On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous
“Dear Ma, I am writing to reach you – even if each word I put down is one word further from where you are.”; with these words, a little boy begins to share a deeply-personal story for everyone hovering over his words, without him knowing of how those words may change their lives
What Marlon James calls “A Marvel’ and Max Porter ‘A Masterpiece’, is the debut novel by Vietnamese-American poet Ocean Vuong – titled: On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous. It ends with a cover note by Hao Nguyen that reads “The past tense of sing is not singed”.
What an unexpected trail of thought I anticipated to flow through as – by habit – I flipped through the first and the last lines of this book. Thrilled at the edge of fear, realising that it’s going to be the last time I read this piece of fluid literature for the first time. Feel it like it’s meant to be felt, completely and all at once.
How do you know that a story is complete?
Full? Ready to be taken off the stove, hot, waiting to become one with your own blood.
Ocean invites one into his story by saying, “I am writing because they told me to never start a sentence with because.”, and tells it as if he’s walking you through a memory along the sidewalk of his thoughts.
How do you know a story is a story?
Poorly told, Vuong’s story is that of an immigrant f bird that flew abroad to promise light for the future that follows, it’s a story of a person of color discriminated upon not in the land it comes to seeking refuge, but also in the land it belonged. A story may be his own, as many interviewers claimed in their conversations with Ocean.
I disagree.
To me, On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous is a story of Little Dog’s never-ending hope.
Hope, which a child, hurt by the very word it screams on instinct upon being hurt, holds in his heart. A word that more often than not is an innocent cry for help.
A word that the world promised us would mean safety.
The word? ‘Ma’.
The hope? That someday, in some language, his mother, deprived of any education, would still understand how in protecting him, she tore him apart.
Vuong, while narrating an intrusive incident of truth, quotes the mother’s reply to Little Dog upon being called a monster by him, she says “I am not a monster, I am a mother”; then goes onto to describing a mother in the shade of this interface of the story he built. He writes, “To be a monster is to be a hybrid signal, a lighthouse: both shelter and warning at once.”, which is to say, to be a mother is to be the same?
What do you think?