Finding Refuge
Sandra Valabregue. ‘Totem Tree III-3’ 2020
Hila Ratzabi
Hila Ratzabi, former editor-in-chief and poetry editor of the literary journal Storyscape, is currently director of virtual content and programs at Ritualwell.org. She is the author of a poetry chapbook, The Apparatus of Visible Things (2009).
BOOKS
The Truffle Eye
By Vaan Nguyen
Translated by Adriana X. Jacobs
Zephyr Press, 120 pages, $15
Israeli poet Vaan Nguyen was born in 1982 in Ashkelon to Vietnamese refugees who had been rescued from the South China Sea three years earlier and granted Israeli citizenship by Prime Minister Menachem Begin. Growing up in Jaffa, she was often bullied for her Asian otherness even as she immersed herself in Hebrew language and culture. The 2005 documentary film The Journey of Vaan Nguyen follows the poet and her father as they travel to Vietnam in a fruitless attempt to reclaim family land stolen by the Communists. The film reveals Nguyen’s experience of displacement and longing to return to a Vietnam that no longer resembles the country her parents remembered.
To what degree can “refugeehood” be read into Nguyen’s poems? Some critics tend to exoticize her, overemphasizing her Vietnamese otherness even within awe-filled praise for her innovative work. Evyn Lê Espiritu Gandhi, for instance, an expert on Vietnam War refugees, regards Nguyen’s poetry as an occasion for literary-political alignment and solidarity between the Vietnamese-Israeli population and similarly marginalized Palestinians.
Nguyen herself resists such interpretations: “I am a poet who does not feel like a refugee,” she has said. Adriana X. Jacobs, translator of Nguyen’s recent collection The Truffle Eye, likewise cautions against reading too much into the poet’s background: “Introducing Nguyen’s poetry to the Anglophone reader needs to account for the particularities of the Vietnamese experience in Israel without letting this history overshadow her work.”
Nguyen’s unflinching poems report on travels from Tel Aviv to Hanoi to Hollywood to New York, from one man’s bed to another. They reveal a restless soul whose only true home is in language. But the architecture of language proves to be unsteady. Grammar and meaning fall apart as the poet attempts to construct something enduring out of perpetual displacement.
Indeed displacement, internal and geographical both, is the primary undercurrent of the poems in The Truffle Eye, from the very first lines of its opening poem, “Mekong River”: “Tonight I moved between three beds / like I was sailing on the Mekong / and whispered the beauty of the Tigris and the Euphrates.” Placed at the beginning of the book, these lines serve as a thesis statement, tracing the speaker’s movements across lovers and rivers in search of an elusive home. Situating Nguyen in the Hebrew canon, Jacobs notes the reference to H.N. Bialik’s “Between the Tigris and Euphrates.”
Other poems in The Truffle Eye address cultural difference through the lens of gendered power dynamics. Here, for example, is “Culture Stain,” worth quoting in full:
Examine before you extract
the seeds of nothing at the riverbank
with the village air
and the roads
and so on.
In the horizon the city begins, a portable
wax poet without a patron
or a fanzine.
A rosy sun sets
on a musical Monetbach lake in your eyes—
When we hold each other
you’ll ask where I came from. I’ll say
I came from this rot.
Where did you come from, you’re asking,
I mean, parents?
The poem begins with a moment of contemplation of the “seeds of nothing” (zeraim shel hevel—the Hebrew giving a nod to Ecclesiastes through hevel), an attempt to transcend the stain of culture from the title. The poet wishes to write without reference to gender or ethnicity, the way the proverbial Western white male poet can disappear into the universal. Yet our perspective is soon drawn to a view of the city, a stand-in for a “wax poet” who can’t fully realize her vocation, because the blue-eyed lover will inevitably ask where she came from. As much as the speaker might aspire to be a poet who contemplates the “seeds of nothing,” the gaze of the dominant other always seems to remind her of her cultural difference.
Nguyen’s poems articulate the experience of otherness that Nguyen has had to navigate and struggle against her whole life, but they speak out of that experience with such sharpness and ferocity that they grant the poet a position of power. That language sometimes takes the callous form of traditionally male “locker-room talk,” as in the poem “Data Processing”:
You read the smart poetry
Coming out of Herzliya Pituach, near the beach.
Once you were a pilot with seven strikes on enemy territory.
My life:
Seasons of men.
A dick list
Wiped clean.
This short, acerbic poem hinges on its center line, “My life.” The three preceding lines are addressed to the lover who reads smart poetry and performs masculine acts of aggression in the military. The three subsequent lines retort to the first half of the poem, as if the speaker’s list of sexual conquests can balance out or outweigh the man’s (implied) intellectual arrogance and bravado. The original Hebrew uses the term tabula rasa, which Jacobs translates crisply as “wiped clean”—though this loses the philosophical and literary connotations of the original term. Tabula rasa here hints that this is not merely a reclaiming of power through sexuality but through language itself, which the poet can wipe clean and reinvent—exactly as Nguyen does.
Sylvia Plath (“And I eat men like air”) is one literary ancestor to Nguyen’s cutthroat poetry. But there are others. In the poem “Ideal,” Nguyen writes: “Soon she’ll drip, soon / she’ll throw a chair screaming / ‘This is crazy!’ / This mental case / A witches’ scourge / A bat cutting across the sky. / Underneath, a bourgeois enemy on a mattress.” This recalls Anne Sexton’s “Her Kind”: “I have gone out, a possessed witch, / haunting the black air, braver at night; / dreaming evil, I have done my hitch / over the plain houses, light by light: / lonely thing, twelve-fingered, out of mind.”
Love Jewish Ideas?
Subscribe to the print edition of Sources today.
The Truffle Eye, filled with surrealistic imagery and collage-like constructions, is itself out of its mind. It exhibits the poet’s dexterous use—and deliberate misuse—of Hebrew to push the language to its limits. Jacobs’s careful and intelligent renderings do justice to Nguyen’s linguistic playfulness, most evident in the absurdist short story that ends the collection. In “The Truffle Eye” a man wakes up one day in an unnamed city and decides to “change his identity.” He becomes a woman with truffle eyes who confers blessings on passersby in the street. After she goes blind in one eye, Eva (as she’s called) attracts a mob of “necktied men” who are amazed by this “interesting” person. Soon the mob becomes a herd of beasts, a “human storm” that violently drags Eva until she manages to escape and return home. Without giving away the ending, I can say that the story serves as a metaphor for Nguyen’s own dizzying transformation into an Israeli literary “celebrity.”
If it disquiets the squeamish reader, The Truffle Eye also brings to Israeli literature a bold assertion: despite a lifetime of being the object of the other’s gaze, the poet wields the power to use language to make something new and wholly one’s own—perhaps even a home.
This article appears in Sources, Spring 2022.
