‘Thơ Gạo Gió’: A POEM THAT SCRAPES AWAY THE WIND.
Gạo Gió in Vietnamese means to scrape away the wind.
Practiced throughout China, Indonesia and Vietnam, the traditional treatment uses a spoon or coin to scrape the back and shoulders with a liniment to bruise the capillaries under the skin. Bruising the skin in this way, you draw out and expel the cold wind that had struck you down.
The framing of this photograph references French Neo-classical paintings by Jean-Aguste-Dominique Ingres; namely ‘The Turkish Bath’ and ‘La Grande Baigneuse.’ This reminds the viewer how ethnographic and documentary photography owes a great debt to Ingres’ Orientalism. The erotic bath house betrays the colonial fear of what it most desires.
Tourists and expats to this day still associate the unbearably hot and humid equatorial colonies with Tropical Neurasthenia; a psychophysiological neurosis and sexual malaise that accompanies life in the tropics. Perceiving the people living in the tropics as either sensuous or grotesque, it is not surprising that photographic images of the Vietnam war appear like a fever dream; of naked children drenched in napalm and monks burning into the streets.
‘Thơ Gạo Gió’ subverts Ingres’ gaze and sensationalism. Instead, this is an intimate family portrait. With my aunty Nguyen Thị Kim Nhung doing traditional medicine to treat my mum’s fevers. Beyond warding off Ingres’ creepy gaze, Kim Nhung scrapes a single word poem on her sister’s back. The word ‘MÁT’ not only means ‘mad/unhinged’ but also means ‘a cool and welcome relief.’ The women in this portrait also subvert the judgement of men in my family (and much of the Vietnamese community in Australia) about their work as poets and artists. They are regularly called ‘MÁT.’
Finding relief in each other’s company, my Aunty, mother and I understand that Tropical Neurasthenia is both a racist and sexist construct. However, for anyone carrying on with business as usual. the delusion of normality is itself a fever dream.
We continued to inscribe ‘Gạo Gió’ text on each other as gestures of poetry, care and solidarity:
‘Loạn’ meaning chaos, and ‘Điên’ meaning crazy, are other terms of madness that reference the movement of 20th century Modernist Vietnamese poetry founded by Hàn Mặc Tử.
