‘Book of the Other’ and Other Furious Grammars: A Conversation with Truong Tran

A longtime mentor and friend, the poet and visual artist Truong Tran has gifted me many things, from guidance towards my first book (“Write the book as if you are writing your life,” he said, and I never forgot it) to temporary use of the lofted writer space in his studio where I finished Imagine Us, The Swarm (Nightboat Books). There, I wrote, staring into one of his old art projects–an obsessive cluster of gay pornography cut up into tiny butterflies, their winged dicks fluttering over my head. It is this bizarre blend of generosity and obscene humor that defines Tran for me, and which I find to be characteristic of his visual art and poetry. His forthcoming collection book of the other, however, takes on a graver tone.

When Kaya Press asked me to plan the publicity campaign for book of the other, there was not a question of my support. A collection of essays, prose, and antipoetry, this book chronicles the process and aftermath of a racial discrimination lawsuit Tran filed against San Francisco State University. It is an excruciating documentation of the type of silencing that comes with being nonwhite and being continuously passed over for well-earned opportunities in favor of white colleagues. Yet the book is about more than the event of the lawsuit itself as it explores the time spent grappling with one’s racial pain and the toll that takes on a person.

In 2014, Cathy Park Hong’s essay “Delusions of Whiteness in the Avant-Garde” in Lana Turner sent shockwaves through experimental poetics communities, calling out how whiteness has set aesthetic and participatory constraints for writers of color. Hong notes, “[White artists and institutions] prefer their poets to praise rather than excoriate, to write sanitized, easily understood personal lyrics on family and ancestry rather than make sweeping institutional critiques.” Years later, the same problems persist though the terms of institutional and individual power have shifted to become even more layered and at times obfuscated by seemingly well-intentioned moves to diversify. This is where book of the other intervenes.

Douglas Kearney describes this book as “documentation, a file on whiteness,” an apt portrayal of the book’s attempts to directly grapple with racial pain through experimentation, its eschewal of metaphor and refusal to be subsumed in a single/singular genre. For people of color like myself, book of the other  is also painfully relatable. I wanted to have this conversation with Tran as a young queer experimental writer of color who has witnessed the emotional toll of his struggles, and because this is such a familiar narrative for so many nonwhite academics I know in academia that perpetually operates on scarcity and competition. It is impossible to be unbiased here. I am impacted just as any other nonwhite academic and writer has been and continues to be impacted. As much as I can, I want to let Tran tell it as he has experienced it, so you can witness it for yourselves.

***

EXCERPT from TRUONG TRAN’S BOOK OF THE OTHER

you write with the consciousness. of not building this stage. and yet you build it. with the writing of this sentence. with every sentence. youve ever written. you write with the consciousness of not performing. in writing of your wants. to walk off the stage. you perform. you tell your audience. this is not the performance of anger. that this is anger. and still you are met with a standing ovation. you are told. that this is your best performance yet.

***

Muriel Leung: book of the other is a searing indictment of racism, not just in academia, but the accrual of grievances that manifest in daily encounters with racism, xenophobia, and homophobic violence. It is also a book that takes risks in its experiments with language and grammatical choices, as if trying to toe the line constantly between silence and explanation. What is the relationship between the book's formal experimentation and its content? And how did you know when you'd arrived at the form that best communicated the complexities of these social tensions? 

Truong Tran: It’s taken almost 15 years to write this book and it’s taken just as long to live the book. This is not something I wanted to write. It was and is still happening to me, this silencing, this erasure. Writing this book was a way of writing myself out of silence and back into existence. Formal experimentation was a way of navigating through the subjectivity of race and violence that I experienced in my own narrative and that of the world leading up to this current moment. My tools for writing the book, or one might even call them my weapons of choice, were the use of the period as a singular and deliberate gesture of punctuation. I wanted it to be disruptive, physical, relentless. I wanted to punch my way out of this book and out of this subject with the period. There are moments in the book when the period feels rapid and almost bordering on an enacted violence, and at other times, it feels lazy and tired. This is because the book and the writing became true to my nature. I was tired, exhausted, and feeling defeated by the subjectivity of racism. The period held that consciousness for me in those moments in the same way that it enacted my desire to break some shit in other moments.

The other constraint came in the editing process. My editor did something that I will always be grateful for. She asked questions, tough questions. She kept on asking why as a way of saying, “you’re still not saying.” I knew that at some point I would have to answer that question for myself even as I resisted the expectations of answering it for the other. There was still something that I did not or could not say. At what point does the decision to not say become the enactment of a lie? I found a way to say what needed to be said in the footnotes of the book. It is the book that is hidden inside the book. It is the book that emerges from the book.

ML: It's interesting that you describe this book as the persistent tension between what is being said and not said. Where are you in this journey so far, in navigating the tension between silence and speaking aloud? Have you come to any new conclusions about this?

TT: There is so much here to unpack. Silence is a many-tentacled inquiry. There was a time in my life when I thought that silence was my power. I would invoke it as a protest. I could hide my anger in my writing, in pockets of silence, in the absence of language on the page. In the space of the academy,  I thought I was doing the work of silence. Silence evolved into a consideration of craft, as a veiled consciousness, as white space, as a poetic constraint. Silence as abstraction. 

I want to circle back on the word “hide” because that was in fact what I was doing. I was hiding in plain sight. I was hiding in the classroom and I was hiding in my poetry, in my words. book of the other is my way of writing myself out of silence and back into existence. I wrote this book with the constraint of honesty, that I would say what needed to be said about what was happening, as it was happening to me. The narrative of this book is not just about the filing of a discrimination lawsuit. That alone would not be enough. This is about the silencing that comes with having experienced what I saw as discrimination. There is a transference of shame from the perpetrator to the inflicted, and the overwhelming expectations that I, as the inflicted, hold that shame, inheriting the silence that comes with knowing. This is someone else’s shame. I’ve been carrying it in silence for having been silenced. I’m putting it down. I’m saying to the reader. This shame is not mine. I will not carry it any longer. This silence.

The idea of silence as a practice or a craft or a tool for my writing, my protest, can only work if the world receiving my silent treatment arrives at an understanding that my voice is needed. The fact is, the white world that is the academy already knows that I have a voice. They're afraid of my voice. They are silencing this voice at every turn. I can no longer claim silence as my form of expression. I cannot simultaneously enact silence while being silenced. Last night I read from the book at an event. I heard my voice as I was reading. I heard glass breaking in the distance.

ML: What you’re describing sounds like a relationship to silence and speaking that so many nonwhite people constantly have to negotiate. I see this in your descriptions of your experiences as a Vietnamese refugee having to learn English as a young boy new to the U.S., and of coming to terms with your queerness. There's a self-consciousness about relaying these experiences, a wariness about aestheticizing them, that courses throughout book of the other. And in your refusal to perform your identities in such a way that panders to a white audience, as you put it: “you write with the consciousness of not performing. in writing of your wants. to walk off the stage.”

How do you navigate this desire to speak about the specificity of your experiences without falling into the trappings of the kind of performativity of which you speak?

TT: 1. I fear that I am incapable of avoiding the performative. I resist. I go so far as to even declare my resistance to the performative throughout the book. It is as though I am reminding myself that I am not going to perform even as I am standing on that stage. 

I have been receiving a lot of notes and messages stating a sense of anticipation and eagerness to read my story, to be touched by it, to feel it as readers.  I am grateful for all this support but I am also wary of the expectations that come with these statements. I want people to be compelled by the work, to be moved, perhaps even moved to action. I want to confront and convict those indicted in the work even if this kernel of knowledge exists only between myself and that singular presence inside the book that I am talking to in that specific moment. I want some readers to experience the desire to unread the book. I want readers to arrive at knowing that reading this text will always be within proximity to living this text. I want to share in the discomfort between reader and writer but one thing I know I don’t want is this, that my life is experienced as the inadvertent entertainment that comes from reading this book. This makes me think about all the times I’ve read reviews of books that label the work as heartbreaking, heart-wrenching, or generous, that these are the prescriptions and/or expectations we bring to our reading of a text. If we could just shift that perspective ever so slightly, perhaps we could let go of our expectations of the writer, the other? Is this just my take or is this the reality of being brown? A white writer crafts a novel from the perspective of a serial killer and the work is celebrated for its much-needed social commentary. I am trying to tell the truth about my living. I’m telling my story to the white woman who asked me to tell my story. And she looks at me and she says without hesitation, Truong that’s not what happened. My reality is this. Every response to the question is a performance that is embraced, critiqued, or rejected.

2. I don’t consider myself much of an experimental poet. If metaphor is a luxury then I don't think I can afford the price of admission into experimental poetics. My experimentations with language are born of utilitarian needs. I use the period in excess to reclaim some authority over the English language as if to say, So what if I did? What's it to you? I used the period as a blunt instrument, as both hammer and spoon to dig my way out, the period as a representation of my bloody knuckles, punching my way through the story, out of the book. I wrote this book in the first person, second person, present tense, past tense. Again, this is a function born of necessity. What happens in this book happened before and is happening even now. When I thought I had reached the end, I found that I had more that I needed to say. I wrote a book inside a book of all the things I still couldn’t say until I said it in the footnotes. These experimentations are not my wants for the language but rather my needs. They are not meant to abstract or obscure a path through. My experimental poetics, if I am going to call it that, is a way of storing provisions, a way of digging, scraping, punching, in the hopes of one day breaking through and getting the fuck out.

ML: How close do you think you have gotten with book of the other, Truong? To “getting the fuck out”? 

TT: I thought that was a simple enough statement at the time I wrote it the other night. Yet here I am unpacking again. “To get the fuck out.” There is a bit of bravado in making that declaration. Where would I go? What would I do? Who am I at the end of all this? book of the other exists in a loop. It is the retelling of experiences over and over because it was impossible to detail the experiences or the thinking in a single narrative or single poem. There were books written inside of books, and as such, there will be readings and inquiries inside the act of reading this book. How close have I gotten with book of the other in terms of getting out? I’ve written this book, an endeavor that's taken 15 years of not just writing but also living and enduring. I am having these conversations in the open. You should know that your questions help in the process of breaking down the structures that have kept the book walled in. My knuckles are bleeding. I am exhausted. Light is seeping through the cracks. Air is finding its way in. I dedicated this book to my students. It reads, “for my students past. present. future. that you might choose to do this work. that you might find these words to be of use. of comfort.” How close am I at getting out?  I think I’m out. I’m breathing. I’m holding this book. Its weight in my hand is weight off my body. In this beginning, I’m still a teacher. Everything else is still in process.