Po(i)sed for Action: At the Intersection of Poetry and Drama, Part III

On election day, 2016, as I was sharing work and listening to poets speak and read at Jane Wong’s Poetics of Haunting event in Seattle, the mood in the gallery shifted to mourning as the news of the presidential win sank in. To be fair, the nature of the event, centered around Wong’s powerful digital project examining what is haunting contemporary Asian American poetry, had already cast a melancholy glow upon all of us as we contemplated legacies of war, colonialism, and marginalization. Little did we know what would exactly follow in the days and years after that evening, though I think we all knew.

Back home in Denver, I saw people unraveling around me: friends cried at work, a gentle professor snapped at me after class over a scheduling conflict, a peer whose spirited outbursts in class turned to private daily harassments (aimed at me). By the time January rolled around, I found myself teaching “Introduction to Creative Writing” to sleepy undergraduates at 8AM, wondering existentially what we were all doing there when our country as we knew it was being rapidly dismantled. Which isn’t to say that I did and do not find value in creative writing; on the contrary, I believe the literary and fine arts to be essential at all times.

What I questioned then, given the circumstances, was my agency (or lack thereof) in the feeling of helplessness I was experiencing. Teaching creative writing did nothing to empower me, even if I attempted to empower my thoughtful, sensitive students.

What happened next was random but pivotal: I saw an ad posting for a TA position in the business college, applied, and got the job. The course, “Strategic Business Communications,” a new elective for undergrads, was something the school was ‘trying out’ since employers were reporting back that recent graduates were not prepared for the workplace; in short, their communication and social skills were subpar. My TA position quickly transformed over that year into lead instructor; I took the reins, redesigning the course curriculum and soon after, the course became mandatory for all sophomore business majors.

I mention my two-year stint teaching strategic communications to students whose dreams include “owning a yacht” and “having a garage big enough for all my vintage cars” because it was important to me that I had direct access to young adults who aspired to be C-suite level executives and politicians. At the course’s core, I emphasized the importance of listening and code-switching, engaging the students in improv play, mindful one-on-one exercises centered around being present, and required that students watch video recordings of their solo and team speeches and presentations. I think I can safely say that they all hated it, and also that they all recognized by the end of the term not only how much their speaking skills had improved (and public speaking anxiety diminished), but that they felt now confident in their ability to engage in any space.

It was important to me that these students in particular had to consider the effects and consequences of not only how they spoke, but also all the nonverbal cues as well; it was my hope that they become ethical, sympathetic listeners and communicators.

*          *          *

As I began reading more contemporary plays, I found myself drawn to how the dramatic form emphasized (usually) engagement between two or more entities (at least one character and the audience, or other characters).

At the time, my dissertation research revolved around listening to and recording narratives of exodus and adaptation/assimilation (or lack thereof) within the Vietnamese diaspora. As I heard and gathered the conflicting recollections within my own extended family—as well as those of strangers, I felt at a loss regarding what to do with what I had the privilege of witnessing. Internally, there were concerns about appropriation of stories that weren’t mine to tell, and attempts to describe others’ experiences from external, descriptive points of view in a poem felt disingenuous (a feeling I attribute only to my own attempts, and certainly not to the successful, moving poems of others who have been able to write about stories not their own).

So I tried my hand at a play.

During one of my counseling sessions, my therapist asked what I would say to a seven-year-old version of myself, if I could travel back to see her. I balked at the idea of physically returning to my difficult childhood. “What are you afraid of?” my therapist asked. “You survived, and you can survive a return to speak to your younger self because you have skills now that you did not yet have then.”

In the first scene of the first play I wrote, a version of me (Annie) talks and hangs out with a seven-year-old version of me (Young Annie):

Lights up on the top stage.
YOUNG ANNIE struggles to fly her kite by herself.
 
ANNIE
(softly) Wind. Pause.
 
YOUNG ANNIE
Is it blowing this way, you think?
 
ANNIE closes her eyes, as if reading the wind in her hair.
It’s blowing in all directions, in equal and opposing forces, I think.
 
YOUNG ANNIE
There’s no wind?
 
ANNIE
There’s no wind. Or too much wind.
 
YOUNG ANNIE
I don’t get it. Did I cut my string wrong?
 
YOUNG ANNIE holds up her kite and dangles it.
 
ANNIE
No way, Jose. I’m sure you followed the measurements they gave you.
 
YOUNG ANNIE
I did, but it was kinda hard to tie some of the knots and I think maybe the knots are in the wrong place.
 
ANNIE
Hey, let’s try getting her to fly together. I’ll hold her from over there (points to the shed) and you stay here and start running once you feel the wind lift her and I let go.
 
YOUNG ANNIE looks at ANNIE hesitantly.
 
ANNIE (cont.)
Of course, if I have your permission to touch your kite. I promise I’ll be very careful with it. You used rice paper, am I right? I know how brittle that is.
 
YOUNG ANNIE nods.
 
ANNIE
I really like the shape you cut—it looks like the shape of a meteor streaming across the sky.
 
YOUNG ANNIE smiles shyly and nods.
And I painted tulips on it because I wanted to see flowers flying in the sky!
 
ANNIE
That’s amazing. Let’s try to get her in the sky.
 
YOUNG ANNIE
Okay.
 
ANNIE reaches her arms out to YOUNG ANNIE.
May I?
 
YOUNG ANNIE gingerly hands ANNIE her kite. ANNIE walks over to the shed. Together they try several times to get the kite up and flying, and at times, come close to doing so. YOUNG ANNIE concentrates hard and holds tightly to the spool of string, running when she feels ANNIE let go.
 
YOUNG ANNIE
(out of breath) This is like fishing … but with running.

While writing this, and the rest of the scene, I was looking at a picture of myself at age seven, on a soccer field holding a kite I made in school. As I looked at the faint smile on my face then, I transported myself to that time period—recalling much of what the photograph does not relay: the bullying and social cruelties of my white classmates, the rage and violence at home, wanting to protect my younger siblings, but not knowing how. As I typed lines I wish I could say to my younger self, I stepped into being seven again in order to write Young Annie’s reply. What I thought would be awkward (the dialogue) became a seamless movement from my body to my former body—an empathy across time and space.

What compelled me to continue the therapy exercise and play was my surprise at the tenderness I felt for myself. In contrast to how I can bluntly share some of the most difficult moments and facts of my life with strangers today, I found that a direct style of engagement with Young Annie wouldn’t work. What I could offer was kindness, a being with.

*          *          *

In Melisa Tien’s play, Best Life, the dialogue between the only two characters is drastically different. Lourdes is “non-white; poor, soft-spoken; younger than Cheryl,” who is “white; wealthy; takes up space; older than Lourdes.” The setting is a sidewalk cafe with each woman at a different table.

Throughout the play, the two women speak, sometimes to each other, and even when they do converse directly, it is quickly apparent that one party is not truly listening to what the other has to say:

LOURDES
An egg fell on my head this morning while I was sitting over there.
It broke.
It didn’t hurt.
It was cold.
 
CHERYL
May I take some of your sugar if you’re not using it?
 
LOURDES
An egg fell on my head this morning while I was sitting over there; it broke, it didn’t hurt.
It was cold.
So I went home to wash my hair, and I discovered my mother there.
 
CHERYL
I’m going to take two packets of your sugar, if you don’t mind.
 
CHERYL proceeds to take four.
 
LOURDES
An egg fell on my head this morning while I was sitting over there; it broke.
It didn’t hurt; it was cold.
So I went home to wash my hair.
And I discovered my mother there with her lover.
 
CHERYL
Thank you so much.
 
LOURDES
They were slapping each other.
 
CHERYL
Excuse me?
 
LOURDES
My mother and her lover.
 
CHERYL
Excuse me!
 
LOURDES
Yes?
 
CHERYL
Did you say an egg fell on your head?
 
LOURDES
This morning, while I was sitting over there.
 
CHERYL
Where did it come from?
 
LOURDES
I don’t know.
That’s the great mystery.

What I haven’t yet shared is the delightful fact that Lourdes has the ability to rewind the clock, travel back in time—albeit only back by about five minutes. The play continues in this fashion: Lourdes and Cheryl ‘converse,’ and Cheryl is often inconsiderate, superficial, or unknowingly offensive. When the conversation reaches a moment of misunderstanding or tension, Lourdes says “Go back,” and the scene rewinds to a previous moment before starting again, moving forward on a slightly different track. And thus the play proceeds in such a fashion, as if taking three steps forward, two steps back, three steps forward . . .

Of the many elements which pique my interest, what I’d like to focus on is the recursion in Best Life. The folding and unfurling are crucial to the characters coming to understand each other. Too often in real life do we depart from a conversation once it’s evident that the other person (typically a stranger) is rude or holds a viewpoint fundamentally different from my own—we don’t take the time to engage in extended dialogue because we do not know them, or do not have enough resources in that moment to invest in a little while longer—plus, there’s no guarantee that the conversation can end nicely.

Lourdes’ “Go back” time-travel gift is a generosity to both her and Cheryl not only because they can redo a derailed segment of their conversation, but also because returning to a previous point won’t take up more live time; the clock also rewinds (or at least, it does according to Best Life’s laws of physics as I imagine them). If only we all had such redo functions in our lives.

*          *          *

Recursion in Tien’s play struck me, because it is essential to my own literary arts practice. About my brother Oliver’s suicide, I have written, “That which has happened cannot happen again”—the very opposite of a redo, but more than anything, I wish I could undo his death.

In the first part of this series, I shared how Oliver had cut himself out of hanging family portraits two years prior to his suicide. In that same post, I shared my first attempts to reverse the negative valency of these artifacts in the aftermath of his death; I filled the voids in the photographs by placing them in the streams and flora of springtime in the Colorado mountains.

In attempting to write a radical eulogy to Oliver, I found I had no words, only actions: building a coffin, placing the marred photographs in places where the earth was springing back into life again.

What I’d like to briefly share here, is how the years since then have yielded returns to these photographs, a site of rupture, my brother’s self-erasure.

It would be nearly a year until I could sit down to write words in the space where my brother cut himself out. After doing so—I wanted to work with the family who survives (the photograph and the cutting), to employ poetry as a framework which supports what is missing.

Six months later, on the anniversary of my brother’s death, I was watching a Nature documentary on eels and was reminded of the Japanese gyotaku practice where ink is applied to one side of a prized catch (fish), then pressed against fabric or paper to preserve the memory of the moment. Essentially, the dead body as a stamp.

I saw many similarities in the struggles of an eel in the elver, or adolescent phase of life. Elver, from ‘eel-fare’ (mid-17th century) since the young eels journey from the deep ocean to go up river streams, sometimes traveling on land, or up vertical dam walls. Elver, which sounds so much like Oliver to me.

After these triptychs and gyotaku series were published in a collection, I thought I was done with the cutout photographs, done reclaiming the rupture which so acutely wounded me.

The following year, I had to go back—but this time, I fixated on what was left behind in the photographs: a finger Oliver left in, part of his baby shoe. I began to embody my younger self, my sister, my mother in these photographs—writing poems which became documents of overlapping narratives.

And more recently, this past summer, I returned again, creating something by chance: in an act of radical empathy—while tracing my body in Photoshop so that I, too, could cut myself out of the photograph, I accidentally had created conditions that automatically filled in the cutout with projections of the surroundings. Instead of a void, white or black space there was more stucco wall, wooden door, straw swan. The effect was ghostly when I applied it to my younger self and sister, mother, which felt apt. As if the setting had grown in over the spots where we had stood—a world, regenerating, thrusting forward, even after we were no longer there, even after some of us have gone.

*          *          *

As I’ve shared in the last post, I’ve been working with my family’s home video archive as well—a place where my brother is alive, living, remains intact.

In editing and crafting video-poems for myself, I often found myself in a recursive loop, playing the same brief clips over and over again in order to figure out where to place them, or what to adjust in them. Like the second hand on my naked clock getting stuck on the hour or minute hands because it was slightly bent during a move—the second hand stuck until I nudge it along with my finger.

It reminds me of visiting with my young cousins once, in 1997, watching Dunston Checks In on VHS at ong ba noi’s house. When the movie finished, my cousins hit rewind on the VCR, then play, and we watched it again. And again. And again.

I do not know how I endured so many viewings of the same children’s movie in one sitting, but I do know that each time I watch it, I would focus on finding something I hadn’t paid attention to previously—something in the background, or away from the main action.

To go back allows for new possibilities, yes, but also to take the same path again, but more carefully. It is what I facilitated for my business undergrads, when I filmed their speeches and presentations, asking them to watch it, to adjust their bodies, form, all the aspects of delivery.

In closing, I’m sharing a video-poem I fear is sentimental, which is embarrassing to me—but don’t find embarrassment reason enough not to end with a sister and brother struggling to get a kite to fly.

Are You Sleeping from Diana Khoi Nguyen on Vimeo.