A Poetry Craft Essay by Bunkong Tuon
On Writing “What Is Left” and How a Poem Remembers and Speaks

My poem “What Is Left” picks up where my other poem “The Carrying” ends. “The Carrying,” which is about my uncles, aunts, and grandmother leaving Cambodia to seek food and shelter in a refugee camp in Thailand, concludes with the following lines:

At night in the refugee camp my uncles cradled
Hope that was as real as the belief that
No matter what came before, a life was still a life.
Then they turned to their corners of dirt and wept.

When composing “What Is Left,” I had been thinking about my overall work as a writer, scholar, teacher, and father. I have always been interested in examining the Cambodian genocide and its impact on survivors and their families. More specifically, I am interested in what happens after the genocide and how survivors rebuild their lives. This is my central occupation. For example, my novel Koan Khmer explores this thematic obsession as it focuses on a child survivor, Samnang Sok, trying to rebuild his life in the States. Another example: as a parent, who is also a child survivor of the Cambodian genocide, I try to give my children what I did not have: an ever-present father.

The poem “What Is Left” begins and ends with the line: “What is left after war is the gratitude for what is left.” It is the same idea held for dear life by the uncles in “The Carrying”: “No matter what came before, a life was still a life.” 

Yet, this is not blind gratitude, the belief that one should be grateful no matter what had happened. There is complacency, a kind of willful forgetfulness, in such blind gratitude. “What Is Left” offers a different kind of gratitude, the kind that takes a critical stance, the kind that contains memory and history, the kind that stands against amnesia. The poem remembers and takes stock of what happened to Cambodia, who did what, and how a survivor lives afterward.   

In A Primer for Poets and Readers of Poetry Gregory Orr compares the art of lyric poetry with that of sculpture making. In a process called modeling, the artist constructs an armature, the skeletal structure of the piece. After this skeleton is completed, the artist then slaps clay and other materials onto this structure. “What Is Left” was similarly built. The first line of the poem (“What is left after war is the gratitude for what is left”) is the armature, the foundation on which every line is built around. With this opening line, I was meditating on the possible meanings of life after genocide. The poem then took the form of a list poem, as it leaps from one topic to the next: ghosts and the writing of poetry, how the English language was used to drop bombs on Cambodia’s countryside and now the speaker uses it to communicate to the nation that dropped those bombs, and how the speaker directly addresses his uncles, aunts, and grandparents and vows to speak up and tell their stories. 

The poem is a kind of memory that speaks. It refuses silence, which is a common theme in my writing about the Cambodian genocide and its survivors. Under the Khmer Rouge regime, to speak up against authority meant death. And writers, artists, musicians, filmmakers—those who told stories—were killed. The Khmer Rouge wanted Cambodia to forget its past, so that they could rebuild a new society in a new era they called “Year Zero.” As a result, approximately two million lives were lost to executions, labor, sickness, and starvation. The poem calls out the United States for carpet-bombing Cambodia from 1960 to the early 1970s, which claimed the lives of countless Cambodians and, consequently, gave rise to the Khmer Rouge. The United States, the poem claims, is complicit in the Cambodian genocide. 

In claiming this, the speaker of the poem returns to the theme of “what is left after the war.” Haunted by ghosts of the Cambodian genocide, the speaker writes. He has no other choice. He also acknowledges that he uses the language of the empire: English. It is what he has because he was educated in the States. He tells his uncles, aunts, and grandparents: “Lok-Yeay and Lok-Ta, Pok and Mak, Pu and Meang, / Oum, your tongues are my tongue, and we are telling.”

Note the use of Khmer family titles. This is how I and many other Khmer Americans address our uncles, aunts, and grandparents. In this poem and many other poems like it, I resist English’s erasure of the Khmer identities of my family and my people. I also tried to transform the English language or, as I put it in my novel Koan Khmer, “infecting” the empire’s language. In other words, by using English to tell Khmer American stories in a way that does the least damage to my people, I can shift slightly the English language on its axis. 

Here is the poem in its entirety.

“What Is Left”

What is left after war is the gratitude for what is left.
My dreams are filled with ghosts looking for home.
The dead speak to the living through my poetry.
Each time I write, I rebuild. Retrieve what was stolen.

Nothing is dead until I let it. English is not the language
Of my birth. It is the language of death. More bombs
Dropped on Cambodia’s countryside than in Hiroshima
And Nagasaki. I was bombarded by this language.

I had no choice but to use it. I stand on the precipice
Listening. Ghosts are ancestors asking for light.
I holler to celebrate the dead and the living.
Lok-Yeay and Lok-Ta, Pok and Mak, Pu and Meang,

Oum, your tongues are my tongue, and we are telling.
What is left after war is the gratitude for what is left.

I did not set out for the poem to win a Pushcart. No one that I know writes this way. We want to get our poems as right as we could, that is our humble goal. And who knows how a poem gets chosen for a prize? But I am grateful for my Pushcart. If the poem reaches a lot of readers because of the prize, then I am pleased as punch. It is not the kind of poem where I write for myself and then stash it away in a filing cabinet in my office. It’s the kind of poem that wants readers to know what happened. It’s the kind of poem that wants to be heard. It wants to come out of the darkness and speak.

Bunkong Tuon is a Cambodian American writer, Pushcart Prize–winning poet, and professor who teaches at Union College in Schenectady, in NY. In 2024, he published What Is Left, a Greatest Hits chapbook from Jacar Press, and Koan Khmer, his debut novel from Northwestern UP/Curbstone Books. He lives with his wife and children in Upstate New York. Visit his website here.

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