Most, if not all, of Nguyễn Chí Thiện’s poems in the 1984 bilingual edition Flowers from Hell were composed in his head while Thiện was a political prisoner in North Vietnamese concentration camps between 1958 and 1976. Because he was not allowed to have paper and pencils, Thiện had to memorize his poems.

Those published in English translation in 1984 were set down in writing between his release in 1976 and before 1979. The manuscript was dramatically delivered in person to the British diplomatic delegation when the poet, risking arrest, broke through Vietnamese guards at the British embassy in Hanoi on July 16, 1979, and appealed straightforwardly to the diplomats to publish his work in the West.

Thiện was immediately rearrested upon leaving the British embassy and spent the following 16 years in prison, sometimes in total darkness and solitary confinement. He continued to compose poetry mentally as a means of survival, memorizing hundreds of poems. Because he was so closely watched, he was able to write them down only once he was permitted to leave Vietnam in 1995.

A complete version of Flowers from Hell, which includes hundreds of poems from the second set of prison poems, was published in Vietnamese in 1996.

In the original, the poems are versified in strict meters and strong rhyme schemes. Most of the poems are fairly short, seldom running to more than half a page. And most of them are harshly critical, bitterly resistant expressions of dissidence from communism.

Their themes are resistance, dreams of freedom, bitterness about the passage of time, life in the prison camps, excoriations of the degradations brought upon Vietnam by the communist system, memories of past pleasures and the careless days of youth, his mother’s love, his impossible love for a special woman, his betrothal to poetry, hard labor, clouds, trees, birds, recollections of nature, hunger, and the behavior of prisoners and prison keepers.

Some are letters to imaginary persons, some to real people such as Bertrand Russell, who is invited to visit Vietnam and castigated for expressing support for the Vietcong:

“the Party’s gagged our mouths all these long years. / After your visit you’ll hate them, / you’ll want to drag them out and chop them up. / Almost a hundred years of age, / you’re less expert than any famished child / in Communism, my dear sir” (53).

The moods swing from deepest despair to hatred, then back to optimism about the human spirit and the joys of remembered freedoms, love, and companionship under clear skies.

The poems cry out the poet’s sense that “All pathways to life’s gate are blocked” (63) and “Oh, how it hurts, the century’s big mistake!” (65).

Interspersed among the bitter laments and the revivifying recollections are the poems of staunch resistance, like The Party Banished Me to the Wilds. Its last stanza describes the way the party buries political prisoners,

“wishing I’d turn to mud down there. / A miner I’ve become— / I’ll dig up precious ore, and tons of it, / not gold nor diamond for a woman’s toys: / uranium ore for atom bombs” (71).

These collected poems are Thiện’s bombs: explosive and moving verbalizations of the indomitable and free-thinking human spirit.

Categories: British Literature, Literature

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