NER staff reader Sabrina Islam talks with poet Monica Sok about spiritual and linguistic rebirth, returning agency to the Khmer people, and her three poems in issue 45.2.
Sabrina Islam: In “Inside the Institution” you write, “The soul argues against the words / of white people. What does she say? // I am a child of survivors. / Institutions can be destroyed.” As a daughter of genocide survivors writing actively about the Cambodian American narrative, what are a few of the challenges you’ve faced within institutions and the classic workshop model?
Monica Sok: I believe everyone faces their own challenges within institutions—whether that means preserving their energy for creative work, advocating for more resources, or carving out space for themselves as people of color within historically white programs. I’ve had all of these challenges, and I know that I’m not alone or unique in my experience as a Khmer woman who has worked in academia.
In past workshops in which I didn’t feel safe, I felt very protective of myself and my poems. This was especially true when I began to explore the history of the Cambodian genocide early on. I was writing about my parents’ experiences, which they were finally willing to share and asked me to record. My parents broke their own silence to share their stories with me, and there I was in the workshop, required to sit in silence and listen to everyone around me talk about my poem. That didn’t feel right to me. Many of the students didn’t have knowledge about the genocide, though they learned about it through my work. I began dissociating and felt disconnected from my poems as I was dealing with their emotional lives while others were more concerned about craft.
In the poem “Inside the Institution,” I recall a conversation in which a teacher argued that institutions would never change. In that class, we talked a lot about the work of white poets. That day, I think the other students and I were advocating for the program to invite more poets of color to read or teach at the university. It was clear to all of us that the program needed to change and reflect the growing landscape of contemporary American poetry. I can’t remember the full conversation, but I didn’t hold back when I said, I am a daughter of survivors. Institutions can be destroyed. I understand that an entire world order can be upended for better or for worse.
SI: How do you find subverting language and history empowering?
MS: In history class, it angered me to find only one small paragraph about the US bombings in Cambodia, described as a “sideshow,” in the chapter on the Vietnam War. Actually, I think I took a whole class about the Vietnam war as a high school senior, and there was still no real emphasis placed on learning about US involvement in Cambodia. The same was true for a university level course literally called History and Film: Vietnam and Cambodia. In college, I found more books about the Khmer Rouge written by Western scholars. I yearned for Khmer people who told their own stories, and then I began to discover more and more memoirs written by Khmer genocide survivors. Because my history was so marginalized and contextualized by the Western gaze, subverting language became a tool that could give agency to my community. In my poem “The Death of Henry Kissinger,” I took things that he said and subverted his language to lay bare his bad karma. In doing so, I held this war criminal accountable for his war crimes in Cambodia. It was and still and is a long road to learn about my people’s history.
These days, I’m excited to witness so many Cambodian artists, activists, refugee scholars, and storytellers of all kinds who are creating a renaissance. We are empowering each other to reclaim our own narratives. Recently, I learned that there is now a Cambodian American Studies curriculum in California that will soon be available for K-12 educators. This came about with the help of Cambodian communities and organizations that have been carving out space for our people for a long time. It’s exciting to know that future generations will have access to our history through school, which I had so much trouble finding as a young person.
SI: In “Evacuation” you write, “Endless cornfields before us. A row of houses where people live, // now empty. Pages flutter in the sky, a concentration of birds. // In this family, I never know where we are going.” When talking about your debut collection A Nail the Evening Hangs On with Danny Thanh Nguyen for Poetry Project, you argue that “all language is reincarnation, all language is rebirth.” You also discuss myth-making, a technique you adopt to allow for a multiplicity of voices when you mythologize your family’s narrative. Why address familial silence regarding inherited trauma?
MS: Familial silence and inherited trauma shaped my childhood in ways that I’m only understanding now as an adult. Because my parents didn’t talk about our history, I had very little to no context for how my family ended up in the heart of Amish country. I knew that we were Khmer, and we spoke Khmer at home. I knew that there was a faraway place called Cambodia. I had no real sense of belonging in Pennsylvania though. Familial silence loomed over our household, and I could feel my parents’ trauma through their temperaments. In “Evacuation,” I portray my parents helping me leave behind my depression in Lancaster in the same way that they evacuated Phnom Penh on April 17, 1975 when the Khmer Rouge took power. This is how they knew how to support me, their daughter, survive a depression they were familiar with themselves. This is how they were teaching me survival skills in a very small, white Christian town.
When I look back on my childhood now, I also see how special it was for my refugee family to rebuild their lives there. There is harmony between my parents and the surrounding farmland, and they have a very strong relationship with the Amish farmers from whom they directly buy produce. It’s September, so I know that they will be buying corn every week. I feel like my parents went through a kind of rebirth while building a family in Lancaster, and maybe they were able to create a full life for us there because of their relationship to the land itself. I celebrate their refugee ways of knowing, which has made me a resourceful person. This, too, is reincarnation.
SI: In your perceptive and deeply emotional poem “By the time I finish writing this poem I hope to know what love is,” you write, “I don’t know what comes next or who will love me now / other than myself, who must heal alone / in a temporary sublet.” Elsewhere, in your interview with Mariah Bosch for The Normal School, you mention how in your writing you want to lose control of your creative process and move toward desire. In your writing process, how are you experiencing that shift in attention and subject?
MS: The other day, I was listening to a woman talk about how painful it is to go through a breakup during summer because everything is so beautiful outside. Meanwhile, you’re feeling like garbage on the inside. I remember that feeling from a long time ago. The line that follows the one you mentioned above is: “Honeysuckles and yellow trumpets / outrageous on the sidewalk.” Eventually, I realized that in order to heal from heartbreak, I had to surrender to those unruly flowers that I thought were in my way every time I walked down that street. Perhaps that’s what I really meant when I said that I wanted to lose control in my writing process. I wanted to learn how to surrender.
Practicing desire means answering every moment honestly without anticipating the next. Now as I shift my attention toward desire in my writing, I have to completely detach myself from an outcome. I’m learning to value even the most fleeting forms of tenderness in my life. I give them a place in my poems now, whereas before, I invalidated those feelings simply because they were impermanent.
I also want to speak on the topic of desire as a daughter of refugees. As a young girl, I was conditioned to serve the needs of others in my family but not necessarily honor my own desires. When I finished writing this poem, I was surprised that it was, in the end, about my father’s faith in my love for someone else. He was an unexpected witness to my heartbreak, and it was an experience he had never seen me go through before. This poem reveals how much my father loved me while I was learning to love myself. It made me curious about the women he has loved in his life before the genocide. I think of my mother’s love life too. Did she get to have one before she got married to my father? These are juicy questions.
SI: Which poets and writers have shaped your understanding of language and poetry?
MS: The late Louise Glück had a great influence on me. I worked with her as a Stegner fellow at Stanford, and our workshop would gather at her house in Berkeley, which felt a lot more cozy than being at the university. I was about to publish my first book, so I was starting to write new poems under her tutelage, which was a challenging transition. I didn’t really know what to write about, and I was somewhat afraid to explore topics beyond my family history and the genocide, which had been my main focus for a long time. I began facing myself, my childhood in Lancaster, fresh grief and immense heartbreak, all of these inner workings that informed my own pain, from which I tried to shield myself. I stopped trying to act stoic about my own personal hardships.
Louise helped me free myself so that I could play with language again. Once she pointed out that she could tell I had fun writing a poem that I had turned in. She taught me to experiment and to stop relying on certain devices that I used as a crutch. She gave me the courage to end a poem with a question instead of concluding it with an answer. She taught me that I didn’t have to know everything to write the ending of a poem. Louise inspired me to become a more honest poet. Her guidance nourished my process most of all.
SI: How does teaching inform your writing life?
MS: My work in the classroom taught me to be kind to myself while writing. I told my students all the time that they needed to be kind to their creative spirits, so that they could open themselves up to vulnerability in order to write their poems.
One of my favorite and most memorable courses that I taught was a special elective on AAPI poetry at Stanford in 2022. We discussed the complexities and limitations of the term AAPI and prioritized reading poetry by Pacific Islander poets like Haunani Kay-Trask, Noʻu Revilla, Brandy Nālani McDougall, since they were mostly exposed to East Asian poets. This was true for me too in my own education. So it was an opportunity for all of us to finally study the poems that we needed. The class ended up forming a sense of community that aimed to create a grief culture in a time of increasing anti-Asian violence. We imagined safer futures together. I had some of my first Khmer students in the class, and I was their first Khmer teacher too. It was a space in which I felt comfortable enough to ask all of my students to call me គ្រូ or Neak Kru, which means “teacher” in Khmer. They wrote poems and stories that I needed to read when I was a kid. Outside of the university setting, I also taught Southeast Asian kids in Oakland through organizations like the Center for Empowering Refugees and Immigrants, and Banteay Srei. These young people affirmed my work as a Khmer poet and made me feel less alone.
SI: Are you working on a new writing project? If so, how is this project formally different from your previous work?
MS: Yes, I am indeed working on another book of poems. I’m in the stage of deep revision, which is my favorite part. I don’t know how best to describe its formal qualities since it’s still developing. And I definitely don’t want to create any high expectations! But many of my friends have noticed that my language is more direct and precise. I’m interested in brevity. I’m not relying on persona poems as I did in A Nail the Evening Hangs On, so my readers will have a different experience of my work. I made myself very scarce in the debut, but I’m happy to say that I’m the speaker in my poems now.
Sabrina Islam, who reads fiction manuscripts for NER, holds an MFA in creative writing from University of Maryland, where she teaches college writing and creative writing. She has received scholarships from the Kentucky Women Writers Conference and the Key West Literary Seminar. Her stories can be found in Flock, Acta Victoriana, Prairie Schooner, and the minnesota review. She currently lives in Washington, DC.
Monica Sok is the author of A Nail the Evening Hangs On (Copper Canyon Press, 2020). She has received support from the Elizabeth George Foundation, Hedgebrook, Kundiman, MacDowell, the National Endowment for the Arts, Poetry Society of America, and the Wallace Stegner Program at Stanford University. Her poems have appeared in Paris Review, POETRY, Kenyon Review, New Republic, and the Washington Post, among others. Sok is a daughter of Khmer Rouge regime genocide survivors and stands in solidarity with Congo, Palestine, and Sudan. She lives in New York City.
Photo of Monica Sok courtesy of Andria Lo