Reflection on Ocean Vuong’s “Not Even This”
Ocean Vuong is a poet and author from Vietnam. He has published multiple poetry collections as well as one novel. His most recent poetry book, “Time is a Mother”, contains a poem called “Not Even” or “Not Even This” (multiple titles). It is ultimately about his mother’s death and includes the line that later became the collection’s title. He also touches on his experience of being Asian-American as well as gay.
The poem begins with a simple one-word line: “Hey”. Finding a direct greeting like this, a personal welcome to the poem, is a unique find in poetry. It sets the tone of the piece immediately, almost as a letter or a confrontation to the reader. He also later inserts “dear reader” in one of his sentences, a reminder that we are hearing his voice directed straight to us. Vuong’s use of metaphor is remarkable. He talks about the tokenization of his marginalized identities with specific examples, one being told “You’re so lucky, I’m just white” at a party. The reader can easily visualize this scene and feel Vuong’s discomfort and anger at those types of comments. Later, he writes, “It’s been proven difficult to dance to machine gun fire. / Still, my people made a rhythm this way.” Vuong is from Vietnam and the country’s history is essential to him and his writing. He weaves metaphor into his work in a way that the reader understands is not entirely make-believe. This line in particular talks about how in his experience, being Vietnamese means getting used to horrors like “My people, so still, in the photographs, as corpses”. The harm and death of innocent people is something he says he has grown accustomed to.
One of the strongest metaphors Vuong includes in this poem is his description of the man standing alone in a field as the narrator rushes by on a train. He catches a quick glimpse of him and the woman sitting beside him comforts him as he begins to cry. It is sometimes difficult to understand why Vuong includes certain lines, but after several reads, it is clear that everything in his poetry is intentional. He compares the man in the field to “a knife wound in a landscape painting”. The experience of seeing a random man, all alone and sticking out like a sore thumb in a field, is imagined to be jarring and the narrator’s tears are wholly understandable.
Vuong ends the poem with a quick description of birth: “and I was lifted, wet and bloody, out of my mother, screaming / and enough”. This is unique because typically poets start a poem with an allusion to birth, not end it. Vuong puts so much emotion and weight on every word that the final line, “and enough.”, feels very final and serious, like a casket closing. The contrast between this and the imagery of a baby being born are polar opposites and that creates an interesting dynamic.
