Bac Ninh, Written To A Brother In America And Song Of Napalm

Memory is the diary that we all carry with us." – Oscar Wilde. This quote by Wilde portrays the personal properties memory has, such as our past experiences, emotions, and perceptions of life. In the context of war literature, this statement resonates with the author's writing about what it's like to be home during and after a war takes place. Bao-Long Chu's "Letter from Bac Ninh, Written to a Brother in America" and Bruce Weigl's "Song of Napalm" are examples of how memories shape relationships and identities in the aftermath of war. Through the lens of Wilde's metaphor, this essay takes an analysis of these two poems, exploring their portrayals of memories and their effects on individuals. This is how post-war memories affect relationships.

The repetition of death in this poem shows us the repetitive cycle of loss in the war and how the relationship between the living and the dead became closer. Although the brother is not dead, the distance between each other is a loss enough to perceive him as dead, thus shifting their relationship. Memories of being in the war itself have a great impact on the relationships around you. This is heavily depicted in Bruce Weigl’s Song of Napalm. Throughout this poem, we see how the invasive memories of the war skew his perceptions of life. When Weigl says “branches / Criss-crossed the sky like barbed wire / But you said they were only branches.” (Weigl 12-14) this shows the audience two things first being that the memories from war will appear in the writer’s day-to-day life through simple things such as the sky, but also that the relationship between him and his wife has changed since the war ended. In Memories of a Lost War: American Poetic Responses to the Vietnam War by Subarno Chattarji, he says post-war that there was a “sense of isolation and