Alisak Sanavongsay interviewed at Little Laos on the Prairie

Little Laos on the Prairie recently did an interview with Alisak Sanavongsay, who's been a long-time comunity builder involved with many of the national and local efforts to rebuild Lao culture in the US.

From efforts with the SatJaDham Lao Literary Project to the Southeast Asian American Legacies Symposium, he's assisted groups such as the National Lao American Writers Summit, Cooking with Nana, the Laotian American National Alliance, the Elgin Lao Artists Festival, the Center for Lao Studies, and many more.

Based in Merced, California, he shares his perspective with the community and his ideas of what makes a good leader in the Lao community. Worth checking out!

Souvankham Thammavongsa's "Cluster" featured at the Globe and Mail

Souvankham Thammvongsa is an award-winning Lao Canadian poet whose books include Small Arguments; Found; and Light, all from Pedlar Press. Among her notable awards is the Trillium Award, and the CBC Bookie Award for Book of the Year in the poetry category for Light, which is a beautifully composed text that has my highest recommendations.

A short film was based on her book of poems Found. It was inspired by her father's notebook from the refugee camps she discovered in the trash one day. She recently came to Minnesota in April to meet with other Lao writers, artists and scholars as part of the National Lao American Symposium and Writers Summit.

Recently, the Globe and Mail featured her poem "Cluster."  It's always an achievement when a poet is featured in the newspaper, even more so, for Lao in diaspora. I hope this serves as encouragement to everyone that there is indeed space for our words, our dreams, our journeys.

Documenting the Cambodian diaspora with Pete Pin

Art Radar recently posted a great interview by Lisa Pollman featuring Pete Pin, "Inter-generational project reveals complexities of Cambodian diaspora"  that also has many implications for those of us who are documenting the Lao diaspora. It's well worth the read, espeically for its questions of art with intergenerational dimensions and a sense of community-centered creation.

His projects have included “Cambodian Diaspora,” “Cambodian Diaspora: Memory”, and “I am Khmer,” which may not strike some as particularly ambitious titles, but they're functional enough.

There's a lot that should resonate with Lao artists here. In the Khmer community, he didn't grow up with much access to art, and he felt a great disconnect from his culture and his identity. Pete Pin defied the statistics and went on to puruse his graduate degrees.

What's encouraging to me is that he purchased his first camera in 2008, and got what many would consider a later start in life as a photographer.  He found inspiration in the work of Richard Avedon and Robert Frank thanks to exhibits in San Francisco. I would hope this encourages Lao not to be intimidated by the idea of starting later in an art.

One notable concept he mentions is the "hinge generation" put forward by Eva Hoffman. It's an idea of trauma experienced through recieved memory, which is particularly of interest for Lao who were born in the 1970s and on. Many of us have a sense of what our elders went through but did not directly experience it. For Lao, there's a consistent frustration that elders, particularly parents and grandparents don't talk about those experiences in any great detail, and there's not much of a clearinghouse for these stories where we can reassemble a sense of what really happened during the Secret War. In an era of such intense personal documentation, it remains a very visible gap in our human record.

Hoffman notes that those of us interested in preserving the memories of our elders and discussing our journey have to beware of self-indulgence and narcissism. Without naming names, I can say that I've seen that in action in Lao and Southeast Asian narratives. Hoffman has further warned that we can't see ourselves as''a victim of victims, as damaged by calamities that had been visited on somebody else.'' She notes that "if we insist on fidelity to our childhood knowledge, we may run the risk of being unfaithful to what our parents themselves knew." So this could become a challenge.

Pete Pin's present work is centered on documentary photography, not photojournalism, so these are images that are taken over a long-period of time, and not necessarily shots centered on things we'd consider breaking news. I can see many Lao photographers across the country working with this method. Pete Pin makes note of some other interesting approaches to photography, such as participatory, collaborative and performance photography.

Pete Pin and Lisa Pollman discuss a New York Times article by Teju Cole "Memories of Things Unseen" and the idea that photography is a memorial art, and one that intersects "memory, space, and time."

Pete Pin mentions an issue in putting together exhibitions that we learned during the Legacies of War: Refugee Nation Twin Cities exhibit in Minnesota five years ago, that you have to be careful not to reintroduce trauma. There's a challenge because we can't always be sure what's going to trigger those memories or where the outcome goes. You need responsible facilitation and use a safe space. Pete Pin even suggests having mental health resources on hand, which is not an issue other communities exhibiting community-centered arts typically include.

The project shifted for Pete Pin, which originally was concieved as creating an archive of family stories, but I find his current conclusion interesting, that family stories should really stay with the families. I think about this as I remember The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down, and some of the conversations we were having about this back then. He now makes efforts to get people to participate at their own levels of comfort.

Overall, there are some very interesting ideas presented here that I think many in the Lao community need to consider as we go forward with our own efforts to document our diaspora. Be sure to give this a read.

New Soudary Kittivong Greenbaum Poem, "Narratives"

Soudary Kittivong Greenbaum was one of the founding members of the SatJaDham Lao Literary Project, which marks its 20th anniversary this year. Her work has been published in many of the anthologies SatJaDham released in the late 1990s. Her experience has taken her from Alaska to Texas, and points in between.

Since the days of SatJaDham, she has gone on to a career in the non-profit sector, building over 15 years experience, with a focus on human rights, social justice, equity, education and public health.

She recently had a new poem published at Little Laos on the Prairie, "Narratives." Be sure to check it out.