U Sam Oeur’s Sacred Vows

Sacred Vows begins with “Thunder in the East mak[ing] the sound traDOK,” what an endnote identifies as “the Vietnam War against the U.S.” (a very strange framing of the US invasion in aid of the French colonial regime) and from there it goes downhill. Because U Sam Oeur, a devout Buddhist, was a citizen of Phnom Penh when the Khmer Rouge became the de facto government of what would soon, and for only briefly, be called Democratic Kampuchea. Throughout you sense that Ouer sees the monstrosity and ambition of Pol Pot’s regime as spokes in the wheel of genocide, easy to boil into one phrase from the titular poem — “It’s a good dream/but it’s impossible.” But unfortunately, almost 30 years old, and absent of what translator Ken McCullough calls the “operatic qualities” behind his blend of traditional and free verse forms (closer to hymns or the lyre-accompanied poetry of Homer), it takes effort to find the flexible in the aged bone. “It is Sam’s hope to someday open a creative writing school in Cambodia,” he adds, which is the best way to look at Sacred Vows: a school for the next generation.

To account first for what is lost in uprooting the school building, architecture is obliterated and not for always apparent reasons. Poems like “Oath of Allegiance” often fully adopt the bilateral triplets capped by a centered line seen in the original Khmer, without a similar consistency for poems like “May Peace Prevail In Cambodia,” where the bilateral couplets are ousted for quatrains. It’s a minor peeve possibly explained by the rendering of the traditional Cambodian set forms (“includes forty-six…most poets rarely use more than the same five or six”) into English, but as a matter of course it would be nice to have more of an explanation to better appreciate the context of these changes to Oeur’s work. It’s a lost opportunity to introduce readers to the tradition, if a minor disconnect.

But the minor can be a crack in the major. Often, like a Whitman of homilies, a poet he has translated into Khmer, Oeur directs his poems to an audience: titularly as in “to the teenagers,” textually as the opening “O Poets” in “The Ruins of Angkor Cry Out For National Concord,” occasionally ironical as in “Humor at the Meeting to Strengthen Phum Khum” where the poetic voice addresses their “dear compatriots.” These poems linger, conversational, cresting, ecstatic. Yet they never quite stretch the line like the Brooklyn Bard (although this is hard to gauge without the aforementioned guidance), never dare  prod at the radically universal — more storying, more the clerk saving papers from a burning archive. A recitation of events more compelling than Whitman’s but, not as freewheeling, not as compellingly told. Sacred Vows is trepidation towards the radical.

That’s not to deny it power. The conversational, cresting, and ecstatic is obvious in something like “The Wheel Turns,” an Epic recounting of months spent after being freed from the Sampoch Concentration Camp, moving on foot and oxcart towards Phnom Chi in a “tributaries of people from all directions,” before getting sick, “my plea to die on the bank rejected,” surviving until Pol Pot’s regime collapsed. The literal wheel blends with the karmic wheel, Ouer’s journey blends with prayers to “Princess Lotus Bud,” “Princess Krabum Chhouk,” and the near death thought as “I gazed at my son—he was small as a bug./I tried to recall my Sacred Vows,/my Oath of Allegiance, while I lay face up to the sky.” Storm clouds from the east will move west with their thunder, and we can only acquiesce. It’s humble, moving, and too real in the face of such horrors.

It also clearly restrains itself, however.  What stands out in the “Sacred Vow” is not his prayers for “the shore of genuine Freedom,” “the rebirth of my beloved Cambodia,” but his pleading for God to “please scour Cambodia.” It’s a violent word, “scour,” steel wool on burnt-caked pans. A violence of disgust and despair, as seen in the poem “The Krasang Tree at Prek Po”:

In ’75 the krasang tree was surrounded

By people seeking refuge.

By ’79 the krasang tree was surrounded

By babies’ skeletons, smashed

Against its trunk by Utapats.

The Utapats said: ‘the annihilate

Grasses, uproot them daily.’ O, Grass!

What has the grass committed!”

And desiring such violence in pursuit of the good but impossible dream is the central tension here, the lesson Oeur seems to want to pass on. As if to say to his pupils, teenagers and yet to be, don’t step on the grass because “what has the grass committed”? Today’s permission is tomorrow’s indulgence, look at the “babies’ skeletons, smashed” after only 4 years. Abdicate history to God or for what substitutes God in “Work at the Douglas Corporation, Urethane Department, Minneapolis, Minnesota” — “I will transmute my energy/…/into production, hoping they’ll use/my taxes to stem the oppressors.” This poem, ironically, in its Beatnik interactions/meditations over a workday is one of the most distinct in the collection. A genuinely striking, if underinvestigated, traDOK in the terrain.

Whitman wrote, famously, of grass too. Leaves of it. In that titular poem he wrote “Or I guess the grass is itself a child, the produced babe of the vegetation.” This is the sort of radical gesture that the trauma of genocide, of camps, of Pol Pot and Democratic Kampuchea, terrorizes out of poetry. Men will break babies against trees to uproot grass, and this is horror. It hardens softness, rigor mortis. From rigidity, dissociation, and from there blurred vision. This is the glossless side of the Whitmanian, of “I also say it is good to fall—battles are lost in the same spirit in which they are won,” a worthy spirit, if harder to embrace for a genocide survivor. Still, Oeur bequeaths himself best he can. He’ll grow from the grass. One hopes that the day will be balmy, thunderless.

Favorite Poems:

“The Hunting World”

“The Howling Dead”

“Prelude”

“Water Buffalo Cobra and the Prisoner of War”

“Sacred Vows”

“The Wheel Turns”

“The Krasang Tree at Prek Po”

“Work at the Douglas Corporation, Urethane Department, Minneapolis, Minnesota”

Conceição Lima’s No Gods Live Here

“Broadly speaking, the vision of Africa that predominates the anglosphere's imagination continues to flatten and dehumanize the continent” is Shook’s condensed, prosaic description of Conceição Lima’s  “Archipelago”: “the enigma is some other thing—no gods live here/just men and the sea, immovable inheritance.” In fact, this miniature poem from Lima’s 2024 No Gods Live Here, translated by Shook, embodies its weighty brevity, its mystery (what is “the enigma?” How does it relate to the presence of gods?), and its embodiment of the enchantment and terror of Sao Tome & Principe’s history.

Maybe off-putting is the way to describe this embodiment, as when in “The Guardian” Lima writes that “he decreed the wind’s obedience/and the vassalage of every fruit.” “Obedience” and “vassalage” read as overly precise, a thesaurus-y translation, until you see the original Portuguese are “obediência” and “vassalegem.” It’s technical refinement to the point of dissociation; off-putting in a similar way to how the slave history of the twin-island nation is mentioned in “Afroinsularity”:

And there were living footprints in the field slashed

like scars—each coffee bush now breathes a

dead slave.

Just as when the absence of gods points to “just men and the sea, immovable inheritance,” here the breathing of the coffee bush points to a violence not just in the inherited history, but in the survival struggle — there is no god to turn to, the footfalls of the living are imprints of their lives before their deaths, and the coffee bushes sighs their lives. Fitting on an island with no human history prior to slavery, no native food crops, and a slave regime whose dedication to sugar plantation profits led to, according to historian Gerhard Seibert, “a shortage of food and caused famine among the enslaved people.”

This is sort of the central tension of No Gods Live Here. On one hand there’s something consciousness raising to the collection. Twenty of sixty poems, a full third, use “word” as an operative metaphor. An almost accompany poem to “Archipelago,” “The Archipelago of the Word,” rhapsodizes of “five letters and all the world’s islands./Five letters and the world an archipelago. Your name—the archipelago of word.”

Against this, “Elemental Ghosts,” a series of poems dedicated to specific African leaders (“Kwame,” “All of Cabral’s Deaths and a Mountain”) and histories (“Congo 1961,” “Circum-navigation”) is less about a world of a disconnected islands but about the earthily, intimately human, “he who seized the word,” as Lima writes in “Mwalimu,” “and plowed a boneless field.” It’s an idealism (there exists no “boneless field”) based on the expropriation of language; a metaphor not distant from the actual history of nationalized plantations following independence in 1975.

And it’s here in the roots where the conflict of word and act is most pronounced, where Lima abandons word (a bit tiring a metaphor after the 10^th time) for her strongest moments, like the grandiose, global “Dark Song of my Roots”:

May no language proclaim us islands unto ourselves—

you are not the word

M’banza-Kongo

but you could be,

you are not

Malabo,

but you might be,

you are not

Luanda,

and you could be,

you are not

Kinshasa

nor Lagos,

you are not Monrovia, though you could be.

Pointillistic, the burst of lines, places, and rejections—passingly reminiscent of Hopkins’ triumphal “not, I’ll not, despair” of “Carrion Comfort”— makes an archipelago of “all the world’s islands.” The ultimate rejection of the “anglosphere’s imagination” (via language) for the lands themselves, their peoples, their histories, bone-filled, points to the promise of the “could be.” And maybe that’s what “the enigma” is: that which trades in absent gods instead of the present’s historical promise.

Favorite Poems:

“House”

“Plantation”

“Dark Song to My Roots”

“Archipelago”

“The Other Landscape”

“Border”

“All of Cabral’s Deaths and a Mountain”

“Seeds”

“The Archipelago of the Word”

“Essential Words”