain, I believe that he and his producers mishandled the Hmong voices in their yellow rain episode by editing out indigenous Hmong knowledge about the mountains and honeybees, information counter to the argument of the reporters. The Radiolab episode, broadcast in 2012, concludes that President Reagan used yellow rain and Hmong testimony to blame the Soviets for chemical warfare in order to justify US production of these weapons. Who witnesses and sees the Hmong amid this blame game and arms race? Hmong testimonies of death, illness, and suffering become shameful tools by which the episode misrepresents history, and Krulwich is unable to acknowledge the truth of Hmong deaths (“people would have died ugly deaths in the consequence”). Vang counters Krulwich’s statements with one of her own. She implicitly aligns Radiolab with those “false men” who used the Hmong in the proxy war, and she calls out the show for its “disfigured interrogations,” likening pundits such as Krulwich to the “Aging purveyors of / Genetically modified diplomatics.” In many of her clap backs, Vang embroiders her lyric with metaphor and imagery (“Handprints fleeing / To leave no crease / Behind” and “mortality snaking toward / Delusional truth”) that render the stark moments of direct language all the more startling:

                        You refuse our dead,
As though
We were never alive.
 
Just say what you mean to say, that is:
 
                                    Hmong,
            Keep
            Your dying
            To yourself.

As much as I admire Vang’s lyric dexterity, I found myself hungry for and satiated by these moments of direct confrontation. There is undeniable power in plain speech, translating the unsayable from what is officially stated.

In addition to the call and response of the numerous epigraph poems, Vang enters the archive and tears into state documents. “Agent Orange Commando Lava” excerpts various late-1960s memos that document US calculations pertaining to the use of chemical weapons in Southeast Asia. In between each found fragment, stylized in italics, Vang identifies precedence for yellow rain:

would drastically change the weather patterns
life cycles of plants and animals may be affected
formation of fungi and growth of bacteria
could produce serious localized flooding
 
If this happened then why
Not yellow rain
            If these experiments then
   Why not yellow rain                      If climatic
Repercussions resulting
                        From experiments
                                                         Then why
                                                         Not yellow rain
 
*
 
29 May 1967
Telegram from the Embassy in Laos to the Department of State

Between the lines, Vang finds the unspoken threads of what happened to the Hmong. Her investigations and discoveries grant her access to spaces in which she exercises authorial agency; this is no mere marginalia but composition as amendment to the offending record. Here I see affinities with Tyehimba Jess’s Pulitzer Prize-winning Olio (2017), which documents and retraces the lives of African-American performers before and after the Civil War. Like Jess, Vang counteracts decades of official erasure and exclusion.

Writing into the archive also opens up moments of formal play and engagement, as in “Self-Portrait Together as CBW Questionnaire,” which reinvents the structure of the chemical and biological warfare questionnaire used to collect responses from Hmong refugees. It’s a poetic take on the hermit crab essay, a style in which a writer adopts an existing form to contain their work. Instead of generating her own questionnaire, Vang interrupts her lyrical lines with the physical lines of the form:

So Long As_______________
 
We:     Depart _____   from _____   the Middle _____
 
Of Our Embroidered Fairytale _______________________________
 
So Long As in the Banishing _______________________________
 
                                    We Rescue a Hundred Whispers
 
Force the ___________________                  Utterances __________________­­­

The poem’s content is camouflaged in the found poetic form, which slows the accumulation of semantic sense from each fragment. Official paperwork, tedious and at times baffling in its convoluted phrasing, is more difficult for refugees (and thus nonnative speakers) to navigate. Yet despite the blanks and field of this form, Vang demonstrates surprising fluidity as she transforms the document from a bureaucratic burden to sheet music.

Vang also offers intricately layered collages of text lifted from government documents and news articles, numbering and titling each as “Composition.” These “Compositions” serve as nonnarrative assemblages, and as visual intercalary pauses between the other sections of the book. Vang employs typographical devices reminiscent of Douglas Kearney: varying font sizes and gradients, with text that sometimes verges on illegibility.

It is difficult to enter these constructions, and that seems to be the point. In the example below, “Composition 1,” readers see the overwhelming reports of chemical weapon attacks in Laos, an experience at odds with US officials’ conclusion that there was “not enough information to make a case for or against yellow rain”:

Elsewhere, Vang makes graphical use of maps, redacted photographs, and documents as watermarks, shadows behind the textual layers of her poems. While the graininess of these images lend a spectral quality, they are often more distracting or inert in their effect on the page.

Sometimes the poetics of documentation is a space of such comprehensiveness that the projects become exhausting documents in themselves. Entrance into these works can be daunting. As more contemporary writers engage in the documentarian mode, producing stunning books of witness and reckoning, it is rare to encounter a writer like Vang whose poetics is less concerned with “finding out what actually happened” and more about “surfacing” truth from history, its materials, and implications for the present moment. This is an epistemological inquiry at its heart, and “man // made truth” is just as toxic as biological and chemical weapons. Enough already, with both of these. In Afterland, Vang references “the phantom attack / that never happened, but our fallen know it did,” her speaker vowing to “come back / as the carved edge of a claw.” With Yellow Rain, Vang scores onto the record the previously silenced experiences of Hmong, rupturing the erasures within Western accounts of history, all while holding the US government, media, and scientists accountable. It is revolutionary.