[11. VIOLENCE: ANGLO-LINGUISTIC]
By Nam Le
Appetitive, omnivorous, expansionary.
Atonal, with smashed-together consonants,
It wants it all.
Empire and industry. Science, technology, narratology.
Transaction. One language to rule them all.
Billions strong.
The standard. The first and first second.
Mitotic, mitogenic, mitochondrial.
Ceaselessly
Dividing, changing, charging.
It incorporates all, exiles all. We become internal
Émigrés. Exophones.
Our tongue blood-glutted, rapined, chrismed in Rome.
Hardened in old Germanic mouths.
Totalized.
Bonded now to long Western bent.
Western lexicology, logorrhoea, lexithymia.
Western grammar.
Say it was said, what I will say, but not in English:
In the Nôm script of pre-colonial Việt Nam:
—[Tongue] ... [Revolt]—
English demands: What is the function of each word?
Is it pronoun, noun, or verb? Adjective? Adverb?
What is its action?
English demands: Which is the subject, which object?
Whose tongue? How many? What gender or case?
What is its article?
English demands: What is the tense, the mood?
Is the revolting—or the tonguing—transitive?
To/Against whom/what?
And when—has it happened? Will it? Is it?
What auxiliary for perfect and/or continuous?
As to whether—
Might it? Should it? Must it? Would it?
English with its mind of closed grids
Demands
Answers—data, declension, denomination.
But Vietnamese answers: “I am all these things.
Or any.
I am openness, manyness at once, entelechy.
Your grammar is violence. Your way is narrow
Exaction.
The Way that lets itself be said to be the Way
Is not the Way. Nothing (I say) (ha ha!) is more important
Than freedom.”
Notes:
This poem is from a longer series called 36 Ways of Writing a Vietnamese Poem.
Source: Poetry (March 2023)