Hmong Refugee’strongsstrong Death Fugue.pdf

Hmong Refugee’s Death Fugue by Sheng-mei Ma, Ph.D., Hmong Studies Journal, 2005, 6: 1-36. Hmong Refugee’s Death Fugue By Sheng-mei Ma, PhD Michigan State University Hmong Studies Journal, Volume 6, 36 pages Abstract The author of this literary analysis pieces together accounts from oral histories, academic literature, popular works and Hmong storycloths to describe the “death fugue” associated with the early narratives of the Hmong refugee experience in Southeast Asia and the United States. Introduction Black milk of daybreak we drink it at sundown We drink it at noon in the morning we drink it at night We drink and we drink it --Paul Celan’s “Death Fugue” Paul Celan’s Holocaust poem suffocates in the black smoke rising from the crematoriums’ chimneys, shrouding inmates as well as survivors’ consciousness, including daily rituals as simple as drinking milk. A disturbing parallel exists between Celan’s death fugue and that of the Hmong, one which mourns their loss in the Southeast Asian conflict since the 1970s. Similar to Celan’s fugue, the Hmong’s collective story is filled with refrains, thematic variations of demise and death. “I come to this foreign land, / without young brothers, without old brothers, / and the others eat, while I watch like a dog waiting for scraps” (Vang and Lewis 124), thus sings the Hmong woman Lee Txai in a Thai refugee camp in 1980. i Her self-image plummets as a result of, among other things, the wretched liv