This Week in Reading #4

On Ocean Vuong and the 'others' of the English language

A lot is spoken of writer’s block. I suffer through periods of reader’s block. I pick a book, read a few pages, and almost mechanically open Youtube for 20 minutes of scrolling through Shorts. No word inspires you, no sentence compels you to read the next one, no author seems to be possibly worth your time, at least for the time being. The last ten days have been a personal period of reader’s block, caused partly due to social fatigue morphing into physical exhaustion. But light has returned, the birds have resumed their singing, and I am a much happier reader now after finishing Vuong’s On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous.

I first listened to Vuong on a podcast when I hadn’t yet read his work. I quickly realised that this is a person who cares about deeply about language. It is so evident even in the way he speaks. He said this about the violence in the ‘American lexicon’, stopping me straight in my tracks:

We have to ask — I’m not saying it’s wrong, per se. I use it too, being a product of this country. But one has to wonder, what is it about a culture that can only value itself through the lexicon of death? I grew up in New England, and I heard boys talk about pleasure as conquest. “I bagged her. She’s in the bag. I owned it. I owned that place. I knocked it out of the park. I went in there, guns blazing. Go knock ‘em dead. Drop dead gorgeous. Slay — I slayed them. I slew them.” What happens to our imagination, when we can only celebrate ourselves through our very vanishing?

As someone who tries to write, there is much focus on the aesthetic of the written and spoken word. At school, English workbooks would obsess over alliterations, identifying a simile from a metaphor, completing idioms, checking for personifications. Little is talked about the affect of the words themselves, of what they do to people who use them, of what it does to language itself. Violence is so ingrained in our language that they now even fail to evoke that violence, words have lost its vital relation with their meaning, intensifying the pervasiveness of violent, even degrading language. We dump our romantic partners, as if they are all garbage. We kill our interviews. We roast some classmate with whom we have had historic beef. Very, very few people are then able to identify this feature of language and be critical of it. Fewer still, like Voung, are able to transform this casual violence into transmitters of beauty. He brings the same carefulness to the written word and we are better off for it. My ebook copy of the book is heavily annotated in digital yellow and green and purple.

I wonder where this carefulness, this craftsmanship comes from. Voung is the single child of an immigrant Asian mother and grew up quite alone. Susan Sontag once ventured that eloquence in speaking is a symptom of a ‘heightened painful individuality.’ I would readily extend this hypothesis to elegant writing. He is also the first in his family to be able to read English and study it at the university. There is something to be said about how we, the children of the post-colony, take so willingly and almost aggressively to the English language. As he writes, ‘obscure texts by dead people, most of whom never dreamed a face like mine floating over their sentences’ is what saved him, and so many of us. We want to not just learn it but desperately make it our own, because we know that this language has already estranges us from the tongue of our mothers and fathers. We do not conquer though, at least not in medieval terms, we simply expand it, making space for ourselves within it, in its nouns and pronouns.

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