Ma Vang\u2019s work on refugee epistemology<\/a> as reorienting the nature of secrecy. The Secret War which the US had waged in Southeast Asia has as its corollary the secrecy of Hmong knowledge which is invalidated, but also becomes a form of resistance because it can\u2019t be co-opted into Western epistemologies. She has this reading of a missing baggage declaration form by Hmong refugees which symbolizes the things which are lost and irrecoverable to a people always on the run, and which thus represents the problems of archival work for Hmong historiography. What kind of historical arguments can you make when this war is supposed to be a secret and the US is intentionally destroying and withholding historical evidence? What is needed, then, is a new way of knowing. Perhaps this is what poetry offers us.<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\nMai Der: Ma\u2019s work has been instrumental for me, and in leading the discourse in Hmong studies. This project does try to offer a kind of knowledge that might work for Hmong people, or if not Hmong people, at least for me, as opposed to what Western thought wants to impose. It is hard to categorize what that form of thought is. That poem \u201cWe Can\u2019t Confirm\u201d describes this liminal state where you can\u2019t figure out if it\u2019s one or the other, and which resists being pulled either way. This resistance to categorization may be some ingrained form of survival, almost a refusal to conform to what makes sense to the \u201ccivilized\u201d mind, and a resistance toward falling in line with Western constructs which fall outside of Hmong cosmology altogether.<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n
Sydney: It seems to me that this is also what your collages do. At first, I had read them as the physical daze of the pain of experiencing yellow rain. But for the post-memory generation, it\u2019s also the epistemological daze of trying to figure out what had happened and realizing that everything is so indeterminate. That this is the liminal and fragmented space from which the Hmong subject must emerge.<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n
Mai Der: It is the liminal space of emergence. But there\u2019s also agency in this space that allows for the potential of a new state of certainty to surface. For so long, Hmong people have been shrouded in histories of uncertainty. Through migrations and wars over the centuries, there isn\u2019t even a clear sense of where Hmong people might have come from, probably southwestern China. All of this leads me to think our history is one of not knowing one\u2019s history. But in this not knowing, there is a kind of agency and power to push further. There\u2019s perhaps more heft in what one can achieve through one\u2019s work, as opposed to being from a place where one \u201cknows everything\u201d or when everything has already been pre-determined.<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n
Sydney: Agency in the refusal to organize oneself. Agency in the refusal to consolidate oneself into some illusory unity. In your conversation with Kao Kalia Yang, you had described the Hmong as an \u201corphan citizen.\u201d What does poetry look like that comes from an orphan citizen?<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n
Mai Der: That\u2019s a great question. There\u2019s the matter of what comes out stylistically and technically, craft-wise. But there\u2019s also the voice that emerges that does not belong anywhere, and which does not state who it is. Going back to that phrase, I even think that the word \u201ccitizen\u201d is problematic because not everyone gets to be a citizen. And maybe just \u201corphan\u201d is what we all are anyway. I think the poetry of the \u201corphan citizen\u201d comes from a place where you don\u2019t have all the answers, where there is a search for answers, but you get to a point of stasis, as opposed to the Western need to know everything. When you come from an \u201corphan citizen\u201d status, you have an openness to uncertainty and surprise, and a natural ability to adapt. The poems may not conform to the standard poem or conventions of writing. I see that in my own writing. In my first book Afterland,<\/em> I received comments from some readers: \u201cthis person doesn\u2019t know how to use grammar,\u201d \u201ctheir syntax is all over the place,\u201d or \u201cthis doesn\u2019t make sense to me.\u201d But I appreciated hearing that. I wasn\u2019t writing to meet the need of the reader. I was writing to meet that new need which we were talking about earlier: that new thing emerging from this sense of uncertainty. It\u2019s something I can\u2019t describe or explain or name. And I\u2019m okay with that.<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\nSydney: This seems to be a stylistic feature I\u2019ve noticed among other Asian American women poets such as Hoa Nguyen, Cathy Park Hong, or Theresa Cha. People criticize their poems for improper grammar when really, it\u2019s playful language. The racist reception of their work misses the fact that these poets are generating new ways of using language by messing with language.<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n
Mai Der: I love all the writers you just referenced! Allowing myself to break the rules of grammar is a literal and figurative dismantling of the Western text. It\u2019s not a complete dismantling but it destabilizes something in the reader. It\u2019s good to allow ourselves to be unsettled by what we read, by how it comes to us, and in what form.<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n
Sydney: My last question is about the last poem of your collection, \u201cYet There Is Still More.\u201d You write, \u201cThat refugees are put somewhere to wait \/ That refugees are put everywhere to wait \/ That wait is the refugee \/ That a refugee is waiting \/ That waiting must go on.\u201d On the one hand, you capture the horror of waiting, which remains indeterminate, which is a euphemism for the warehousing of refugee bodies, which becomes a form of living death. But also, you understand waiting as a form of perseverance, a persistence of the refugee body which critiques the nation-state by its very existence, waiting as a waiting for justice, or waiting as a waiting for history to be brought to light. What does waiting mean to you, and why did you end the collection here?<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n
Mai Der: I end the collection here because the story of yellow rain still goes on. The reader is not given this smoking gun answer about yellow rain. We have waited this long already. There are people still waiting everywhere around the world. For that poem to come at the end of a very long book is another moment for me to offer another commentary about the ongoing struggles of refugees, and particularly Hmong refugees. The waiting which continues to happen before anything about yellow rain will be known, which is perhaps never. And the idea of never is part of the idea of waiting. This poem tries to show that this is not where the story of yellow rain ends.<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n
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