¶ Adam Aitken: Why did you want to go to Vietnam?

S.K.Kelen: I wanted to visit the country whose name I’d heard demonised and lionised for quite a few years and read in the paper and watched on TV the world’s superpower try to bomb a people into submission in the name of freedom. It was surreal at the time. In retrospect and having been there what was done there seems truly evil. Everyone argued about Vietnam. Should we be there or shouldn’t we. But I always felt a kind of bond to the place, a lot of dreams said Vietnam. Sometimes you just know you should go to a place. Of course the courage of the Vietnamese people was something I admired greatly and when the opportunity arose to go there I went and was not disappointed.

¶ What is attractive about Vietnam?

S.K. Kelen in Hanoi. Photo courtesy the author.

For starters it has more beautiful landscape per square kilometre than any other country I’ve visited. I’m not saying the countryside in other places, including Australia, India, Indonesia or Europe, America or wherever, is not inspiring; it’s just that Vietnam packs in a lot of sublime scenery in a relatively compact area. Highlands, rivers, thick jungle, Ha Long Bay, busy villages working rice fields and of course a lot of old cities with beautiful names like Hanoi, Saigon (or Ho Chi Minh), Hué, Hai Phong, Do Song, My Lai, etcetera. And it’s a place full of poems that come almost too fast. I doubt you could go to Vietnam and not love the country and find the people thoroughly charming, sophisticated and hospitable and Vietnamese society is fundamentally more peaceful than say in Australia or the US, for example the cops don’t carry guns — they don’t need to — that’s probably what would have hurt the Australian soldiers having to fight there the most is that the people they were fighting would have preferred to share a beer or a cup of tea with their guests rather than desperately defend their homeland.

I spent most of the Asialink residency in Hanoi, a city that is hard not to feel at home in. What better way to get to know a city on arrival than to take a ride from the airport with a psychopathic taxi-driver driving at breakneck speed ridiculously fast for the number of bicycles, cyclo, and other slow traffic on the road — and the similarities with Rome don’t stop there — the main greeting is chao. It’s an ancient city where the oldest surviving building is the thousand-year-old Temple of Literature. The heat is something else. A city that has seen so much war, it’s amazing anything has survived.

It’s a dynamic city whose people seem to make an art of friendship and neighbourliness, lead life with style, good humour and vigour. And the way the traffic moves is absolutely magic: lines of bicycles, cyclos, motor scooters, taxis and trucks passing through each other with a fluidity like rivers running into each other. The closest to road rage I have witnessed is when cyclo drivers and their passengers clicked their tongues when a tourist got out of sync with what the traffic was doing and turned her scooter the wrong way, as if she had lost the traffic’s rhythm and skipped a beat. Poets notice these things. And it is true that Hanoi is a romantic city. And wonderfully quiet after midnight when the traffic in the suburbs actually stops. The locals call it ‘the city of love’ or the ‘Paris of the East’, though a few other cities do that, too.

I lived in Gia Lam north of the Red River and though part of Hanoi it was a whole city where most of the heavy industry was carried out. And there also rice fields and buffalo there.

Hanoi’s street life is rich, the commerce endless. The food is superb — the soup at the cafe with torn-up newspaper serviettes was a revelation. The Red River really is red, well pink a lot of the time, but through the day passes through every shade of red saving its extra special effects for sunset. You can spend hours just watching that slow old river, I didn’t get to see it flooding. I get homesick just talking about Hanoi.

Rain at 5.30pm pushes down a blanket of heat. And there is one Asian continuum — flat roofed houses that grow upwards in steps that lead into each other like an Escher print — pillared balustrades and omnipresent minarets held up by dragons. On a lot of the roofs of the Gia Lam houses which were rebuilt after the bombings had statues — angels, Cupids etc. The kind of architecture in which Sindbad the Sailor would feel quite at home.

¶ What did you dislike about Vietnam?

Not much. You can’t drink the tap water! But you can always have a cup of tea.

¶ What hassles did you run into with publishing houses and bureaucracy over there?

The tea was cold and very strong, at meetings everyone smokes lots of cigarettes and women senior bureaucrats are generally chaperoned by another woman officer who stands quietly behind a curtain, taking notes. You must walk a very fine line between formality and bonhomie. If someone is late for a meeting it means your negotiations are likely to be fruitful and an hour left waiting is meant for cogitation and creativity. Any delays or mix-ups generally lead to an adventure or a restaurant, a cup of coffee — not all that different to Australia really.

But the business of censorship came up and it was handled in a very smooth way. The Ministry of Culture and Information approved The Gioi publishing the poems in Dragon Rising but asked them to ask me if I would mind withdrawing one poem, “Sapa”, from the collection, because a Chinese delegation was due to visit Vietnam and the poem might have reminded them of less pleasant times — the poem is about the Vietnamese army giving the Chinese invading force a good hiding in 1979, and the sensitive souls of the Culture Ministry thought it prudent not to risk offending their guests (even if the chances of the visiting official actually seeing the poem were not great). If the poems were to be published a few weeks later, it would have been fine to include “Sapa”. So naturally I agreed. My freedoms did not feel at all inhibited. It was more a matter of manners and discretion than anything political. The fact that the timing of a poem’s publication is taken seriously enough to be considered in terms of international relations was very heartening.

¶ How did you find The Goi?

Very professional, they know how to publish poetry (as well as every other kind of book). They did a beautiful job publishing Dragon Rising — bold design on the cover — and it’s off-set so the type is very traditional. It’s a very big publisher with lots of new titles, as well as reprints — in Vietnamese and many other languages.

¶ What makes Vietnam a special place to write about?

Vietnam’s a fascinating place, the society struck me as very sophisticated, decent and resilient. The spirit there is wonderful. An optimism and cheerfulness that’s hard to understand after all the war that’s been rained down on them. Resilience and pride. Of course there’s a healthy cynical attitude towards government and corruption, though the corruption there seems pretty low level, mostly at the municipal and small business level, almost cute compared to what goes on in the west.

¶ How did the Vietnam War influence your poetry?

When, before or after visiting Vietnam? Before going to Vietnam I wrote a few poems, basically about the futility and stupidity of our involvement in a piece of blatant, disgusting bullying — and all the bloody blood shed — for what? To rescue the ailing US helicopter industry, to win American elections. What gets me is the way Americans think it was about them, defining their place in the world, working out their attitudes and figuring out what they did wrong. Obviously they didn’t learn much from the whole pathetic adventure. When all they had to do was pay attention to one Graham Greene novel, learn the lesson gently delivered and just leave well enough alone. So, I guess that brutal attack on a nation just added poems of anger and disillusion to my work that otherwise would have been all sweetness and light.

Vietnam in 1998, about 20 years without a war (since the 1979 Chinese incursion) did generate poems of some sweetness. So really the Vietnam peace has been more influential on my work.

¶ What sights of interest did you see in V?

Hanoi and environs, Hoi An, Hué, Ho Chi Minh City, played lots of tennis and ping pong in Da Nang, went boating on the Mekong and on Ha Long Bay, swam in the poisoned sea off China Beach, visited the pirates who live on a city of boats off Cat Ba Island, Cat Ba Island, visited Hai Phong, Sapa, the holy mountain Ba Vi....

¶ What’s the Vietnamese attitude to poets?

Very encouraging. For example, I was interviewed by a couple of newspapers and magazines and about two months later, the receptionist at the Hoa Sen Hotel at Da Nang,introduced herself and said, “I understand you are expert at English language poetry”. She had read the interview in Sport & Culture magazine and asked if I could take some drafts of her poems written in English to “correct”. They were love poems, very much in the Vietnamese tradition of rivers, rain and aching hearts, and they were really good poems. I made a few suggestions and gave her a copy of “Dragon Rising”. She asked if she could have five signed copies for her friends and I naturally complied (from journal: 10/ 11/ 98). Visiting poets are well received.

Poster for poetry reading

Nha Tho (Poet) Street is one of Hanoi’s jauntier restaurant/ entertainment areas, and a lot of the streets all through Vietnam are named after mythical and historical emperors, heroes and poets. Poets are just an accepted part of life, they have always been there and always will. But in Vietnam, as in most parts of the world, it’s hard to get rich writing poetry. Though there seem to be more publishers willing to give your work a go.

¶ Did North South differences in Vietnam impact on you?

There’s a bit of residual resentment over the outcome of the war in the south — sometimes you’ll get talking to ex-non-coms and officers from the old South Vietnamese Army who did a bit of time in a re-education camp. But they all seemed to be doing pretty well in business or their careers and what was left of their bitterness seemed to be mainly bad memories aimed as much at the Americans as the northerners not only for being bad friends and letting them down but for making a mess of the country. More a past betrayed than too much to complain about now. There seemed to be an view shared by people in the north and south that the war was barbaric, stupid, pointless but also, almost a sense of mystery as to why America and cohorts would want to cause so much trouble and pain. The war seems a long time ago. From reading the (English language) Vietnamese newspapers and talking with people, Vietnamese politics in 1998 seemed much like what Australia’s politics were like in the 1950s, 1960s and maybe in the 1980s, more domestic in outlook and concerned very much with (re-) development of resources, improving health services, education, standards of living, attracting foreign investment.

There are other differences between north and south and the centre of Vietnam, the food varies, climate, the dress is more traditional in the south. The traffic in Saigon has a lot of cars and they’re gridlocked a lot of the time, while in Hanoi it’s mostly scooters, bicycles and cyclos. Apparently in Hanoi until about 1990 it was all bicycles and cyclos — only a few trucks and taxis. The rain in Hué was endless.

¶ What books and films set in or about Vietnam have had an impact on you? For me, Duras’s The Lover is still a powerful story about Europeans living in colonial times. [Graham Greene’s] The Quiet American as well. The film was deeply important to me. The film Apocalypse Now I am very ambivalent about, and it seems that recent scholarship in the United States is divided about it. What about you?

The Quiet American is a wonderful book and the movie, too. Cautionary tale, political prophecy, a story about love, decay, truth, and the writing is beautiful. Bao Nhin’s Sorrow of War is a great novel too, especially the flashbacks to the protagonist’s days in Hanoi, swimming in the lakes etc, the narrow streets — so evocative — but also it shows the war from the other (non-US) side and how the same kind of madness (the drugs, bad killings, MIAs) happened to the Vietnamese as well as to the Americans. Movies like Apocalypse Now, Platoon, Full Metal Jacket etc treat the war from an American point of view and though they do that pretty well, the Vietnamese seem to provide just a backdrop for Americans to play out their insecurities and psychoses. Some of them are pretty serious and seem to be as much catharsis for the American viewers as well as presenting history.

¶ Have you read other Australian poetry and literature engaged with Vietnam? Pam Brown’s ‘Hanoi Sequence of prose poems for example? Or Jane Gibian’s recent poets published in Heat magazine number 6? If you have read them, how do they affect you?

I’ve read Pam’s “Hanoi Cycle”, she was obviously there before the motor scooterfication of Hanoi but I still got a strong feeling for the place that a visitor would have, making do with language differences, getting around a new and exciting city. I read Jane Gibian’s poems in Heat magazine, the haiku form was well suited to the kind of observations the poems were making, kind of quick but slow at the same time...

Copyright © S. K. Kelen and Adam Aitken 2004