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INRASARA
__________________________________
STORIES
RETOLD ONLY
AFTER
40 YEARS
Translated by DO VINH
Story
1.
Running
away from diseases
Mother took my brothers and sisters
and I into hiding
in sixty–three. Nowhere far, mother
took us
to an aunt’s house three streets
away. Mother
said: let’s sleep over at the lonely aunt’s, I
knew that mother was taking us to run
away from diseases.
Father retold: in times past, our
maternal grandfather piggy-backed him
running far, far. These days the ham-
lets can not go anywhere. I remember
my sister with one hand holding
tightly to her dhai dress
ragged, president Ngo forbade the
Chams to wear,
with the other arm holding onto the
youngest boy
crying two rows of tears. Nowadays the youngest boy
is in the sixth grade, the dhai dress no one forbids to wear, my
sister
has tossed it away a long time ago,
the strategic war
diseases are no more. A story retold only after 40
years.
Story 2.
Eating words
I have a friend who is afflicted with
the disease of eating
words. Nothing else, he eats
morning noon afternoon, he chews
gnashingly.
His wife cried all of these two
years.
He eats all sorts of light and heavy
things
Nietzsche, Confucius, then Sagan. He
eats habitually. He eats
slow, meticulously. When I was still in shorts
i saw an old man in my village
eating the moon with raw water for
lunch.
Before that, my father retold, my
maternal great grandfather,
running away from a Minh Menh mandate
read
the book of rituals, burned through
the poetry of Glang Anak,
mixed kids urine to drink instead of
eating words. He lived over a hundred years old,
my father said, such strange eating
habbits,
unique to each generation no matter
where.
Chams never cease to have the
word-eating
gene. His wife cried why exactly it had to be
her husband.
Story
3.
Waiting
for boats
Perhaps it has been one, two hundred
years, and more than that, he has
waited. Waited for the boats.
Arriving in
the afternoons, just as the guru had
promised.
Like seventy years earlier, his son
waited for the boats. Surely
to come, the father had said. A father
could not ever lie to his son.
Like forty years past, his
grandchildren
waited for the boats. In the afternoon, after
closing the cages. They waited as such, still
in that upright position on that
mound of earth ---
toward the sea. The boats surely
will come. Their ancestors had
promised so, it is written so in
books. They
cannot but wait. For the boats
to come from the sea. This inheritance passed
down from fathers to sons. Until the
hamlets, then they stopped waiting, no
more
opportunity to wait. The boats had
came and gone, a long time ago,
perhaps.
INRASARA
Translated by DO VINH
· THE WRITERS POST (ISSN: 1527-5467),
the magazine of Literature & Literature-in-translation.
VOLUME
7 ISSUE 2 JULY
2005
Editorial note: Works published in this issue may be
simultaneously published in the printed Wordbridge Magazine Issue 6 January
2005 (ISSN: 1540-1723).
Copyright © Inrasara, Do Vinh & The Writers Post 2005.
Nothing in this issue may be downloaded, distributed, or reproduced without
the permission of the author/ translator/ artist/ The Writers Post/ and Wordbridge magazine. Creating links to
place The Writers Post or any of its pages within other framesets or in other
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