Beauty and Connections in a Monstrous Reality

Ocean Vuong insists that he hasn’t written about anything new. His recurring themes - violence and exile - have been central to literature since the Iliad and the Odyssey. Yet, with the right approach every subject is inexhaustible. Some poets try to meet readers’ expectations, he says, but that kills originality. He imagines himself digging a hole with a shovel as the reader looks over his shoulder. Whatever emerges will be a surprise for both. 

Ocean Vuong’s latest book, The Emperor of Gladness is a novel, the second after On Earth we’re Briefly Gorgeous. It tells the story of Hai, a young man who is diverted from committing suicide by Gravina, an old woman with dementia. From then on, Hai becomes her caretaker and the two form an unexpected connection. 

Gravina has roots in Vuong’s life. When he won a scholarship to study 19th-century American poetry, he couldn’t afford rent, and moved in with a friend's grandmother. Also named Gravina, she was a Lithuanian woman, a survivor of the bombings in Dresden during World War II. Still, Vuong affirms that Gravina the character is fictional. Art can't be a pretext to disclose something as sacred as the intimate details of a person’s life.

The author is no stranger to a narration that draws from his own experience. Like his protagonist, Vuong once worked in a fast food restaurant. From that experience came the idea of what he calls a “circumstancial family”, one tied to work and labour. No one works in a fast food because they want to, he recounts, but because they have a dream now deferred or they’re struggling. This shared struggle can unexpectedly turn the workplace into a fertile land for gentleness and generosity. 

Within this expansive notion of kinship, motherhood is also central in both Time is a Mother, one of his acclaimed poetry collection, and On Earth we're Briefly Gorgeous. Vuong was raised by four women who lived through two patriarchal system, first in Vietnam and then in the US, yet built a matriarchy at home. Vuong admires his mother and his aunts for surviving, for escaping their abusive partners, and for providing care. They were not perfect, he adds, they were wounded, but they gave him a substantial life. 

And as he pays tribute to these female figures, he also wants to honour a particular use of language. The poetry he studied in college was written by men but it’s dismissed as purple, pretentious, flowery, unrestricted: words used to belittle women. This, he finds, is very hypocritical. That’s why he chose to use a lush and baroque language in his novels and poems. “I wanted to go back there, to take the rusted tools and make them shine again, to use them to create something monstrously beautiful."