Suzannah Evans

The Hardship of the Voyage

Night Sky with Exit Wounds, Ocean Vuong, Jonathan Cape, April 2017, £9.99, 96 pp. (paperback) Kumukanda, Kayo Chingonyi, Chatto & Windus, June 2017, £9.99, 64 pp. (paperback)

Ocean Vuong’s Night Sky with Exit Wounds and Kayo Chingonyi’s Kumukanda explore journeys, family, and the bridges between cultures. Both poets left their countries of birth at a young age, travelling from Vietnam and Zambia respectively to be ‘raised in a strange land’ (‘Kumukanda’). It is perhaps this negotiation of a second language and culture that accounts for the vividness of the two collections, fuelled as they are by a ‘need to speak a tongue that isn’t mine’ (‘Kumukanda’), and interwoven with memories of the past and visions of alternate selves. An attention to speech also characterises both works, so that Chingonyi’s poems thrum with the energy of colloquial conversation, while Vuong is acutely attuned to the musicality of words. The books are also intensely moving, and the depths of feeling evident in each make them, in my mind, two of the best debut collections to appear this year.

Night Sky with Exit Wound is startling in its attention to physicality. A close focus on sexuality and the human form is apparent from the collection’s very first poem, which opens with the words ‘In the body’. Vuong’s celebration of the physical puts him in counterpoint with that other singer of the (bodily) self, Walt Whitman, as the Vietnamese American novelist Viet Thanh Nguyen and others have suggested. His celebratory stance, however, is hard won. ‘Headfirst’, voiced by a mother, ends with the lines ‘My son, tell them / the body is a blade that sharpens / by cutting’, and descriptions of the body elsewhere are laced with pain. Despite this sense of suffering, the body can be a tonic, a way of anchoring oneself, as the

speaker intimates in the starkly beautiful, and comically titled, ‘Ode to Masturbation’:

& sometimes

your hand is all you have

to hold yourself to this

world

While there may be a comic play of allusion in the idea of to ‘have’ and ‘to hold’, the poem reads as a serious piece, fraught with longing, or the ‘desperation / of unstruck / piano keys’. The contradiction evident in the speaker’s conviction that masturbation is the ‘briefest form / of forever’ finds its echo in the poem’s short lines but overall relatively significant length, while the poem’s final words – ‘& lives’ – hover against the white space of the page, drawing attention to the idea of masturbation as a radical and life-affirming act. ‘Some Day I’ll Love Ocean Vuong’, with its title after Frank O’Hara and Roger Reeves, grapples further with ideas of selfesteem and love, seeming to arrive at a point of acceptance: ‘The most beautiful part of your body / is where it’s headed’. Other poems celebrate erotic encounters with men, and ‘Because it’s Summer’ is particularly effective in its portrayal of desire, which seems to speed up time, the four hands of the men ‘quickening / into dozens’.

While much of Vuong’s writing is linguistically arresting – we might think of the description of a ‘dress / petaling off him like the skin / of an apple’ in ‘Trojan’ – his poems are also formally diverse. ‘Seventh Circle of Earth’ stands out as a poem which is written entirely in footnotes: the white space around the poem’s numbers signifies the loss of a gay couple, Michael Humphrey and Clayton Capshaw, murdered in Texas. ‘The Gift’ is another visually interesting poem, where the woman’s attempts to learn to read and write are framed with the alphabet’s beginning:

a b c_____a bc_____a b c

She doesn’t know what comes after. So we begin again:

a b c_____ a b c_____a b c

The fourth letter of the alphabet is ‘a strand of black hair – unraveled / from the alphabet / & written / on her cheek’, while the poem ends with the speaker’s tender observation that the fallen hair looks ‘Like a word’ on the paper.

‘Immigrant Haibun’ adopts a Japanese literary form combining prose and haiku, first used by Matsuo Bashō in the seventeenth century and associated with his travel accounts, to document the voyage that Vuong’s parents make across the ocean to the United States. The poem appears early in the collection, and its fluidity and easy prose underlies many of the later works. It begins mid-journey: ‘Then, as if breathing, the sea swelled beneath us’. The sea’s liquidity is contrasted to the ‘smoldering’ Vietnamese city that the couple have left behind, and the hardship of the voyage is made clear by the female speaker, who notes that her partner ‘burned his last violin to keep my feet warm’. The sibilance of the sea creeps into Vuong’s prose, as well as into the couple’s own speech, in a passage where the sonic overlaps echo the repetitive nature of life adrift: ‘We had been sailing for months. Salt in our sentences’. Later, words themselves become embodied objects, as tangible as the wooden ship: ‘He throws my name into the air. I watch the syllables crumble into pebbles across the deck’. The poet takes his own name from the sea, and in one of the instances of speech scattered across the poem, the male passenger affirms that ‘If we make it to shore . . . I will name our son after this water. I will learn to love a monster’. After the visceral detail of the prose sequences, the poem’s first and final haiku comes as a lilting respite:

Summer in the mind. God opens his other eye:

two moons in the lake.

Vuong’s writing, then, is as lyrical as it is ‘smoldering’, the intense eroticism of the collection perhaps functioning as an antidote to some of the more difficult historical and personal passages. Night Sky with Exit Wounds shows Ocean Vuong to be a writer with promise, and I look forward to reading more of his work in the future.

The same can be said for Kayo Chingonyi. Kumukanda, his debut collection, brims with poems that are at once lyrical and hard-hitting. A deft wielder of words, Chingonyi writes poems that are as often about music as they are musical, and for a book steeped in the loss of family and the poet’s ‘original culture’, as explained in the author’s note, Kumukanda is often extremely joyous.

Much of this joy is prompted by music. ‘Self Portrait as a Garage Emcee’, one of the opening poems, is an intensely personal piece centred on the speaker’s love of garage music, pirate radio, and cassette tapes. It opens in ‘117 Retford Road, Harold Hill, Essex’ and documents the moment the speaker first comes across the music of ‘back room studios’: ‘flicking through the stations, one dark afternoon, / I head those click-and-clack-hihats and stop on Majik FM’. The music is a revelation. In a nod to adolescent pastimes, the speaker notes how ‘Hours lost to the underwear section of Littlewoods catalogue / give way to R&B on E numbers, hi-hats the hiss / of hydraulic pistons, snares like tins dropped / on tiled floors’. Later, he saves money to purchase cassette tapes and record emcees, passing their lyrics off as his own to the delight of his playground followers: ‘girls two years old asking my name and could you do / the one about the cartoon characters again?’ The poem’s ending turns poignantly on race:

Since I could spit lyrics every stone thrown by those two boys, whose cries of nig nog still follow me, bounced off my back; fell reverent at my feet

Music is shown as having the power to protect, to transform: a moment of violence is rendered into one of transcendence. Even the act of violence is narrated musically, with the rhyming of ‘stone’ and ‘thrown’, although the

racist insult continues to haunt the speaker long after the event. Similarly, although he can recite Eminem’s music ‘line for line’, the speaker faces the racist stereotyping that ‘made Marshall a poet and me / just another brother who could rhyme’.

‘Self Portrait as a Garage Emcee’ is full of rhymes and chimes like this, and reverberates with Chingonyi’s awareness of subtleties of sound. Satisfying sound consonances surface throughout the poem, so that the ‘fuzz of traffic’ sings off ‘dinner table jazz’; elsewhere, internal rhymes such as ‘ape the latest tape’ speed up the poem and lend energy to Chingonyi’s writing. Chingonyi also has a gift for recognising the musical moments in ordinary speech. His knack for portraying different voices reminds me of T. S. Eliot’s assertion in ‘The Music of Poetry’:

poetry must not stray too far from the ordinary everyday language which we use and hear. Whether poetry is accentual or syllabic, rhymed or rhymeless, formal or free, it cannot afford to lose contact with the changing language of common intercourse.

When the neighbours in the poem speak of how ‘ the old girl, God rest her soul, wasn’t found for days’, then, their voices ring clearly in our ears. Other moments of speech also seem as if they have been seized from the air mid-conversation and placed directly in the poem, from the girls in Harold Hill who ask the speaker if he is from ‘up London’ to the school teacher who insists the speaker ‘ ha[s] a voice’. In ‘How to Cry’, cockney voices shout their wares, fish ‘ box-fresh from Billingsgate’. Colloquial speech is also skillfully rendered. Emcees have ‘too many ladies / to big up from last week’s rave’ in ‘Self Portrait as a Garage Emcee’, while in calling a spade a spade the speaker must ‘stifle a laugh / at the playwright’s misplaced get me blud and safe’. ‘Andrews Corner’ records how ‘the correct answer is always your mum’. Just as reading NW by Zadie Smith shocked me with recognition at the London slang from my childhood, so Chingonyi powerfully weaves the realities of spoken language into his poetry.

Elsewhere, Chingonyi is lyrical. ‘Fisherman’s Song’ is a lilting and

devastating poem on the recent migrant and refugee crisis, where the melodic rhymes and bleak content recall many of Blake’s poems. He is as eloquent speaking about love as he is about loss, and poems such as ‘In Defence of Darkness’ show him at ease with sensuality:

We’ve time to touch like we used to – the harshness of our journey written into the depth of a clinch. Chest to chest, your head in the cleft of my breastbone.

‘[C]linch’, ‘chest’, ‘cleft’: the sounds of the poems fit together as easily as the lovers’ bodies. Other poems also celebrate what the physical body can achieve. ‘Some Bright Elegance’ reads as instructions for dancing: ‘I say dance, not to be seen but free’; ‘Throw yourself into the thick, emerging pure / reduced to flesh and bone, nerve and sinew’, and the poem advocates joyous movement as a response to racism, hardship, and indignity. Perhaps this is Chingonyi’s strongest message, that life is due celebration despite its tragedies and challenges. His words to his niece in ‘Malumbo’ could, then, hold meaning for all of us:

I hope that you hold on to your wonder that you’ll never grow so stiffly poised a scent or song is not enough to conjure that smile of yours, the fullness of your voice.