Village View – Week of May 24

In honor of Asian and Pacific Islander American Heritage Month, the Abode will be sharing quotes and messages from Asian and Pacific Islander Americans of varying faith backgrounds. This week we share a poem from Mai Der Vang. Born to Hmong refugees who fled from Laos a year before her birth, her writing is heavily inspired by folklore and growing up in a shamanic household.

From an interview with The Brooklyn Rail:

I think these inventive moments are subconsciously rooted in a kind of reality and history that is so much a part of my Hmong identity. For example, some of the surrealism in my poems are inspired by folklore and Hmong shamanic beliefs. So for me, I feel a natural synergy between how the imagination receives historical and cultural information, and then how it redistributes that information back out.

Some of my imagery is rather bizarre, and for me, that is a personal craft preference. But even then, again, I think that preference is rooted in having grown up in a family that practiced (and still practices) shamanism. Perhaps for me, that is where reality and surreal meet—poetry then becomes the medium through which I attempt to translate and interpret that symbiosis. … Being grounded in these kinds of beliefs and rituals certainly has impacted my approach to poetry. It’s helped me harness poetry’s shape-shifting abilities and potential for creative fluidity between the literal and the figurative.