Essay: Night Sky with Exit Wounds – Ocean Vuong

Because of the United States’ involvement in the Vietnam War, a proxy war to the Cold War, a wave of Vietnamese refugees immigrated to the United States in an attempt to flee the political instability of Vietnam. Poet Ocean Vuong immigrated from Vietnam to America at the age of 2, and has spent the majority of his life in the states. In his renowned book, Night Sky with Exit Wounds, Ocean Vuong explores the ways in which his experience as an immigrant affect his sense of identity; although he was not alive for the Vietnamese War, Vuong examines in the first section of his book how the emotional trauma of the war works transgenerationally and continues to affect his identity in the present day by forcing him into a perpetual transitional state.
Because his parents refuse to talk about the war, there is a generational disconnect which further dissociates Vuong from the past. His parents respond to his questions about the past with an unwillingness to talk, largely in part because of all the sacrifices his parents made in order to provide a secure future so Vuong might never have to think about these struggles. Therefore, Vuong does not have access to stories about immigration, so the majority of the first section of the book is an imaginative trope to construct a story for himself. The first poem of the collection is entitled “Threshold,” which implies a certain liminality – a space of transition and transformation. By titling the poem this, Vuong foreshadows the rest of section where he attempts to transgress a threshold to understanding the past. The poem depicts a moment where he “watched, through the keyhole” his father playing guitar and singing (3). In this moment, He is unable to fully see everything because looking through the keyhole is only a partial view of the situation. Vuong is looking through that which has locked him out of this moment – cueing the reader into what he will do in this section; on a metonymic level, then, the key illustrates Vuong’s attempts to try and understand the past that he has been barred from previously. Referring to the moment with his father, Vuong says “he was singing, which is why I remember it” (3). This memory is framed by associations and through the lens of a voice, mirroring how the only recollection of the past that Vuong obtains is through an oral history. However, because the moment is an imaginative one, his identity and connection to the past remains uncertain. Vuong states, “Even my name/knelt down inside me,” which demonstrates a separation and perhaps a displacement of self. His name, foisted onto him by his family, contains a sense of ancestral past within it. However, in this construction, his name is independent from his being, which demonstrates that he has not been able to fully connect with his family history. While Vuong attempts to use oral histories in order to locate his own identity against that of his ancestors, this fabricated memory is unable to completely bridge the generational disconnect that constructs his identity.
Vuong’s sense of identity is only further fractured by the painful conflict that is his formative birth moment. His mother is the daughter of an American military general in Vietnam during the war and a Vietnamese woman, and therefore Vuong would not exist without the war. However, he feels a strong sense of ambivalence about the war because it both created him as well as propelled him out of his home country. In the poem “Aubade with Burning City,” Vuong explores his complicated feelings surrounding the war. He begins the poem by presenting an image of beauty and innocence with “milkflower petals in the street” (10). The next line, however, complicates the image by comparing the petals to “pieces of a girl’s dress,” suggesting that this aesthetically beautiful moment also carries dark undertones about death and slashed innocence. The line break creates a juxtaposition for the reader that emphasizes the contrast between innocence and the horrors of war. The rest of the poem continues in a similar manner, demonstrating the facade of beauty and happiness within which the horrors of war are hidden. Throughout the poem, Vuong weaves in lines from the song “White Christmas” where the term “white” has a double meaning; other than snow, it represents the American military presence in Vietnam during the war. These lines demonstrate the irony of hearing American songs about having a happy holiday while the American presence in Vietnam causes destruction. This ambivalence about his feelings regarding the past are heightened because he would not exist without this pain and destruction. The way Vuong writes about the juxtaposition of beauty and conflict in the past as his formative origin story reflects how he feels about his identity in the present – ambivalent and confused.
By repurposing classic origin stories, Vuong examines how writing allows him to explore the complexity of immigration being his formative birth moment. In the original story of the Odyssey, the moment when Odysseus returns to his son Telemachus is represented as a moment of Odysseus’ wit and cunning as he disguises himself as a beggar. However, in Vuong’s retelling in “Telemachus”, his father is actually struggling while Vuong “pull[s] [his] father out of the water, drag[ging] him by his hair” (7). His father’s “knuckles [are] carving a trail” as he gets pulled lifelessly towards the shore, evoking an image of agony and bleeding knuckles. This image represents the pain of immigration to a new place, even while his father is escaping war-torn Vietnam with a “bombed cathedral” and “bullet hole[s]” (7). Although he is not the one physically affected by the process of being brought to shore, he must deal with the struggle of dislocation and deal with the effects of the immigration – mirroring the way transgenerational emotional trauma functions. Similarly, the trail created by his father’s knuckles is destroyed by “the waves [that] rush in to erase” it (7). The trail, representing the evidence of his father’s immigration, gets washed away which prevents Vuong from accessing it; this loss of history paralleles Vuong’s detachment from the past because of the generational disconnect and oral history. When comparing himself to Telemachus in the original story, however, Vuong gives himself a sense of heroism and personal agency as he assists his father. By changing the fate of Telemachus, he explores whether he can use writing to explore his own role in the process of immigration to give himself more control and personal agency over his sense of identity. His repurposing of an origin myth is an attempt to locate himself within the space of ancestral memory and change it to fit his new identity as an Asian American. Now that he is in America, he has the ability to try to create his own story such as through the act of writing this story. And yet, he is also still constrained by this mythology, by his disconnect from the past, and by the transgenerational emotional trauma of immigration. Vuong rewrites these origin stories to help both himself and the reader access the complexity of these moments and understand how he himself was created out of this moment of both power and pain.
Although Vuong attempts to exert control over his identity, his effort is limited because it is impossible to separate his identity from his complicated family history, which confines him to a perpetual state of transition and prohibits him from any sort of discrete individuality.
In the poem “Immigrant Haibun,” Vuong shifts away from the use of origin stories towards a haibun which is a Japanese poetic form. He employs a mix of Western and Eastern form allusions as an expression of his experience and an attempt to discover how he can inhibit both spaces. Because he believes “form [to be] an extension of a poem’s content,” he uses a hybridity of form to demonstrate the instability he feels about his experience as an immigrant. This poem explores the imaginative journey of his parents on a boat sailing to the United States. Similarly to the origin stories, he examines how this moment of strife was his imaginative moment of conception when he says “the ship rocked as [his father] swelled inside [his mother]” (16). The word “swelled” has a sexual connotation in this context, so this line refers to Vuong’s creation. Because this fabricated conception occurs during the physical journey of immigration, literally in between Vietnam and the United States, Vuong’s birth moment occurs in an transitional space. Later in the poem, he states that “sometimes [he] feel[s] like an ampersand” (16). The ampersand is not a word of closure; instead, it represents a joining and combining of two disparate clauses and ideas, mirroring how Vuong himself exists as a physical combination of nationalities as an immigrant. However, the ampersand also represents a transition between two thoughts. Vuong identifies himself with the ampersand because what defines his birth is a state of movement, so he feels caught in between in the same way that an ampersand exists in an intermediate state.
Vuong ends the section by suggesting that his feeling of confusion regarding his identity might never disappear because he carries the transgenerational emotional trauma of his ancestors. In “Immigrant Haibun,” Vuong states that when he was born, “love’s echo [was] hardening into a boy” because he was a tangible representation of his parents love and experiences (16). The majority of this first section, however, is about his parents’ experiences, not his own. In the last poem of the section, “Self-Portrait as Exit Wounds,” Vuong switches from imagining the past to examining his own experience as an immigrant. He begins the poem with the word “instead,” which suggests that he is shifting directions in the collection and offering an alternative (26). When referring to this self-portrait, Vuong repeatedly says “let it be,” which is a passive construction that is asking for change (26). As demonstrated by using a passive form, Vuong is the person writing his self-portrait and yet he does not have full agency over its contents because his self-portrait is not solely constructed by him. By putting this self-portrait in relation to the previous poems about his family history, he suggests that his own identity is inextricable from his ancestral memory. The idea of echos mirrors the structure of the first section because the final poem, his self-portrait, is an “echo” of the rest of the section, as is evidenced by the repetition of images woven throughout the first section such as water, violence, and exit wounds. The poems about his parents are “love’s echo” and Vuong himself is the “boy” that the “love’s echo[s]” have created. Because Vuong was created by these echoes of ancestral emotional trauma and ultimately becomes the echo, himself, he will never truly be able to move away from the pain and confusion of immigration.
Vuong was not present to directly experience the trauma of the Vietnam War; however, he still experiences the effects due to the trans-generational nature of emotional trauma. In the first section of the book, he presents the issue of how the constant state of transition and movement in his family history affects his sense of identity, which is inseparable from his ancestral memory of the pain of immigration. However, in the end of the book, Vuong ultimately embraces the past “the way snow touches bare skin – & is, suddenly, snow no longer” (85). When snow touches skin, it fades away, and in the same way, the emotional pain of his past diminishes. The melting of snow is also a transformative process, which mirrors the change from solely pain to also appreciation. The confusion about his bifurcated identity will never disappear and he will always be aware of it in the same way that an individual is aware of snow melting on their skin; however, by the end of the collection, he sees that there is also beauty in being connected to his ancestral past. Although he may grow and evolve, this change will always grow out of the fractures of his dislocated identity but also out of love.Because of the United States’ involvement in the Vietnam War, a proxy war to the Cold War, a wave of Vietnamese refugees immigrated to the United States in an attempt to flee the political instability of Vietnam. Poet Ocean Vuong immigrated from Vietnam to America at the age of 2, and has spent the majority of his life in the states. In his renowned book, Night Sky with Exit Wounds, Ocean Vuong explores the ways in which his experience as an immigrant affect his sense of identity; although he was not alive for the Vietnamese War, Vuong examines in the first section of his book how the emotional trauma of the war works transgenerationally and continues to affect his identity in the present day by forcing him into a perpetual transitional state.
Because his parents refuse to talk about the war, there is a generational disconnect which further dissociates Vuong from the past. His parents respond to his questions about the past with an unwillingness to talk, largely in part because of all the sacrifices his parents made in order to provide a secure future so Vuong might never have to think about these struggles. Therefore, Vuong does not have access to stories about immigration, so the majority of the first section of the book is an imaginative trope to construct a story for himself. The first poem of the collection is entitled “Threshold,” which implies a certain liminality – a space of transition and transformation. By titling the poem this, Vuong foreshadows the rest of section where he attempts to transgress a threshold to understanding the past. The poem depicts a moment where he “watched, through the keyhole” his father playing guitar and singing (3). In this moment, He is unable to fully see everything because looking through the keyhole is only a partial view of the situation. Vuong is looking through that which has locked him out of this moment – cueing the reader into what he will do in this section; on a metonymic level, then, the key illustrates Vuong’s attempts to try and understand the past that he has been barred from previously. Referring to the moment with his father, Vuong says “he was singing, which is why I remember it” (3). This memory is framed by associations and through the lens of a voice, mirroring how the only recollection of the past that Vuong obtains is through an oral history. However, because the moment is an imaginative one, his identity and connection to the past remains uncertain. Vuong states, “Even my name/knelt down inside me,” which demonstrates a separation and perhaps a displacement of self. His name, foisted onto him by his family, contains a sense of ancestral past within it. However, in this construction, his name is independent from his being, which demonstrates that he has not been able to fully connect with his family history. While Vuong attempts to use oral histories in order to locate his own identity against that of his ancestors, this fabricated memory is unable to completely bridge the generational disconnect that constructs his identity.
Vuong’s sense of identity is only further fractured by the painful conflict that is his formative birth moment. His mother is the daughter of an American military general in Vietnam during the war and a Vietnamese woman, and therefore Vuong would not exist without the war. However, he feels a strong sense of ambivalence about the war because it both created him as well as propelled him out of his home country. In the poem “Aubade with Burning City,” Vuong explores his complicated feelings surrounding the war. He begins the poem by presenting an image of beauty and innocence with “milkflower petals in the street” (10). The next line, however, complicates the image by comparing the petals to “pieces of a girl’s dress,” suggesting that this aesthetically beautiful moment also carries dark undertones about death and slashed innocence. The line break creates a juxtaposition for the reader that emphasizes the contrast between innocence and the horrors of war. The rest of the poem continues in a similar manner, demonstrating the facade of beauty and happiness within which the horrors of war are hidden. Throughout the poem, Vuong weaves in lines from the song “White Christmas” where the term “white” has a double meaning; other than snow, it represents the American military presence in Vietnam during the war. These lines demonstrate the irony of hearing American songs about having a happy holiday while the American presence in Vietnam causes destruction. This ambivalence about his feelings regarding the past are heightened because he would not exist without this pain and destruction. The way Vuong writes about the juxtaposition of beauty and conflict in the past as his formative origin story reflects how he feels about his identity in the present – ambivalent and confused.
By repurposing classic origin stories, Vuong examines how writing allows him to explore the complexity of immigration being his formative birth moment. In the original story of the Odyssey, the moment when Odysseus returns to his son Telemachus is represented as a moment of Odysseus’ wit and cunning as he disguises himself as a beggar. However, in Vuong’s retelling in “Telemachus”, his father is actually struggling while Vuong “pull[s] [his] father out of the water, drag[ging] him by his hair” (7). His father’s “knuckles [are] carving a trail” as he gets pulled lifelessly towards the shore, evoking an image of agony and bleeding knuckles. This image represents the pain of immigration to a new place, even while his father is escaping war-torn Vietnam with a “bombed cathedral” and “bullet hole[s]” (7). Although he is not the one physically affected by the process of being brought to shore, he must deal with the struggle of dislocation and deal with the effects of the immigration – mirroring the way transgenerational emotional trauma functions. Similarly, the trail created by his father’s knuckles is destroyed by “the waves [that] rush in to erase” it (7). The trail, representing the evidence of his father’s immigration, gets washed away which prevents Vuong from accessing it; this loss of history paralleles Vuong’s detachment from the past because of the generational disconnect and oral history. When comparing himself to Telemachus in the original story, however, Vuong gives himself a sense of heroism and personal agency as he assists his father. By changing the fate of Telemachus, he explores whether he can use writing to explore his own role in the process of immigration to give himself more control and personal agency over his sense of identity. His repurposing of an origin myth is an attempt to locate himself within the space of ancestral memory and change it to fit his new identity as an Asian American. Now that he is in America, he has the ability to try to create his own story such as through the act of writing this story. And yet, he is also still constrained by this mythology, by his disconnect from the past, and by the transgenerational emotional trauma of immigration. Vuong rewrites these origin stories to help both himself and the reader access the complexity of these moments and understand how he himself was created out of this moment of both power and pain.
Although Vuong attempts to exert control over his identity, his effort is limited because it is impossible to separate his identity from his complicated family history, which confines him to a perpetual state of transition and prohibits him from any sort of discrete individuality.
In the poem “Immigrant Haibun,” Vuong shifts away from the use of origin stories towards a haibun which is a Japanese poetic form. He employs a mix of Western and Eastern form allusions as an expression of his experience and an attempt to discover how he can inhibit both spaces. Because he believes “form [to be] an extension of a poem’s content,” he uses a hybridity of form to demonstrate the instability he feels about his experience as an immigrant. This poem explores the imaginative journey of his parents on a boat sailing to the United States. Similarly to the origin stories, he examines how this moment of strife was his imaginative moment of conception when he says “the ship rocked as [his father] swelled inside [his mother]” (16). The word “swelled” has a sexual connotation in this context, so this line refers to Vuong’s creation. Because this fabricated conception occurs during the physical journey of immigration, literally in between Vietnam and the United States, Vuong’s birth moment occurs in an transitional space. Later in the poem, he states that “sometimes [he] feel[s] like an ampersand” (16). The ampersand is not a word of closure; instead, it represents a joining and combining of two disparate clauses and ideas, mirroring how Vuong himself exists as a physical combination of nationalities as an immigrant. However, the ampersand also represents a transition between two thoughts. Vuong identifies himself with the ampersand because what defines his birth is a state of movement, so he feels caught in between in the same way that an ampersand exists in an intermediate state.
Vuong ends the section by suggesting that his feeling of confusion regarding his identity might never disappear because he carries the transgenerational emotional trauma of his ancestors. In “Immigrant Haibun,” Vuong states that when he was born, “love’s echo [was] hardening into a boy” because he was a tangible representation of his parents love and experiences (16). The majority of this first section, however, is about his parents’ experiences, not his own. In the last poem of the section, “Self-Portrait as Exit Wounds,” Vuong switches from imagining the past to examining his own experience as an immigrant. He begins the poem with the word “instead,” which suggests that he is shifting directions in the collection and offering an alternative (26). When referring to this self-portrait, Vuong repeatedly says “let it be,” which is a passive construction that is asking for change (26). As demonstrated by using a passive form, Vuong is the person writing his self-portrait and yet he does not have full agency over its contents because his self-portrait is not solely constructed by him. By putting this self-portrait in relation to the previous poems about his family history, he suggests that his own identity is inextricable from his ancestral memory. The idea of echos mirrors the structure of the first section because the final poem, his self-portrait, is an “echo” of the rest of the section, as is evidenced by the repetition of images woven throughout the first section such as water, violence, and exit wounds. The poems about his parents are “love’s echo” and Vuong himself is the “boy” that the “love’s echo[s]” have created. Because Vuong was created by these echoes of ancestral emotional trauma and ultimately becomes the echo, himself, he will never truly be able to move away from the pain and confusion of immigration.
Vuong was not present to directly experience the trauma of the Vietnam War; however, he still experiences the effects due to the trans-generational nature of emotional trauma. In the first section of the book, he presents the issue of how the constant state of transition and movement in his family history affects his sense of identity, which is inseparable from his ancestral memory of the pain of immigration. However, in the end of the book, Vuong ultimately embraces the past “the way snow touches bare skin – & is, suddenly, snow no longer” (85). When snow touches skin, it fades away, and in the same way, the emotional pain of his past diminishes. The melting of snow is also a transformative process, which mirrors the change from solely pain to also appreciation. The confusion about his bifurcated identity will never disappear and he will always be aware of it in the same way that an individual is aware of snow melting on their skin; however, by the end of the collection, he sees that there is also beauty in being connected to his ancestral past. Although he may grow and evolve, this change will always grow out of the fractures of his dislocated identity but also out of love.