Yearly Archives: 2019

A submission call for "texture poems" from the Vietnamese diaspora, in commemoration of the 44th anniversary of April 30, 1975. This year on diaCRITICS, we wish to reflect on this day in terms of both the past and the present. We would like to consider “textures” of diasporic experience that have since been gathered, created, collected and re-collected, imagined and re-imagined, since that historic day in 1975.

"I dive into history while recognizing that I am more than a war. / We are our ancestors’ wildest dreams. / We have suffered and continue to, but that doesn’t define us. // What value do my communities have in society? // Who is considered worthy of praise? // What is considered natural or unnatural? // What does utopia look like? // I decide. / We decide."

"Accuracy, though, was never Nao’s goal. Instead, Sheep Machine is a meditation on the act of seeing. Nao asks: what do we see and how do we describe it? It is a question of truth: is what I see true and can I tell you what I see truthfully?"

"To have Vietnamese representation on stage is imperative, inspiring, moving, and bloody outstanding. I cackled like a maniac whilst keeping myself from a full on effin’ sob fest. In fact, I am still processing these waves of emotion."

The blind man draws circles and traces charms / Bloodline cursed over three generations: / A mother burns her baby with fire and water / To prove the newborn is not his father’s future assassin.

We are Vietnamese. I did not feel at home in my own skin, a banana: yellow on the outside, white on the inside. That is, until I met other Vietnamese Australian artists like Chi Vu who had Vietnamese ancestry and artistic sensibilities.

Isabelle Thuy Pelaud is the co-founder of the Diasporic Vietnamese Artists Network. In this intimate interview, she talks to Vi Khi Nao about everything from poetry, to the long echoes of colonial dynamics in France, to her fight for the lowercase 'i' as a form of subversive rebellion, to dreams, to wonderment, to the beauty of anti-theoretical living as learned from her dog Coco. 

Nhạc vàng songs are like ghosts living in and out of diaspora, trailing behind Vietnamese veterans, rewinding themselves, back to their country and the struggles of living through destitution and ideological polarization. The political and historical erasures that were never archived in print media were/are re/recorded and re/produced as songs. […]

I try out the words in context, the way she used to—or at least the way I remember she used to. Family must Hy Sinh for each other. Mother has experienced so much Khó Khăn. You must Chịu Khó in order to be successful. […]

In January 2019, The Djerassi Resident Artists Program, in partnership with the Diasporic Vietnamese Artists Network (DVAN), hosted 12 women and gender-nonconforming writers of the Vietnamese diaspora, to take part in a hybrid literary/art collective project, She Who Has No Master(s). On the last morning, Vi Khi Nao asked each writer to answer a different question for this collection of one-line interviews.