DetoNation by Ocean Vuong summary and analysis

 DetoNation (Poem)

by Ocean Vuong

There’s a joke that ends with — huh?

It’s the bomb saying here is your father.

Now here is your father inside

your lungs. Look how lighter

the earth is — afterward.

To even write the word father

is to carve a portion of the day

out of a bomb-bright page.

There’s enough light to drown in

but never enough to enter the bones

& stay. Don’t stay here, he said, my boy

broken by the names of flowers. Don’t cry

anymore. So I ran into the night.

The night: my shadow growing

toward my father.

 

 Summary and Analysis:

"My sweetest songs are those that tell of saddest thoughts"

While he was pursuing his graduation, Ocean Vuong developed the habit of writing especially at night as he was in love with that color. During the day times, he learned literature at Brooklyn college and worked in a cafe rest of the times. At night he focused on writing poems. He always preferred the presence of darkness and the sea. His much celebrated poetic collection entitled the ‘Night sky with exit wounds’ and other notable poems as well came out of those night time efforts.

 

He had been brought to US from Vietnam  as a refugee and settled with his family in a working class town of Hartford. Unfortunately, his father abandoned them having physically and psychologically harassed his mother. She had to suffer a lot consequently and Vuong grew completely with the influence of his mother as well as grandmother. Thus, he associates all kinds of dark and destructive aspects with his own father.

His writings largely reflect the scenes of violence in the Vietnam war and the tormenting experiences from the Hartford. The poetic density of vuong constitutes the world of endless pains and desolation.

Vuong’s mother and grandmother always treated throughout in a grimly humorous manner. As he writes in a poem “An American soldier fucked a Vietnamese farm girl.  Thus my mother exist .Thus I exist ”

Ocean Vuong and his mother came out of lust. As he himself says an American soldier raped his grandmother and vanished. Similarly his mother too betrayed by her husband. Thus, Vuong fated to grow as a fatherless child and the father figure remais as a nightmare for him. Eventually, his family became a laughing stock. They were incapable of producing a single moan of protest and exposed to several kinds of torments.

That’s why his family itself became a matter of joke for other. But for him it ends with anger and frustration (huh?).

Here the bomb surrealistically says ‘here is your father’. Because the speaker’s father dismantled his family just like the bomb shattered Vietnam (Vietnam war 1955).

What he tries to convey is  his father caused many troubles and traumas. That’s why he resides inside the speaker’ lungs.

The earth certainly is very much delicate in the sense that a small bomb could devastate an entire nation. As his father destructed his family while that too was helpless. Thus the word ‘Father’ itself is a form of slicing a day with bomb.

Here he strikingly juxtaposes his father figure with the bomb as both lamentably affected him, the former destroyed his family and the latter detonated his nation Vietnam. The bright light of the bomb can destroy the celestial bodies but not ever defeat their firm mind. The speaker wanted to run away from this light.

Now he lives in America and becomes the part of Flower Power Movement, which raises the voice of protest in California against the Vietnam war proposed by America.

Having realised the harmful and destructive effects of light,  the speaker would like to seek asylum in in the darkness (night). Though it shall bring all the painful memories of his father.

" Poetry is a space where tensions can be investigated "- Ocean vuong