What happens when language is permanently fragmented without one’s control?
While far from a debut project, Truong Tran’s How to Exi(s)t: A Poet’s Memoir is still laden with firsts. It marks the first time he has written solely in prose, and the first time he is confessing why that is. Tran uses How to Exi(s)t to open up about his dyslexia, a topic he hitherto held close to the chest.
“How do I claim my identity as a writer when I also dread the act of reading?” he asked.
This collection of essays blends personal and rhetorical interrogation with memory and anecdote, all coming together to form an abstract portrait of Tran’s life as a Bay Area teacher, writer and visual artist. His identities as a dyslexic Vietnamese American queer man are foundational to understanding the words and sentences on the page. However, Tran’s belief in the idea that compartmentalizing our existence is not innate is evident in the way he seamlessly blends examinations of these identities. He creates a final product that bleeds with authenticity, rather than—as he puts it—becoming a performance for the white gaze.
In his essay titled, “On reading as a way of looking, seeing,” Tran begins by confessing that he does not like reading. Then he takes the reader back to his childhood spent in the library, where immigrant mothers like his own took advantage of the safety and supervision they provided. From here we learn Tran’s love of language came from sneakily reading about S&M in a corner: “I discovered language’s dirty little secret. It told me I was gay, again and again, and I loved it for that very reason” (Tran 122).
But the profound impact of language can cut both ways, especially when that language has been used as a tool of colonization and continues to be used in a way that grants authority to those with dominant cultural power.
“My engagement with language has always been an engagement with an exclusionary act,” Tran said. “I don’t think that literature was written for people like me. So when I am reading literature, it’s an act of breaking and entering.”
Tran mentions his previous work, Book of the Other, which focuses on the racism he has experienced in academia, throughout the memoir. He does this in both a reflective way, and in a way that takes full advantage of the honesty and directness granted by prose.
Poetry allowed Tran to hide behind metaphor; How to Exi(s)t is a departure from that. To prove it, Tran includes an essay where a professor he had written about in Book of the Other invites him to speak to a class, seemingly oblivious to how Tran has documented his racism in that very book. Metaphor gave him plausible deniability. By growing to love the traditional sentence through the process of writing How to Exi(s)t, Tran breaks free from reliance on the figurative.
In a cafe near Embarcadero station in San Francisco, he described the experience that fundamentally shifted how he views reliance on metaphor. Tran gave his students an assignment to identify what they were hunting and being hunted by. One student, a Black man who had lived in Oakland his whole life, said he always felt hunted by the police, that he didn’t have the luxury of metaphor.
Tran highlights this idea in the essay, “On art and shame,” which dives into an art installation that he created using cutout images of male genitalia. He only used images of white men. When asked why not Black or brown men, he always replies with some variation of, “Because I won’t fragment their images for art’s sake, in the act of cutting. We are fragmented enough.”
Themes of fragmentation are a throughline in many of these essays. They mirror Tran’s work as a visual artist who brings together disparate images and objects to form his pieces, in some instances through the very pages of this memoir.
Tran sprinkles mention of his San Jose childhood throughout the non-chronological narrative. This calls attention to formative experiences he had in what he, and other Vietnamese immigrants who settled in the area, called the “garbage neighborhood” due to it being built over a municipal landfill.
“The world looking in would say that we were poor, we were dead poor. But from us, from where we stood and how we looked at the world, it was just full of wonder,” Tran said.
Wonder and imagination blend with the concrete hometown relationships Tran gives insight into, and how those relationships inform his work. Tran’s deep ties to the communities that surround him make these essays shine.
Truong Tran’s ‘How to Exi(s)t: A Poet’s Memoir’ will be published Oct. 6 by City Lights Books. An official launch will be held on Sunday, Oct. 18, at 2pm at City Lights, 261 Columbus Ave., San Francisco.
