NGUYỄN CHÍ THIỆN
Nguyễn Chí Thiện (1939–2012) was one of the great Vietnamese dissident poets of the 20th century — and his biography is almost inseparable from his poetry.
He was born in Hanoi in 1939 and, initially, even supported the Viet Minh. In 1960, however, while teaching history, he challenged the official version of World War II. He was arrested and sent to "re-education" camps. After being released, he was arrested again in 1966, this time because of poems considered politically subversive. He spent a total of 27 years in prisons and labor camps.
The extraordinary aspect is that, during many periods, he was unable to write. He composed the poems mentally, memorized them, revised them, and recited them to other prisoners. According to his own account, around 300 poems were created during the eleven years of imprisonment between 1966 and 1977.
In 1979, after being released, he managed to write down about 400 poems on paper and took the manuscript to the British Embassy in Hanoi, trying to get it to the West. He was arrested again upon leaving the embassy. The manuscript ended up being published abroad, first in Vietnamese and later in translations. In 1984, the important bilingual edition Flowers from Hell / Hoa Địa Ngục appeared, published by Yale; in 1985 he received the International Poetry Prize in Rotterdam while still imprisoned.
And the poetry?
It is brutally direct. It is not a poetry of sophisticated metaphorical elaboration in the sense of Ocean Vuong. It is a poetry of testimony: hunger, prison, disease, forced labor, humiliation, death, political repression.
But precisely because of this, there is something very powerful in it.
For example, in "My Verses", he virtually denies that what he writes is poetry:
“My verses are in fact no verses”
“They are simply Life's sobbings”
And then he transforms his own bodily experience into a kind of poetics:
“The dry cough of two caving in lungs”
“The aimless contractions of an empty stomach”
“The hopeless beat of a dying heart”
And finishes by refusing the name of "poetry" again: “No verses are they!”
This is interesting because the poetry is born precisely from what he says is not poetry. The cough, the hunger, the heart, the cold, the prison become verses.
Another passage, from "Inside the Prison Trap of Steel", says:
“refuse to be a buffalo, a dog.”
And then:
“Unless we are mere clay”
“we shall stay men.”
Here appears one of his central ideas: the ultimate form of resistance is not allowing the system to turn the prisoner into an object.
There is also a very different dimension in poems about his mother. In "My Mother", he writes about her praying for him and about the tears caused by her son's succession of arrests.
And perhaps the most beautiful thing is that, despite the political violence, his poetry is not merely a poetry of hatred. The foreword to the Yale edition highlights precisely "the survival of dreams, hope, and love" alongside anger and the observation of prison life.
There is a phrase of his that I find especially revealing:
“Flowers from Hell — real blood has watered them”
The "flowers from hell" are the poems themselves: something beautiful growing precisely where it should be impossible for beauty to exist.