In ““The truth is memory has not forgotten us”: Memory, Identity, and Storytelling in Ocean Vuong’s On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous” Quan Manh Ha and Mia Tompkins examine how memory and storytelling interact to shape identity through the vehicle of “On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous” by Ocean Vuong. While this article deals mainly with the book by Vuong, there is crossover between the 2019 book and the 2014 poem of the same name. In both his novel and his poem, Vuong allows a glimpse of how violence and intimacy coexisted in his life at many different stages and created a foundation for his work.
Manh Ha and Tompkins share a brief history of Vuong, including that his poem and novel are semi-autobiographical, and through the use of a narrator named Little Dog crafting letters to his illiterate mother, a picture of transgenerational trauma emerges. The authors share how Vuong’s examples of violence at home often translate directly into seeking the same sorts of relationships outside of the home. This is an examination of how trauma begets trauma, and how wounds unhealed can lead to the creation of still more wounds.
Vuong’s narrator, Little Dog, is the victim of abuse at the hands of his mother, Rose. Rose commits physical, psychological and emotional abuse against her son, and that abuse is learned and replicated in Little Dog’s romantic relationship with Trevor, his same-sex partner. This creates many intersections from which to examine Vuong’s poem, novel, and life, though it shouldn’t be reduced to mere trauma porn. It is so much more than that, and Manh Ha and Tompkins dig right in to the depths to expose the parts where Vuong’s work is more than just oddly interesting.
A framework from which to not only view but understand Vuong’s work is meticulously laid out, including how to put the experience of Vietnamese Americans into historical context. The authors explain how the American war in Viet Nam was protested widely in the US, and they state “The US government responded to this dissent by attempting to control the narrative of the war through propaganda, the media, literature, and records” (4). What follows is an explanation of how Vietnamese children that were brought to the US after the war were indoctrinated into an American idealized version of history as part of their grasp at the American Dream. Many of these children have a type of historical amnesia, in which their own memories or the memories of their parents have been overridden and replaced with an image of America as a hero-savior country that cradles them in warm and loving arms, instead of being the country most responsible for their displacement and suffering.
Especially interesting is how the authors offer a scathing rebuke of how the US tries to hide the scars it has inflicted on and in many of her inhabitants by means of this indoctrination. According to the authors “Historical amnesia in the United States is an organized, systematic, and intentional mechanism for maintaining dominance. Rather than admitting responsibility or expressing shame, the US has selectively promoted its questionable notion of patriotism in order to sustain the nation’s ideological position” (5). This is, of course, exacerbated by many states in the US refusing to acknowledge complicity in any number of atrocities, and even refusing to allow the teaching of concepts that might lead to a critical examination of the role of the US in different national and international situations, including some wars. This includes the exclusion of topics such as critical race theory, racism, and sexism from some schools based on the actions of the legislators of those states.
While the history and the rebuke are fascinating, Manh Ha and Tompkins really shine when sharing how Vuong is able to, through the narrator Little Dog, excavate his own identity through the learned art of storytelling. One gets the sense that this was a monumental undertaking on Vuong’s behalf, as being a biracial, gay, abused, immigrant lends its own set of challenges to his unique experience. Little Dog’s personal history is pieced together through stories told by his mother and his grandmother, with each piece like a part in a jigsaw puzzle, connecting to other parts just enough to see a true picture emerge amid the pieces. This includes pieces of his family history that happened well before his birth, but that still had a monumental impact on his life.
Included in this identity exploration is Little Dog’s education at an American school, his learning of English, and his lack of skills speaking in his familial tongue. This creates a situation wherein “their generational differences are magnified by cultural disjunctions that are not easily explained, particularly out of their native contexts” (13). In this landscape, Little Dog attempts to make sense of a trauma that he never experienced but still continues to shape three generations of his family. Through the fractured retelling of his family’s traumatic story, Little Dog seeks to understand the events that will always impact his life, like the learned trauma responses to PTSD that is exhibited even though he never experienced the war. The authors share that “By writing about its cascading and brutalizing personal effects on the lives of Rose and Lan, Little Dog rewrites history” (15). Therein lies the power of storytelling.
On its own, Ocean Vuong’s 2014 poem “On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous” is a deep exploration of family, war, abuse and trauma. Taken in a larger context with Vuong’s novel of the same name, and viewed through the lens that Manh Ha and Tompkins create from the subtexts of history and the future, it can be viewed as little else than triumphant. In fact, to borrow Vuong’s own description, it is, ever so briefly, even gorgeous.
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