For next class, we will have a guest teacher, Maria Caroliina Vaz de Almeida, who has kindly prepared these questions for you:
1. In a 2021 article, Hai-Dang Phan mentions the centrality of An-My Lê’s photography to his poetry, remarking that it has allowed him to “reckon with my own thoughts and feelings toward war and conflict, dislocation and exile–and above all toward our shared experience of leaving Vietnam as refugees and growing up in the United States.” Succinctly, An My-Lê’s photography can be interpreted in light of thetransposition of time and space from the Vietnam War into the American landscape through the civil reenactments of the war. Either:
a) Select and comment on one of An-My Lê’s photographs from the collection Small Wars (1999-2002), which you can find here: Small Wars — An-My Lê.
b) Discuss Hai-Dang Phan’s poem “Small Wars” in comparison with An-My Lê’s photograph entitled Rescue (for example, the significance of usingdifferent artistic mediums, the continual process of reenactments, the use of rhetorical devices like Ekphrasis, or others).You can find Phan’s article here, if you would like to read it: Speak, Reenactment | Hai-Dang Phan.
2. Hai-Dang Phan’s work also engages with the turmoil of adopting and writing in the language rooted in the cause of the exodus, seeking to connect geographical dismembering with linguistic disruption. “My Father’s Norton Introduction to Literature, Third Edition (1981)” incorporates and quotes directly from multiple sources of the American and English literary tradition. Either:
a) Identify one of the poems, short stories, or plays referenced in the poem and discuss its significance within the context of Phan’s poem.
b) Comment on the poem’s dialogue with the American and English literary tradition, namely, how the linguistic and literary hybridization further challenges the boundaries of national literature.
phtos by An-My Lê
1a) The picture entitled “Sleeping Soldiers” shows a group of exhausted soldiers sleeping on the ground in what seems to be a green, shady forest. They are wearing military uniforms and you can barely distinguish their equipment scattered on the floor. Although the setting instantly projects us to the concept of war, the sunlight that filters through the trees added to the fact that the soldiers are having a rest creates an almost calm, peaceful atmosphere. I think that An-My Lê wanted to capture a moment of recovery, a break from the daily stress caused by the conflict. Actually, when I first looked at the photo I thought that it was a real portrait from the war; I didn’t understand, at first, that Lê posed her subjects. This tension between reality and simulation challenges photographic images as evidence of history, as we discover that something that appears to be real is actually performed.
ReplyDeleteb) Hai-Dang Phan’s poem “Small Wars” can be compared with An-My Lê’s photograph Rescue, as both works examine Vietnam in relation to the war but in different ways. What we can generally affirm by analysing these works is that the Vietnam War has really had a strong impact not only on an historical level but also in art, memory, and curiously, in performance. The two artists show us a reconstruction of the War through staged photographs or through poetic reflection.
Talking about the differences, Lê’s photo has a clear and direct impact on the viewer, underlined by the shape of a smoke cloud, the readiness of the soldiers with rifles in their hands and the dense vegetation surrounding them and making the scene even more gloomy and filled with tension; instead, Phan’s poem guides us through a journey of memory and reflection.
Another thing to underline is that both works emphasize that war is not finished but continually reenacted: In Lê’s “Rescue”, we have some actual actors who restage scenes of combat and by doing so they are turning war into a performance that can be repeated at any time in any place. In Phan’s poem the speaker revisits images, stories, and inherited histories, suggesting that war is replayed psychologically.
What makes the poem of Phan really engaging is however the use of ekphrasis. The purpose of using ekphrasis is to respond to a visual work of art like a photograph by interpreting and questioning it. Even if it does not describe Lê’s photograph directly, it mirrors the same concerns: how images of war are constructed, remembered, and interpreted. The role of Phan here is to turn a static image into a dynamic narrative. Ekphrasis in “Small Wars” is not just describing “Rescue”, but it expands the meaning of the photograph. Another aspect I wanted to focus on is the camera of Lê; this device doesn’t judge and, as a camera, it can distance; if the viewer gets emotional by looking at the pictures it is because Lê worked a lot to present scenes for which a spectator would feel empathy; but the photo itself is just a reconstruction of past events. On the other side Phan carries a more reflective and somehow intimate tone.
1. a). The picture “Ambush I” (1999-2002), particularly struck me among all the different pictures of the series “Small Wars” by the Vietnamese photographer An-My Lê.
ReplyDeleteKeeping in mind how her work can be seen as a transposition of the Vietnam War into the American landscape through the civil reenactments of the war, the first thing I would mention is the use of black and white. I think it is very powerful, because it creates a sort of detachment from reality by changing the colours, yet maintaining the feeling of confusion generated by the typical colours of military clothes, which perfectly melt with those of nature, even with black with and white.
Moving on to the subjects, we can clearly see three soldiers at the sides of the picture and a very subtle fourth one, so shady that it almost looks like a ghost if it wasn’t for his rifle. They are checking every side of their surroundings to be safe in a setting that is against them.
The center of the image is empty with only the dense vegetation that recalls the forests of Vietnam, which I believe is the real protagonist in all of An-My Lê’s “Small Wars”.
Something that catches the eye is the contraposition between the stasis of nature and the dynamicity of the soldiers, who have to move and act quickly against a still entity in order to be able to fight and protect themselves from their “enemies”.
What is in focus here is only the bottom part of the image, while the background filled with trees is merely defined, however creating an interesting contrast between the lower part of the image, considered as the terrestrial part, and the upper one, connected with spirituality and the idealized, represented here also in terms of the sunlight that shines on the soldiers from above as a divine symbol. As a matter of fact, the stillness and calm of the sky and the frozen trees oppose the quick and harsh movements of the real world, where war disrupts everything.
2. b) Hai-Dang Phan’s “My Father’s Norton Introduction to Literature, Third Edition (1981)” mentions multiple sources of the American and English literary tradition. The importance of this matter lies specifically within the challenging of the boundaries of national literature through linguistic and literary hybridization, by showing how the national conception of literature can be disrupted through, for example, the Vietnamese glosses his father made while learning useful subjects for his job, like Computer Science, and enjoyable ones, like Introduction to Literature, making them his own despite a different language. The fact that he could do this by committing himself to translate a hard type of texts like literary ones from a language that had to become his own along with Vietnamese perfectly highlights the linguistic obstacles migrants have to overcome in order to integrate in a new society, but at the same time the added value they can bring to texts that were written by people with different languages, cultures and values.