“Say to the saola: forgive us in our plea to love you, forgive that you give us meaning,” recited Mai Der Vang.
On March 26, Vang, a decorated poet, came to Pitzer’s Broad Performance Center to read from her newest collection, “Primordial,” which was published on March 4.
Vang’s first collection of poems, “Afterland” (2017), earned publication through the First Book Award from the Academy of American Poets. Her second book, titled “Yellow Rain” (2021), was a finalist for the 2022 Pulitzer Prize in Poetry. Vang currently teaches for the MFA Program in Creative Writing at Fresno State.
Vang’s poetry was centered around the saola, a critically endangered animal endemic to the Annamite Range between Laos and Vietnam. Since her parents were Hmong refugees from Laos, Vang feels a connection with this species and has centered many of her poems around it.
“I do feel a special form of kinship because this animal is one from an area of the world that is so wrecked by war,” Vang said.
In “Death in Captivity, a Surrender,” she writes about an animal that can be interpreted as either a saola or a human.
“An animal migrates into a new body, senses the impulse to leave,” Vang read. “Say to the animal: heavy is an apology inside the wind. Say to the animal: mortality anchors us to this planet.”
One student who attended the reading, Sia Were PZ ’25, noted how these natural elements in Vang’s poetry spoke to her.
“The poet had a way with words that was so powerful and personal,” Were said. “For instance, there was a moment she said pomegranates and lemons and this just unlocked a memory hidden within me.”
Brent Armendinger, a professor of English and world literature at Pitzer, organized the Literary Speaker Series, which brought Vang to Claremont.
“I try to bring writers who are doing unexpected things with language and who are responding to the world and the problems of the world in meaningful ways,” Armendinger said.
Armendinger, who teaches the class Eco Poetry Workshop, is interested in highlighting writing that explores the environment in unique ways.
“I want students to think about how what we call the environment is not just pristine nature, it’s something that’s connected to everything else,” he said. “[Vang’s] book is also about refugee experience alongside the fate of this animal and the environmental situation.”
In her poem, Vang writes about a saola who died in captivity, examining humankind’s relationship with the ‘primordial’ species.
“Nothing survives in a menagerie of glaciers, not water dispensing from winter, nor the echo of a mammal’s lullaby,” she read. “You’ve lasted long enough to let yourself be witnessed by veterinarians, conservationists, villagers, to even permit a palms touch along your brown fur.”
“I do feel a special form of kinship because this animal is one from an area of the world that is so wrecked by war.”
However, Vang did not want to write about saola as a window for her own experience but rather as its own being living alongside her.
“I was really careful in trying not to use saola as a metaphor for Hmong resilience,” she said. “Because saola is not a metaphor, saola is a living, breathing animal with its own agency and autonomy. Who am I to just appropriate this animal for my own literary art purpose?”
Because of this, Vang’s work about saola often addresses the animal itself, using a reverential tone. But in another poem, Vang uses the saola’s history to discuss climate change.
“You understand the fate of the saola is bound to the fate of the forest,” Vang read. “You understand the fate of the forest is bound to the fate of this planet. You understand the fate of this planet is bound to the fate of your body.”
Because her first two books addressed the legacy of the Vietnam War, Vang intended to focus on a different topic for her third collection. Instead, she found that the saola connected her back to the war in a unique way.
“Something about the story of the saola and the conservation struggles around saola continue to invite another way of thinking about the war,” Vang said. “So here I am writing about saola, and here I am writing about another window into the war for me.”
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