The Price of Standing Up For The Truth

This post is dedicated to the poet Nguyen Chi Thien.

My heart, that endless story, is something

That only a child will understand, love and like

He will not fully grasp its profundity or richness

But will instinctively share its marvelous quality.

My heart? It’s the pen, inkstand and paper tube

Of a gentleman-scholar unlucky at the exams

Left in a corner to gather dust and dream….

The above poem is an excerpt from a poem titled My Heart by Nguyen Chi Thien’s from his book where you can read more of his poems Flowers From Hell.

Who is Nguyen Chi Thien? Born in 1939 Thien was one of the greatest contemporary Vietnamese poets, who died exactly a year ago on October 2^nd 2012 at the age of 73. Thien had spent 27 years (equal to that of Nelson Mandela’s) of his life in prison and good amount of these years in a solitary confinement. Why? Because he refused to accept the North Vietnamese Communist leader Ho Chi Minh as a hero and Communism as paradise. As Margalit Fox wrote on the New York Times, “It was not the isolation that was hardest to endure, though it lasted nearly three decades. Nor was it the cold of his cell, where he was often chained naked, nor summer’s blistering heat, nor the rusty shackles that infected his legs, nor the relentless hunger. It was, Nguyen Chi Thien said afterward, the utter lack of access to the written word: no books, no newspapers and, more devastating still for a poet, not so much as a pencil or a scrap of paper.”

Let’s look into the history of poetry to put Mr. Thien's life in context. Poetry is widely accepted to have started during the early agricultural societies, spoken or chanted as a spell to promote good harvests as well as means to express the people's struggles and triumphs. The earliest known Western poetry comes from the legendary Homer who is attributed in writing the two epic masterpieces The Iliad and The Odyssey. Of course the Greeks also used poetry to communicate other thematic messages. Names of many revered writers from 500 BC and beyond are still recited and ring a bell when we hear and read their names such as Sophocles and Euripides. Epics such as France's La Chanson de Roland’s Beowulf from the Medieval period are still read (this was actually one of the books that was a required reading in my high school English class = I disliked it a lot) and Shakespeare’s works from the Renaissance Period of course lives on.

Perhaps the continuous use of poetry was nowhere ubiquitous as is in Vietnam. As reported on BBC, until the turn of the 20th century almost 95 percent of Vietnamese literature is believed to be in the form of poetry, even history books are sometimes written entirely in poetry. And in Vietnam, Thien is the most well-known and respected contemporary poets. The man is truly fascinating with a stubborn will for dignity and the truth. Thien, first got in trouble with the communist North Vietnamese government in the 1960s. He decided to substitute for his ailing high school history teacher and he realized the textbook stated Japan’s defeat in World War II was to the Soviet Union. Thien told the class that no, that was in fact not accurate, Japan surrendered to the US following the US dropping two atomic bombs in hiroshima and nagasaki. The 21 years old Thien was soon arrested and spent the better part of the next 27 years in different prisons and hard labor detention camps.

Thien, was not allowed and did not had the access to continue writing while in prison, but that did not stop him from writing, editing, storing and deleting his poems in his head. When he gets the opportunity he recited his poems to his close friends and mates he wrote some 700 poems this way. At one point, as the Economist reported, Thien took the risk to smuggled 400 of his poems to the British Embassy in Hanoi and begged them to have it published in the West. Though, the Brits rejected his request for asylum and the North Vietnamese government sent him to prison for 6 years for his attempt; his collection of poems was published as Flowers From Hell. The book has been translated to many languages and it won the International Poetry Award in Rotterdam in 1985.

Thien was freed in 1991 and went to the US in 1995, settled in Orange County CA aka in ‘little Vietnam’ where he published two more short stories and converted to Catholicism. Thien was also finally reunited with his brother (who fought on the South Vietnamese side) and had not seen each other since 1954.

The price some pay to stand up for the truth and one’s convictions is something that directly or indirectly affects us all.  As Dr. Martin Luther King eloquently wrote it once from a jail cell “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are all indebted to courageous people like Nguyen Chi Thien.

Cheers,

Daniel