On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous by Ocean Vuong

Ocean Vuong’s first book, the poetry collection Night Sky with Exit Wounds (2016), circles obsessively around fathers. (Vuong’s violent father left soon after the family – grandmother, mother, father, son – arrived in Hartford, Connecticut, from Saigon via a refugee camp in the Philippines when Vuong was two years old.)

In its middle is a four-page poem called ‘On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous’, which opens like this:

Tell me it was for the hunger
& nothing less. For hunger is to give
the body what it knows

it cannot keep. That this amber light
whittled down by another war
is all that pins my hand to your chest.

After war, with violence and trauma in our bodies, what of love? How do we connect, body to body? 

Vuong’s first novel, named like this poem On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous (2019), centres the closest body to body connection there is: a child’s to his mother, a mother’s to her child. It’s framed as a letter from the protagonist Little Dog to his mother, who cannot read and so will never read it.

I am writing you from inside a body that used to be yours. Which is to say, I am writing as a son.

It’s about his mother and her body, the violence in her body, on his body, on hers, and his childhood under her turbulent, fabulous, ferocious rule, and it’s also about his travelling away from her – finding his first job, his first love, his way in the world, learning English which she does not speak. Language is another of the novel’s pressing concerns, another way of opening and closing distances between bodies.

Little Dog’s letter is an attempt to close the distance his life opens up between mother and son in time, space, history and language that he knows cannot be closed – and yet, here it is, his letter. It opens: 

Let me begin again.

Dear Ma,

I am writing to reach you – even if each word I put down is one word further from where you are. I am writing to go back to the time, at the rest stop in Virginia, when you stared, horror-struck, at the taxidermy buck hung over the soda machine by the rest-rooms, its antlers shadowing your face.

The novel works like poetry, turning words over, cracking them open, moving in fragments, restless, breaking into poetic lines when the emotion is too raw, interrogating race, class, work, masculinity, Vietnam, America. Images and motifs reverberate: Monarch butterflies; colouring in; Tiger Woods; bodies bruised and marked, painted (his mother works in a nail salon) and adored; war.

Monarchs that survived the migration passed this message down to their children. The memory of family members lost from the initial winter was woven into their genes.

When does a war end? When can I say your name and have it mean only your name and not what you left behind?

This novel is so much about the charged histories carried by words. The capacity of certain words to make visible and others to render invisible. About language and communication across silences. In his first job aged fourteen, on a tobacco farm outside Hartford, Little Dog cannot speak to the men he works alongside, they do not share a language, so he bridges the silence with gestures and images:

A work of myriad communications, I learned to speak to the men not with my tongue, which was useless there, but with smiles, hand gestures, even silences, hesitations. I made out people, verbs, abstractions, ideas with my fingers, my arms, and by drawing in the dirt.

What I wanted to say to them, as I rode away, and also the next morning, all mornings, is what I want to say to you now: Sorry.

And at its heart is a breathtaking, devastating love story.

I read this book last summer and have been wanting to write about it ever since, but I’ve struggled to find a way to write about it – this incandescent poem of a novel in which a son’s words to his mother transmute war, trauma, addiction into love, passion, beauty and art, the ephemeral gorgeousness of its title – because I’m more inclined simply to urge anyone who hasn’t read it to read it.

‘Have you ever made a scene,’ you said, filling in a Thomas Kinkade house, ‘and then put yourself inside it? Have you ever watched yourself from behind, going further and deeper into that landscape away from you?’

How could I tell you that what you were describing was writing? How could I say that we, after all, are so close, the shadows of our hands on two different pages, merging?

Vuong’s novel testifies to the capacity of words, attention, love, to transform violence and pain into something beautiful and achingly present. For me this novel makes a key change – from war to messy beauty – in a visceral, radical and radiant way that I’ve not quite encountered before in my many years of reading on war.

I never wanted to build a ‘body of work,’ but to preserve these, our bodies, breathing and unaccounted for, inside the work.

And now Vuong’s work has bought his mother a house. ‘She always wanted a garden – and she got it through poetry.’

What more could poetry ask?

That’s it for my blogging until December – and an apt place to leave it, as I return to my own writing about war. Till the summer, happy days.