Suicide and Oranges: An Interview with Vi Khi Nao
Vi Khi Nao | Suicide: The Autoimmune Disorder of the Psyche | 11:11 Press | March 2023 | 158 Pages
When one door closes, another one opens. I’ve been thinking about this idiom since I talked with author Vi Khi Nao over Google Docs about her new book Suicide: The Autoimmune Disorder of the Psyche, released this year on Pi Day from 11:11 Press. It’s less an idiom than a platitude. There is only a slight difference in the economy of these constructions, but one is social and the other is emotional. A platitude is used by someone who doesn’t care about you as an emotional palliative to make you stop complaining about your misfortunes. Wikipedia says platitudes are trite, meaningless, prosaic, and often tautological, meaning their truth is like a vacuum. This is to the user’s benefit as he/she/they have caught you in a phrase to which you must respond ‘thank you’ and nothing else. On the other hand, idioms are language constructions of the social fabric. Figurative statements without literal meaning that lift the veil to the intersubjective reality of any given community. They are often one of the first things you learn in another language to understand the culture beneath grammar. For example, Ich verstehe nur Bahnhof (I only understand train stations) told me a lot about the Germans.
Nao’s language is idiomatic for another world. Perhaps this has to do with the fact that her pre-linguistic ideas arrive in English by way of Latin and Vietnamese. “I only understand Cheerios,” is something one of her characters might say, and probably does somewhere. Throughout her massive oeuvre of prose, poetry, and collaborative texts, Nao captures something of our present, sometimes reminiscent of the films of David Lynch, often evocative of deeper human myths and traditions of thought. It’s hard to tell whether her dreamy representations of human life are microscopic or macroscopic—they have more to do with the slippage between the two. Language that wanders unmoored between the minor and major has been characterized by French philosophers Deleuze and Guattari as deterritorialized, a manifold concept that’s most interesting when it’s applied to writing. In their dissertation on Minor Literature—a paradigm invented around Kafka who wrote as a Jewish German-speaking minority in Prague—Deleuze and Guattari describe the deterritorialized as “language cut off from the masses, a ‘paper language.’” Growing up in Iowa City as a Vietnamese refugee, Nao’s language is made from mounds of salt and rambutan. There is an urgency to strangeness when meaning is in search of a home, or a home is in search of meaning. This urgency manifests as “the impossibility of not writing, the impossibility of writing in [English], the impossibility of writing otherwise.” Nao admits to this impossibility and proves it in her prolific output. She proves it in the way she inspires us to reconsider how we relate to the world.
Minor Literature always assumes collective value because utopia is a collective endeavor. I wouldn’t necessarily describe Nao’s work as utopian, however. The apocalypse is something of equal worth. Nao said in an interview with BOMB, “When I produce a work, I don’t view it as transformative. I see it more as an extension—an extension cord. You plug it into the wall, and it can get you only so far, and then you find another cord and add it to it, and you can listen to music a few miles down the road instead of where the outlet is.” Her writing produces networks, each of us readers becomes more than just an outlet, but a nexus of greater extension. It’s through this matrical logic that she overcomes the platitudinous nature of talking about suicide. The truth of suicide is often one-sided and vacuous, “solipsistic” some might suggest. But what Nao accomplishes in this book is like building a bridge over a black hole. She invites us into her human circuit to contemplate the (im)possibility of death. She shows us the umbilical cord that stretches between multiple presents—jamming doors open so that no single one can close—the wind of the apocalypse blowing through.
This interview has been edited for clarity and brevity.
ELLENA BASADA: Hello, Vi, thank you for meeting me on this blank page. Let’s begin with a follow-up question to something you said at the end of your talk at PNCA last month. I had asked whether the inspiration for writing poetry and prose came from different places. You told me that to write poetry, you just make line breaks in prose. That’s what you did for your application to Brown—you applied to both prose and poetry programs with essentially the same manuscript, only the one for poetry had more concrete forms, is that right? I was compelled that you consider genre distinctions somewhat arbitrary. Brown is a notably (notoriously?) experimental program, so maybe there’s something to say that when writing is experimental, the genre categorization matters less. You talk about your relationship with Forrest Gander and C.D. Wright (two of your professors when you attended) in Suicide: The Autoimmune Disorder of the Psyche—did you end up in the poetry program? Did the distinctions end up mattering? Do you consider language arbitrary?
VI KHI NAO: Not essentially the same manuscript. There were a few stories I converted into poems. And, I few poems I made into short stories. And, what I meant to say was that the submission process for poetry and fiction was interchangeable. Brian Evenson, the current director at that time (2011) broke the acceptance news. He spoke to me and in a few words, he informed me that I could work in both disciplines. It ultimately didn’t matter. And, it was true. It didn’t matter. I chose fiction, but I also ended up working with Forrest and C.D. as well. I don’t think language is arbitrary. I think the form and its supple contents can be made malleable through precision. Some degrees of curatorship are required to mold the terrain or basic geometry of chance.
EEB: I found the suppleness of contents less malleable in Suicide, but not less precise. Your writing is less alchemical than your previous works. You forgo your usual experimentation for something more didactic and precise. Your usual scathing tone transforms into one both honest and diagnostic. At times, I felt like I was reading an author’s book on craft. It’s as if you’ve stepped out of your usual shoes and into work boots so you can give us a tour of the machinery behind the curtain. How did this manuscript get written? Was it a challenge to break out of your usual flow?
VKN: What do you think of that shift? Did you enjoy the precision? Writing in a different mode outside of one’s comfort zone is always challenging. One has to learn how to betray properly. To bury the footfalls. To erase the conditions and rituals that shape the interiority of one’s literary genetic cells and try for different genetic patterns. It’s not easy. It’s nearly impossible. As my mother always reminds me: it’s easier to move mountains than to change oneself. I always try to persuade my heartbeat to exist outside of my chest wall, but I often return to my preexisting ways. Only by letting my sternum be broken into two, again, is that authentic change possible.
EEB: Do we take pleasure in precision or do we benefit from it? I didn’t feel the same level of play and joy reading this text. On a sentence level, there is less chance in this work, less room for us to come in and wiggle around. In Suicide, the fixedness of language does exactly what it’s supposed to do: communicate. Still, the familiar strangeness of your language creeps around the edges of words in these fragments when you chronicle moments of immense pain—when time slows and you cinematically pan across the room. You write, “I feel raw and more human than ever. I love being bewitched by time. I am learning that although light isn’t human, it can’t hold its breath very long against the wall.” This stunned me. The beauty and the horror. Abjection combined with very intricate and careful meditations. What is the relationship between beauty and pain? Is this a part of your DNA?
VKN: Beauty, I think, lives with its mouth closed and I think pain, in this context, exists with its mouth open. There is this silence and this resilience that hold us captive without our permission. Both beauty and pain do not comprehend consent culture. They announce their hypnotic, disobedient, uncooperative presences and they leave us utterly docile. Is complacency, the head conductor of this genetic journey, always shepherding us toward acquiesced annihilation? I don’t believe we have a choice in this matter. Our volition is also compliant. If pain is the soulmate of beauty, then perhaps they cohabitate in order to make the other crazy.
EEB: Acquiesced annihilation is the heart of Suicide, a chronicle not necessarily of attempts at death, but moments of fearlessness, of embrace, even of euphoria. You say “God asked me for permission . . . and with permission comes euphoria.” Thinking of what took place in the bathroom—or in the hotel room when you were “completely detached from your perception of reality”—as euphoric makes me think of jouissance, painfully transcendent bliss. Hélène Cixous believed jouissance to be the fuel of creativity (for women). Is the emotional landscape of the world you entered in your mother’s Vegas bathroom, or as you treaded for 30,000 steps mid-day across the desert, the same one you enter while writing? Is the moment of switch from complacency to chaos the moment of freedom that you rely on for creation?
VKN: Cixous must have observed us empirically and taken keen notes of dyadic impulses: our power and our impotence. The extinguishing (smotherable) philosophy that existed in my mother’s bathroom is fugacious and temporary while the emotions that thrive in my writing and thrive in me now keep revisiting me like a ghost. The bathroom incident stopped splitting my desire into many parts. It stopped peeling the patterns in my consciousness like a mandarin. So when I step into my writing again, I feel warm and whole and naked like a newborn calf. My existence then becomes a film, where the sound of my rebirth enters the screen first and is followed by the images in motion, photographs of my psyche as it continues to develop itself in the dark. Did I capture that darkness in my writing? Or have I failed in some way or somehow because I allow the medicines I currently take to help heal my heart chemically treated it in its aftermath?
EEB: You do capture that darkness but you give us much relief. It’s like scrolling through a carousel of stories on Instagram. These illuminated corners of your psyche are paced with distracting media, like sports, Google searches about Jesus and penises, and your own grotesque fascination with The News. Suicide is in fragments, not split into multiple parts like a mandarin, but into two: focus and distraction. The chosen media interspersed throughout scenes of lucid memoir work toward a kind of thesis in which you pathologize our sick culture, concluding that we are sick because “we are what we eat.” These media also divert us away from the more personal and painful scenes. Do you imbue your reader with the same kinds of distractions that arise in your own life? I feel almost as if we become you. It becomes me who picks up my phone to read Twitter and scrolls across the transplanted face of Katie Stubblefield which I will stare at for an undivided twenty minutes. I’m the one looking out my own window daydreaming a message to someone found guilty of convincing her boyfriend into suicide. Do you indulge in distractions? Does it influence your creativity?
VKN: Gertrude Stein once wrote, “And, then there is everything.” Is the invitation to participate in the everythingness a kind of totality towards diversions? If you become me—for sure, you carry the heavy scent of rice paper and fish sauce, and the content of your fluid is high in salt. In reading my work, you may have already eaten an entire fishing village and a boatful of suicidal aches. I used to stare at the ceiling a lot and it used to be my primary mode of creativity. My own version of tabula rasa without gentrification. And, now my distractions exist in watching the crypto market unfold. I find my interests in the financial markets excite my innovation and creativity. Are you distracted, Ellena? How long did it take for you to read Suicide? Did you frequently stare blankly out into space? Did it give you emotional or psychological indigestion?
EEB: I am often distracted but I’d like to believe I have some control over this. I create a fixed constellation of distractions around me that I think is productive. Jumping from one thing to another throughout the day, the week, the month—I feel like I’m pushing my life forward. Only through this simulation of life, which becomes life, can I be creative. I finished Suicide in one evening sitting without much lifting my eyes to the darkness in my room outside the circle of lamplight. I read it twice actually. The first time, as I reached page 102 when the language abruptly concludes in the middle of the physical books—drops off into an abyss of white pages—I did feel some indigestion. Some of my perturbation was coming from the feeling manifesting in my chest. Almost as if I had just watched some Cronenbergian body horror, there was something newly present in me, something like dread—the feeling that emerges when you see a dead body. The second time I reached the end, however, I felt a bit of wonder. My response was more psychological, as I realized that your language ends itself midway through our encounter with it. What is the number Pi? Does your writing commit suicide? What continues on the pages beyond its end?
VKN: You are astute to observe that my writing did end its life. Some, in response, wished that my book wasn’t so short. But, I feel it’s just enough. Just the right amount. I gave everything. I removed my bra, my blouse, my underwear, my skirt, my lingerie, and my socks, and stood naked. What more could I have denuded? Removed? Pi is part of a mathematical equation for a circle. The circle has so many significant implications and connotations. Some are so obvious that it would be a terrible gesture of cliché on cliché to utter/to name them. I was hoping the readers would continue its life for me. My writing life for me. On my behalf. An invitation to collaborate. If you collaborate, by default, my writing life won't self-euthanize.
EEB: Every time you write “self-euthanize,” I read it first as “self-enthusiast.” I love the idea that we as the reader are to see this as an invitation to collaborate. I think this suggestion is really successful in Suicide. Your answer reminds me of when you say that you became a porn star after your open heart surgery in 2019. I feel like this book is pretty pornographic, it reminds me of body horror and also of “trauma porn.” There’s this concept of “radical vulnerability” that’s become popular. Writing about oneself in the way you do is extremely personal and vulnerable, radically so I would say. Yet, I feel there’s almost a refusal of vulnerability in this work. The surplus of vulnerability—it’s beyond vulnerable, which I might define as confessional. The use of questions demonstrates this, as they simultaneously affirm your position and open up the possibility of another. Like a pornstar, you make yourself available. I feel like in doing so, you become more real to us—not some abstract “writer” but Vi, a human in a specific place and time. Is there something yonic about the question mark? Can you talk about this author-reader relationship and what vulnerability means to you in this manuscript?
VKN: I don’t know if there is vulnerability in the invitation to collaborate. If I exist alone, I choose death. And, I haven’t arrived at a place in my life yet where I exist with others and I also choose death. At some point in my life, I want to exist with others and choose death. There will be a time for this, I reason. Suicide is the most “vulnerable” work of mine to date. It’s even more vulnerable than my memoir, Country in a Glass of Water, which hasn’t come out in the world yet and which reveals so much about my existence as a refugee. There is nothing pornographic there though sex/abuse is frequently mentioned. One can be confessional and pornographic without being exposed. Suicide, due to its readability and legibility (accessibility) is more about directness. Is that the right word here? It’s the first work of mine where I feel I could have an authentic relationship with the readers. Previous and future work of mine deals more directly with my relationship with language, time, sexuality, and food, and they don’t require the readers to engage/participate/have skin in the game. This invitation has the possibility for true rejection and that possibility is authentic. It reminds me of the nature of falling in love. People fall in love left and right and they do so willingly and casually and madly. In writing Suicide, I choose to fall out of love. I choose to love. Without all the excessive frills and ornamentation of language to dilute its attribute.
EEB: Thank you for this response, Vi. “Intimacy” is a word I forgot to include in the question but one that I think resonates with what you’re describing. Other writers, you note, perhaps rely on “heavy smoking, heavy drinking, a heavy of some kind,” for falling in love, or falling out of it. I think addiction is one way for writers to achieve their own version of tabula rasa. But you’re only addicted to the ceiling. You say you’ve been monklike all your life. In past interviews, you talk about your restricted eating patterns. Your belongings are few enough to fit into a single suitcase. This reminds me of Schopenhauer’s idea of “will to life” and the ascetic negation of this will. He says that the denial of will is the only way to save oneself from suffering—to be freed from the pain of existence that is caused by the will’s endless striving. You must find philosophy boring since you don’t mention any in this “philosophical” exploration of life and death . . . Is striving the same as heaviness? Is heaviness what writers pull from in order to succeed?
VKN: I love philosophy! My experimental, difficult novel, Swimming with Dead Stars, has philosophical ruminations in it. I am just not very good at quoting people or remembering to quote others which makes me a terrible scholar. I do remember Hegel who said God invented humans in order to validate his existence and I think we are all baby gods. We make things in order to validate who we have become. Terrible monsters if that is in our cards. If I had met you before writing Suicide, perhaps I would have included more folks like Schopenhauer or Nietzsche, or Julia Kristeva, whom I only read whenever I have my heart operated on. Especially her book Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection. I think striving is very light—a focus, a purpose, a desire is like being in the zone. When we are not in the zone, pain arrives to visit us and make a mess of our so-called authentic efforts toward upward mobility. If one cannot die, the antidote to suffering is to be in the zone at all times.
EEB: I have not read Swimming with Dead Stars and I will. In my notes on Suicide, Kristeva comes up quite a bit. The bathroom is a setting that you revisit again and again in the text as the ultimate site of abjection—the place of collapse of life and death and shit. Some of the most affecting elements in these scenes are the portrayals of yourself, and your sister, desperate to maintain cleanliness and enact the feeling of responsibility you have towards your family members. Desperate to uphold the symbolic order, you wrote over the abyss that was breaking open before you—you became a writer. Kristeva describes literature as an “apocalypse” that takes place right on the edge of definition and chaos. Is this what writing is like for you? Is there a contradiction here, being an experimental writer, as your logophilia sometimes dips into abjection and at the same time attempts to cover over abjection? It’s like a corpse wrapped in saran wrap.
VKN: I feel more like a bee or a dragonfly trapped in a bowl of honey. The writing life has made me sweeter though bitterness has been a great source of comfort food for those who have only experienced my jar of literary fruits in small bites. I agree with Kristeva regarding the apocalypse, but is “definition” the right word for that intersection? Or “chaos”? It seems, in my experience, that its rim or parameter should be between madness and opportunity (an economic term perhaps?) where mis-opportunities are opportunities too. Or from a Wikipedia search, “In economics, opportunity cost represents the potential gain that is lost when choosing one investment choice over another. In short, it's a value of the road not taken.” We make investment choices when we write—we invest in a particular kind of adjective or noun and hysteria and lunacy come to that party to pour alcohol on it and light it on fire. Sometimes I feel writing ruins that party.
EEB: Are we back to desire limned as different parts like a mandarin? Choice what throws the mandarin’s skin back around it so it appears like a single thing? My last question today is about fruit. In your writing, sex is everywhere. But it’s sex removed from the body and sold on a piece of styrofoam. Penises are measured by the millimeter flaccid and hard; your own sex appears shaved and prepared for a catheter. I find the most sensual objects throughout this work and others to be fruit. Food and fruit are consistently ripe for metaphor—the most sensual literary device, it procreates new being through two or more things. Do you prefer this mode of procreation to the biological? You also like to express your emotions of gratitude in the form of a jackfruit sent in the mail across the country. What's the difference between a durian and a jackfruit? Does it relate to queerness? If you could be any fruit which would you be and why?
VKN: That is a fat question(s)! I hope I have the stamina and appetite to respond! But, I will try. A durian is a fruit of sorrow and rebirth and a jackfruit is the fruit of Hồ Xuân Hương’s:
My body is like a jackfruit swinging on a tree
My skin is rough, my pulp is thick
Dear prince, if you want me pierce me upon your stick
Don't squeeze, I'll ooze and stain your hands
It’s easier to queer a fruit than a woman. And, men shouldn’t be mentioned here because it’s insensitive to ghosts. But, I hate blowjobs. I think my throat is small and it’s hard for me to breathe in general. I think people with heart issues or conditions or stroke potential shouldn’t give blowjobs. I just don’t know how women do it without vomiting. It’s the most uncomfortable human posture, like bending an elbow backward. It’s not designed to be that way without things being broken. There is material practicality to being sapphic and a writer. I just love fruits because they are so pure to eat. And, because I would need five or ten or twenty books to fully capture the depth of this desire, I will say that a fruit is more of an innate writer than me. Have you peeled an orange and experienced the squirting effects of its rind or juice on your skin? An orange can bend its torso, its head, its ovoid back to ejaculate. A superior sexual species to me, it seems. More flexible, more succulent, more moist, more tender in the way it expresses its orgasms. Don’t you want to know what an orgasm tastes like? Your mouth full of sunlight?