by Isabelle Thuy Pelaud, Ph.D.

Through the vehicles of words, space, and breath, the narrator of Truong Tran’s dust and conscience weaves a story of self, knowing that it is impossible to show life as it is. The narrator knows that in spite of his desire, knowledge and intentions, he is prey to his perspective and to the various discourses that comment upon subjectivities like his. In Tran’s collection, identity is represented as a matter of “‘becoming’ as well as of ‘being’” that belongs to both the future and the past. For the narrator, cultural identities are something that undergo constant transformation under the continuous “play” of history, culture and power. In short, identity is portrayed as elusive—an entity that cannot manifest itself through the content of a work alone; it is something that needs also to be addressed and articulated by the form of the writing.

The form of dust and conscience reflects the narrator’s unique process of identity formation. The text eschews punctuation and conventional poetic meter, syntax, and forms. In so doing, Tran comments on the process of telling a story from the perspective of the native insider/outsider. Viewing linear narratives as formal constructs in which ideological production is inscribed, dust and conscience is composed of fragments, glued by a language that the narrator describes as “a form mangled by cohesive weighted” that serves “the purpose of anchoring.” For instance, the poems have neither beginnings nor endings, no punctuation, and no capitalization, none of the marks that normally characterize conventional sentence structure. Hence, the conventional ordering of thoughts into linear and causal expressions is thwarted.

Most of all, dust and conscience is a text marked by ruptures. It is not the history of a native’s return that the narrator reveals, but a series of feelings, reflections and moments collected during a trip to Viet Nam. But rather than examining the “what,” the narrator calls for the exploration of the “how,” the manner in which difference is reflected in the narration and in turn shapes its form. The narrator insists on speaking from multiple positionalities, namely as a gay man, a post-colonial man, a religious man, a Vietnamese American man. He insists also on speaking from the perspectives of his own subjects. In the last segment of the “book of beginnings” Tran writes:

Yes the stories are at times overwhelming but would I stop listening the answer is no for without the stories there would be no history and without the history there would be no people where then would I be if not the acronym the oddity the visitor the native (24)

In view of the violent uprooting experienced by many Vietnamese, the narrator encounters “overwhelming” stories, witnessing truncated lives during his travels—both physical and imaginary. Ultimately, what he seems to be looking for is “home.” The narrator wonders whether the “beginning” is located in Viet Nam or in the United States. The first sentence of the book starts with a stutter of synonyms: “inception incipience debut dawn,” all evoking a beginning without references, not even of national borders. Although the theme of nation is central, not once does the text mention the name of a country, a common marker of identity. It implies that such a connection may be a luxury that is not fully available to someone like him. “Where would I begin if not at home,” he writes. The term “home” does not have clear meaning or associations for a narrator of the diaspora, and can merely exist as a question. Yet the idea of home is necessary. It is for him a guide; its evocation provides him with strength and allows him to move forward while looking back. In Viet Nam, he realizes that although he does not feel American, he is not Vietnamese either. He clearly sees he has no place he can call home. The quest can only be located within the fragmentation of words and stories. Home is a place neither here nor there, and a place between here and there. If home is merely a word evoked sparingly throughout the text, it is a word that does not hold onto meanings.

Tran was commissioned by the Creative Work Fund to go to Viet Nam and write about his experiences as he encounters his so-called people. The grant was allocated on the onset of the 25th anniversary of the end of the Viet Nam War, which, for a week or so, saturated the American media. Yet, Tran, like his narrator, refuses to speak as a minority subject. He also refuses to engage in the act of selecting one identity and privileging it over another. Dust and conscience is about resistance, multiplicity and ruptures from the concept of home. Its narrator does not bare or unveil his soul to an audience in search of resolution to the Viet Nam War, nor does it engage in the anesthetized multicultural rhetoric promulgating the belief in equality for all. Tran works outside the popular genre of Asian American autobiography. And like Korean American writer Theresa Hak Kyung Cha in Dictee, Tran writes against narratives of assimilation and incorporation. Dust and conscience is a book about what cannot be said, a book that works within the fissures of traditional narrative and shakes the parameters of pre-prescribed spaces.

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Isabelle Thuy Pelaud, Ph.D. is Assistant Professor in Asian American Studies at San Francisco State University. She specializes in Vietnamese American literature and actively promotes Vietnamese American cultural work. Her essays and short stories have been published in Making More Waves (1997), Tilting the Continent (2000), Vietnam Dialogue Inside/Out (2001). Her academic work can be found in Mixed Race Literature (2002), The New Face of Asian Pacific America (2003) and Amerasia Journal (2003).