The Viet Arcane is a poetic vision of the Viet Nam War written in the early 1970's. It was inspired by a book by Ren Depestre, A Rainbow for the Christian West, in which a series of poems enacts an invasion by the Vodou Loas - or Haitian gods and goddesses - into the southern and most reactionary part of the United States. Hirschman imagines a similar invasion manifested by Vietnamese Mediums who follow the Dao Mau (the Worship of the Mother) religion...