Reenactments: Poems and Translations

by Hai-Dang Phan

In Reenactments, poet Hai-Dang Phan explores the history, memory, and legacy of the Vietnam War from his vantage point as a second-generation Vietnamese American. Woven throughout the poems is a narrative of his family's exodus from Vietnam that beautifully elucidates the American record of immigration, dislocation, inheritance, and ultimately hope. The poems are persuasively varied in their approach. The past and present, the remembered and imagined, all intersect at shifting angles, providing bold new perspectives. And, in a fresh move, Phan widens the lens, interspersing translations of several other contemporary Vietnamese poems to the mix. This subtle and moving debut is an important addition to the literature of immigration.

Genres: Poetry, Asian American, Family

88 pages, Paperback

Published February 19, 2019

Reviews

[Craig Werner · Rating 5 out of 5]

Reenactments joints Viet Thanh Nguyen's Sympathizer as the most searching literary engagement with the experience of the (South) Vietnamese diaspora. The volume is comprised of Phan's own lyrical excavations of the traumas of his refuge family--his father was a captain in the South Vietnamese Navy--and of his translations/adaptations (some, apparently, looser than others) of poems by Vietnamese poets. It's an important move since it makes it clear that Phan understands his own experiences as part of a larger chorus. The final poem in the volume, "My Mother Says the Syrian Refugees Look like Tourists," cast those experience in the larger movement of people which is, along with the related reality of what we're doing/have done to the climate, the central issue of our benighted century.

That's the frame, but the power of the volume lies in Phan's voice, his ability mine lyrical shafts into image worlds that are both familiar and disconcerting. I marked something in a large majority of the poems, and there are countless lines I'll return to, but these offer a sense of the voice:

"Tomorrow's another country where here will be
elsewhere, and I'll not know the names of the trees."("For Fachil Assultani"

"This is a warm-up exercise, my morning ritual in dark times,
the pages of the orange notebook filling

and filling with everything I see--a tracery of flight paths,
wave forms,
tread marks--and even more I cannot face.

Accumulation and attrition. The clouded

black surface of the carrier deck." ("Events Ashore")

"Daily, nightly, along the shores of light,
the events that will not end, and have only just begun.
The horizon." ("Events Ashore")

You can pretty much open at random, but the poems I'd particularly recommend include "A Brief History of Reenactment," "My Father's Norton Introduction to Literature, Third Edition (1981)"--which provides a beautifully culture-specific take on how reading can echo the power of the African American musical tradition of call and response--and "Waiting for al-Qaeda."

Important part of what's clearly a moment of unusual power and depth in American poetry.

[Jenna]

Written by a poet born in Vietnam in 1980 whose family came as refugees to the U.S. when he was a young child, these poems on the whole strike me as carefully precise, conscientiously well-researched, documentarian, self-effacing, understated, spoken in a level quiet voice -- and therefore entirely believable. But here and there, an unguarded-seeming wistfulness:

"the crack of a bat sent a tiny moon
into orbit,
...and you had no team, you did not know
whom to root for, home or away."

The poet manifests a deep quiet interest in the technical military details of Vietnam War narratives, as evidenced by his easy fluency in weaponry nomenclature, the names of different kinds of guns, aircraft, boats. A prominent section of the book delves into the subculture of military reenactors, trying to understand what light their activities, their obsessively accurate costumes and props, can shed on the persistent legacy of wars in general. Now and then, though, Phan catches you off guard with a strikingly vital, fresh, human way of naming:

"Airplanes nosing into position,
tipped and alert like nipples."

I like how, in addition to Hai-Dang Phan's own poems, this book also includes Hai-Dang Phan's translations of Vietnamese poets who write/wrote in Vietnamese -- mostly Phan Nhien Hao, but also a few others. This unique compositional strategy strikes me as of a piece with Hai-Dang Phan's self-effacing tone in his own poetry: an intentional decision to move the book beyond the limits of the merely personal, beyond the limits of the emotion-driven single-voice memoir, to create a broader, more complex, more global picture of his subject. The translated Phan Nhien Hao poems not only concern Vietnam but also present Phan Nhien Hao's drily eagle-eyed observations of 1990s America during a bus trip from Atlanta to Seattle, from his valuable vantage point as a canny outsider.

The must-read poem in this collection, though, if one is forced to pick one, is Hai-Dang Phan's "My Father's Norton Introduction to Literature, Third Edition (1981)," which can be read here and was also selected for the 2016 edition of the Best American Poetry anthology series: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poet...

[C · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a lovely, fascinating collection of poetry.

It is at once a look back at a history of wars and a celebration of life lived after escape. There is a sort of universality to the way that children play war that is addressed in the beautiful opening poems and that slowly seeps through the rest of the book as how we are all affected by our histories of war.

These poems are interspersed with translations that have a very different tone. Where the poet is calm, the translations are bitter, infused with anger. At first, this juxtaposition really threw me off but as the book went on, I fell in love a bit with how they played off of one another.

It is a fantastic collection and I will certainly seek out more from this poet in the future.

[Fabiola Barral · Rating 4 out of 5]

Love the “scrapbook” feel to this— like an organized collection of a life. All the pieces create a lovely whole.

[Cubierocks · Rating 3 out of 5]

A mixed bag for me, but I'm still glad to have read this!

Faves:

Video Elegy

To a Human Skull

[Maddy Prucha · Rating 5 out of 5]

“My Father's Norton Introduction to Literature, Third Edition (1981)” …no words, glued to my mind for the foreseeable forever