Who Has Access to the Archive?
Review of Mai Der Vang, Yellow Rain
by Miranda Pate
In her second poetry collection, Yellow Rain, Mai Der Vang confronts a history that has been swept under the rug for over fifty years – the truth about the “yellow rain” that fell onto Hmong refugees at the end of the war in Vietnam in the 1970s. The strange precipitation, toxic to plants and animals, was initially under investigation as a biological weapon, but American officials then rejected the evidence and the experiences of the Hmong to claim instead that the “yellow rain” was the feces of bees, a naturally occurring phenomenon. Exposing the inconsistencies of these claims, Vang leverages poetry to bring justice to a group whom history left behind. Equal parts heart-wrenching verse and robust archival analysis, Yellow Rain uses declassified government documents to defy the erasure of the experiences of the Hmong. Through striking formal organisation, contrasts between the sterility of government documents and resounding natural imagery, and a thread of hope, Vang creates a collection that demonstrates the power of poetry and narrative for retribution and testimony.
Vang’s use of form in every poem is astounding. No two poems look the same or have the same metre, and each poem takes up space on the page in a way that is visually interesting and unique. In some poems, Vang blends the formal elements of archival documents with the language of poetry, creating a work that demonstrates the tensions between the sterility of government reports and the beauty of Hmong oral storytelling. For example, in “Self-Portrait Together as CBW Questionnaire,” Vang uses the structure of a survey form sent to Hmong refugees but changes the words so that every element on the page is part of the poem (34–36). With the spaces for answers still present on the page, there is a choppy disconnect that represents the incompatibility of the rigid American documentation with Hmong cultural traditions. This remains a central tension throughout the collection, as Vang grapples with the erasure of Hmong culture in the larger inquiry into yellow rain using the very documents that she rejects as false.
Who has access to history when the archive is biased? By including documents describing the Hmong as “medically unsophisticated victims” (99) and “illiterate indigenous people” (156) who are unable to tell the difference between bee pollen and chemical weapons, Vang demonstrates that the Hmong were not allowed to help write this history: their experiences are still being ignored to this day. She highlights that the Hmong were not taken seriously, partially because of their oral culture. She quotes the New Yorker: “the Hmong are some of the best storytellers on earth. They can make up stories faster than you and I can write them down” (158). Juxtaposing such statements with a renewed attention to Hmong stories and testimony restores a place in history for the Hmong.
Vang’s poems employ many depictions of nature. She weaves imagery and metaphors such as “evening birdsong” (26) and “rain as refugee” (85) into a collection that examines what has historically been considered scientific fact. “Specimens from Ban Vinai Camp, 1983” clearly demonstrates a tension between twentieth-century science and nature. The form of the poem employs real headings used for specimen samples from the Hmong, yet the descriptions underneath each heading combine bodily descriptions with visceral depictions of nature. For example, the lines, “Blood (heparin) from breath of a conifer of the most feral cold” and “Blood (heparin) from ecru river embodied once as an elder lake” (48), are labelled under the heading “5. Male 30 / Sample Collected 21. Jan 1983 / Last exposure in Laos to “chemical rain”: Nov. 1982.” Vang uses these descriptions to demonstrate that the Hmong do not see these things with the same rigidity as the scientists, thereby emphasizing that there are many different ways to interpret observations. Furthermore, the integration of nature-based metaphors and government documents demonstrates the connection that the Hmong have to nature and thus contradicts the American government’s claims that the Hmong were unable to differentiate between pollen and poison. By representing a people who are in tune with the natural world to an extent that cannot be neatly transcribed, Vang rejects the long-held belief that the Hmong could not tell the difference between bee feces and chemical weapons. She thus opens our collective history to new possibilities.
Finally, there are elements of resilience in this collection. Vang demonstrates that the American government’s attempts to isolate the Hmong from nature and turn them against the bees (a part of the ecosystem that they had understood for generations) never succeeded. Indeed, Vang continually compares the Hmong to the bees, demonstrating that they have and maintain a relationship with them: in “Allied with the Bees,” she writes “we have hiked / These hills without shoes, long / Enough to hunt alongside the bees” and “what happened / To the bees also happened to us” (131). She also writes, “When my parents recalled what they knew about yellow rain, they did not speak of bees” (161), demonstrating that despite the American intent to falsify history, the Hmong maintained their relationship with the bees and did not allow American officials to redefine their experiences. The final poem of the collection, “And Yet Still More,” looks to the present and the future, drawing from the analysis of yellow rain and applying it to other situations of historical erasure, remarking “That refugee fathers sit outside of high schools waiting for the bell / That landmines excel at waiting” (180). The messages from this collection can be expanded to other cases of erasure and falsification. They also indicate the toll that waiting for the truth can have on the groups affected. With her final poem, Vang concludes her insightful recombination of art and archive. She asserts that we are still barely scratching the surface of a history of violence, erasure, and falsification, but that poetry, art, and storytelling give us the power to reclaim history.
Works Cited
Vang, Mai Der. Yellow Rain: Poems. Minneapolis, MN: Graywolf Press, 2021.
Miranda Pate grew up in Calgary, Alberta, and is a recent graduate from McGill University, where she completed a Bachelor of Arts with First Class Honours in English Cultural Studies.