The Story Behind the Picture...

Since the publication of my chapbook last November, many reviewers and readers have pointed to the cover's stark and almost macabre face. It is a face of utter agony and despair, a face or burning. Nearly everyone has compared it to Edward Munch's infamous 1893 painting "The Scream". I can definitely see the resemblance: the fiery background framing the screamer's despair surging towards the viewer, the face, pale in it's shock and fear.

                                          


The painting for the cover could very well pass as a contemporary version of Munch's classic. However, this is not the case, at least not in the artist's original intent. The painting is by a young artist named Ashley Blazawski and was inspired by AP photographer Nick Ut's Pulitzer Prize-winning photo of "the "Napalm Girl", or Kim Phuc. 

The photo was taken in June 1972 shortly after an American napalm raid that erroneously hit a civilian village where young Phuc lived. As you can see, the face depicted in the painting is the boy running in the frame's left field. The boy has not been identified to this day, which makes the painting's focus on his pain even more important to me. It puts a human face to the lost suffering of marginalized peoples throughout history, a history that is too often erased and dismissed in American textbooks. 

Here is a short video of the bombing. WARNING: GRAPHIC


Photographer Nick Ut recounts the moment:

"As soon as she saw me, she said: "I want some water, I'm too hot, too hot," - in Vietnamese, "Nong qua, nong qua!" And she wanted something to drink. I got her some water. She drank it and I told her I would help her. I picked up Kim and took her to my car. I ran up about 10 miles to Cu Chi hospital, to try to save her life. At the hospital, there were so many Vietnamese people - soldiers were dying there. They didn't care about the children. Then I told them: "I am a media reporter, please help her, I don't want her to die." And the people helped her right away."

But what about that boy? And the countless others forgotten in that war? Those questions race through my mind each time I come across that photo. So when I was giving a reading at the community college I used to attend and saw that face glaring out from the small gallery showcasing student work, I knew exactly where it came from. As a Vietnamese American who grew up struggling to make sense of the war that indirectly resulted in my birth, I am familiar with many of the photographs of that era as well as the faces that peer out of them. I promptly contacted the artist via a Facebook search and discovered we went to the same high school together. It just made so much sense to collaborate. I knew that this piece of art will be the cover of my first book. I just didn't realize it would be so soon. I first laid eyes on the painting in June 2010 and by October was already proofing the first galleys for my chapbook published by Sibling Rivalry Press. I am a firm believer in beautiful cover art that has a strong connection to the work in encases. As someone who will probably never own a kindle or any other e-reader, the ability to feel and touch and sit with a book from cover to splendid cover is very rewarding for me and I can only hope my chapbook would do the same for others.

You can check out Ashley's work here or buy a copy of Burnings here.

                                                     "Scarred" by Ashley Blazawski (2009)