ON A HMONG POETICS OF ECOCIDE.

This article explores chemical warfare through HmongAmerican poet Mai Der Vang’s book Yellow Rain. A scientific, political,and cultural incident, “yellow rain,” according to countless Hmongsurvivors, is the name for the yellow sticky chemical substance thatfell from the sky across Southeast Asia in the aftermath of the USwar in Vietnam. While initial investigations found that yellow rain wasa chemical weapon, scientists later dismissed Hmong testimonies toassert that it was, instead, a result of local bee feces. I approach Vang’stext as a formulation of an ecocidal poetics that exposes the relation-ship between local, place based Indigenous knowledge in the contextof neocolonial warfare. Dwelling deeply within the ecocidal discourseof US state archival erasure and documentary practices, Yellow Rainmaterializes Hmong epistemologies of their local ecological system asa form of historical reckoning. Vang’s work offers a distinct contribu-tion to critical refugee studies’ critiques of US empire.