Media project: Where I am from - A visual poem

“Where I am from” is a visual poem that centers on the idea of personal identity across history. In my “From” project, I intend to explore the similarities and differences in the way women from different historical eras view their identities and how they choose to express such feminine identity through imagery and poetry. I hope to capture this by juxtaposing poems from Vietnamese female writers in the past and folk poems next to my writing.

The poem is delivered in the form of texts accompanied by a set of four digital collages. The dominating images in all four collages are the Vietnamese woman with the conical hat and the lotus- two symbolic images of Vietnam. The lotus flower is our national flower. It is the flower that rises from the dirty mud. For us, it is a metaphor for rising through challenges and hardships, just like how Vietnamese people rise from the difficulties, from wars and poverty, to build their lives.

My poem follows the Vietnamese traditional poem rules with 4 lines per stanza and the final words rhyme with each other. The first stanza is inspired by an ancient poem called “The Floating Cake” which is a metaphor for the woman. Her fate rises and sinks with the fate of the country.

You can see signature literary devices in Vietnamese poems, parallelism “rise, and sink”, “mountains and streams” and metaphors “my body is white and softly rounded”, which symbolize the woman’s body. In my poem, I also tried to implement the same techniques with the metaphorical image “lives lost on the boats” and parallelism between “Land and coast”

In my collage, I use the image of a woman wearing a conical hat at the center with a sorrowful look on her face. I thought of mothers who lost their sons in the war, and wives who lost husbands in the storms. The orange circle symbolizes the ”softly rounded” floating cake, rising and sinking. The conical hat is somewhat like a mountain on the stream.

The image of the boat represents the lost lives of the immigrants who fled from the country after the Vietnam War. It resonates on a deep and personal level for me as someone who has also gone across oceans, traveled, and lived outside my country.

In the second stanza, I try to create contrasting images between “water flooding fields”, and “scooter-flooding asphalt roads”. Again, a pair of parallelism, a bit of wordplay: dusk fall, city glow, Saigon fell, we rose.

The background is of an empty field in the war. But then from further away, there’s a skyscraper rising from the ground. The building is the tallest tower in Saigon and it’s shaped like a lotus bud and is slowly blooming, a symbolic image of recovery and growth.

The Fall of Saigon is an iconic photo of people trying to escape the country when the American government in the South of Vietnam collapsed. There were hundreds of people jamming themselves in a helicopter to fly off. In contrast with it are the two smaller photos below depicting the vibrant scene of motorbikes and cars braving the streets of Saigon.

I try to create a fun optical illusion here with tiny people climbing up from the traffic jam. The small dots of colors look like flowers and the surrounding fields resemble flower fields instead of a paddy field wrecked by bombed.

In the third stanza, again, I took inspiration from the classic theme of folk poetry when writing about women: they need to marry a good husband.

I play around with the words here keep my ends open and use the metaphorical image: swim up against the currents”

In the collage, the woman is swimming gasping trying to escape from the age-old belief that her fate is decided by her marriage. The blue background is an attempt to create the illusion that she is surrounded by water. The line here is a barrier. It is also a gap that separates past beliefs and modern beliefs.

In the fourth collage, I try to create optical illusions: the lotus is floating on the water and the woman’s making the petals of the flower.

On my journey to explore my identity, I realize that there’s no clear cut between past and present, traditional and modern. Things intertwined, connected, overlap, and inherit from one another. I am a part of that vast, rich, complicated flow of history. The further I go, the smaller and more humble I feel. Although my cultural and historical heritage is what has been handed out to me, I am actively creating my legacy and actively adding to the rich culture of my country.

On a side note, since I could not find images that suited my intentions for my collages, I had to use an AI-powered tool to draw to produce images that could convey what I wanted to show. Maybe that is also an example of how I am “actively creating” “hand-made” artifacts that help enrich the representations of my culture.