Cathy Linh Che is the author of Split (Alice James, 2014), winner of the 2012 Kundiman Poetry Prize. She has been awarded fellowships from Poets & Writers, Hedgebrook, Poets House, and The Lower Manhattan Cultural Council’s Workspace Residency. She currently lives in Brooklyn.
1. My poetry attempts to define terms like war, rape, and molestation through my family’s and my own experiences, rather than allowing images from the news, film, or media to dictate what these terms ought to mean.
2. Sometimes I clamor for language. I clamor to fill in gaps, the unsayable. What is unsayable? Things that are socially impolite? Actual violence against a marginalized body? If violence can happen, then surely there must a language there to document it.
3. I think about the struggle between erasure and anti-erasure. To me the act of speaking is anti-erasure. Writing, witnessing and documenting is anti-erasure. Writing down my mother’s story says that this matters. History matters. Trauma matters. The occurrences of her life and their implications matter.
4. It has been said that reading, and especially reading fiction, increases our ability to feel empathy. It expands our worlds and asks that we look through others’ subjectivities.
5. Whereas, rape is a form of object permanence. The memory of the event persists long after its occurrence. The victim or survivor is the object of the action, the recipient of someone else’s power. Coupled with silence, this person becomes, to the perpetrator or unempathetic reader, forever the object.
6. The title poem of my book “Split” shows how military decisions, large and small, can have deep and lasting impact.
7. The CIA backed a 1963 coup d'état ousting Ngo Dinh Diem. John F. Kennedy okayed it. Ngo Dinh Diem’s subsequent assassination meant unrest in my mother’s village in Central Viet Nam. It meant a surge of Viet Cong soldiers there. That year, a South Vietnamese soldier was shot in the stomach and bled slowly onto my mother’s bed. That year, the Viet Cong destroyed her school house, thus ending her formal education in the sixth grade.
8. In the coup’s aftermath, my mother’s family left their village in a forced exile from her childhood home. (The home was later leveled by an American tank.)
9. My mother woke sniffing the air, detected a burning smell. It was American soldiers sleeping in a ditch outside her home. Their scent of unbathed skin and mosquito repellent. They were there to keep her safe from Viet Cong. She was thirteen and beautiful and doing her daily chores. They approached her and asked to cut her hair. They pointed and gestured: her hair, the cut of scissors, their helmets, her hair. My grandmother smelled rape and sent her only child to live with family in the city.
10. Years later, my mother tells the story of a girl in a nearby village. She was my mother’s age. An American soldier raped her in a dried out gully. She was airlifted to a field hospital. She did not die but lived her life as the one who had been raped, and for the rest of her life, she could not marry.
11. Writing, to me, is an act of anti-erasure. It reaches for the unsayable. Anti-erasure is when the silenced or marginalized object speaks. When it asks a reader to listen to what it has to say. And what it says is the evidence.
