WE PROMISE ONE ANOTHER / Introduction ...

we promise one  another - poems from an asian war -
selected, translated    by    don luce -john c.  schafer- j. chagnon
published by The Indochina  M.E. Project , Washington , D.C, 1974.


         INTRODUCTION :  THESE ARE THE POEMS  OF THE YOUNG VIETNAM ..
        selected, translated , introduced by     DON LUCE - JOHN C. SCHAFER  -J. CHAGNON


 T hese are  the poems  of the young of Việtnam.   They express  the hopes and sorrows of a youth which had known only war.   There is little joy.   Joy does  not come often to a land where brother is sent to kill brother.   But there is love which shines through in rare moments.   Tragically, the love is often for a friend lost in the war.

T here is hatred too.   This is the consequence of brother being pitted against brother.   It is  the result of a foreign army trying to protect the corrupt and power-hungry.

U nderlying  all else in these poems is the closeness of the family and the great love for Việtnam.    The respect and venerations of  the ancestors is told here, the struggle to be worthy of the family is recorded in the writings of the youth.

T hese are  the poems that have sent the young to jail -- and the poems that were written in jail.   Some were smuggled  out of the jails like Côn Sơn and Chí Hòa . meticulously copied by hand and passed  from youth to you.   Others were printed in underground newspapers and distributed in the crowded corridors of the  schools and at the secret meeting places of the youth.   Many of the poems have been put to music by the popular young songwriters : Tôn Thất  Lập, Trịnh Công Sơn, Miên Đức Thắng .   These are sung wherever the youth meet ... at work  camps, in crowded cafes,  by lovers ,  in the prisons and during street demonstrations.

T he Vietnamese  love poetry.   their culture is best understand by their poems.   Though Vietnamese recognise the superior talent of their especially gifted poets and songwriters ,  they do not consisder poetry and song to be the special property of a small group of  literati .  They are  for everyone.   Farmers, soldiers, and students all write poems.  At the end of a party each person attending is usually expected to sing a song or recite a poem.

T he interest in poetry is part of the Vietnamese love of beauty  , their devotion  to aesthetics, which is evident in their approach to the spirituual as well as the physical world.    They are fond of saying of a particularly courageous and inspiring person that his life as like a poem.   Nowhere are poetry and life more closely intertwined than in Việtnam. 

B ut few outsiders have read the poems and understood the culture of Việtnam.   Few have listened to the voices of the people of Việtnam.   We can also appreciate their beauty and the evidence they provide of the courage of a people who can still sing after years of unrelieved sadness and war.

T he words   are simple,  but there is a depth of meaning.   There are, however,  difficulties in appreciating poetry filtered through literary and cultural sensibilities very different from our own.   To many Western readers these poems may seem  overly sentimental and even perhaps self- indulgent.   We  may tire when we hear continually of poor suffering Việtnam,  doomed  love affairs, prison tortures, war and death.   But one must remember that these are all a part of life in Việtnam today,  and Vietnamese cannot avoid them.   In the poem 'The Present ', the poet tells  of sitting down to write his girlfriend a love letter but finds the words' I love'  slanted by the explosion of rockets,  saking his hand holding the pen.   he ends by syaing ' Some  day when there ' s peace  / I will write you a different poem .'

W hen one  considers all that has happened to Việtnam,  it is remarkable that Vietnamese have not lost their ability to hope.   In a collection of songs called ' Song from the Devastated Fields ' ,   Miên Đức Thắng , a popular young writer and singer, expresses what has happened to his land and people.    These songs,  particularly ' Mother, Raise Me to Be a Prisoner ' , are very critical of the Thiệu regime  and its American allies.   Miên Đức Thắng was put in prison for singing them, but he does nor give in to despair.   In the title song, ' Songs from the Devastated Fields', he sings :

                                 From the devastated fields of today we sing these songs ;     
                                 Despite a thousand  frightful years our life is still happy ,
                                 Though weariness is printed on our dry hands ,
                                 We will never give up ,
                                 Though  our fields now are abandoned we will still work for tomorrow ,
                                 Though  flowers will blossom and the future will be bright .
                                 So let us go and recultivate our fields ,
                                 So we can  live and die in our homeland ;        
                                 And tomorrow our land will flourish with new ricefields ,
                                 Tomorrow our land will blossom with more smiles ,
                                 Tomorrow our land will be greener than the mountains and hills
                                  For tomorrow we are determined to live in our land .  

I n the West  we are taught to suspect those who wear hearts on their sleeves. Many of us cling to the belief  that an emotional cry from the heart should be restrained nd are ashamed or reluctant to give in to our feelings.  With us  there is the real danger that the levels of self-control we achieve may make us forget the validity of the feeling they are designed to mask .   And it is wrong,  it should seem,  for Americans  who can absorb the horrors of a Mỹ Lai  and saturation bombing  of a land  and people with only ripples of guilt  in the national consciousness to pass judgment on people who have not lost their capacity to weep in the face of suffering .   These poems are affirmations of feelings on the part of a people who have long been treated by many Americans as if they had no feelings.   By reading their poetry we can learn what has happened to them,  and hopefully,  what has happened to us .  
[]

DON LUCE -  JOHN C. SCHAFER
&  JACQUELYN CHAGNON

( from  WE PROMISE ONE ANOTHER -  poems fron an Asian war -
 Published by The Indochia Mobile  Education Project  , Washington, D.C, 1974  -   p. 1-4)