Creator
U Sam Oeur
Cambodian poet and memoirist who survived the Khmer Rouge period and translated Walt Whitman into Khmer.
U Sam Oeur is a Cambodian poet and memoirist, the author of the poetry collection Sacred Vows (1998) and the memoir Crossing Three Wildernesses (2005).[1][2] A former member of Cambodia's Parliament and delegate to the United Nations, he survived four years in Khmer Rouge camps by feigning illiteracy and destroying his manuscripts.[3][1] He lives in Texas, where he translates the poetry of Walt Whitman into Khmer.[3]
Life
Oeur grew up in rural Svay Rieng Province, near the border with Vietnam, and went to school in Phnom Penh under the French colonial system.[4][1] After high school, USAID sent him to the United States.[5] He enrolled at California State University, Los Angeles, in 1962 to study industrial arts, and earned his bachelor's degree in 1965.[6][5] Mary Gray, then director of The Asia Foundation, encouraged him to apply to the Iowa Writers' Workshop, where he earned an MFA in poetry in 1968.[6][7]
He returned to Cambodia in 1968. He taught for a short time, managed a cannery in Phnom Penh and held managerial posts in light industry.[7][1] From 1970 to 1972 he served as a captain in Lon Nol's army.[7] He was elected to the National Assembly in 1972 and served on the Cambodian delegation to the United Nations.[6][1] He was also Secretary General of the Khmer League for Freedom, a post to which Lon Nol nominated him in 1972. Ken McCullough gives the group's name as the Cambodian League for Freedom and Democracy and dates its founding to 1973.[5][7]
On April 17, 1975, the Khmer Rouge drove Oeur from Phnom Penh into the countryside, along with more than 1.8 million other residents of the city.[6] He was held in six concentration camps. Most accounts give his time there as four years, through 1979; Education About Asia gives it as nine.[7][6][8] At the start of the takeover he burned his copy of his MFA thesis, fearing it would be used against him. He threw away his eyeglasses and passed as an unschooled laborer, using the farm skills of his rural youth to hide his education.[4][9] Once he escaped execution only because a water buffalo he had lost came back.[9] Many people assumed he had been killed.[4]
After Vietnamese forces drove out the Khmer Rouge, Oeur returned to Phnom Penh and worked in the Ministry of Industry.[7] In 1991 a coworker found a poem in his desk that criticized the Vietnamese-backed government, and the ruling party forced him to resign.[7][10] In 1992 he came to the University of Iowa as a fellow of the International Writing Program, sponsored by the Dashiell Hammett-Lillian Hellman Fund for Free Expression. He arrived at the Cedar Rapids airport in September 1992 with a suitcase of worn reference books and the clothes he was wearing.[4][7] The university later named him an Independent Scholar, which allowed his visa to be extended, and he became a U.S. citizen.[10] He is a devout Buddhist and lives in Dallas.[2][5]
Poetry
Oeur writes in strict Khmer forms with intricate rhyme schemes, and he chants his poems in a dramatic style.[7] The poem "Sacred Vows" uses the Khmer "crow-hopping" form of seven-line, four-word stanzas with linked internal and end rhymes, while some later poems are in free verse.[7]
Sacred Vows was published by Coffee House Press in 1998 in a bilingual edition, with the Khmer poems and their English versions on facing pages.[10][6] Ken McCullough translated it with Oeur.[9] Its 53 poems date from the early 1950s to the years just before publication, and many tell of the Khmer Rouge years.[8][9] Oeur could not bring his written poems out of Cambodia, so he memorized hundreds of them, and the book rebuilds much of what was lost.[11][6] Its longest section is "In the Concentration Camps."[7] Across the collection he uses myths, stories and history as an ironic counterpoint to Cambodia's condition in 1998.[1] An earlier chapbook, Selections from Sacred Vows, appeared in 1993; on it Oeur followed his name with the Khmer title "Itinerant Poet."[4][7]
Crossing Three Wildernesses, written with McCullough and published by Coffee House Press on May 1, 2005, tells his life story. Its title refers to the three wildernesses Cambodians were forced to cross under the Khmer Rouge: death by execution, by disease and by starvation.[2] Its publisher calls it the first memoir by a government official from before the Khmer Rouge years.[2] McCullough also wrote the lyrics for The Krasang Tree, a chamber opera based on Oeur's poetry and experiences.[1][2]
Oeur's Whitman translations into Khmer include "Song of Myself," "When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd," "Crossing Brooklyn Ferry" and "I Hear America Singing."[5][10] He also wrote the poetry collection Ever Hopeful.[10]
In May 1998 he presented his poetry at the Asia Society bookstore in New York.[8] The Minnesota Historical Society holds an interview with him recorded in Minneapolis in 1998.[11]
Works
- Crossing Three Wildernesses (Book)
See also
References
- ↑ 1.0 1.1 1.2 1.3 1.4 1.5 1.6 U Sam Oeur, Wikipedia
- ↑ 2.0 2.1 2.2 2.3 2.4 Coffee House Press, Crossing Three Wildernesses
- ↑ 3.0 3.1 Lannan Center for Poetics and Social Practice, Georgetown University, U Sam Oeur
- ↑ 4.0 4.1 4.2 4.3 4.4 The Iowa Review, U Sam Oeur: five poems, with an introduction by Ken McCullough
- ↑ 5.0 5.1 5.2 5.3 5.4 Taos Journal of Poetry, U Sam Oeur
- ↑ 6.0 6.1 6.2 6.3 6.4 6.5 6.6 Education About Asia, review of Sacred Vows by Marianne Villanueva (2000)
- ↑ 7.00 7.01 7.02 7.03 7.04 7.05 7.06 7.07 7.08 7.09 7.10 7.11 Artful Dodge, Ken McCullough and U Sam Oeur
- ↑ 8.0 8.1 8.2 The New York Times, From Misery to Flight: A Cambodian Soars Through His Poetry (May 23, 1998)
- ↑ 9.0 9.1 9.2 9.3 Tricycle: The Buddhist Review, Sacred Vows
- ↑ 10.0 10.1 10.2 10.3 10.4 Ken McCullough, U Sam Oeur and Ken McCullough
- ↑ 11.0 11.1 Minitex, Learn at the Library: Exploring poets for National Poetry Month (April 6, 2023)