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

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.