This is a story about the courage of a remarkable poet who not only managed to survive 27 years of inconceivable sufferings in communist prisons, but who, in the midst of the misery, composed two amazing books of poetry.
During the 27 years of Nguyen Chi Thien's imprisonment in Vietnam, he constantly trained his extraordinary memory in order to not forget the hundreds of powerful poems that he created in the quiet of his mind since he could not write them down because he had neither pen nor paper.
Nguyen Chi Thien was born in 1939 into a lower middleclass family and received a good education in French and Vietnamese culture. He remembers the "unending, boundless love and concern" of his parents who after he had been diagnosed with tuberculosis at the age of 15 sold their house in Hanoi and moved to the city of Haiphong by the sea to take care of his health.
In 1954, at the age of 15, he welcomed the establishment of Communist North Vietnam, but like many North Vietnamese, he then turned against the regime during the following reign of terror.
During the Soviet and Chinese style "collectivization," from 1953 to 1956 tens of thousands of people were executed and even more were thrown into abysmal jails where they eventually died.
It was during this time that Nguyen Chi Thien began composing poetry critical of the regime, which immediately started to spread around the country by word of mouth.
In 1961, at the age of 22, he was thrown into prison for three and a half years, where he wrote, addressing his parents:
I am fully aware that in my broken life
I cannot do much in return for your love…
Actually, he did not write those words as he could never write in prison. Even if he could have gotten the resources, it would have been too dangerous. Instead, he could only compose verses in his mind.
During his first detention, Thien composed about 100 poems.
"Those who live in a free world," he says, "can hardly imagine the living conditions of prisoners. Being always very hungry, they ate everything they could catch: mice, rats, spiders, snakes, lizards, etc. In a short time, all insects around the camp were exterminated. Prisoners had to do it secretly, if the guards noticed them swallowing, prisoners would immediately get shackled. People were dying one after another. As far as an eye could see, there were graves around the labor camp everywhere."
It seems impossible to survive in those conditions, but Thien always had his poetry as an ethereal wife standing with him, comforting him, and encouraging him.
I Married Poetry
I married poetry since my student days,
From our very first encounter, she knew I was in love.
I was so in love that I soon forgot all my earlier paramours.
And she agreed to marry me simply because
I could not live without her by my side to console me.
Our wedding was truly one made in heaven
Since our best man was Dream, and Vision our bridesmaid.
With all our off springs Poetry now has her hands full,
She has grown pale with all these years of imprisonment
And having moved out of the palace among the clouds
She has grown from dream and vision days into a kind of dumb stupor…
So they blame her for being too sad and angry
Refusing as she does to put on rouge and makeup
So that she can sell her body to the Party for a living…
By sticking with me, she knows nothing but tragedy and suffering,
Sharing, oh, so many sad stories that boil us up.
- Darling, until when will you silently carry on your faith?
- Until a day you tell me your first lie!
After being released in 1964, he continued writing and reciting poems to his closest friends from memory. Very soon, his verses became well known throughout Hanoi and Haiphong. In 1966, secret agents suspected that it was him, whose poems were being widely circulated in Vietnam, and although he denied writing "reactionary poems", without any evidence or trial, he was sent to prison for a new 12-year term.
Thien composed about 300 more poems during those long twelve years.
No matter the destitution he faced, he still found — only God knows how — the inspiration and strength to say:
Though the night seems impenetrably deep
And boundless over my head,
I still pray,
Still live and trust
That the dawn will come, the dawn will come.
In July 1977, two years after the fall of South Vietnam, Nguyen Chi Thien was released to make room in the jail for many soldiers from South Vietnam. When he returned home to Haiphong that year, however, instead of reuniting with his parents he found two graves at the outskirts of town.
They called him a "walking skeleton" at that time: being about 6 feet tall, he barely weighed 80 pounds. As a political prisoner, he was denied any kind of employment. "Hardly making the ends meet, I often went to bed on an empty stomach," recalls the poet.
"I made up my mind to try to send my poems abroad. They were the fruit of twenty years of my work. I couldn't let them be buried with me."
Nguyen Chi Thien decided to go to the French or British Embassy. It took him three days and nights to write down 400 poems.
He couldn't make it to the French Embassy because it was heavily guarded at that time. So on July 16, 1979, he managed to sneak past the guards of the British Embassy, and handed three diplomats a manuscript that was hidden under his shirt.
The cover letter, which he had written beforehand in French to accompany his poetry collection entitled The Flowers of Hell, read: "It is in the name of millions of innocent victims of dictatorship… that I implore you to have these poems published in your free country… Of my broken life there remains but one dream: that is to see the greatest possible number of people realize that communism is a great calamity for mankind."
British diplomats solemnly promised to publish his poems and shook hands with him. Upon leaving the Embassy through the back door, Nguyen Chi Thien was immediately arrested.
[ Part Two of this article will be published on the Epoch Times website later this week.]
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