Susan Nguyen

Language Is Such a Physical Thing: A Conversation with Susan Nguyen

interviewed by Verónica Jordán-Sardi

Susan Nguyen’s debut collection, Dear Diaspora, won the 2020 Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Poetry. Dear Diaspora is an unapologetic reckoning with history, memory, and grief. Parting the weeds on a small American town, this collection sheds light on the intersections of girlhood and diaspora. The poems introduce us to Suzi: ripping her leg hairs out with duct tape, praying for ecstasy during Sunday mass, dreaming up a language for buried familial trauma and discovering that such a language may not exist. Through a collage of lyric, documentary, and epistolary poems, Dear Diaspora scrutinizes our turning away from the trauma of our past and our complicity in its erasure. Suzi, caught between enjoying a rundown American adolescence and living with the inheritances of war, attempts to unravel her own inherited grief as she explores the multiplicities of identity and selfhood against the backdrop of the Vietnamese diaspora. In its deliberate interweaving of voices, Dear Diaspora explores Suzi’s journey while bringing to light other incarnations of the refugee experience.

The collection will be published in September, 2021 and can be preordered here.

Verónica: Dear Diaspora starts with a quote that refers to the trauma people inherit from their ancestors and their decision to revisit these moments through art or other means. Could you talk about why you chose to preface the book with this quote? 

Susan: Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s Dictee was so impactful to me when I first read it in grad school. It was really important to me in reinforcing the idea that I could control my narrative. One of the reasons I think I chose that quote is because remembering is power. Remembering can be painful, but the memory of our pasts can’t be taken from us.

Verónica: I love this idea of memory as a facilitator of agency. And you follow this comment with the recognition that memory can be painful. Does pain ever stop you from writing/remembering?

Susan: Of course! That's a very human response.

Verónica: Cha’s quote frames Dear Diaspora as a “reply that will not repeat history in oblivion.” Do you consider this book a “reply” to the pain any member of any diaspora inherits?

Susan: I don’t know if my book is a reply. In some ways this book feels like the thing before the reply for me – it’s the thing that has helped me begin to articulate and better understand some of the trauma within my community and my family. There’s still a lot that I don’t know and some things that I may never know, but it’s been important to me to revisit the past so that it doesn’t get lost. 

Verónica: What did/do you wish to accomplish, personally and/or artistically by revisiting or writing through the pain and grief of your ancestors?

Susan: Preserving memory and history is important, especially if the predominant narratives out there don’t reflect your own histories. I don’t know if I knew it during the writing process, but I was writing the book that I’ve always needed and wanted.  

I wanted to see more of myself in literature. There are plenty of texts out there that speak to or about the Vietnam War, but for a long time, I didn’t realize or question that they were always from the perspectives of white people. In middle school, I did a book report on the Vietnam War, and I didn’t even question at the time that the books I most easily found were from white journalists retelling their war experiences – maybe I didn’t question that these books didn’t reflect my family or community because in reading about the war, it felt like something very abstract and very separate from me. 

Verónica: So when did this abstraction become more of a reality to you? In other words, when did you begin to write what you've always needed and wanted?

Susan: There wasn't a single moment, rather a cumulation - I have memories of family members telling stories or making mention of war-times or post-war-times. These weren't things I was ever told directly as a kid but just things I heard the adults talking about at family gatherings. Eventually, as I grew older, I began to question more about the Vietnam War - I mean it appears a lot, directly or indirectly, in pop culture. 

And I've been writing towards what I needed and wanted for a long time. A lot of writing I did before the MFA wasn't about the diaspora, but it was still about identity and personhood; although, it had more to do with my body as a woman and eventually the intersections between what it means to be a woman and a Vietnamese-American woman in contemporary America.

Luckily during my MFA, I also took Vietnamese language courses and some other courses that focused on Asian or Asian-American and Pacific-Islander authors and texts that helped give me some language to write about the diaspora.

Verónica: I interpreted several poems in Dear Diaspora as exploring the way in which first generation Americans mentally, emotionally, AND physically struggle with the language of their origins, their “first language,” and with the language of their adopted home. As an immigrant with complicated relationships to my own first and acquired languages, your exploration of these tensions deeply resonated with me. How did you choose to evoke these struggles? Did you choose to evoke this struggle as a mental AND corporal obstacle? If yes,why? 

Susan: I don’t think I chose any particular way to evoke those feelings. That’s probably not the answer you are looking for or hoping for. I’m trying to get better at thinking through and articulating my writing process especially after, truthfully, not having spent that much time having these conversations about poetry and writing for the past year or two post-MFA and largely focusing on day-to-day survival and work. 

What I can say is that I wanted to explore the tension between languages and how, honestly, English is where I am comfortable. Vietnamese is not where I am comfortable. It is actually where language makes me feel really vulnerable, maybe even the most vulnerable. And this is despite taking a few years of Vietnamese language courses in grad school and growing up speaking it on a basic level. 

But one of the things I think about a lot is how there are so many things in my family and in my parents’ lives that I won’t know because, if they expressed it in Vietnamese, I would not understand it. And I wonder, too, how much of me they don’t know or understand. For example, have they seen my silly side? My snarky or sarcastic side? I don’t think so. I don’t make jokes in Vietnamese, you know. I don’t have enough language (yet) for that.

When my cousin from Vietnam came to study in the US a few years ago, I saw how easily she conversed with my parents and family and how they could joke and carry on conversations about complex topics. I remember one particular car drive where my father in casual conversation shared something from his past, a random anecdote, that I had never heard before and that really affected me. How much are we not sharing because our first languages, where we feel comfortable, are not the same? 

I don’t think I’ve really been able to adequately write about this, although now I’m wondering if maybe I’ve been trying too hard to write about this explicitly whereas maybe some of the poems in my collection are beginning to do that already. 

Verónica: I think this fear of "missing out" because of linguistic or cultural differences is really common for immigrants and/or first-generation Americans. Although I feel very comfortable speaking Spanish with my parents, I think I have had to develop my own way of speaking with them that's beyond linguistic structures. I think your book touches on how language production is a bodily and intimate process that can also feel physically alienating-- the tongue not feeling comfortable with certain shapes or sounds, like when you're right-handed but trying to write with your left...is this a correct interpretation?

Susan: Yes, speaking and learning a language is such a physical thing! I remember feeling so vulnerable in my Vietnamese-language courses because learning a language is so intimate and vulnerable, even if it's a language that I grew up speaking on a basic level. I think part of that vulnerability stemmed from the fact that I felt like I should have a better grasp of Vietnamese and that I should get the hang of it more easily.

Verónica: I loved experiencing the poems in Dear Diaspora in all their different “shapes and sizes,” like vignettes, lists, letters and prose. Could you discuss how structure factors into your writing process? 

Susan: Sometimes I start a poem with the idea that this is going to be a list poem, and it comes easily. But most times, I begin writing and there’s no pre-thought-out form – I keep fiddling around with the lines and stanzas until I feel like the form works with the content. Or at least doesn’t take away from it. When I spend too much time thinking about the form before writing the poem, I can get in my own way.

When I felt like I was “officially” starting this collection, I thought the book would be composed entirely of third-person prose poems. At the time, the third person felt like a radical choice because I felt really self-conscious that all my poems were first-person. And I thought that writing prose poems meant I wouldn’t have to think too much about form. Writing in third-person and with the same form in mind allowed me more freedom in some ways to just write when I was feeling at a standstill with my work. 

Verónica: Interesting...were there any poems in this collection that you initially wrote in the third person to provide that freedom but that you later decided to make into first person or vice versa?

Susan: I don’t remember... There were, of course, plenty of third-person poems I wrote that did not make it into the manuscript. I think, too, that reading my third-person poems made me realize that the first-person poems were also necessary in my collection and that the collection would be way less interesting if they were all in the third person. I also, at some point, got tired of writing in the third person.

In the end, my collection includes poems in first-person, second-person, and third-person voices because I realized I didn’t have to limit myself. It’s also pretty cool to look back at my manuscript and realize that I ended up making some of my own forms with my “The Body as a Series of Questions:”; “Suzi as a Series of Questions:”; and “Grief as a Series of Questions:” poems. I think this happens a lot – oftentimes writers and artists that are marginalized break traditional forms and even create their own forms to adequately express what they want to convey. 

Verónica: Could you talk more about the process of developing this “question form” poetry? Did it happen organically? Is there a reason the interrogative mode felt right within this context?

Susan: Sure, I remember writing down the "The Body as a Series of Questions:" in Natalie Diaz's class during some class discussion or writing exercise. I'm not sure how I arrived at that line, but I knew I wanted to use it somehow. And then the rest of the poem began in response to a prompt in that class.

I think the questioning mode appears a lot in the collection because I spend a lot of time questioning my identity, the diaspora, the war, what I know or don't know about all of these things. So, when I wanted to create a few more threads in the collection, it felt natural to go back to "The Body as a Series of Questions:" as a form, but instead of the "the body," it became "Grief" or "Suzi" as a series of questions.

Verónica: In Dear Diaspora “Suzi with an i” grapples with building an identity that incorporates her roots and parents’ pasts in Vietnam and her present growing up in middle-America suburbia. Was Suzi a kind of mirror on which you were able to reflect and understand your own experience growing up as a Vietnamese American?

Susan: Yes, exactly. Inventing this character that I could write about in the third-person helped me free up some anxieties and also made it easier to write about certain things that I was having a hard time approaching, for whatever reason, in the first-person. And then this made it easier to get back into writing some of the first-person poems that appear in the collection. 

Verónica: Awesome. I think this partly also answers my previous question on whether the conscious use of the third person made it easier for you to switch to the first person. It was fascinating to witness Suzi grappling with the idea and meaning of “ecstasy.” What does “ecstasy” mean to Suzi?  Is Suzi’s search for ecstasy related to her search for an identity?  

Susan: I want to leave some space for interpretation. But I will say that I don’t think the meaning of “ecstasy” is static in my collection. One part of “ecstasy” is Suzi developing a sense of self and bodily autonomy.

I think the reason I was even writing about ecstasy has to be credited to an MFA class I was in that was taught by Natalie Diaz. The name of the course literally included the words “grief and ecstasy.” I don’t know if I would have been thinking about and exploring those themes so heavily if it weren’t for that class, but I’m so grateful for the readings and conversation in the course. 

Verónica: Do you remember a specific author or work that you found particularly inspiring from that class?

Susan: The first two that come to mind are Athena Farrokhzad's White Blight and Mahmoud Darwish's Journal of Ordinary Grief. I borrow language from both at some point in the collection. They got me thinking about what ecstasy meant for me and then what it meant for Suzi within the context of my manuscript – Suzi searching for ecstasy and questioning grief gives her some agency and control of her own narrative.

Verónica: The middle of Dear Diaspora features a section of poems that are different from all the rest – a series of obituaries, interviews and memorials that you say in the book’s notes were inspired by research you conducted on the Vietnamese Boat People. How did conducting this research inform your artistic choices and your process writing this section? 

Susan: I didn’t know what that poem would be when I started writing it. But I decided that even though it’s pretty long and not directly about Suzi, the poem was important to include so that readers had more context of the Vietnam War. 

In a way, I also didn’t want to let my readers off the hook. I wanted them to be faced with these obituaries and stories of what people experienced during and after the war from pirates and death at sea to prison camps in Vietnam where many people, including my own family members, lost many years of their lives. 

Verónica: So...just to clarify...you intended this "section of poems" to be read as one long poem?

Susan: I honestly hadn't considered this. But yes, I think maybe the best thing to call it is one long serial poem?

Verónica: Why did you choose to title the book Dear Diaspora? If it is a kind of letter written in solidarity with the Vietnamese diaspora, what do you hope your recipients gain from your message? 

Susan: Throughout my collection, I have a handful of poems that are letters to the diaspora and each one begins with the line “dear diaspora.” These poems began as a serial poem, but I decided to break up the poem and disperse a few of the sections throughout the manuscript at the suggestion of a mentor. Writing these epistolary poems was my attempt to speak directly to the diaspora and to make something as large and complex as the term “diaspora” less abstract. Dear Diaspora honestly started out as a placeholder, a line that I could pull from the book just to refer to it as something while I tried to find the real title. It quickly stuck.

Verónica: How did writing the epistolary poems make the meaning of diaspora less abstract to you?

Susan: To be able to directly speak to it made it feel less abstract to me - as if I was writing a letter to a familiar stranger that I knew intimately. Even if the recipient I was addressing my writing to can't respond... maybe that's not the point. The importance is the act of articulating my thoughts and questions and putting them out there into the world.

Susan Nguyen hails from Virginia but currently lives and writes in Arizona. She earned her MFA in Poetry from Arizona State University, where she won the Aleida Rodriguez Memorial Prize and fellowships from the Virginia G. Piper Center for Creative Writing. In 2018, PBS NewsHour named her one of "three women poets to watch." Her work appears in diagram, Tin House, and elsewhere. Her debut collection, Dear Diaspora, won the 2020 Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Poetry. Visit her at www.susanpoet.com

Originally from Cali, Colombia, Verónica Jordán-Sardi immigrated to the United States with her immediate family as a young teen fleeing sociopolitical unrest. She holds a B.A. in English Literature and French from the University of Florida, an M.A. in Comparative Literature from the University of Iowa, and an M.F.A. in Creative Writing from California College of the Arts. Her cross-genre work can be found in Columbia Journal, Litro, Cleaver, Comparative Literature Commons, and La Pereza Ediciones. Verónica currently lives in New York where she is pursuing a PhD in English (Writing Practices) at SUNY-Albany.