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.
( Please also see Part One. )
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.
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. This was the first of many detentions.
During his first detention, Thien composed about 100 poems, committing them all to memory, as he had no writing materials.
In 1966 Thien was sent to prison for a new 12-year term.
Thien composed about 300 more poems during those twelve years.
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.
Upon returning home, he wrote down 400 of his poems, and smuggled the manuscript into the British Embassy where he gave it to British officials.
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.
He was condemned to twelve more years of prison, where he continued composing, what he later called The Flowers of Hell II, a new collection of more than 300 poems.
"I've spent eight out of twelve years in the Hanoi Hilton Hotel," says the poet reflecting on his life. "This name was ironically given to this prison by one of the three hundred American pilots, who were struck down by Russian missiles during the Vietnamese war. Living conditions in this 'hotel' were more than terrible. In a three square meter dark cell, without windows, each prisoner had a space of only six inches to lie on his side on a cement floor. Besides, forty other prisoners had to stand all night along the walls. The next night, they changed places. To go to the toilet, you had to have the skill of a Kung-Fu master or a circus performer. Every day, one or two people died of suffocation.''
In these days (1988), he composed the poem, "Ill and Shackled."
Ill and shackled,
My body is paper thin
With a stomach that is empty.
Yet miracle like, I still live on,
Scaring away even Death.
As for these barbaric enemies,
Even they could not figure it out,
For they had thought I would be crushed long ago.
Little did they suspect
That a whole garden of flowers would blossom on steel.
The three British diplomats kept their word and by 1980, Nguyen Chi Thien's poems started circulating among the Vietnamese in the U.S., France and other countries. In 1982, an article in Asiaweek titled, "A Voice from the Hanoi Underground," followed by a BBC broadcast, brought worldwide attention to the imprisoned poet.
He was made an honorary member of the PEN clubs in France, Sweden, Japan and the U.S. The poet was awarded the Amsterdam Poetry prize and the American PEN Freedom Award. His poems were translated into English, French, Japanese, German, Chinese, Czech, and Spanish. Many of his poems were almost immediately put to music by the Vietnamese exile composer Pham Duy, and sung around the world.
"All of this was unknown to me while I was in solitary confinement in my homeland for creating these verses with the rhymes and rhythms of freedom and resistance to tyranny," said the poet. "My whereabouts and my condition, whether I was alive or dead, were unknown to the translators and publishers. However, people all over the world were watching and I was given the "Freedom to Write" award in 1988.
"Thanks to the collapse of the socialist regimes in Eastern Europe and the pressure of the Vietnamese Diaspora to call my situation to the attention of international opinion, I was released in October 1991."
After diplomatic relations between Vietnam and the U.S. normalized, Nguyen Chi Thien came to America to live with his brother whom he had not seen for forty-one years.
The next day after arrival, he hurried to write down the last 300 poems "before they left my mind." He habitually first closed the blinds on the windows to make sure nobody could see what he was doing, and then suddenly realized that he finally did not have to worry about safety anymore.
Should anyone ask, what I hope for in life,
Knowing that I am in jail, you would say: Freedom!
Knowing that I have been hungry for a long time,
You would say: Food and warmth!
No, no, you would be wrong…
I have only poetry in my bosom
Supported by two paper thin lungs
To fight the enemy, I cannot afford to be cowardly stupid,
And to win over him, I must live a thousand autumns!
Feeds