Books in Review
Hai-Dang Phan
Reenactments
Louisville, Kentucky. Sarabande Books.
- 98 pages.
Historical reenactments have gained a bur-
geoning popularity recently. According to
Jenny Thompson, author of War Games
(2004), more than eight thousand histori-
ans, war enthusiasts, and adventure seekers
gather annually to stage a historical battle.
Although these re-creations can be surpris-
ingly authentic, the stakes are never as high
as they are for those portrayed in Hai-Dang
Phan’s debut poetry collection, Reenact-
ments (2019), who frequently confront,
and are confronted by, reenactments of the
Vietnam War. Phan, who also wears the
hats of the translator and the literary critic,
was born in Vietnam in 1980 and came
to the United States as a refugee when he
was almost two years old. For him, the war
doesn’t need to be performed by makeshift
actors. The war is still here.
Phan’s debut begins with the epigraph-
warning “Maybe nothing ever happens
once and is finished,” which is drawn from
the seemingly unlikely source of William
Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom! (1936). It is
an ambitious addition to Vietnam War lit-
erature and a fearless contribution to the
small, albeit energetic, body of verse by the
new generation of Vietnamese American
refugees. His poems, somewhat like reenac-
tors, don different garments and come in
different sizes and forms—there is a ghazal,
a haiku, prose poems, sequence poems,
poems written in unrhymed couplets and
triplets, translations of Vietnamese poems,
poems that include the Vietnamese lan-
guage, and poems with indented lines.
While the urge to impress and show range
is common in most debuts, what is uncom-
mon in Reenactments is the level of control
that is exercised. It whispers what it needs
to say, not necessarily because it is afraid
to scream but because it understands that
screaming is not always the best way to
communicate.
This is true even in heart-wrenching
poems, like “Video Elegy,” where the poetic
voice, which has the tenderness of a mater-
nal lamentation, addresses a fallen soldier:
“They sent you back / nicely packaged, /
cleanly and precisely // converted / into
VHS. Forever // I will mourn / the record
of your face, / personally // and profession-
ally.” These lines, like the lines of so many of
Phan’s poems, are linguistically simple but
emotionally complex. The fallen soldier is in
some sense preserved by being “converted
/ into VHS,” but, concurrently, his human-
ity is lost in the way he is “packaged” and
commodified. He comes back from the war
only virtually; he is not buried in a grave
but in the tapes that contain his last living
moments.
Phan returns repeatedly to different
visual representations of the war and of
Vietnam in his collection, often to briefly
have access to a time and place that are
unfamiliar to him. In “Quiet Americans,” a
family watches the Phillip Noyce–directedfilm that adapts Graham Greene’s novel The
Quiet American, and they are “spellbound
/ by old Saigon flickering in the rear win-
dow.” Similarly, in “My Viet Cong,” there is
an admission that “As a kid, I watched every
single Vietnam War movie. / Apocalypse
Now. The Deer Hunter. Full Metal Jacket.
Platoon. // You name it. I was too young
to realize I was after / my own face on the
NVA soldiers and VC guerillas.” What’s
striking in these moments is Phan’s ability
to inquire into the complex psychology of
refugees and ask important questions: How
do images of the past affect the generation
that has not participated in the events?
What happens when this generation real-
izes, like the speaker in “My Viet Cong,”
that these moving images are themselves
fraught with historical inaccuracies, that
“they shot the war in the Philippines” and
that, ironically, “Vietnamese refugees were
hired to act various roles, like VC”?
The answers are implicitly planted
throughout the collection, like mines. That
they are not thrown at the reader like gre-
nades should not imply that the ironies of
war escape the poet’s sharp eye. In fact, Phan
is at war and at war with these ironies from
the beginning of Reenactments. In “Small
Wars,” he “pulled the pin on the smoke
grenade, tossed it / under a tremendous
wing, then slumped over my aircraft like a
/ limp ragdoll.” It is ambiguous whether this
is a war zone, a reenactment, or, metaphori-
cally, the imitative wars that survivors and
their children often stage psychologically. In
this ambiguity, there is also an indictment
of a contemporary culture that monetizes
the atrocities of war and treats wars, with
real and painful consequences, as reenact-
ments—plans them, assigns roles, decides
on a flexible end date, and always has plans
for the next ones. Aren’t we lucky to be
indicted by a poet with a voice this strong?
Christos Kalli
University of CambridgeHAI-DANG PHAN100 W LT SUMMER 2019