This project is an extension of the “Origin Tale” project, with songs and stories of VN, and I have posted a video about it on the fundraising site Indiegogo - please take a look:
http://igg.me/p/101008?a=579580
Thanks!!
Origin Tale - the mixed-media chapbook project - has received an Opportunity Grant from the Oregon Arts Commission (FY 2012) to help with printing/publication costs!
This was good news for us this fall. Though I had hoped we’d be able to realize this project by fall of 2011, I think it is looking more like we’ll have something to share in 2012. Please stay tuned! :-)
"I am the great great
granddaughter
of the mountain.
I am the great great
granddaughter
of the sea.
"
granddaughter
of the mountain.
granddaughter
of the sea.
→ 22 Aug 11 at 2 pm
The soul refines itself through repetition: we fight onward through time, die, re-spawn. But the sword gives way gradually to subtler weaponry, to accumulated, speculatory distance and relationship between bodies of combatants, and the warrior’s implements through time grow lighter and smaller and more abstract—a rifle, a bullet, a lever, a button, a word. Hence would my mother be born again and again on her path of lifetimes, embodying various incarnations of the warrior-sister, until she is born as the mother I will know in the present era, when in lieu of sword she now wields a pen: by some laws of reincarnation it is said one must be a warrior of the blade before one incarnates as the next kind of fighter: the magician. Privy to forces of construction — ((art)) — beyond those of destruction.
My mother would be a writer.
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[Flash 9 is required to listen to audio.]
"The Mountain and The Sea"
Sea Moon
Sea Moon
(63) plays
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[Flash 9 is required to listen to audio.]
"O R I G I N T A L E"
The Sea and The Mother
(74) plays
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→ 21 Aug 11 at 9 pm
… & when they part, brother and sister will make promises almost as lovers would do.
She says: <I will come back for you, my brother, once our battles in the south are won, and I will tell you then the stories of all I have seen, of all the wonders and wilds of our father’s world.>
He says: <Sister, I will wait for you.> <I will be singing my song for you.> <& yes it will be the same song as always before.>
[ —because surely music is important to this tale. Because even before we had story we had song: there is a tradition of sung-poetry—ca dao—familiar to our people. We sang those poems while working in fields and kitchens, while resting on river banks or recovering from battles, in contemplation of work, war, love, family, nature, time, the passage of time. We sang, unaccompanied by any instrumentation but for our raw, unadorned voices; and by this method we ordered our lives (and our comprehension of what it meant to be living) according to tonal structures. & before we had language ((these relics we now call words)) surely we must’ve begun with those tones alone—nonconsonant, guttural and fundamental, falling or rising, submissive or dissident—to evoke an aural palette to say «to sing…» where and how we had come before. We would have intoned all of our need for telling. This would’ve been back before they—certain inclined ones of us—discovered how to snatch the tones, as well as the words, from the air and concretize them into shapes, symbols, notes. Our voices now subverted : into materia. So that now when I write I know it to be but a substitute for the singing that once was enough between us. ]
→ 21 Aug 11 at 9 am
<You will travel far in the company of men with paler skin than you, duller skin, over time.>
<You will feel sometimes acutely tired, but you will also find it difficult to rest.>
<You will feel lonely very likely often.> <You will at times feel that you miss someone or thing you cannot remember.> <You will come to places where sometimes the trees, the lay of land, the music in the movement of the water, the way the light strikes things, these simple forms of witness, will almost remind you of who or how It was.>
<You will love — deeply — just a few times. This will become your best vehicle for remembering.>
→ 21 Aug 11 at 4 am
It had been so many years of warfare by this time that her memories of the former home in the mountains with the first mother had greatly dimmed. But in those moments of star-gazing sometimes she felt an inkling of something forgotten or remembered, not quite a sound, not quite a face, but a glimmer—a dark, reminiscent murmur, tender, forlorn—lilting inside of her. …
→ 20 Aug 11 at 11 pm
—and so there were wars, many battles, and my mother fought alongside her brothers. She wielded a sword, black hair strapped in one long python-thick braid lashing the air behind her. She struck down soldiers of emperors who invaded (more than once) from China. Strange tribes raged up from the south and those too she met and matched, fierce and quick with blade, arrows, and fists, agile on horseback.
For many lifetimes over would my mother and others like her play this role : of woman warrior—a role in which the woman’s penchant for self-sacrifice is transposed onto the arena of nation, in place of family.
…
There were, it is said, eleven terrible wars against at least seven different invading forces over a period of eleven long centuries. You must understand this if you are to understand the Vietnamese people at all—I have been told. You see : for a millenium or more, long before the West even alit on our shores, we were fatalists, separatists, already. Willing to lose—and thus to give—everything. : it is also interesting to note that the indomitable fighter’s spirit, that relentless of our independence-seeking character, in the mythos of Viet Nam is embodied as feminine.
"But this is how the Vietnamese identity was to re-cast itself in the latter part of the 20th century: now splintered, one-half still geographically rooted and dominant, the other free-floating, scattered across seas, fragmented into hundreds of thousands of individualities, to be absorbed, negated, or negotiated, across a vast assortment of geographies.
Now we were travelers. We were seeds.
"
Now we were travelers. We were seeds.
→ 20 Aug 11 at 10 pm
… His scaly, luminous-eyed father, those eyes so large you can see the veins that travel through them. like branches of blood jaggedly meandering just beneath the surface of the liquid sheen that seems to coat the rounded, bulging contour of eyeball—the path of those veins are a prediction, don’t they yet know, of the fate that will unfold for the father and his half of the offspring in coming generations; the veins configure a map of the migrations (the luminous eye the globe) they will soon be sent out upon. & the brother, taking in the audacity of his father’s blood-veined eyes, senses all of this, even if he cannot explain it in words. He only knows it will not be easy. For any of them.
…
The father’s gleaming eye on the daughter: <Do you want to come with your father? We will go south. We will fight. Do you want to fight, my daughter?>
<I want to fight.>
The brother’s gaze, at those words, falls.
