“Absence • behind me, • absence in • front of me • forever reaching at • a ghost.”
Primordial, the rich and rewarding new collection by Mai Der Vang, is deeply engaged with the absence—and presence—of a genus, a people, a language, and life itself. By focusing on Saola, a spindle-horned, critically-endangered, and rarely-witnessed mammal, Vang explores the fate of the genus with that of Hmong people, each impacted by generational and environmental violence, and reclaims their agency. Whether disappeared, hidden, or seen, Saola live; Hmong live.
Yet, to consider these poems solely a metaphor doesn’t do the collection, nor Saola itself, justice. Vang—a Pulitzer Prize finalist for her last collection, Yellow Rain—embarks on a vulnerable, intricate examination of history, existence, place, identity, and memory, through vibrant and complex forms and lyrically resonant language.
This interview was edited for clarity and length.
Mandana Chaffa
The metaphor between Saola and Hmong sings—or perhaps laments—throughout the collection. How did Saola enter your consciousness, and did you imagine that it would have such an outsized presence in this collection after the tremendous success of Yellow Rain? What did Saola mean to you before this collection, and now?
Mai Der Vang
I first learned about Saola when I was an adolescent. I recall my mother saying something about an animal with horns in Laos. Many years later, I heard about Saola again, but from my Hmong writing friends, and it was then I discovered the animal to be highly rare and critically endangered. I never stopped thinking about Saola, and it appeared in both Afterland and Yellow Rain. This third book allowed me to dive deeper and draw new connections between Saola and everything I’d been thinking about for years.
Saola can only be found in the Annamite Mountains between Laos and Vietnam, and while it looks like an antelope, it’s actually a relative of wild cattle. It’s been threatened by snaring and poaching (as bycatch) and even by loss of habitat. Conservationists estimate there are fewer than one hundred remaining, although it’s unclear if Saola could already be extinct.
When I started writing poems for Primordial, I knew I wanted to explore the precariousness of Saola’s existence, but I did not initially realize that it would lead me back to the shadows of the war and the refugee experience. As a Hmong-American poet, I’ve thought about this animal’s connection to the U.S. wars in Southeast Asia, specifically the Secret War in Laos, when the CIA conducted a covert proxy war to coerce Hmong boys and men to fight and die for the American campaign against communism. The story of Hmong becoming refugees reminds me of the Saola’s tenuous existence in a landscape ravaged by a history of war. In writing poems for Primordial, I wondered about the ways that a war-torn landscape might also provide refuge and sanctuary to rare and elusive species like Saola. I wondered about how the environment, the landscape, the flora, and the wildlife all become casualties of war, forced to evolve or go into hiding to survive extermination. With this came larger considerations around existence and extinction—Saola on the run, Hmong on the run, and a return to primordial memories in the midst of a planet in decline.
On metaphor, I’ll add here, too, some realizations I had around the ethical implications. It’s fair to look at what’s happening in the book and observe Saola as a metaphor, I think most readers will. But I’m also interested in shifting away from and moving beyond this notion of Saola as a metaphor to serve a literary purpose. Saola is a living, breathing mammal who co-exists with us in this world. Who am I to co-opt this animal into a literary device for the sake of my art? I’m no one to do that. I hope there is room in my work to help readers push past the reduction of Saola into metaphor, and I’m grateful for what I’ve been able to glean from this book around the ethics of poem-making.
Mandana Chaffa
Secrets make their way into many of these poems, and I feel the friction between making one’s presence known—I am here, I am HERE, i am here—and conversely, how much safer it is to be unnoticed. Indeed, vulnerability in its many hues is threaded through the collection, but a kind that isn’t entirely powerless, despite the effects and demands of empire, ecological disaster, even one’s name and language. How do secrets fit into your poetic craft?
Mai Der Vang
You’re right to sense the tenuous relationship with secrets. There is tension between the choice to remain hidden versus the state-sponsored campaigns of secrecy that have been forced upon Hmong people and that have shaped a public narrative of who we are or aren’t. To seek secrecy for reasons of safety, as Saola seeks to run and hide, as Hmong have run and hid, too, from war and genocide, shapes one half of this complicated dynamic.
The other half pushes back to resist becoming secret because of the “Secret War,” and it pushes back to upend the secrecy that has been thrust upon Hmong identity. For the CIA to shroud the collective history I share with other Hmong people into classified information that can now only be accessed with redactions, to then have been made to feel as if we weren’t supposed to exist in the first place—this demands a deep and emphatic restoration of oneself that is rooted in the right to declare, “Yes, I am here, here, here, and I will make you see me.”
There seems to be a similar tenuousness, I think, in Saola’s case, too. On the one hand, Saola’s increased visibility might help with conservation efforts. But it also has the opposite effect of exposing it to further threats, vulnerabilities, and human encroachment. I imagine Saola existed for so long unbeknownst to the world because it managed to live mostly in secret. There is power in the choice to stay hidden.
Mandana Chaffa
Can we talk about the title? This idea of the first in sequence of time is often as slippery to grasp as the last, each endlessly behind or in front of us. Time feels like an ouroboros as it is. Yet what you grapple with so beautifully in Primordial is almost a collection of times. This multidimensional exploration is as literal as it is cosmic, as visual as it is metaphysical.
Mai Der Vang
The word “primordial” became a guide for me as I wrote these poems. I felt grounded in a primordial awareness, and it seemed to activate within me a connection to what I imagined to be the earliest memories of light in the universe. In mourning the end, and in considering how I might contribute to the discourse around climate and extinction, I felt compelled to return to the beginning of our existence 4.5 billion years ago, to try and see the first rays of primordial light, a nebula of dust and gas, a supernova explosion leading to the ever-expanding accumulation of energy, and a plate of interstellar substances spinning violently while being pulled in to the center by gravity. It’s humbling to remember how this chaotic eruption of energy created what we know today as our Sun, our solar system, and Earth at home in a spiral limb of the Milky Way galaxy.
I think, too, of Saola’s primordial spirit as an animal with unique primitive features and one that took shelter in the refugium of the Annamite Mountains to survive the Ice Age as a rare and relict species still with us today (hopefully). I could not help but see Saola as central and interconnected to my understanding of the making of the stars and cosmos.
Mandana Chaffa
In you, a war I never encountered so much
but to be cursed. You bring me to stone dreams
of Hmong wandering foothills outside Fresno
by way of a mountain from an omitted past.
There’s a strong second-person address throughout the book, to Saola but also to a culture, to a kind of historical slantness, to use Dickinson’s phrase, a kind of ancestral DNA that marks us, even indirectly. When compiling this collection, did any poems shift from first person to second to collective third from what you originally penned? If so, why? How did these addresses change your relationship with identity?
Mai Der Vang
Yes, some of the poems shifted in voice. The “Saola Grows Up” series was originally in first-person but then shifted into second-person. It’s rooted in my own experiences, and perhaps because of the second-person perspective, there is a distancing of self, but still a seeing of self-inside-of-self together with Saola. I found it both strange and somewhat apt to think of Saola as a refugee or as a descendant of refugees growing up elsewhere.
I often write in first-person in my initial draft as it allows me to lyrically feel out what the poem wants to do, where it might go, my own connection to the topic, and essentially say what I’m thinking without the pressure to be accountable, in that moment, to anyone or anything but the speaker. In subsequent drafts, I might also try out the second- and third-person voices, or the collective we, to get a sense of what might offer the most nuanced, charged, or rousing delivery. When I change the voice or perspective, the stakes also change. Then, there are the poems clearly addressed to Saola or that reveal a speaker communing with Saola. Having the poem directed at someone or something is a practical strategy that helps me know where and what I am channeling through and to whom.
Mandana Chaffa
…Then the urgency of some to seize
you as a means to feed a family, live bymeager means in a cycle of split subsistence.
It’s outsiders poaching to nurse the rich.Then, too, have Hmong hunted you as I have
roamed for you in my nouns.
I loved how “Hunters” first delves into how even the hunted are often hunters, with the sly ersatz ars poetica hat tip to how writers are also seekers of the perfect word. I wouldn’t normally get this granular, but I’m intrigued by your decision to use nouns as the container here, and more philosophically, how your poetic seeking has altered since your earlier work.
Mai Der Vang
I appreciate the granular attention to language, and I do obsess over word choice, syntax, and other grammatical considerations. But I think it’s also me trying to slow down to create a more attentive connection with and to language. Language can be generative and restorative, but it’s also fraught with violence and pain, and it may even fail us at times when it’s unable to fully convey what we mean. Sometimes, for me, the only consolation is a kind of anti-language where the rules and conventions of writing are destabilized to make way for a more honest experience with language.
Writing poetry can, at times, feel exploitative as it’s the act of taking from language to serve an artistic purpose. But I think the relationship can be mutual and approached from a position of care. When I write a poem, I’m also enriching language with further possibilities. I’d like to think I’m giving back to it even when I’m breaking the rules. In this way, my seeking has grown to realize I must reciprocate and allow language to do through me what it needs.
Regarding “nouns,” I used to count the number of nouns I put into a poem. The more nouns I had to balance out my abstract details or sense of “floatiness,” the more grounded the poem became. It’s weird, but I think of the noun as the object transiting between my conscious and unconscious mind, between my two selves.
Mandana Chaffa
A technical question: How do you start the process when crafting a two-page spread incorporating graphs and text? With something like “Make your stand • backing into a • boulder, solitary • in your steps though • never to forget the • swords on • your head,” I assumed that the line came first, but I’d love to know your process. How many different iterations did you have of that poem? Are you creating these on paper? How do you arrange this kind of piece? How does this kind of mapping inform your practice?
Mai Der Vang
These are the visual “node” poems in the book, and they’re my attempt to reconfigure the poetic line. I wanted to unsettle the notion of the line by thinking both outside and inside the line, by crafting one long line with sub-lines branching above and below from the center, and by creating literal and figurative networks in language to map and reveal the deeper interconnectedness of how we write, express, and communicate. My hope was to examine if I could resist the convention of the line by retransfiguring or exploding its presentation on the page. At the same time, I still wanted to lean into the linguistic structures of the line by keeping the syntax, punctuation, and grammar generally intact. I was driven by the question of whether it’s possible to keep language fastened together while simultaneously disembodied. What does that do to our understanding of “the line,” and how does it move us toward non-linear possibilities?
To write these pieces, I first craft the main long line that runs through the entire poem. Then I introduce tension through enjambments, fragmenting the line’s language. I’ve essentially broken the long line into individual units of words or phrases. I’ll insert additional enjambments and then revise some more before transitioning to Adobe Illustrator, where I type the poem’s text and draw the lines and dots. I don’t immediately know where to position the text in relationship to the lines, whether below, above, or to the side, so I’ll feel it out, move things around, and then decide what seems most compositionally appropriate. I’ve also printed them out and cut them up with scissors to further experiment with the text’s arrangement. I like that it can be a very hands-on process, and it feels like I’m literally building a poem.
Mandana Chaffa
I was so taken with how you use language as a gesture, such as the way you layered text upon text in several poems. For example, the iterations of the word “light” that present so darkly. The explosion of the word “language” that is nearly impossible to comprehend. All of these enhance an architecture with a friction between what we see, what it means, and what it can’t express.
Mai Der Vang
With the “light” poem, I was hoping to create the effect of light on the page. By taking the word “light” and superimposing it hundreds of times over itself, the shape became darker, almost as if a light were growing brighter. And yet the darkening can also serve to dim the light. The words “light” and “language” are initially legible on some of the pages, and as the energy builds, as the shapes intensify, a transformation happens. If you were to quickly scroll through a PDF version of this poem, you’d experience a slight animation effect, in the brightening or darkening of the shapes, along with an amorphous rush of movement across your screen. I did not initially intend for any of this. I had written the text and was experimenting with its presentation in Adobe Illustrator when my finger accidentally touched my mouse pad in a way that sped up the pages. I saw the animation, I saw the effect of light, and, tying back to earlier, I felt a blip of primordial energy flash across my screen.
Mandana Chaffa
Can we talk about Hmong language? I understand that historically it was an oral language, and the use of a Romanized standard writing system commenced in the last century; even now, it doesn’t seem to be considered an official language of any one country, though spoken in several. How much is your writing informed by that weight of being unrecognized or, conversely, belonging to no one, but to many? Was that one of the catalysts for the terrific Hmong American literary anthology, How Do I Begin, that you co-edited?
Mai Der Vang
You’re right that Hmong is largely an oral culture. We did not have a written system until the 1950s, which was, no surprise, a colonial project developed by missionaries to proselytize Hmong villagers. There was another writing system, too, founded by a Hmong farmer, but that system was suppressed for political reasons and is now considered a rare and lost form, but there are some people who still know and use it. Because Hmong people are thought to be an indigenous and stateless “minority” who have long been displaced from where we originated, Hmong is not an official language anywhere that I’m aware of.
This lack of origin, place, recognition, and belonging certainly informs my work. On the one hand, Hmong as a language feels like it is slipping away without a stable geography or way to live alongside the language fully, which doesn’t exist for the Hmong experience; at least for me, it hasn’t. But on the other hand, the borderlessness and nomadic nature of how and where the language travels has allowed for its adaptability and continued evolution, a means of flourishing without terrestrial limitations. Indeed, it’s fair to think of these reasons as catalysts for the anthology. In putting the book together, we also realized there is so much at literary stake for a people who have been traditionally oral-based and are largely absent from the national landscape.
Mandana Chaffa
There is an exciting reconfiguration of language and meaning through the collection; language often arrives as image, and image arrives as language. One of my favorite examples is “Camera Trap Triptych,” which belies the adage that a picture is worth a thousand words, as you describe three rare images of Saola in about 120 words each.
Mai Der Vang
I find myself drawn to the way text and space interact on the page, which often results in something that is visual. I think, too, of how the simple configuration of text and space together creates the compositional dwelling or spatial universe of the poem. Building the shape of a poem is like building a home with all of its rooms and windows, where the inner and outer spaces pool together conscious and unconscious activations of language. I’m thinking here of Gaston Bachelard’s The Poetics of Space. He writes, “When the image is new, the world is new.” There’s a chance to transform the way we see our world, to make new the banal, if we allow ourselves to see things in ways we normally wouldn’t. The triptych was my attempt to understand this dynamic and to engage with non-language-based elements to express and offer a language-based experience. I wondered about the process of transmuting images into a language of their own, and I was curious about ways to enact the word as the image or the image as the word. I also wanted to write something that drew from the camera trap photos while not entirely revealing or showing Saola to the reader.
Mandana Chaffa
Saola stands for many resonant themes in your work—the impact of war, the price of disappearance and of assimilation, the complexities of identity, and the state of the environment. Rather fanciful, I know, but I had an image in my mind of a kind of Schrödinger’s Saola—the paradox of both living and being extinct—in a never-ending limbo. It also underscores the power of poetry, because in Primordial, Saola emphatically IS.
Mai Der Vang
That’s exactly it, a sort of Schrödinger’s cat experience for Saola, ever teetering in the liminal space of always existing and no longer existing, still here and gone, both present and absent. Part of me never wants to know the outcome of Saola’s fate as it allows me to linger longer in the possibility that it may still be out there, roaming the forests as it is and should be. Yet, the other part of me wants to destroy this façade of comfort, this complacency and bypassing of grief, leading to the false belief that everything is fine when it isn’t. I’m driven and humbled by the tension of never knowing, and for this book, the question of Saola’s current existence fueled me through each poem. No matter the outcome, war or no war, Saola simply IS, as you say, and it’s in this way that Saola stands as a powerful and majestic truth by its lone self.
Mandana Chaffa
We arrived into a future
without our names.
We arrived as refugees from a past.
Until it was “discovered,” Saola existed without genus, without name, and throughout the collection, I was thinking of how our names—and the names others pronounce upon us—can weigh us down. If we had the agency to create our own names, histories, all the things that appear to define us, could there be a kind of freedom or even immortality?
Mai Der Vang
I do think so. I think about the phrase “Hmong” itself as being the name Hmong people gave to themselves, meaning “free people,” which was suggested by a Hmong scholar, as opposed to the pejorative “Meo,” a term dating back to persecution in China that was forced and meant to degrade. To write one’s history and identity is a threat to power and authority. To name oneself and resist linguistic subjugation becomes a political act. I want to believe there is the potential for immortality in the names we give ourselves, and some of it will depend, too, on the choices made by the generations that come after. But maybe that’s part of it, too. Maybe when a name no longer needs a person, animal, or thing to embody it, it has transcended itself. It has become something far more powerful than a name, and that opens a whole new realm of possibility.
POETRY
Primordial
By Mai Der Vang
Graywolf Press
Published March 4, 2025
