VietNamNet Bridge – A collection of poems about Vietnam, named ‘Giong Nhu Ban Vua Cham Vao’ (It just looks like you touch things now), written by Dutch poet Dick Gebuys has been published. Since 2004, poet Dick Gebuys has gone to Vietnam, where the poet expressed his love through his collection of poems.

Dutch poet Dick Gebuys.

The conversation between popular Vietnamese author, Di Li, and the poet may offer readers clear insight his collection of poems.

All the foreigners I met when I go abroad usually considered Vietnam as a country of war. I could also see your similar feeling when I read the poem “The American war”. Maybe it was your first insight about Vietnam when you reached here the first time?

Yes and no. I was a young boy during the American War. I only witnessed this war by the western media. But I was 16 when I met in 1970 in Belgium a young boy – Steve – coming from New York. He was a soldier in Vietnam, wounded by a bullet, stayed in a hospital in Bangkok. He was a victim of war. I was stupefied by his stories. Steve thought he was back in Vietnam.

So I had been in Vietnam. And then I knew: once I will go there!

When I came here, I did not come for the country of war. Really not. I spoke with people who witnessed the War. I read books and walked around in the Cu Chi Tunnels. And most of all I tried to be aware of what the effect of war was nowadays.

But now everything in society is ‘Americanizing’.

Vietnam has Cam Ly, My Tam, My Linh, Elvis Phuong and so many others. You have great poets and composers of songs like Quoc-Bao. Why would you like to listen to ‘Top of the World’ and the Carpenters, which were not on the top of the world at all?

I think that Vietnam does not lose its rich tradition. The Vietnamese young generation now at least should read the mirror of Vietnamese culture and look at life, Huu Ngoc’s great book ‘Wandering through Vietnamese Culture’.

But when Wandering Through Vietnamese Culture I read “The freedom of the park” and “A street in Saigon”, I see obviously your sight changing. You described a modern Saigon and a noisy city in these poems?

My friend, Quoc Bao, who is the poet, composer, photographer, taught me to enjoy the modern Saigon, the dynamic city of these days. Everyday changing everywhere, but with the same heart beating and the same soul glowing as ever underneath all these changes, underneath all these new ‘clothes’. I worry all these high and big buildings and all these plazas because they have got nothing to do with what I see as the Vietnamese soul.

I love the Tao Dan Park at Nguyen Thi Minh Khai. This park sends out a spirit of freedom, in any sense of this word. It is great to walk there, either you do that in the early morning, or when the sun is setting, that lovely time of twilight that is so very short, therefore very precious in the tropics.

I like the way you talk about water in “The red river”. The Dutch persons have a special sensitivity of water, don’t they?

Yes, we have! In fact I was born under sea level, in Rotterdam. Our life we devote to the eternal struggle against the power of water. But we in Rotterdam also thank our standard of living for the water, to the harbour, the ships coming from all over the world to the city that has been for long the biggest harbour in the world.

My ultimate wish in this life was to live in a house on the waterside. For the reason, I loved to stay in the Riverside Hotel in Ho Chi Minh City, on the Saigon River.

And any time that I pass the Red River, I think back of the trip I often made with my parents and my grandparents crossing the Hollands Diep, near Dordrecht en Moerdijk, the border between the provinces of South-Holland and Brabant. And then the feelings I had crossing that bridge come back to me in Vietnam. Like also the child I once was comes back to me.

Why have you written a lot about Vietnam but not about your country?

I was inspired by things I saw all over the world, Also in Russia, in Ukraine, in Lithuania, in Estonia and in Latvia. Wherever I come and see things that challenge me, I like to write about it. Even when things happen in a part of the world I never saw. So thinking back of meeting people from Yugoslavia in the Netherlands, reading about the First and Second World War, I wrote a poem about the War in the Balkan, from 1914 up to the Nineties of the last century.

Vietnam is a country I have loved since 2004. For me it has become my second home country. When there is love, there should be a reason to write down what you see, feel, observe…To write down the things you care for…the things you love…

Thank you very much for sharing.

Nhan Dan/VNN