Ocean Vuong

[meghna]

Respond to the given poem from your point of view, focusing on specific words, patterns, images, or any other aspect of the text that appeals to you.

Excerpt from: Ocean Vuong’s “Night Sky with Exit Wounds”.

Why do all my books leave me empty-handed?

In Vietnamese, the word for grenade is “bom,” from the French “pomme,”
meaning “apple.”

Or was it American for “bomb”?

Woke up screaming with no sound. The room filling with a bluish water
called dawn. Went to kiss grandma on the forehead

just in case.

An American soldier fucked a Vietnamese farmgirl. Thus my mother exists.
Thus I exist. Thus no bombs = no family = no me.

Yikes.

Comments

Assignment

[entite]

It can be said that this poem was written a few years after the Vietnam war where an American man and a Vietnamese farm girl fell in love. The man and the woman made love with the the bomb blasts as their music during the war. The girl gave birth to a child while the man was fighting in the war. The girl gives birth and goes in search of her love after 9 months in the hope that her lover comes back. She leaves behind a book with her mother to give to her child incase she does not come back.The book included love letters and feelings which were exchanged between the man and the woman and the mother's messages for her child.However it was later said in the newspapers that she had stepped on a grenade and passed away with her lover while running back home for their child.
Their child grew up and the book was given to the child by his grandmother who took care of him. Only when he turned 18 he was given this book. The child had kept this book with him and decided to open it when he fell in love because his mother had asked him to read it only when he falls in love.The child goes through the book. The child is having sex for the first time and tries to relate to the feeling his parents might have felt because it was written in the book that sex was like exploding like a bomb when you reach climax.However the child does not realise that his parents were making love despite the noise in the background with the cries of people and the bomb blasts.The kid while making love accidentally hits the candle on top of his table and it falls on the book left behind by his parents which is kept under the bed and the book burns to ashes. Therefore he says why do all my books leave me empty handed because like the way his parents burnt into ashes, the only thing that was left of his parents memories also got burnt.He has lost many books in a similar way, where the books he touched have turned into ashes one way or another, more like as if he was cursed.The boy expects sex to be like a bomb exploding and says the word "bom" in Vietnamese which comes from the French word "pomme" which means apple, and also the fact that he lost both his parents to bomb blasts it could perhaps be that he is explaining what he saw when he was fucking her, her buttocks shaped like an apple when he exploded into her. After reaching climax , he fell asleep but woke up screaming with no sound because he saw a dream of his parents burning in a fire. After waking up in the evening with the colours of the sky falling in his room, he goes and kisses his deaf grandmother's forehead because she was the only living memory of his mother. He says if his parents didn't reach climax in the midst of the Vietnam war where there were bomb blasts he would not have existed.

Saaha 1934035

reflective response

[millinithoitak_2000]

knowing the fact, ocean vuong being an American-Vietnamese writer ,his poems were very much influence by the Vietnamese war .it really does not matter whether you are born before ,in or after the war ,the implication remains the same .the given excerpt ,to me seems to show some amount of neutrality. voung seems to be lost at one point of time ,where books does not give him answer to his questions ,it gives us a picture of vulnerability where voung is dependent on books to answer his questions ,to speak out his thoughts through writing . being an educated man in the family ,tries to find out the word that bothers him ,yet lies with uncertain answer .the simplest , derivation of the word 'bomb’. The poet being oblivious of the word could mean that this word did not exist prior to Vietnam hence it was unknown .we also know the multiple involvement of countries in this 19 long years war. Hence it is also possible that the origin is unknown.’ woke up screaming with no sound' this probably talks about the implication after the war ,the habituated nature of the bombing which acts as an alarm for a long period of 19 years .the used of word 'dawn' shows the timing when the bombing actually happened. The poet when his grandma not because he really wanted to give her a morning kiss but I believe is an alternative way to check if she is fine or if she is alive .in the last two lines the poet shows us how he became an American .there is a harsh and improper use of words ,which probably means that the poet's mom and dad exist not because they are in love ,but it’s a kind of harassment and repeated exploitation especially to more vulnerable people like the farmers .he also assures us that if the war had not occurred he would not exist .the last word 'yikes' is a disappointing remark ,which to me is kind of mysterious as I cannot come up with the accurate or even with imagine thoughts of what the poets actually felt of his existence.

Poem Analysis

[akangshakalita]

In Vietnamese,the word "bom" means grenade, which is derived from the French word "pomme" meaning apple. The meaning of both the words are extremely contrasting and the poet is pondering whether it derived from the American word "bomb".

The Vietnamese war allowed the American soldiers to take shelter in the country and commit crimes like raping innocent Vietnamese farmgirls and carrying out massacre across the country. This later came to be known as the "My Lai Massacre", where the victims were particularly women and children. The American soldiers tortured,raped,beat,killed many innocent Vietnamese. Once such instance is that an American soldier raped the mother of the poet, who believes that if the war would have never taken place,there would have been no possibilities of coming of U.S. soldiers to Vietnam, and hence he would have never existed. People believe that U.S. soldiers raped women out of frustration. But these claims are not at all justified. Raping someone is,and was,never an option to lash out their anger. We need to ask what paved the way for U.S. soldiers to commit such crimes towards Vietnamese and why war is even necessary when we can try to figure out our differences through mutual acceptance and adjustments.

The line "woke up screaming with no sound" is quite interesting because the poet is claiming something which is not possible. No one can scream without making any sounds. In literal sense, scream itself means crying out loudly when someone is in pain, excited or angry. According to me, the poet is trying to say that he pretty often have nightmares about the aftermath of Vietnam War and the impact it has left upon in his life. After a war, it is the survivors who have to suffer a lot and in many cases they suffer from post traumatic stress disorder, which disables them to move forward in their life and suffocate them with the haunting memories of past.