Monthly Archives: July, 2020

A Conversation Among One: Reading Nhã Thuyên’s un martyred

Book, you call yourself a conversation but you know you are a monologue. You are one reader talking to mostly silenced poetry, waiting for another reader, for a me, an us, a them to come and breathe back into the space to make and keep the conversation alive, and perhaps to keep a poetry alive.

THIS IS FOR MẸ: The Birth of Vietnamese Londoners

I want the British Vietnamese identity to own both identities and values with more ease and less burden than our parents' generation faced.  I would like more British Vietnamese folks to really own who they are and be fearless in that.

Syntax ~ a poem by Thuy On

The keening of us / the spaces between / a kerning too distant

‘Human is a Half-Open Being’: An Interview with AJAR Press

My hopes and questions for AJAR are not separate from my hopes and questions for the Vietnamese language in its survival from all violences of the past [I am pessimistic and not exaggerated] and in its encounters with the other’s languages.

Book Review: Chapbooks by Jessica Nguyen & Natalie Linh Bolderston

These chapbooks center the histories women carry with them as well as how they're making space in the world, in the present as well as the future.

In the Diaspora: July 2020

Socio-cultural, literary, and political news and events relating to the Vietnamese diaspora and to Việt Nam.

When a sound is indefinitely reverberated, who thinks of doubting their ears?

The sounds that permeate the places of our memories and our everyday lives can often feel like background noise, negligible to its environs. It's not often that sounds are explored as a source of grounding to a place, and it's exactly what the online exhibition, "Nameless. echoes, spectres, hisses," intends to explore.

A Being Beside, A Being With: Diana Khoi Nguyen in Conversation with Vi Khi Nao

My materials are documents which feature members of my family—I don’t have sole claim to the material, and yet I work with it, manipulate the footage, the memories for my own purposes. I want mostly to mine my past, but in so doing, my family gets included along the way.

An Altar to Resilience: “Sự Hồi Tưởng” Installation at SOMArts

Although those who died at sea were not our blood relatives, we still consider them our ancestors, as the journey of the Thuyền Nam is so intimately linked to who we are. For these lost ancestors, we wanted to create a space that was warm, inviting, and beautiful. We wanted to create a space that would make them feel special.

Being Seen: Artist Profile of SunKissed Productions

Through it all, there was intergenerational healing and we cried behind and in front of the scenes. That’s the power of art: it can transform traumas into a story that allows so many others to be seen and validated.