Growing up in a Hmong family that practiced shamanism accustomed Mai Der Vang to seeing things in both a literal and figurative way at the same time.
She brings that experience with overlapping realities to "Afterland" (Graywolf), a collection of poems about the Hmong experience, from 17th-century China through the secret war in Laos and ultimately to resettlement as refugees in the United States. It won the Walt Whitman Award of the Academy of American Poets in 2016.
Her coinage of afterland refers not only to the spirit world but also to the U.S. as a destination for Hmong refugees and to Laos itself after the devastation of the war. The U.S. bombed Laos heavily in an effort to disrupt supply lines during the Vietnam War; decades later, unexploded ordnance is still a problem there.
Vang was born in Fresno, Calif., where her refugee parents settled after a brief stay in the Twin Cities. Like other Hmong, they came to Fresno "because there were these rumors of beautiful nostalgic landscape that looked a lot like the landscape that they had just fled from, and you could farm there," she said.
While her sisters became nurses, she was the one drawn to reading and writing, "the only one in the family that would be willing to write things for my dad and fill out documents ... "
Every literary writer works to develop a voice; Vang and other Hmong-American writers face the additional challenge of doing so from a culture that only recently adopted writing itself. Her poem "Mother of People Without Script" remembers Shong Lue Yang (1929-'71), a Hmong farmer who, guided by his visions, developed a writing system. He was known as Niam Ntawv, or "mother of writing," Vang said, because people saw his effort as "this feminine embodiment of the possibilities of language and literacy."
Vang writes in English, bringing occasional Hmong words into her poems. "We're finding ways to experiment," she said. "I think we're going to see some exciting things happening with code switching and with how we integrate our native tongue into the English language."
While working on her master's degree at Columbia University, Vang felt an affinity with Latin American poets such as Pablo Neruda, Octavio Paz, Cesar Vallejo and Alejandra Pizarnik. "I just felt like they were doing things that I wanted to do in my own poetry. ... There was a yearning in their voices in the way they were describing imagery, the way they were practicing this idea of surrealism dislodging perception."
Vang has used her growing visibility to fellow Hmong-American writers, curating a series for Poets.org. A former youth agency worker, she brings the message today she brought to teenagers then. "I would say to young people that their voices matter ... that they are not alone, and that there are communities out there who will support them."
