U Sam Oeur

U Sam Oeur (born 1936) is a Cambodian poet, a former member of the Parliament of Cambodia, and a former UN delegate. He is the author of a collection of poetry, Sacred Vows, and a memoir, Crossing Three Wildernesses (2005). He is a devout Buddhist.

Life Born in 1936 in rural Svey Rieng Province, Cambodia, French Indochina, Oeur spent his youth farming rice and herding water buffalo. He later moved to the U.S., where he earned a B.A. in industrial arts at California State University, Los Angeles, and an M.F.A. from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where he was recruited as a student in poetry by Dr. Mary Gray, director of The Asia Foundation. After his education in the United States, Oeur returned to Cambodia, where he managed a cannery in Phnom Penh, worked in light industry, became a captain in the politician-general Lon Nol’s army, and served on the Cambodian delegation to the United Nations before the Khmer Rouge took over.

Oeur currently resides in McKinney, Texas, where he translates the poetry of Walt Whitman into Khmer. In 1975, Oeur and his family members were forced, along with millions of other residents of Phnom Penh, out of the city by the Khmer Rouge. In successive years, Oeur and his family were held in a series of six concentration camps. In 1976, while captive, his wife gave birth to twin children who were murdered by state actors. He writes about this traumatic event in “The Loss of my Twins,” translated by Ken McCullough for MĀNOA: A Pacific Journal of International Writing. Grounded in this historical and experiential context, his poems explore what it means to have one's identity effaced, or to efface one's own identity to avoid being killed. In Sacred Vows, Oeur writes in traditional Cambodian forms and “[uses] myths, stories, and history as ironic counterpoint” to the social and political situations of 1998 Cambodia. Of his poems, Oeur has said they offer “philosophical responses in a dialogue with the tradition. I do not wish to reject that tradition or negate the tradition, just breathe life into it.”

Oeur has worked closely with American poet Ken McCullough, whom he met in the Iowa Writers Workshop while the two were classmates. McCullough is the translator of Oeur's two books, Sacred Vows and Crossing Three Wildernesses. McCullough is also the author of the lyrics for a chamber opera -- “The Krasang Tree”—a performance based on Oeur's poetry and experiences.

In 1998, Oeur was invited to give a poetry reading at the Minneapolis Center for Victims of Torture. After reading his poem “Loss of My Twins,” Oeur was approached by a female doctor from the University of Minnesota, who told him, “[...] I thought only medicine can heal the sick. But now I know poetry can also heal the sick people, in a way that heals the emotions, the psychological trauma.”