Mia Sloan
Interview with Cathy Linh Che
Cathy Linh Che views poetry as a site of capacious possibility and necessary world-making. Spanning individual and collective memory through personal and political narratives, Che reveals the potential of language to push against historical paradigms and bring excluded voices to light. She is the author of Becoming Ghost, a Finalist for the National Book Award, which juxtaposes her family’s survival as Vietnam War refugees with their uncredited roles in Apocalypse Now. Che previously authored the Kundiman Poetry Prize-winning collection Split, co-authored the children’s book An Asian American A to Z: A Children’s Guide to Our History, and wrote and produced the film We Were the Scenery, which was shortlisted for an Academy Award. She teaches in the low-residency Creative Writing MFA program at Antioch University and lives in New York City.
WASHINGTON SQUARE REVIEW: What are you reading and thinking about these days?
CATHY LINH CHE: I'm currently traveling, and I'm carrying essay collections by James Baldwin and John Didion in my backpack. I’m thinking about the essay as a form, and I’m also thinking about the ways that poetry and fiction—at least in the American context—has been shaped by the CIA’s involvement in the funding of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. I’ve watched the ways that American poetry has been overtaken by ideas of craft that have sanitized what people think is a “good poem” and lowered the stakes of poetry, so people think that poetry is not an action and that it is incapable of doing anything. Poems can push boundaries of possibility. As part of my poetry practice, I’m led to the page continually as a way to press against any boundaries that might limit our political imagination. I’m writing things in my own private notebook that I think of as potentially dangerous to publish, something that could result in my being added to an FBI file. So, I’m currently thinking about poetry as a space of true freedom and rehearsal for actions against and beyond the state—actions that can truly make lives better, end imperial violence, and bring about the collapse of the American empire and the rise of something better.
WSR: This reminds me of James Baldwin’s essay “The Creative Process,” where he defines the role of the artist as finding points of contact between the “wilderness” of the self and our external constructions of society to reveal a deeper reality—one that I also think resists any craft analysis. On one hand you have the institutionalized study of poetry, such as the MFA, and on the other hand these wildernesses that poetry speaks to and that we struggle to touch in academic spaces. Can you tell me more about your process of realizing the stakes of poetry for yourself?
CHE: While the MFA, and other institutional spaces, can produce work that feels less wild, more controlled, these spaces can also create opportunities for this contact between the “wildness” of the self and our external constructions of society to occur. The problem of the university isn’t that it’s a site of learning; it’s that its structures are bound up with capitalism, neoliberalism, the state, surveillance, and the police state.
Most of my poetry writing and study took place in the classroom, where I learned “craft” but also was exposed to poems, communities, and ideas I may not have encountered otherwise. The classroom is not the only place to learn this, but it is a space that does exist that can be used variously.
I wouldn’t be the writer I am today without my MFA community, my teachers, my peers, the books I was able to access in the library, the recommendations, the salons, the access to public reading from living authors. They all supported my contact with the wilderness of self by providing the environment that encouraged me to write boldly and bravely.
On the other hand, the MFA workshop can silence, can treat a piece of writing as if something to be dissected outside of its context and connection to the world. “Craft” can be, as Fargo Nissim Tbakhi states in his essay “Notes on Craft: Writing in the Hour of Genocide,” “the network of sanitizing influences exerted on writing in the English language: the influences of neoliberalism, of complicit institutions, and of the linguistic priorities of the state and of empire.”
I remember an MFA workshop comment when a poet said of a poem, as a compliment: “Oh, this poem is political, but it is actually good.” The assumption was that anything political is by default “bad.” This idea has probably trickled down from the CIA’s shaping and intervention! I was on a panel recently with a writer who did his MFA at Iowa in the 60s. He was a Vietnam War soldier who went AWOL. He brought a poem about the Vietnam War to workshop. His instructor told him, “We don’t bring in poems about the war here.”
On the other hand, Sharon’s workshop made me want to write into my wilderness of self and world. Sharon offered up a space of vulnerability that came about because I felt permission to bring in work that felt deeply private.
This permission-making and permission-giving unlatched something inside of me. During a workshop, I confessed one of my greatest fears was that my writing would veer into melodrama. I didn’t want to dishonor the real experience by making more of it than what actually happened, and during workshop, Solmaz Sharif said to me, “What if at the top of the sheet of paper for your next poem you wrote, ‘Be melodramatic!’”
I turned to a fresh page in my notebook and did just that. This led to a poem called “Story” that I wrote on the train, weeping. It was the story of my years of sexual abuse. I crossed an internal barrier into my own “wilderness.”
WSR: Can you tell me more about how you find those permissive places in yourself, where you’re able to touch the parts of your poetic self—your questions, your stories—that bring up the most fear?
CHE: That’s a good question. There are always new fears that arise in poetry, and new places of push and pull. It’s an interesting thing to trace over time.
When writing Split, I felt the fear of being seen, known, and misunderstood, but Sharon’s work, both in the classroom, and in her books, gave me permission, so it was there that I brought in this work, and it was there that I was held. Split had this really amazing reception that I didn't expect. My siblings were deeply supportive. Reviewers really understood the text, and people would emerge deeply affected by it, or connecting to it, or feeling like some part of their own story was being touched.
When Split was published, I was afraid that I would suddenly be marked with the letter “A,” like in the Scarlet Letter—though in this case, I would be marked “A” for “abused.” Having that which was secret move into a public space scared me, and it also kind of led to the amazing personal transformation. I was able to integrate this secret part of me into the whole of myself, including my public, known body. It was no longer my secret—that public-ness meant integrating what had happened to me in ways that felt enlarging.
The new fear after Split was published was what to do with this idea of a public. What do people out there want from me? What do they expect me to write? It took a long time to figure out what I wanted to say next, to shuck off audience expectations. I didn’t do any active permission-giving exercises (which is part of why it took eleven years to publish poetry book two!), but looking back, I wonder what it would have meant if I gave myself permission to disappoint my imaginary reader.
Becoming Ghost offered up other new fears: Do I know enough? Have I researched enough? How do I write about disownment while also trying to honor my parents’ story? How do I do it ethically?
What is my role or responsibility and doing that retelling work? What is the role and responsibility of a daughter who is working within, or pushing back against, a patriarchal system that assumes my own writing and truth-telling is a familial betrayal? I suppose a permission giving exercise would be to write at the top of each sheet of paper: “Be ignorant.” “Be underresearched.” “Dishonor your parents.” “Be unethical.” “Be irresponsible.” “Betray your family.” and see what happens.
WSR: Alongside thinking about bringing your poetic imagination to another person beyond yourself, how do you approach the ethics of imagining the past—one that you weren’t physically witnessing?
CHE: Where does their story end and mine begin? I have developed a set of ideas around the porousness of self. Marianne Hirsch writes about The Generation of Postmemory: “Postmemory describes the relationship of the second generation to powerful, often traumatic, experiences that preceded their births but that were nevertheless transmitted to them so deeply as to seem to constitute memories in their own right.”
As part of this generation, I feel strongly that my parents’ origin story is my origin story too. I think of “story” as not something that one person owns, or two people own, but something that we all collectively share. When we talk about history, it feels alive to me, the ways that the past and present and future converge. I am a product of the past that has shaped my present. If, in the present, I write a restorative archive, then this can change both the past and also shape a future.
The writing of Becoming Ghost is an intervention into the story of Apocalypse Now, a major film which makes up so much of the iconography of the Vietnam War. The addition of my parents’ voices, or my grandmothers’ voices, into this narrative form a public chorus.
My literal DNA contains my mother, my father, my grandmother. I am part of them and they are part of me. All of these voices are part of my poetic inheritance.
WSR: In the context of what you just shared, how did your writing process differ in Becoming Ghost?
CHE: My writing method during Becoming Ghost was much different from Split, in that in addition to mining the self, I would act as this medium and write poems from the voices of my mother, father, and grandmother.. When I say “medium,” I mean something akin to poetic seance. I would participate in what others call “automatic writing.” I would sit with a page and listen for the next line. What happens as I move through is not exactly my own words—it’s something that moves through the body and shows up on the page. There are a lot of poets who work this way. Jack Spicer wrote an amazing poem called “Sporting Life” that compares a poet to a radio: “The trouble with comparing a poet with a radio is that radios / don't develop scar-tissue… / The poet is a radio. The poet is a liar. The poet is a / counterpunching radio.” We’re not just electrical wires, we’re also the vocabulary, the experiences, “the scar tissue” that the messages move through. So what happens is that the medium speaks in a voice that isn’t purely the father, mother, or grandmother, but through a literal body of one’s own experience and language that, as it appears on the page, is something choral, and multi-voiced.
So it’s hard to determine the ethics of writing about history when I see the convergence of time, voice, and story. I call it the “ethics of gossip”—it’s a little cheeky, but it gestures at this idea of what it means to tell a communal story.
WSR: It’s meaningful hearing you describe that, especially in the context of your experience with the reception of Split, as readers identified themselves and their own stories in your voice. This reminds me of the golden shovel, and how it shows up in Becoming Ghost, in that you are literally drawing from another voice and creating the choral effect you describe. Can you tell me more about your decision to include this form in Becoming Ghost?
CHE: In Becoming Ghost, the golden shovel form is used to take lines from the scenes in Apocalypse Now that my parents played extras in—specifically the napalm scene, which begins with helicopters arriving from a distance. There’s an iconic line by Lieutenant Colonel Kilgore saying, “I love the smell of napalm in the morning.”
I wanted to take that text, push it to the side, and have the voices of my mother, father, and grandmother, who lived through the war, take up space. Instead of homage, it’s a pointed critique. It’s also an opportunity to open the door to what has been historically missing within the archive.
WSR: I’m curious to circle all the way back to the beginning, when you were describing your private journal—can you tell me about the shape of your poetry practice in your day-to-day life? How does it build to a larger project when you’ve discovered something that needs more room?
CHE: When life allows, I have a daily writing practice. I join a monthly writing accountability group called “The Grind.” There are times when I will write continuously daily for a year and a half, and there are times when I will write continuously for just one month. There are also times when it’s just not possible. Last year, I did 100 public events. I didn’t do daily writing then because I was just trying to get through the 100 events.
I gather the writing in a single document, where it keeps accumulating. I don’t judge whether the poem or piece of writing is good or bad. I try to trust the process. It’s a way to clear the pipes, build upon my daily thinking, and practice imaginaries. It’s deeply pleasurable.
It’s also a way to practice trusting my intuition. I allow myself to wonder, play, experiment, and stretch the bounds of what a poem can be or do without worrying about where I’m going.
As I move through the world, I am also asking myself: What matters to me? What do I care about? This leads to the next phase, which is to get acquainted with what I want to be in conversation with. I gather that together and find the pieces that feel realized and like they have something to say, and I start to sort them into something like a manuscript. My favorite pieces are deposited into one area, forming a nucleus. As a body of work emerges, I write into it. I print out my favorite poems and tape everything to the wall, then start assembling and editing. With Becoming Ghost, it always felt like there was something missing. That’s why it took so long to publish a second book—eleven years. When I finally felt like it was good enough, I sent it around, and my editor, Jenny Xu, helped me look at ways to approach that missing piece.
The current iteration of the genocide in Palestine was occuring during the assembling of Becoming Ghost. As the daughter of Vietnamese refugees who had watched people be killed by American bombs, and who is now living in the United States and participating in protest movements, I felt the terrible resonances keenly. This made me write into a series of possibilities. As someone who knows that the long Vietnam War did eventually end, I can see the possibility of a free Palestine. During the Vietnam War, everything seemed to indicate the U.S. would win—they had more money, more weapons. But the U.S did not win. Part of that was because of the will of the people, in the U.S., those on the ground in Vietnam, and other solidarities worldwide.
What are the possibilities that history can provide? Hope, a roadmap, a cautionary tale, or even optimism for a different present, past, and future?
WSR: I’m interested in the questions of possibility you bring up, especially in thinking about what a “good poem” means—Baldwin, for example, might define a “good poem” as something that pushes against and expands our paradigms in some way. What gives you hope for the possibility of poetry, personally or politically?
CHE: There was a moment when I thought I might write a book called “Hope,” and see what that would challenge or generate. Isabella Hammad’s Recognizing the Stranger: On Palestine and Narrative references “pessoptimism.” It rang true to me—this idea that one’s pessimism stems from this sense of knowing the terrible things that are happening, and how devastating the realities are, and then there is optimism, knowing that our collective will cannot be deterred. Even as things are terrible right now, our will continues forward, steadfastly and insistently, and we will achieve our freedom—however long it takes.
Language is instrumental in shaping thought. The state is interested in the capture of our culture workers—the way we can see possibility. If they are able to neutralize poetry as a tool of action and thinking, they will make their winning more likely. That’s why so many repressive regimes resort to propaganda and book bans. This is why the IDF burned down libraries and universities in Gaza. And so, the U.S.’s State Department’s shaping of the creative writing workshop seeks to control American literature in a “soft” way, seeding the idea that literature of value centers on individual dramas—the idea that poetry is just about personal expression, that there’s no possible way to use poetry to effect political change, or that a political poem is bad unless it’s “well-crafted” under a rubric that looks at the elements of poetry (simile, metaphor, image) while not taking into account its political clarity.
A creative writing workshop can be one of those spaces where you scrub down anything that might be sharp, remove a burr that is jagged or pointy. We take a magnifying glass and look at poems as these beautiful objects that have no relation to the world. Fargo Nissim Tbakhi posits:
“If we are to consider our writing a space in which to fight, we’d better know who we’re fighting, who we’re fighting with, and why. Political thought and political education are the vital building blocks of that knowledge. Craft asks us to consider the language first and the politics second, tells us that a political education is not central but peripheral to being a writer. We must reject this.”
The hope I have is that the language around us is starting to shape revolutionary thought. I am interested in reframing despair. I am interested in reframing what we see as evidence of our losing. My poetry practice is now a space where I am imagining ways to create better lives and new possibilities. There are boundless ways that language has not been utilized for organizing, and there are ways that poetry and organizing can inform one another, as Solmaz Sharif noted in her essay “The Near Transitive Properties of the Political and the Poetic: Erasure.” In my mind, there’s limitless poetic and creative potential for world-making that we can participate in and enact. I have a great hope for us retaking poetry and remaking it into a hopeful site of possibility
Poetry comes from poesis, which means “making.” The world that poets can make feel necessary and possible. But I am somebody who knows tragedy and also am living possibilities beyond what I could have ever imagined.
Cathy Linh Che is the author of Becoming Ghost, a Finalist for the National Book Award. She serves as Executive Director at Kundiman.