Vietnamese Indigenous Poetry “Ca Dao” and its Role in Preserving Cultural Pluralism in the Current Global Context 

I was born into a happy childhood in a small village in the North of Vietnam. My childhood was happy because it was filled with my mother’s love. My mother nurtured and taught me during those early days by singing Vietnamese folk poems to me. These folk poems are called ca dao in our language and are passed on orally from one generation to the next. We don’t really know who the authors of these ca dao are. We only know that our grandmothers passed ca dao onto our mothers, who sang them to us and it is now our turn to sing ca dao to our children when we bring them to bed at night. The older I get, the more often my mind travels back to the early days of my childhood, when I lay inside a hammock next to the open window of our small, simple house, listening to a very ancient ca dao that my mother often sang out to me. This is a lullaby of my mother’s love: ”. For the purpose of this roundtable, I have tempted to translate this ca dao into English, as follows:

A crane goes to look for fish during the night

Landing on a soft branch, it tumbles down a pond

Mister, could you help to scoop me up

And if I betray you, you shall cook me

In case you do, please use clean water to cook

Don’t cook me with dirty water, my children would be hurt

One has to read this folk poem very carefully to get its deeper meaning. There are a few metaphors: the crane represents poor farmers who must work very hard, including at night, to feed their families. They could die at the mercy of the rich and powerful people, who are the “Mister” in the poem. Yet the farmers insist that they die a noble death and that their souls are not to be tainted by dirty deeds or wrong doings. This folk poem seems to be sad, yet it is beautiful and remains to be the favorite lullaby of tens of thousands Vietnamese mothers and young children. Perhaps the poem is famous because it is the desire of all Vietnamese to keep our soul clean and free from evil, despite of all hardships that we must face. 

I choose to speak about ca dao, or folk poetry at this Roundtable because it is the most well know form of indigenous poetry in Vietnam. Nowadays, a young Vietnamese may not know any modern poem but he or she will surely know by heart at least a few ca dao verses. Ca dao is unique to Vietnam and is an important part of our culture and tradition. It helps to preserve our cultural pluralism in the current global context, because all Vietnamese identify with ca dao. We love our culture, country and nation more due to ca dao. More importantly, we understand much more about the social dynamics, the history, the struggle between the rich and the poor, and the messages of love thanks to ca dao. 

Researches have shown that ca dao dates back hundreds of years ago, but it was only in the 18th century that people began to record it in writing. To date, about 13,000 original lines of ca dao can be found on paper, in tape or video recordings. Some of them continue to be sung or quoted by Vietnamese people in our daily lives.

Ca dao has lived on for thousands of years because they are normally short and very lyrical poems, enabling people to remember them by heart. The language and images used in ca dao are also very unique, either down-to-earth or humorous. The common people of Vietnam adore ca dao because it embodies many characteristics of Vietnamese people. For example, in the following ca dao verse, you could see that Vietnamese people are hopelessly romantic:

Being in love, we take off and exchange our shirts

Coming home and Mom asks; crossing the bridge, the wind blew it away.

The above verse is so popular that it is even converted into a modern song. Nowadays, ca dao is still used as a way to confess love to someone:

It is only now that the plum could ask the cherry 1 

Has anyone stepped into her rose garden?

Since the plum asks, the cherry would like to reply

There is a way into the rose garden, but no one has stepped into it

The term ca dao can be loosely translated as "unaccompanied songs". Ca: to sing; dao: to sing without music. It is the oral traditions that sustain, nourish and keep ca dao alive through our long history of internal struggle, foreign dominations, wars and economic survival. Up until the beginning of the 19th century, most Vietnamese intellectuals preferred to compose their poems in classical Chinese (nom language), hence their poems were not accessible to the wider population, many of those who could not read or write. Therefore, poorer people rely on oral ca dao to explore their creative endeavors. In the following example, the common people use ca dao to mock the intellectuals:

Hey people, don’t marry students!

Their long backs need much fabric,

they fill their stomachs then laze around

Ca dao is not just created for fun. It carries forward many important social messages, which are still relevant today. For example, these verses below depict the fate of Vietnamese women, who still suffer from gender discrimination and were often married off to people they did not love:

My body is like a sheet of pink silk

Fluttering in the middle of the market,

I don’t know whose hands I will fill

In other words, ca dao are created by the common people and echo the pain, happiness, aspirations, needs and desires of common people. 

Nowadays, while ca dao is still popular, its long-term survival is being compromised as young mothers no longer sing lullabies to their children. As our country moves towards development and industrialization, mothers often have to leave their children home to go far away to work. Therefore, I believe that better efforts should be made to record, publish and popularize ca dao, so that the souls of the young Vietnamese continue to be enriched by this beautiful form of poetry. I also hope that more ca daos will be translated and published overseas so that other countries could get to know about the beautiful minds of the common people of Vietnam.

three poems

——————

MY FATHER’S HOME VIL- LAGE 

Among the new corn

my father waited for his mother;

the grass on the dike withered.

The afternoon in deep sleep,

my grandfather started the fire,

sunlight came to rest

on our doorstep, muop flowers

made the pond golden,

dragon flies flew high, grasshoppers

flew low, calling rain to come

and fill the fresh, clear well.

The war rushed in; village

men left and few came back,

pain engraved white on the old ones’ hair.

My father’s childhood was filled with bombs and

bullets;

after the drought, the river flooded the village.

My father tied his promise into a grass ring,

and during a windy afternoon,

he proposed marriage to my mother.

The small road filled with laughter,

the gao flowers set fire to the sky.

The leisurely dew came to weave its net on the pond.

Upon the arrival of autumn, I cried my first tear.

The vegetable flowers are gold,

the hibiscus red;

on the windy dike, my brother’s kite flew high.

I baked sweet potatoes in hot ash;

I ran to hide among the young green rice

my mother had sown.

Through hungry seasons, the village hill was steep,

people bending their backs, patiently tending their

seeds,

their gazes haunted by cracked fields.

My father still believed, still ploughed and hoed,

the village roads fragrant again with the scent

of new cut hay.

Storms come, destroy the gao tree at the

village gate,

but the bamboo grove gave birth to new seasons

of young plants.

The curves of the village temple,

the Persian lilacs purple,

the sun set low with low flying stork wings.

I hug the rice straw to sleep.

Because I keep my homeland in my heart,

my harvest is rich,

all year round.

THE POEM I CAN’T YET NAME 

My hands lift high a bowl of rice, the seeds

harvested

in the field where my grandmother was laid

to rest.

Each rice seed tastes sweet as the sound of lullaby

from the grandmother I never knew.

I imagine her soft face as they laid her down into

the earth,

her clothes battered, her skin stuck to her bones;

in the great hunger of 1945, my village

was hungry for graves to bury all the dead.

Nobody could find my grandmother's grave,

so my father tasted bitter rice for sixty-five years.

After sixty-five years, my father and I stood

in front of my grandmother’s grave.

I heard my father call“

Mum,” for the first time;

the rice field behind his back trembled.

My two feet cling to the mud.

I listen in the burning incense to my grandmother's

soul spread;

uniting deep with the earth, taking root in the field,

she quietly sings lullabies, calling rice plants to blossom.

Lifting the bowl of rice in my hands, I count

every seed,

each one glistening with the sweat of my relatives,

their backs bent in the rice fields,

the fragrance of my grandmother's lullaby alive on

each one.

STARS IN THE SHAPE OF CARRYING POLES

——For the street sellers of Hanoi

The women carry the seasons of guava, mango

and plum to me,

the seasons of lotus, green young sticky rice on

their shoulders,

bringing me the enlightened sunrise, the blue sunset,

dragging their sandal footsteps on the road.

With such little money, I can buy the seasons

of guava and lotus,

the small bills silently

soaked with dew, soaked with sweat.

Behind these women's backs, from orphaned

village fields,

the wind howls endlessly.

They open their embrace:

empty lullabies, swollen with milk.

They carry countless virgin seasons to me

that I would have forgotten without them.

The aroma of Hung Yen just coming into being,

the lotus of West Lake

just coming into blood, Vong village

restless to produce

the green young sticky rice.

They carry and present to me the fresh wind from

their village

where their mothers, children, and husbands stand

waiting,

where dreams are thirsty, and struggle.

I hear their faint singing

In difficulty, the poles press heavy on my shoulder

but I find ways to feed my mother, ignoring people's

laughs

They are my stars,

carrying their difficult fates on their shoulders,

unknown in life,

gazing burning questions into my eyes.

————————

Nguyen Phan Que Mai won three most prestigious literary awards of Vietnam in 2010, which include the Poetry of the Year Award from the Hanoi Writers Association, the Poetry of the Year Award from the Hanoi Union of Literature and Arts Associations, First Prize, Poetry Competition about 1,000 Years Hanoi (a competition which was held for two years and received more than 25,000 entries). She is the author of three poetry collections (Forbidden Fruit, Freeing Myself and Stars in the Shape of Carrying Poles), as well as one travel book, a children’s novel. Ms. Nguyen is also an accomplished poetry translator, and has translated three books of poetry from Vietnamese to English. Ms. Nguyen’s poems have been translated into several foreign languages and published on highly respected literary magazines such as The American Poetry Review, Red Wheel Barrow, Poetry Ireland Review, Great River Review and Words Without Border. Ms. Nguyen’s forthcoming publication will be her English novel about the modern life of Vietnam, entitled Rice Lullaby. She was the Distinguished Asian Writer in the 51st Silliman University National Writers Workshop and the Visiting Writer of the 2012 of International Writers Workshop, Hong Kong Baptist University.

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