In Root Fractures (Scribner Book Company, 2024), Diana Khoi Nguyen listens to the absences in histories ignored or buried. The generations of trauma left adrift along the body’s diasporic experience, often known secondhand, or in silence. “Sometimes, to love your family you have to become a stranger,” she writes—but in the aftermath of her brother Oliver’s suicide, her poetry looks to renew intimacy by piecing together the scraps of the past: she speaks to where silence is cold. She listens for the echo of voices cut out, gagged in imperialist erasure or as scattered, dislocated signs that lay quiet in family. Though much of her life seems blotted-out, the poetics of Nguyen’s prehistory finds in each cutout a figure of the before.
In the poem “A Story About Holes,” Nguyen writes: “a girl dug a hole at the beach, sent her siblings to fetch water.” The voice is tired and blunt, the futility of repetition adjacent to family-life:
She thought in concentric circles, the tides coming
and going, overlapping each other. When she poured water in,
the hole filled up, then emptied, its walls caved in. She began again.
If she could have, she would have dug a hole every day, one
beside the other, then another, and another. A hole is a hole,
but none of them are the same.
With each slow, meticulous enjambment and hung line break, Nguyen distances the girl from the speaker. A Woman in the Dunes-esque suffering as infinite as sand, the girl excavates holes only to fill them, and again digs, and fills, and digs. “A hole is a hole, / but none of them are the same” seems a trite aphorism, and Nguyen leans into the repetitious condition that is the sea. The heaviness of the poem complements her poetics of exhaustion.
Nguyen’s poetry looks to echo off the walls of holes, if only for the semblance of some sound, some shape or form, some reason. Similarly, in the prose poem ‘Đổi Mới,’ the adjacency to violence is told in quiet loss and blunt images: “neatly folded piles of shirts, pants, and skirts, flattened purses rest upon.” A sense of dryness pervades the poem: “As they slept, their bodies grew into the future, like raw rice in the well of a bowl absorbing any moisture around it. Atop my parents’ unused bed all our dust gathers.” The mention of parents settles beside the misplaced image, the strangers. And where gaps lay unfilled, figures take root.
Nguyen offers unplaceable desperation. She doesn’t pretend to set her family’s trauma anywhere besides her own mythology. For example, in “Misinformation,” she acknowledges the veracity of language bent in fault lines, a life’s secrets divulged in textuality:
And the tide flowing and receding, inches further inland, like a palm erasing where they have been
These myths shift imperceptibly each time we recall
them.
Stored along the fault lines of memory
we pick up where we left off, unaware of what has changed.
Unawareness can be exhaustion, but the very act of poetry is recognition—witnessing. To tell her truth, Nguyen must tell what is, to her, a mystery itself. Such mysteries have plagued her life. Why “her father absently stares at his brother’s leg, which may or may not contain a bullet wound,” and how such absences escape stares and modal verbs is one of the many mysteries: like, why associations like “tennis,” from Old French, foray into Saigon, and why she needs to decolonize a mother’s tongue to find her own; why roots connect “from the verb praecidere, prae- ‘in advance’ + caedere ‘to cut.’” Why “were Vietnamese in 1975” and (after line-break) “are engineers,” and why things (titles, objects, sounds) seem to repeat, like in the sea, in holes.
To immigrants, in particular, the sea is a place of repetition, of uncertainty and waiting. A space where we see “in low tide / sheer / curtains strewn,” and “high tide conceals / who emerges.” The seven poems titled “Cape Disappointment” in the collection are similarly cyclical and repetitious. In one, Nguyen writes “sedge and sea asparagus submerge, reemerge” and in another, “time and time again it is time we can’t apprehend”—the alliterative stresses and near-rhymes grate against each other, advancing and receding in calculated claustrophobia, where nausea “arrives like showers sweeping the sandbar, toes edged at the jetty.” But does anything come?
Throughout Root Fractures, Nguyen explores this repetition. The poem “Omnidirectional,” for example, plays as much into the possibilities of repetition as it does the impossibility of escaping bureaucratic absurdity: alienating each fragment in its own sea of blank space, the poem has no set trajectory and can be read in any direction. Sometimes it seems like aimless parody. “I am your father,” on its own, brings to mind Star Wars. But in the context of “Omnidirectional,” one can only see parody as a desperate attempt to look for a smile amidst suffering or as disillusionment with the American commodification of cultural forms. Meanwhile, the confusion of a family displaced from their home hangs over everything. A few (of infinite) “Omnidirectional” readings include:
The sentimental: “because / I am your father / father cry too / father cry too.”
Or a memory of erasure, forced silence: “My daughter / forget everything.”
And if you’re realistic with the father’s coldness, there’s “can you imagine / father cry too / I am your father / just imagine” or simply “son / don’t say anything,” akin to her father as the patriarch looming over Oliver’s death, alongside the institutional authority by which systemized violence and degradation accompany the displacement of thousands (in ‘processing centers’ for Vietnamese refugees).
Oliver’s death and absence drives the invisible, evasive focal-point Root Fractures hinges on. The reader often wonders: have I been here before? But the I is disjointed. Nguyen writes of her I as an assemblage of “the sounds which enter us unregistered, the cry I swallowed dragging sharps across my flesh while down the hallway my still-alive brother wondered if the humming in the walls was real.” Her selfhood has yet to know steady ground, as “it has been years since the state’s last major earthquake and still the aftershocks arrive.”
Similarly, the collection is spoken in flashes and reappearances, whether in the backwash of oppression, the web of life-forms, the beauty of reinterpretation—with his father, Nguyen probes if it was “his marriage that broke him, not the war, not even the loss of a son which will have happened decades later.” She corrects: “no, Sơn, not quiet, look at his hands: they’re humming.” Did her father hear? Could he? To consider this, she removes herself from the lives left to her in absence: “at the time of their son’s death, he joins my parents’ fathers in the elsewhere.” Throughout the collection, the textual distance (in pronouns alone) spans magnitudes of loss as “daily life resumes after an interruption.”
But Nguyen’s eye is set on rediscovery. She questions everything: questions how tenses, possessions, languages, and commodities leap at each other, how a tonal multi-consciousness—at once cultural, familial, and entrenched in personal history—is polyvocal, but never assigns a speaker. She questions why her father is there, catching a glimpse of “lizard-green” tennis courts, and why too ‘green’ is throughout the collection “market greens,” or “The only seals in Vietnam: / American men with green faces,” or “kelp-green curtains” (the “jungle in another country”), or at last the “evergreen” of an olive tree—non-native to the California—on a sunburnt lawn. Her brother: Oliver Khoi Nguyen.
Trees are often invoked throughout the collection, networks and roots connecting in the underbelly of the page. Often, trees are the difficulty of Vietnamese immigrants to reconcile plant-life with the trauma forcefully associated with it. Nguyen notes palm trees as “ornamental” in California, though “we know what happens when naphthenic and palmitic acids are dropped on it.” She knows multiplicities and layers as generative: Root Fractures is a collection that bridges itself, crossing old, buried seams. A collection that forgets its authority.
An early poem may read, “They wake up in a country to a quiet they don’t recognize, dust rising like smoke around bees, smoke without fire.”
A poem in the middle may read the burden of trauma:
He told us there was loud humming inside the walls—Go to sleep, we said. And he couldn’t
couldn’t go to sleep.
Yesterday, your father and I found dead bees inside the attic.
Thousands.
Because generations past, and generations longer, lived under colonial violence, in fear of colors, and jungles, and because self, and dust + hands + humming go hand-in-hand, and the sea is scary because it’s been crossed, and bees in hives are artillery rounds, or Giant Asian Honeybees, or carriers like Hornets or Wasps, and yellow is racial and when it’s rain it’s not really rain it’s feces or T-2 mycotoxin or seabees, and bees don’t go near the sea because the water will kill them; most importantly, however, because the buzz, and the palm—the gentle palm, the motherly palm—will clasp a stinger dead. The poem continues:
Once, when he was still alive, I found a dead bee on the windowsill of
our bathroom.
Not thinking much of it
I swept it into the trash with my palm, a motion captured in the dust like afterimage.
The next morning: a dead bee on the windowsill
the other still in the bin.
I told no one.
In associations, Nguyen teases out the trauma hidden in (and from) her story: told neither backward nor forward, but in fractures that can fit together the morass of pasts/futures and objects/gaps. “In old pictures, a girl whose posture I know as mine,” she writes, then turns: “except the year is 1964. Behind her, a portrait of her mother’s family, and here I find my brother again.” In two sentences alone is the flash of her mother as present-moment, then corrected to her mother’s mother (“her mother” often in place of “grandmother”), until driven to the weight of a lost brother. The generational trauma that cut her mother from her mother.
But she knows bones and weapons. She knows instincts and associations, traditions and conditions, and she knows how alienating they are because they’re an inch from experience left to trauma. This is her inheritance. But the unresolved isn’t lost, and there’s space for reconciliation: ‘my work inspires mother to write poems I will inherit from her.’ The lived experience is lent to mother, whose very life has fell to erasure: “Bươm bướm, she whispered to my mother, butterfly, the word my mother used to reference our genitals, two cupped wings like a heartbeat, bươm bướm.” It’s hidden. Generational trauma is passed in its own rite: “in hiding all that year unmentioned by the coast, my mother as a young girl had her first period, its dark liquid unseen in their nest underground. Bươm bướm, the smear of red between my thighs perfectly symmetrical. Two lips pressed together as if to kiss, or to strike.”
Throughout the collection is a narrative, lineated in the honesty of root echoes and fractures. Vague familiarity builds around her roots, and loops us in with her, with the mothers whittled off her shape, the mothers beneath ground during The Fall of Saigon. The fathers with whom she “engineered a new life” with.
Regardless of the memories and trauma displaced, roaming confused, sometimes happen upon each other: “inside the womb, a fetus will toss and turn frequently during pregnancy. My brother took his life in the garage, a place where he arrived the day my parents brought him home from the hospital nursery.” Having cut himself out of the family’s portraits, Nguyen’s series of visual poems “Tug,” “Beside,” and “Root Fractures”—appearing at seemingly inconsistent intervals—recreate his silhouette, an outline leaving behind the family’s truths. In another, “Đổi Mới,” we overhear “hostage, soldier, victim. Shooter, killer, Charlie. Body beside, body below, parts of the body.” In “Family Portraits,” the connections grow clearer:
in tug-of-war
two sides face off
without rope
use arms
The poetry tugs against itself. The visual poems in “Root Fracture” are cut too: sometimes the whole family is cut-out. Or children. Or the side of a face. Sometimes the tears leak letters, and other times they’re filled with language unspoken. Sometimes the gaps are text, so tangled together they can only be read in contrasts. Overlaid, under or above. Often just “pale white, white” space, or “yellow, yellow” space—maybe “thin white strips.” Maybe a man. Maybe the “unseen hand lifting black chopsticks, rice against a lip.” Maybe, even, a color. “Family Portraits” continues:
all this time watching arms
now I see
her bandage
there comes a time
when a wound
continues undressed
The polyvocality of Nguyen’s sound and family grows twined together, a litany of memories and feelings all in interplay. She knows a bandage’s true healing only when it falls, and the wound is clear. ‘A bandaged hand does nothing to soften a mother’s blow. But you can strike with words, the child learns, striking to stop the blows received, not realizing how a shield also cuts.’
Maybe it’s not the bandage at all, but why it must cover—or what it cuts.
Maybe it’s those not cut out, but left with the aftermath.
