Walls and Mirrors: Enacting the Howls of War A Conversation with Deborah Paredez about her newest poetry collection, Year of the Dog

Deborah Paredez is a poet, ethnic studies scholar, cultural critic, and longtime diva devotee whose writing explores the workings of memory, the legacies of war, and feminist elegy. Her latest book, Year of the Dog (BOA Editions 2020), is a Blessings the Boat Selection, Poetry Winner of the 2020 Writers’ League of Texas Book Awards, and a finalist for the 2021 CLMP Firecracker Award of Poetry. It tells of her story as a Latina daughter of the Vietnam War.

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Tiffany Troy: Could you introduce yourself and talk about the history leading up to the writing of Year of the Dog?

Deborah Paredez: I am Deborah Paredez and the author of Year of the Dog. I started writing poetry when I was 12 years old and read Trojan Women for the first time. I became completely enamored with that play and obsessed with Hecuba in particular. It was around that time when I became aware of the silences in our home around my father's participation in the Vietnam War.

In some ways, my understanding of myself as a poet was tied to the experience of being the daughter of war and tied to the tradition of feminist elegy. The motif of Hecuba crying out plays itself out in this book and it took thirty to forty years to write the book that in some ways I had been meant to write from the beginning.

Tiffany Troy: How is Year of the Dog a book “with and not just about your father”?

Deborah Paredez: In my childhood, because there was so much silence around the war, I often sneaked into my dad's closet where he stored his photo album from Vietnam. I would pour over these photo albums like a kid reading Playboy. I knew instinctively that perhaps answers to the questions hanging in the air about my household could be found in these photos.

Even though I thought I was being sneaky, my family knew. Many years later, when my family was cleaning out the house my mom said, “I'm going to send you these photos that I know mean something to you. You can scan and then send them back to us.” So I did. I realized these photos held a very important archive not just for my father's experience, but also of Latino participation in Vietnam. This experience, in turn, has historically been and continues to be documented incompletely. As a result, I wanted to engage deeply with those archives and to co-create this work with my father. I understood that we were co-creators of this work since he was the photographer whose work I was engaging through my poetry.

On a literal level, I asked for permission to use my father’s archive. Being “with” my father, as opposed to “about” him also had a political meaning. It meant carrying a sense of reverence for him and his story from the perspective of the daughter, as opposed to transforming him into an object of study.

Tiffany Troy: As a poet, it always felt clear to me that the stories of the Vietnam War are told through your lens as you father’s daughter. How was the process like, weaving personal artifacts with iconographic images of war at home and abroad?

Deborah Paredez: Finding my father’s photographs was important in a number of ways. One aspect that really mattered was that the photographs were in the same medium, photography, by which we have often come to know about the Vietnam era. The Vietnam War was the most photographically-documented war because reporters had unrestricted access to combat. As a result, the reporters brought about those images that we saw on the nightly news with images of the dead. These images ultimately fueled protests against the war.

The photographic image, however, has in many ways over-determined our engagement with and our knowledge about that war. I was interested in defamiliarizing the photographs for the readers/viewers. Even as the photographs document, they have also inured us to those horrors. I wanted to re-familiarize us all with these horrors through an aesthetics of fragmentation, collage, juxtaposition, echo, etc. I wanted to implicate the history and stories that iconic photographs of war tell by buttressing them against my father’s photographic archives to expose the racialized terms of inclusion, to foreground the often overlooked Black and Brown experiences of war.

Tiffany Troy: That triptych with Mary Ann Vecchio in the middle and buttressed by the arm of the “napalm girl” Kim Phuc on either side definitely challenged my understanding of war through the archive. What guided you to juxtapose photographic fragments and how do your father’s handwritten photographic captions fit into the iconography of the stories you're weaving together to allow us to view the Vietnam War anew?

Deborah Paredez: I was very much guided by a poetics of fragmentation in bringing down iconic photographs to an arm, for instance. I juxtaposed the images through resonance or a kind of image rhyme visual rhyme or by images that are stitched together so they exposed the seams of each other. We knew the rest of the picture and implicated ourselves in our familiarity. I also wanted to show that there was only so much I could reclaim in excavating my father's story and the stories of soldiers like him. There was a partiality—in all senses of that word—because I was speaking as the daughter of this experience.

Using my father’s captions that he scrawled on the back of some of his photographs was important because of the way by which we're trained to understand the photos. I wanted his voice to be present and handwriting always implied the presence of the body. I fragmented and excerpted those captions so that as to foreground the sense of partiality, the elusive subject that was always present in this work.

Tiffany Troy: You made sure that your father's face did not appear in the collection. Why?

Deborah Paredez: It's important to always interrogate our attempts to represent the other, whether that other is my father or Kim Phuc or Angela Davis, and to understand the power dynamic between the writer and the other. For me, it was to present while emphasizing that I can only ever grasp partially my father’s experience. As such, preserving his privacy and rendering his own subject preserved and inaccessible to me and to us is important.

Tiffany Troy: How do you use songs and howls to add texture to your collection?

Deborah Paredez: In a very early version of the poem “Hecuba on the Shores of Al-Faw, 2003,” a sonnet, I realized I was being a little too tidy because I was trying to preserve the 10 syllables per line. Tinkering with the poem helped me realize the ways in which the book had to reenact the indecipherable howl.

I tried to do that in the final poem in the collection, the untitled concrete poem that repeats and fragments the final lines of the second poem in the book. I hoped to leave the reader with a "pang led" howl, wanting to require the reader to make the sound so that we're all heaving together, so that we see the limitations of language.

We also see the howl in “Year of the Dog: Synonyms for Aperture,” in the howling of “O—H—I—O—I—OH—OH—OH—” and in the Janis Joplin reference in "Self-Portrait with Howling Woman."

Tiffany Troy: Year of the Dog is the product of meticulous research. Turning to the specific example of the Edgewood Elegy, what is the nitty gritty process like?

Deborah Paredez: The nitty gritty is always boring, being the nitty gritty. Writing the “Edgewood Elegy” was difficult because Black and Brown people’s relationship to documentation has always been overdetermined yet un(der)-documented within the larger US imaginary despite having served in high numbers proportionally in the Vietnam War.

When I was writing Year of the Dog, Ken Burns’ “The Vietnam War” came out. Black and Brown soldiers are almost nowhere in that multi-episode documentary. Part of the reason we remain undocumented even in the most valorous moments, is that during the Vietnam era, Latinos were still (mis)characterized racially as White. Researchers literally counted the Spanish surnames in the casualty list to get a guesstimate.

Fortunately, in the Edgewood case, there was an actual monument in San Antonio documenting the names that the community could document. I poured over those names, plugging them into governmental and other databases. One site listed Vietnam War veteran casualties and whatever additional information that the site could collect, like if they were a Corporal or what unit they served in, or if they had siblings.

While there were many pockets of no information, I wanted that poem to capture both the absence of these men and the absence of the documentation and my struggles to attain that so that is how that poem came about.

Tiffany Troy: How do the three epigraphs set up the realities, narratives, and mythologies of the three sections that follow?

Deborah Paredez: The epigraphs very much provide a Venn diagram for the book.

I wanted the quote about Hecuba from Ovid’s Metamorphosis to be the original mythic cry from which this book makes its echoes. I also wanted to signal that while the stories of people of color I tell may appear very regional, it is a tragedy or story worthy of the epic treatment. In Adrienne Rich, I find a feminist committed to bearing witness to experiences that may not have always been hers. Her explicitly feminist ideology and feminist poetics was important in my own upbringing as an unabashedly feminist poet. June Jordan speaks to the very particular experience of racialized subjects. In her case, speaking about Black communities, she insists that we respond in ways that correspond with the scale of our tragedies. Within the context of this country her insistence that we are beyond time for being reasonable echoes through all three epigraphs. In these senses, all three of them are about that howl, which set the tone to guide readers into the mode that the book would register in.

Tiffany Troy: The second section speaks of Kim Phuc’s extraordinary and one-of-a-kind story. How do you bring yourself and your culture into her story?

Deborah Paredez: As a work of documentary poetry my book is invested in exposing the ideological work that photographs and other official archives do. In its aspirations toward feminist elegy, it is also invested in exposing the gendered terms of war imagery. In the collection, I explore the ways in which “othered” women, whether they are Black, Vietnamese or the teenage runaway (in the case of Mary Ann Vecchio), have been positioned in war photography, both in service of war or its resistance.

Nick Ut’s photo of Kim Phuc is exemplary of how war images often perform a kind of violence, even as we understand that immediately after taking that photograph, Ut helped Kim Phuc get to a hospital. It took a lot of soul searching to find a way to reach across time, space, and other divides toward Kim Phuc’s specific story with a sense of care and commitment to retrieving the subject from the ways she had been rendered an object. Part of it involved reading into Kim Phuc’s history. I relied heavily on a great book called The Girl in the Picture by Denise Chong, which spoke of Kim Phuc both before and after the moment captured by Ut's camera. Kim Phuc spent some time in Cuba. While there, she briefly took a trip to Mexico. In that initial trip, she was hoping to defect. Kim Phuc and her coterie visited the Temple of the Sun and while she decided in that moment that her overseers were too vigilant, I was struck by her own journey that took her to places that have particular resonance for me and my people. I was interested in having Kim Phuc be in a mythic location, both situated in and trapped by history. So I latched on this tiny moment in her own biography and did some documentary speculative work that that one does when you're a documentary poet.

Tiffany Troy: How do you incorporate Vietnamese geographies and the Vietnamese faith into the poems about Kim Phuc at the Temple of Cao Dai and the Temple of the Sun?

Deborah Paredez: I was very fortunate that a dear friend of mine, Hoa Nguyen happens to be a Vietnamese historian. She became a consultant to me about not only how to be factual but also how to incorporate certain elements with a kind of cultural specificity. I didn't incorporate very explicitly a lot of iconography or spiritual elements, or even mythic elements of Vietnamese Buddhism, aside from what Kim Phuc’s own biography engages in.

It was important to pick up on the biographical details: Kim Phuc and others were at the temple hiding out. The temple is a sanctuary that is no longer safe in the war and its aftermath. It was really important for me to begin in the temple, in the moments before the bombing, to emphasize that Kim Phuc exists before that moment, just as she exists long after it.

Tiffany Troy: How do you incorporate and refract the different identities through place names and languages other than English in a predominantly English language collection?

Deborah Paredez: Year of the Dog addresses both the insufficiency and violence of language. Hecuba was so grief stricken that she barked or howled. The most mundane or clichéd form of language, like the idiom, possess a kind of violence that is largely unseen.

With the use of Spanish and English, I was chatting with my friend, Sadiya Hartman, about the book and she said something like, "It makes sense that you would be writing about Hecuba because of La Llorona.” La Llorona was the mythic Mexican folkloric figure of the weeping woman. Until that moment, I hadn't made that explicit connection, but it made so much sense, and I was grateful for her insights. Putting La Llorona alongside Hecuba reflected my own poetic and artistic traditions. It was important for me to have the reader see that La Llorona is just as kind of mythic and as epic and important as Hecuba.

Similarly, much as Latinx communities are often predetermined in terms of language and documentation, I think of the meaning of having my last name spelt with a Z and not S in one of my poems. What does it mean to have a last name as “walls” (paredes) misspelled?

Tiffany Troy: Earlier, you were talking about “Paredez” meaning wall misspelled. You also wrote of Maya Lin’s Vietnam Memorial becoming a mirror in the collection. How does the wall versus the mirror dichotomy play into your collection?

Deborah Paredez: The walls and mirrors idea came about in a very literal way. When I was 12, I went on a road trip with the neighbors to the Vietnam Memorial. It was the 1980’s, not long after the war, and I remember visiting the Memorial and being very moved. The Memorial’s granite was so polished, purposefully so, that you could see your reflection and were thus implicated in the losses carved into its walls. Beyond this moment, I was writing this book in 2018, which was, at that time, the year with the highest number of school shootings in the nation's history. I wanted the reader to experience being separate from the historical subject and yet included in its present-day impact.

Tiffany Troy: How do you approach talking about the way in which the women are grieving through the loss through their fathers, brothers, husbands, and family members?

Deborah Paredez: It’s definitely dangerous, right? With the mythic women, it's a little bit easier because they're not going to be so damaged by my clumsy attempt. But historical women, like Deborah Johnson, Angela Davis, Kim Phuc and Mary Ann Vecchio, among others, were women to whom I wanted to pay respect. I found that if I wrote in the second person, almost like I was writing a love letter to them. The second person, then, shows the poet genuinely attempting to reach across time and space to honor them.

Tiffany Troy: How do you both honor veterans and protestors who want out of Vietnam?

Deborah Paredez: Many veteran writers before me get at the complexities of the Vietnam War. Yusef Komunyakaa is an exemplary model of a veteran poet who both writes about his own experiences in Vietnam as a Black soldier in a way that's not jingoistic while also not dismissive of the particular struggles faced by soldiers like him.

In my collection, I wanted to show how in these imperialist projects, those who are often most devalued are summoned to maintain or expand the reach of the colonial order. For me, then, it was important to begin with the story of my mother and grandmother. As much as this book is about my father, this book is an origin story about how I learned to grieve and to shout out against war from maternal figures.

I wanted to foreground how Latino experiences, even in regards to Vietnam War, were just as diverse as White experiences. In “Self-Portrait in One Act,” which features the fascinating story of Delia Alvarez and her brother Everett Alvarez, Delia becomes an anti-war activist even while her brother is being held as a prisoner of war in Vietnam. Delia doesn't want to be deployed in the ways that the POW families are often deployed. She's like, “No, you will not use me that way right, because what you are doing is wrong, even as I am honoring my brother's experience there.” Delia is a perfect example of the kind of experiences that I wanted to bring to bear.

Tiffany Troy: How do you use poetic forms to challenge the propaganda of war?

Deborah Paredez: Documentary poetry is very much invested in using a poet's intimacy with the vicissitudes of language to trouble the document, whether that document is a decree, an edict, a speech or photograph. Coming out of that tradition of documentary poetry, I am invested in both troubling and generating documentation through a poetics of erasure, repetition, and idiomatic (il)logic. How do we rearrange the idioms so that they tell a different story about war and warfare? For me, this approach to poetics helped me think through and beyond the particular ways that language gets debased in war propaganda.

Tiffany Troy: In the “Edgewood Elegy,” the poem visually takes the shape of little, lined up gravestone markers. Other poems take the form of lists. Does the poem like find it's form or do you choose the form intentionally and then the contents are to come to be?

Deborah Paredez: More often than not, the poem finds its form. So, in the case of “Edgewood Elegy,” as I was trying to gain information about these casualties, I just kept coming up again and again against the silence in the archive. Part of me wanted to build a poetic monument—there was certainly an actual monument built in San Antonio—and to render within that monument the silence. I wanted to stage the monumental-ness of that silence, to insist that we disorient or reorient ourselves to acknowledge this grief, so you have to actually turn the page, to literally turn the page to see the history.

In other times, I deploy received forms, like in the opening poem, “Wife’s Disaster Manual,” which is a villanelle. The villanelle in its obsessive repetition, is ideal for the insistent instruction. I found it was a perfect container for holding Lot's wife's insistence that we stand still, and keep standing still, and still, and refuse to look away from the burning city.

As a formalist, I am interested in how form determines our way of knowing. I'm not just reverential toward form but deeply curious about finding its seams so as to undo them. Sometimes the form or the photograph need to be deconstructed, rendered, or ripped apart at times, to spill out of the frame.

Tiffany Troy: In closing, what are you working on today?

Deborah Paredez: I'm working on a work of literary nonfiction, a memoir about my life with divas and their role in my life. About how divas guided me as a Brown poet, thinker, essayist and performance critic. And about how, even though we often associate divas with kind of the singularity, divas have actually taught me to really love and be in relation to virtuosic messy women and not be afraid of them. And I’m also working on some prose poems or lyrical essays about the sea and all of the things that the sea evokes for those of us people of color.