English · Chapter 21
Study notes aligned to the official NEB syllabus.
Tran Mong Tu is a Vietnamese poet who left Vietnam in 1975, the year the long war there ended, and her writing grows out of that war and the losses it caused. Nepali readers meet the poem in Vann Phan's English translation, so the version studied in class already stands one step away from the poet's own Vietnamese. The poem is a short lyric spoken by a woman at the grave of the soldier she loved. Its method is announced by the title, for the poem borrows the vocabulary of gifts and exchange, which properly belongs to love and celebration, and applies it to war, where what is exchanged is death.
The poem begins at the grave. The speaker comes to the man she loved, who has been killed in the fighting, and she brings him flowers. Out of that small act of offering the whole poem unfolds as an accounting of gifts, of what she has given him and of what he has given her in return.
Her side of the exchange is everything a living woman has to give. She offers flowers at his grave, she offers her love, she offers her youth, which was spent in waiting and is now gone, and she offers her tears and her faithfulness. These are the gifts of a lover. They are freely given, they are all she has, and they cost her her life in a different way from the way the war cost him his.
His side of the exchange, as she sets it out, is made of the things that war leaves behind. In place of flowers she has the bullet holes in his body, his spilt blood, and the smell of death that clings to the memory of him. She has the medals awarded for his service, the official honours that the state hands over in return for a life. And she has the loss of everything she once had, because with him gone the future that belonged to them goes as well. The list is arranged so that each of her offerings is answered by something terrible, and the reader is made to feel the mismatch. Love is answered with wounds, youth is answered with a grave, and devotion is answered with decorations that mean nothing to her.
The gifts of the state deserve particular notice, because the poem refuses to accept them as payment. A medal is meant to turn a death into an honour, and the speaker simply places it in the column of things she has been handed, beside the blood and the smell of death, where its emptiness becomes obvious. Nothing in the poem is said against the dead man himself. The bitterness is aimed at the exchange, at a world that takes a living person and returns metal and ceremony.
The poem ends by reaching beyond the grave. The speaker looks past this life and asks that when the two of them meet again it should be in peace, in a world without war, and she voices the wish that the whole exchange could be reversed, that she could hand the war back and receive the man alive. That wish cannot be granted, and the poem knows it. It stands as a measure of how complete the loss is, and it leaves the reader with a plain accusation: war can take everything and give back nothing that is worth having.