Akademik Veri Yönetim Sistemi
American Studies Association of Turkey 42nd International American Studies Conference, İzmir, Türkiye, 23 - 25 Ekim 2024, ss.17
Night Sky with Exit Wounds is a 2016 collection of poetry by Vietnamese American poet Ocean Vuong (1988). The poet’s debut draws on the aftermath of war over three generations and discloses a masterly juxtaposition of tenderness and violence. In this collection of poetry, he comes to terms with his relationship with his past, his relationship with his father, and his relationship with his sexuality. Kate Kellaway describes it as “a conduit for a life in which violence and delicacy collide.” Fragility merges with resilience. Lyrical images are interlaced with images of horror. Trauma is entangled with myth. Michiko Kakutani praises his “tensile precision reminiscent of Emily Dickinson’s work, combined with a Gerard Manley Hopkins-like appreciation for the sound and rhythm of words.” His poetry not only evokes these queer poets of modern times, but also turns to the ancient world of Greek myths and challenges one of the foundational epic stories of the Western civilisation. He reimagines and subverts Homer’s Odyssey, revisiting this canonical narrative as a queer odyssey. He re-appropriates the Greek epic poem, reclaiming it to explore his cultural heritage as a queer Vietnamese American poet. Ocean Vuong’s Odysseus comes back home dead, which refers to his absent father, who dominates his poetry, and this leads his son Telemachus to embark on a quest and to explore his inheritance of war as a queer refugee. Vuong’s Telemachus grows up without knowing his father, goes in search of him, and transgresses the boundaries of time and space in a mythical realm of his own imagination to forge his own Odysseus, to reconstruct his father for himself by himself. He voyages out of the traditional nostos, strives to understand the legacy of his father in his journey to self-realisation and self-fashioning. The queer and coloured Telemachus pulls his father out of the water, drags him by his hair through the white sand as his knuckles are carving a trail and the waves rush in to erase this trail. By rewriting this mythical journey, Vuong offers deep insight into the traumatic memory of three generations. In this revision of Homeric myth, he pits the experience of being queer against the experience of being a refugee. This paper intends to explore how Ocean Vuong reimagines Homer’s Odyssey in order to articulate his own memory of war as a queer refugee by means of closely reading “Telemachus,” “Trojan” and “Odysseus Redux” in Night Sky with Exit Wounds.