Birth Coats and Other Coverings

Abstract

1 Mai Der Vang, “To the Placenta of Return” from Afterland. Copyright ©️ 2017 by Mai Der Vang. Reprinted with the permission of The Permissions Company, LLC on behalf of Graywolf Press, Minneapolis, Minnesota, graywolfpress.org. 2 In her ethnographic work on the birthing practices of the people of the Meratus Mountains of South Kalimantan, Indonesia, Anna Tsing draws on French feminist Julia Kristeva’s writing on the limits that constitute the subject. Tsing writes, “For Kristeva, clean and proper body bound aries are necessary in constituting a human subject who can participate in the symbolic order of language. Boundary transgressions— corpses, menstrual blood, and so forth—are sites of power and danger for the sym bolic, the paternal law.” Anna Tsing, In the Realm of the Diamond Queen: Marginality in an Out-Of-The-Way Place (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993), 179. 3 There are several accounts of the Hmong practice to bury placentae once attached to baby boys near the central pillar of the house, and those once attached to baby girls by the bed. See Anne Fadiman, The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down: A Hmong Child, Her American Doctors, and the Collision of Two Cultures (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1997), 5. 4 The poet Sarah Howe provides more historical context for Mai Der Vang’s work. She writes, “In 1962, seven years into the Vietnam War, the US signed an international treaty to respect the neutrality of Laos, then proceeded to launch a covert war there while preserving the fiction of compliance. The so called Secret War comprised over a decade of clandestine operations in which the CIA armed Hmong fighters against the North Vietnamese.” Sarah Howe, “‘Library of Opaque Memory’: Spectral Archives in Brandon Som, Mai Der Vang and Bhanu Kapil,” in The Contemporary Poetry Archive: Essays and Interventions, eds. Linda Anderson, Mark Byers, and Ahren Warner (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2019), 132. 5 See Alfred McCoy, “America’s Secret War in Laos: 1955-75,” in A Companion to the Vietnam War, eds. Marilyn B. Young and Robert Buzzanco (Malden: Blackwell Publishing, 1988), 284. 6 Ma Vang, “Writing on the Run: Hmong American Literary Formations and the Deterritorialized Subject,” Melus 41, no. 3 (2016): 89-111. I buried you after your birth.