Voices from the fringes: After what you didn't do

Mai Der Vang was born in Fresno, California, in 1981, the daughter of Hmong refugees who came to the San Joaquin Valley in the aftermath of the Vietnam War. Much of her poetry probes the Hmong experiences in America, but “In the Year of Permutations”—written last year—is savagely on point given the trial right now of Derek Chauvin for the murder of George Floyd.

Vang dismantles the narrative Chauvin and the Minneapolis Police Department deployed about doing his job by kneeling on Floyd’s neck for more than nine minutes while he lay face down in the street with his hands cuffed behind him. (I’ve found it fascinating over the past week to watch as one after another MPD official tsk-tsks and deplores Chauvin’s actions; last year this was not at all their song.)

In particular, Vang addresses Tou Thao, a nine-year veteran of MPD who stood by while Chauvin literally crushed the life out of Floyd. Thao, a member of the Hmong community, initially backed up Chauvin’s story, although he watered it down by saying he didn’t actually see what was going on, because he was engaged in crowd control. Vang excoriates whatever the Hmong equivalent of Uncle Tom would be.

“In the Year of Permutations”

Go live with yourself after what you didn’t do.

Go and be left behind. Pre-package
                              your defense, tell yourself

                                                      you were doing
             your oath, guarding the futility of
            
                   your corrupted good,

              discerning the currency of some.

                                   As if them over all else.
                                         Over us.
                                    Above God and Spirit.
                                        
                          You over me, you think.

This is no shelter in justice not sheltering with
enclosure of soft iron a sheltering of injustices
into an inferno flooding of your crimes committed
and sheltered by most culprit of them all.

                      These nesting days come
outward springs of truth,

                    dismantle the old structures,

their impulse for colony—I am done
                                                    with it, the likes of you.

To perpetrate.
To perpetrate lack of closure, smolders of unrest.
To perpetrate long days alone, centuries gone deprived.

                             To be complicit in adding to the
                   perpetration of power on a neck,
                            there and shamed,

                             court of ancestors to disgrace
              you, seeing and to have done nothing.

Think you can be like them.

Work like them.
Talk like them.

Never truly to be accepted,
                                            always a pawn.