Filmmaker Raoul Peck and author Viet Thanh Nguyen discuss their road to making art that’s political and subversive for Aljazeera— Studio B: Unscripted
Haitian filmmaker Raoul Peck highlights the roots of violence and inequality today. He is best known for his Oscar-nominated documentary – I Am Not Your Negro about civil rights icon James Baldwin – and racism in the United States, and for his Peabody-winning Exterminate All the Brutes, a sweeping indictment of colonialism and genocide.
Viet Thanh Nguyen is a Vietnamese-American professor and author whose spy novel The Sympathizer won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction and was recently made into an HBO series. In his fiction and non-fiction books, he investigates his own refugee journey, the politics of memory and the effects of US wars abroad.
In this episode, Peck and Nguyen discuss their political coming of age, what Gaza tells us about the world today, and how they use their work to challenge and unsettle.
Read below for transcript.
Raoul Peck:
As a young student, we still had the dictatorship in Haiti, and for most student abroad, our goal was to go back to Haiti and fight.
Viet Thanh Nguyen:
I am a reluctant memoirist. I take that to be a good sign because if you ever encounter an enthusiastic memoirist, you should run the other direction.
Raoul Peck:
I want people to look closer at the ugly side of Israel and the roots of violence and inequality today.
Speaker 10:
These people have deluded themselves for so long, they really don’t think I’m human.
Raoul Peck:
My name is Raoul Peck and I’m a filmmaker. Born in Haiti, I grew up in Congo, France, Germany, and the United States.
Speaker 11:
What kind of species are you?
Speaker 12:
This gun.
Raoul Peck:
I point my camera where others prefer not to look, racism, colonialism, genocide, but also resistance.
Speaker 13:
This is our land. This is our water, our club, everything.
Viet Thanh Nguyen:
I write about what it means to be American and about the ordinary people who get caught up in US wars. My family fled Vietnam when I was a child. I’m Viet Thanh Nguyen, author, professor, refugee. I spent much of my life trying to forget what it meant to lose a country.
Speaker 4:
The Vietnam War, it’s over. Your job has just began.
Viet Thanh Nguyen:
I’ve always felt like a spy in two worlds. I explore the politics of memory, the history we’re told to remember and the things we’re told to forget.
Raoul Peck:
I read two of Viet’s novels and rarely felt so at home. What I admire most about Viet is his humorous, non-didactic way of threading knowledge, entertainment and politics together.
Viet Thanh Nguyen:
I’ve long admired Raoul for his ability to blend art and politics seamlessly. He’s an auteur whose style is a poetics of commitment.
Raoul Peck:
I’m keen to talk to Viet about what’s going on in the world today.
Viet Thanh Nguyen:
I’m excited to talk to Raoul about how art can challenge the damaged world we live in.
Raoul Peck:
So what are the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves?
Viet Thanh Nguyen:
And how do we face our past to change our future?
Raoul, I am just so delighted to be here with you as a longtime admirer of your work. The last work of yours that I saw was Exterminate All the Brutes, which is a four-hour documentary about colonization, genocide, and white supremacy. And the amazing thing was that you were able to not only just make this but make this and have it broadcast on HBO, which is not normally the home I would imagine of documentaries about colonization and white supremacy. How hard has it been for you to pursue your personal vision as an artist over the decades?
Raoul Peck:
For many, many years I used to say that I do guerrilla filmmaking. Basically find somewhere, some people who are ready to work with me or to fund my movie, hit and leave. And the decision I took very early in my life was that I would only make films that I really want to make. I never made a film because I had to earn a living. As a young student, I was 17 when I went to study in Berlin. That was in ’73. We still had the dictatorship in Haiti. And for most students abroad, our goal was to go back to Haiti and fight. So for some reason politics was our DNA.
And I transmit that to my work that every film is a possible last film, so I never hold back my punches. I always thought you have one shot, so make it work.
Viet Thanh Nguyen:
I take that very personally because I try to do that in my own work as well. It’s been very important for me to do exactly what you said, to come to the realization which would take me decades to come to this realization that I had to write just for myself.
Raoul Peck:
But I wanted to ask you something. I remember reading your first novel, it strike me as that’s the first time really that I thought, “Wow, an American writer, but not totally an American, but who understand extremely profoundly what America is.” And also be totally on my side. So at what point that moment came to you to find a way to be exactly in between and in both completely?
Viet Thanh Nguyen:
I did grow up with a sense of being always inside and outside of every location that I found myself in because of my refugee background coming from Vietnam to the United States. And I think I had an intellectual understanding of what the country was and of what I thought my art should be, but I didn’t have the artistic capacity to realize that vision. So it would take me many years of struggle, of writing different things before I was able to write The Sympathizer. And I felt that The Sympathizer was really the moment when I could start bringing my artistic vision closer to my political vision of what America is, but also what function the artist can occupy relative to such a massive idea as that mythology that Americans have built around this notion of the country which they’ve exported all over the world and then also deeply internalized within themselves.
I think that’s why I feel like we are sympathetic to each other’s projects. There’s some overlap in these colonial histories that have produced us. And was that something you were already understanding even before you left to go overseas?
Raoul Peck:
I think I had to build it as I went. I went to Congo when I was eight. My parents went to work for the UN in Congo and Congo was my land. My friends were Congolese, Belgian as well. But I felt at home. And when I went to France it was the same. But what I also, I think learned was to very early on to deconstruct. You would watch a film on Tarzan and then you go to Congo and you realize that, “Well, there are no tribes dancing around the airplane.” And as an eight-year-old, it’s a shock because all your image of Africa is in that Hollywood movie.
So very early, I didn’t trust everything I was reading or everything I was watching, or seeing on the screen. I remember reading your book, The Sympathizer having two Vietnamese, one a communist, another one with the US army, having an ideological debate and not being afraid to even use the word class struggle communist. In a US environment, what does something very conscious for you?
Viet Thanh Nguyen:
Absolutely. The pressure placed upon someone who is seen as a minority for whatever reason is to always speak to the center of power. And that lore to speak to the center of power is so immense that I think for many people that is internalized. And so when I wrote The Sympathizer, it was actually very important to construct the novel, as you said, as a debate between Vietnamese people and acknowledging that just because we’re Vietnamese people, it doesn’t mean we think the same, feel the same, see the world the same way, but that because we’re talking to each other, we don’t have to translate our worldviews for the benefit of the center of power, whether it’s the United States or whether it’s France or whether it’s other imperial countries and perspectives.
I feel that in your films very, very strongly that there’s certainly a consciousness of colonial history and the way that it affects how stories are told, but also how it affects the storytellers who come out of these colonized situations.
Raoul Peck:
Yeah. It’s not to accept that other people could determine who you are. That’s something I also learned very early and Baldwin is somebody who would always say, “I can’t let anybody determine who I am because I’m in construction. I am something I don’t know even. So who are you to dictate me where I stand in the history of the world?” And that’s why I can imagine the debate with your editor pages and pages of two Vietnamese talking with each other and talking about their history and forgetting the central world. It’s rare nowadays to be able to do that.
Viet Thanh Nguyen:
When I sent out The Sympathizer to editors, it was rejected by 13 out of 14 editors and the 13 editors were Americans. The 14th editor who bought it was actually English, Cambridge graduate, Slavic studies major, read Russian and Marxist theory, and himself, as I discovered, was of mixed race background with an Indian-Malaysian mother. He actually did not question the two Vietnamese sides talking to each other. I think because he understood personally and intellectually the very histories that we’re discussing.
You were talking about Baldwin and Baldwin was a subject of I’m Not Your Negro, this really powerful documentary about Baldwin’s work and his influence. Baldwin is probably best remembered for his writing from the ’40s through the ’60s. But they’re also still resonant today because Baldwin’s political, personal, philosophical insights about race, colonialism, white supremacy, they have not gone out of date. And I find that very inspiring, but it’s also rather discouraging because things have not changed that much in 60 or 70 years. Are you depressed or do you find it energizing that there was someone like Baldwin that you could refer to?
Raoul Peck:
People ask me that question and the quick answer is that I can’t afford to be depressed. The world in front of us is a big question mark. When I was younger I would say, yes, it’s a question mark, but we are a collective. We can fight against it. But today, I don’t see the structure who helped me find my way and on every level within the society, we can’t say that the unions have the same power they used to have. Every institution had a youth organization and the elders were important. I was educated by my elders.
Nowadays, anybody have access to everything. So even the notion of elders have disappeared. I was very reinforced. You are much younger than I, but that you still talk from the solid point of view of Césaire, Fanon, Baldwin, that those were still your references.
Viet Thanh Nguyen:
You yourself brought up unions movements. It’s very rare for me to have conversations with artists, writers in the United States where that ever comes up. The idea of politics beyond the representational sense. If you’re in the United States or maybe here as well, when writers talk about politics, they’re talking more about are we included, are we represented or are stories being told? Are voices being heard? All of which is important, but not politics in the sense, as you mentioned earlier, class struggle, mass movements of people.
And for me, the reason why I turned to people like Baldwin, Césaire, Fanon, Du Bois and other writers and intellectuals is because I could see in their work that they had artistic visions about themselves as writers, but also about themselves as thinkers and as activists and as people who were parts of larger revolutionary struggles and movements. That’s how I see myself. For me, the demythologizing of white supremacy and colonial ideologies has been a lifelong project.
Raoul Peck:
I would touch to something you said within that which was as not to separate the fact to be an artist and an activist or to be engaged in the society you live with. For me, that was never to be separated. One, give the legitimacy to the other, to always question who are you? What are you? What is your place in society and what is your role? And I always saw myself as privileged. So an additional incitement to do something.
Viet Thanh Nguyen:
I grapple with the question of privilege because I don’t think it’s healthy to feel guilty about one’s privilege, but it is healthy to be aware of it. And then for me as a writer to think about what can I do with that privilege and to think that when I wrote something like The Sympathizer and it became successful, it was also because these literary and political movements had come before me and through decades of struggle had created a space, an opening for someone like me and my novel to come through. And the artist who goes around believing in their own genius to me is a very, very worrisome person.
In some ways, to be a filmmaker is to be engaged inevitably with some degree of collaboration and the economic machinery of making movies. How does one be uncompromising when there’s so many other people involved with one’s art?
Raoul Peck:
Well, you have to find the right people because they exist. When I studied cinema in Berlin, going to work in a TV station was being a traitor because you join the establishment. And I was fighting with some of my colleagues at the time said, “But who are you making film for if you don’t go where the people are watching? And that’s something I always kept all my life is to make no compromise but to go where the largest audience could be to make my film accessible.
There is a way not to make compromise and find the right financiers to finance your film. That’s the advantage of democracy is that democracy in order to justify itself need to leave places where people like me can go and you just have to find them and there are enough people that are in position of power, but that has enough bad conscience to come join me. But it’s always a choice. You have to be conscious of it because it’s easy to accept the project and you say, “Well, I have the money to say certain thing.” But usually it’s not true. If you don’t have all the keys in your hand, if you don’t make the editorial choices and the final cut, you basically don’t own whatever the work you do.
Viet Thanh Nguyen:
We will end this section on that optimistic note that there are openings for those who are uncompromising. now we’re going to take some questions from the audience. So please raise your hand. I see a gentleman over there.
Speaker 3:
So, Viet, you are a champion of diasporic literature. Can you give your perspective on the role translated Vietnamese literature and diasporic Vietnamese literature in your case can help members of the diaspora construct and shape the cultural identity?
Viet Thanh Nguyen:
I certainly wanted to tell my own story when I wanted to become a writer, but I also wanted to build a literary community and a movement that would provide opportunities for other writers to tell their stories as well. That goes back to this idea that I don’t believe in individual writerly privilege. I believe in this project of abolishing the conditions of voicelessness that would allow more of stories to emerge. But what I don’t want to see is a diaspora, which one voice, one representative gets to tell their story at the expense of everyone else.
So I do think that diasporic, transnational, and translated literatures are crucial in terms of trying to change the narrative landscape of these countries that we find ourselves in.
Raoul Peck:
Well, I’m very conflicted with that question because sometimes being at the center of the republic, you tend to be allowed to speak about yourself a certain way. So the narrative is a narrative that can sell and at the same time, for me, it’s as important to have the connection with where you come from. I never felt I was totally free in the thematic I choose because when I go back to Haiti, I have to confront my friends, my family, people I grew up with, with their reality.
So imagine I go back to Haiti and they said, “Oh, and what kind of film do you make?” I said, “Well, I just finished a crazy story, five. I wouldn’t be proud to have that conversation because that would mean I don’t know what you’re going through. I’m not interested with what you are going through. So it’s that kind of responsibility.
I was never able to shake it out. Every day I think about what’s going on in Congo. There is a war. A million people have died. I cannot just erase it. So how do I speak of that? In my work, I went back to Haiti. I work, I went into politics. I was in a government and for me that’s natural to have done that. I gave two, three years of my life to do that and I still continue today because those are my friends. They are fighting for democracy every day. They’re risking their life. I don’t have guilt, but I make sure that I show solidarity that I am involved. I try to do my best in that fight as well.
Speaker 5:
I’ve got a question for you, Viet. In 2021, I heard you in a Guardian live broadcast, which I enjoyed, and I think you said something like you weren’t going to write about your life because it wasn’t very interesting. What made you change your mind? Because you have a memoir that has come out now, I believe.
Viet Thanh Nguyen:
I am a reluctant memoirist. I take that to be a good sign because if you ever encounter an enthusiastic memoirist, you should run the other direction. And because exposing personal traumas inevitably typically would involve other people. And so I think I was very reluctant to write about my own life because it would involve talking about my family. And so I did feel the compulsion eventually to write this memoir because I could finally make the connections between my family’s personal experiences and my own and larger historical tapestries.
I’ve spent my career and my life grappling with big political questions of race and colonization and that scale of otherness. But hopefully a sign of my maturity as a human being is that I’ve also come to be able to recognize that otherness is also not just taking place on these vast scales, but also on very intimate scales. Sometimes the people who are most other to you are the people who are right next to you, my parents, my family. The difficulty in writing a memoir is to understand that your ordinariness can be the site of intense conflict. And if we’re able to excavate enough and we tell the most honest story we can about our very minor experience, we might be surprised by how many other people can identify with what we think is so trivial.
Speaker 6:
In Exterminate All the Brutes, there’s a line about knowledge is not what we lack. And I guess it’s a question for both of you. How do we confront the kind of willful ignorance or self-inflicted amnesia that really seems to dominate a lot of the debates about the past?
Raoul Peck:
Well, I wish I could be very optimistic in that. I think we are losing that fact. One of the chapters in the film is like the arrogance of ignorance is the title. When science is not respected, when numbers are not respected, I’m working on a film on Orwell. Two and two is five now, and people are not ashamed to come on TV and pretend two and two off is five. That’s where we are today. Democratization of communication is an incredible tool that anybody can take a phone and give its opinion about what’s going on in the world.
This is great, but to be able to do it without checking any source, you can say something as determinate as the scholar who spent 40 years of his life working on that subject. And unfortunately the press is not doing their job. I belong to a generation who saw how newspapers were bought by billionaires. It started 50, 60 years ago. If we don’t go back to the beginning of the 20th century when the billionaires start to buy the newspaper because the [inaudible 00:22:42] were criticizing capitalism, so they knew that’s where the power is.
Viet Thanh Nguyen:
I’ll try to turn that in a slightly optimistic direction.
Raoul Peck:
Good luck.
Viet Thanh Nguyen:
Artisan scholars are lonely voices and that’s where the Baldwin example becomes important because he probably thought that he was facing a time of catastrophe as we feel we’re facing a time of catastrophe. But then the lonely artists, the lonely scholar still has to have that sense of conviction and voice and vision to continue doing their work even in the face of these enormous oppositional forces. Power has been centralized, but there’s still that opening that you described earlier where committed people can create their own organizations and institutions and communities outside of that.
They might be very small, they might be overwhelmed, but nevertheless, that act is where the optimism comes in. And from those small moments, larger movements may build. That’s the best that I can do. That’s the best that I can do, but let’s end on the note of optimism. It’s very hard for me to pull that off.
Raoul Peck:
But I will make an effort to approach you. What I used to tell to people is that it’s you who determine what the future is. We are a collective or not. So if we just sit and watch what is going on out there in the world, the worst will happen. We make our history. I know it was not that positive.
Viet Thanh Nguyen:
Positive enough.
Raoul Peck:
It needs work.
A big part of my life, I remember watching Apocalypse Now, watching Oliver Stone’s movies. I remember as a young student in Berlin being really angry about those films and reading your book, I had a sort of jubilation because for the first time that war, those crimes were shown in the more realistic light. And I felt your characters were addressing the real questions. How did you live through those Hollywood films that portrayed where you came from?
Viet Thanh Nguyen:
Oh, well, I was growing up as an American and watching people like me, the Vietnamese being shown on screen, doing horrifying things or having horrifying things done to them, and yet not having the capacity for speech or for intervention, I think had a tremendous impact on me. But coming to an intellectual and political awakening in college, what that led to was my understanding that Hollywood was the unofficial ministry of propaganda. And that American soft power was I think just as important as American hard power in exercising American domination.
And that this vast concept had a very intimate connection to me because these movies were bombing me in this intellectual and emotional sense and understanding that enraged me. And because there’s a repetition of modes of domination and power and subjugation which would allow someone like you in Berlin in the 1970s to recognize a situation that was pertinent to me, that makes me think that my anger and my rage are steady, that they will never go away within my own lifetime. And that’s depressing, but also energizing. I’m wondering what emotions power you as an artist. I’ve said anger and rage. There’s other emotions, but that was the first instigation for me to want to be a writer.
Raoul Peck:
It is anger. It is my reaction to injustice is my reaction to dumbness or bullyness, and I’m talking about empire killing other nations. Maybe it’s because I come from Haiti where we have a very proud history of being one of the three major revolutions of the 19th century at the time where there were no other free Black republic. So I went into the world with that knowledge. And my pain or my anger, I think something that is sometime detrimental to my health is that I feel the same pain when I see what is happening in Congo or what was happening in Cambodia or what was happening in Vietnam or what was happening in Palestinian. And also what happened in Germany during the Holocaust.
I remember September 11 in New York. I was in New York. And the first week that was a sort of world communion of pain. And those are moments where you say, “Okay, we live in the same world.” And then very rapidly I saw the American flags coming out. I saw this sort of anger against the foreigners, against the people. Well, me basically. And that’s a different kind of anger where I felt you were stealing my pain and make it something that is only belong to you.
Sometime I feel that towards some people talking about the Holocaust. That’s my pain too, that human being have done that to other human being, and that’s as important to me. And we have to call that everywhere we see it. You don’t have that right to kill innocent people. That’s not the right. Whatever happened to you. How do you deal with that pain or that anger sometimes?
Viet Thanh Nguyen:
Well, I think for me, one way that I’ve tried to deal with it is to develop other emotional capacities as well. And when I think about 9/11 and the American reaction to it, I think that the pain was replaced with hatred. It’s not just anger. I think anger is a healthy emotion. I think rage is a healthy emotion and hatred I’ve never found to be a healthy emotion. And again, that capacity to turn violence that’s been inflicted upon us into hatred for someone else is a universal impulse, I think.
So for me, what was important as an artist and as a writer and as a human being was to also learn not just empathy, but also vulnerability. Americans felt vulnerable after 9/11. They did not feel vulnerable before then because we’re the greatest country on earth. No one can attack us. And then all of a sudden that invulnerability was destroyed on 9/11. And that was the opportunity for Americans to, as you said, recognize the opportunity that was offered to them to understand that in fact we’re all vulnerable and that we have been using our power as Americans to violate other people’s vulnerability.
But Americans turned away from the possibility of shared vulnerability to try to rebuild their invulnerability. Personally, I’ve survived in the world as a refugee and in the aftermath of that by being invulnerable. But I’ve become a better person and a better writer by opening myself up and trying to think of vulnerability, not as weakness, but as strength. What emotions have been the most difficult for you to confront or to turn to, or try to develop?
Raoul Peck:
I think I struggle a lot with myself. So I don’t think I resist any critical judgment about myself. I am a very good critic of myself, so I have that fight within me, but I try not to let emotion dictate any decision I take. I’ve learned to be very rational with my emotion because I don’t trust them in terms of… I’m a human being like everybody else so I react. I may feel hatred, but hatred is negative. So I have to deal with it and understand why do I feel hatred and before I even act upon it.
In fact, that’s what protected me of making too many mistakes in my life by being in so many places to be able to react as a German in a German setup when something happened or as a Congolese, or as a Belgian, or as a French. I learned to have that distance.
Viet Thanh Nguyen:
For me, I feel that… I’m inside and outside of the United States, inside and outside of American culture and American mythology. I’m also inside and outside of the English language because I grew up in a household where Vietnamese was the only language spoken inside the household, and yet English was infiltrating through the TV and through books and so on. And that’s allowed me to do certain kinds of creative innovations with the language, at least in my own work. I’m wondering in your own work whether there’s a parallel in your inside or outside status, how you see your own work in relationship to this larger body of cinema?
Raoul Peck:
Well, I was very fortunate to study Marx very early when I was in Berlin. And there is a small book and in it, Engels explain how he and Marx work on philosophy economy and how they base their work upon the critic of previous philosopher, previous economist, and how this is what you do in order to progress. You don’t just say, “Well, this is (beep). I’m going to write my new ideology or my new theory.” No, you learn first what existed. So that way to apprehend what I would call the riches of humanity.
It’s our humanity because our world is built upon each other. So the idea that you are always on the shoulder of a previous generation was always key for me. I used everything I can get my hands on and then if I had deconstruct, I deconstruct. But I wanted to link to that. You have something with your humor in your books, which sometimes the way you use it’s really… I’m not sure every American reader understand it, but being from outside, it’s incredible hilarious because I know those moments as an immigrant or as a foreigner in the country and you use it a lot, that type of irony.
Viet Thanh Nguyen:
Irony, satire, absurdity, surrealism, jokes.
Raoul Peck:
Yes.
Viet Thanh Nguyen:
I think all of those are really important literary artistic tools, but they’re also tools for survival as well. Sometimes making a joke is our way of coping, but also our way of fighting back. So I have to confess that I watch a lot of Instagram Reels of standup comedians and I’m observing the effectiveness of their jokes as both entertainment and provocation because you cannot explain a joke. I like literature and art that does not explain itself and leaves the reader or the viewer to sit with the joke or to sit with the provocation. And the reader or the viewer’s reaction to that tells the reader or the viewer something about themselves if they’re cognizant of that.
The opening epigraph for The Sympathizer is from Nietzsche, that even torture can make us laugh. And I found that to be a provocation. I found that to be a challenge. Can I make torture funny? And hopefully I succeeded. So my question for you is what is an artistic challenge that you thought would be very difficult for you to confront, but that you were then able to do so?
Raoul Peck:
I did almost three films about genocide. One in Rwanda and Exterminate All the Brutes is going to the roots of genocide. How do you explain that in a way that is not too didactic, but a way where emotions are possible and not continuing to degrade the other person is, the concept of the other is an animal so that you can kill that person. And it’s a notion that unfortunately that we can see in every single genocide that happened on this planet. And the person who invented, Lemkin, the word genocide, because there was no word to describe the fact that basically a state is getting rid of part of its population and a Lemkin have studied them.
He had a list of more than a hundred genocide that happened in the human history. The United States was one of them. But after the Second World War, nothing really was made so that Lemkin’s studies were really known in schools everywhere because the winners had no interest in that. And I know the discussion right now about Gaza is very touchy, but I recommend everybody to watch that list of items that is a real sign of genocide, whether the way you treat women, children, the deprivation of food.
Of course bombing, absence of shelter and whatever we can think of what is happening in Gaza, all those criteria are there. But it’s impossible sometimes to have a discussion because we are forced to take a side. For me, there is no side when in regards of innocent people dying. And that’s the difficult world we are living in, that it’s impossible to put names or definitions on things that have definitions. It’s not like my opinion.
Viet Thanh Nguyen:
Everybody can see all the atrocities being committed that you’ve described. But intention people would say, “Oh, but there’s no intention. There’s no proven intention that Israel is a state is deliberately engaging in genocide.” I disagree with that idea obviously because there have been many genocidal statements given by Israeli ministers, political leaders.
We have intentionality displayed in the videos that Israeli soldiers themselves have recorded. But I find this experience rarely strange to think about as a human being, but also as a writer where there’s a text that’s being said, spoken by Israel and the US, and supporters of Israel saying, “We’re doing this for self-defense. We’re doing this for humanitarian reasons. We’re doing this to prevent anti-Semitism and so on.” And yet there’s a very clear subtext. We all can see the bombing that’s taking place and the massacres and so on.
And I find that so absurd that somehow those of us who can see the subtext are supposed to ignore it and just focus on the text. And that’s provocative for me as a writer to think about the capacity of literature, filmmaking, art to try to respond to this. And in the immediate moment as all of this is happening, it can be very debilitating to think of the insufficiency of something like literature to respond to this moment of crisis.
In some ways it’s retrospective what literature can do. Maybe in a few years someone could write a novel about it from Palestinian perspective. It doesn’t make me give up on literature. It does make me feel inadequate as a human being. You can see some of these images that people are recording on their phones and beaming out on the very social media that you were critical of a little while ago. But those images and that social media does allow us some kind of access. That’s very painful because I find it very hard to watch and listen to some of these images.
Raoul Peck:
But somehow for me, there is a time for everything. There will be a time to blame. There will be a time to name, but how can we do all this while people are dying? I have to bomb you because there are murderers hiding among you. If 10,000 people die while you’re doing that, is it okay? Not okay? Is there a number you can put? Will it be 50,000? When do you stop? So that’s the absurdity of the present situation is like, “Well, we accept the fact that those people dying are not human.”
But the one thing that can establish that we’re not crazy is that within Israel itself, there are people even parents of hostages who say not in our names. Those people are my hope because they resist when it’s very hard to resist the folly of what’s happening.
Viet Thanh Nguyen:
They resist and Palestinians resist too.
Raoul Peck:
Of course, of course.
Viet Thanh Nguyen:
I think we are now turning to questions from the audience.
Speaker 7:
So I wanted to ask you about the thinking that links your films, Mr. Peck and allows you to kind of sweep through and connect those disparate moments of resistance to violence and oppression.
Raoul Peck:
Every one of my film was a film for me that was urgent to make. I never made a project like I want to do that in 10 years, or I want to go back to the past and review the Haitian Revolution. It was about always the first question, “What can I do today to respond to all which is happening around me? What can I counter with a different discourse, with different images?” I want to be efficient. There are two young people asking here.
Speaker 8:
I have a question for you, Viet. How do you feel about the difficulties that your novel, The Sympathizer faces when it comes to being published within Vietnam?
Viet Thanh Nguyen:
We’ve had a translation of The Sympathizer in Vietnamese since 2016, and we have not been able to publish it ever since. There is a complicated system of permissions and apparently self-censorship within Vietnam that from my understanding, allows the government not to actually ban books, but to effectively not allow books to be published because people are afraid of the possible penalties they might face. We were not allowed to shoot the TV series in Vietnam. We are not being allowed to show the TV series in Vietnam.
So I feel personally rejected by the government or by whatever system is preventing these works from being available. And it prevents me from returning to Vietnam. But in a larger sense, I worry about whether a country that prevents different kinds of voices, not just mine, but many different kinds of voices from being heard, can be a healthy society. I mean, there are writers in Vietnam who are being sent to prison for writing things about inadequacies or injustices in Vietnamese society.
Great sacrifices were undertaken by the Vietnamese people to liberate and unify the country for freedom and independence. And it’s arguable that that has not been fully realized for the Vietnamese people.
Raoul Peck:
There is a question here.
Speaker 9:
In this age we live in right now, do you feel that there is an important topic that is probably not discussed as much, and is there something you would like to see from other artists more?
Raoul Peck:
I think it’s like pick your choice because there’s so much to have to deal with. I think we have never been so invaded with sort of problem conflicts. We live in a divided world, but we see it within every democracy right now. The democracy itself is in question. Of course there are urgencies. When people are dying, that’s urgent, but there are people who are dying slowly and in the middle of the United States right now. What is going on? Book are banned. Your book have been banned as I heard.
Viet Thanh Nguyen:
I hope so.
Raoul Peck:
Yeah, you hope so. Unfortunately, we lose so much time doing stuff that all have no utility. You can have fun on TikTok for half an hour, an hour, but not six hours. There is a problem there. So it’s a contrary. I’m not looking for stuff. It’s an avalanche of problems and topics.
Viet Thanh Nguyen:
I agree, but one criteria possibly for identifying your specific cause is for me, what is unspeakable? And that’s going to vary depending on the situation. But when we realize that there is something that has been marked as unspeakable, I think we have identified an issue that we should speak about. So the question about Vietnam was directly related to that. We’ve talked about Gaza. Genocide is an unspeakable word for some people. Black Lives Matter is an unspeakable phrase for some people. Trans rights is unspeakable for some people. And that tells us, I think that we have identified an issue that is crucial and transformative.
Speaker 14:
Who are the a current thinkers and intellects that you look towards and that might offer us hope in the 21st century?
Raoul Peck:
Let’s say-
Speaker 14:
It’s not easy.
Raoul Peck:
Well, it’s more difficult today, first of all because there are a lot of new intellectual, new ideas of multiple generation who have access to publishing, to film, to art. So the situation is different. And it’s true that we don’t have anymore the kind of great intellectual that everybody look up on. You can’t today assume a territory and be like the guru of your fact, of your thematic.
Speaker 14:
Is that a good thing?
Raoul Peck:
It’s a good thing and it demands much more effort for a younger audience to find those people. If you have teachers like Viet, yes, you will get to them quicker. But there’s a lot of confusions. There are a lot of self-proclaimed gurus, but, Viet you should say something.
Viet Thanh Nguyen:
I think there are people, but rather than focusing only on individuals, I want to return and maybe conclude by referring to one of the themes that has been a part of our conversation, which is that artistic and political transformations are not only due to individuals, but to collectives as well. So I do take hope in the fact, in the onslaught of misinformation, disinformation, power politics, imperial politics, we still see movements of resistance that are taking place where people are in the streets, old people and young people organizing themselves, having themselves arrested, and that they are probably inspired by any number of important thinkers.
But also these movements of resistance now and also in the past have inspired these thinkers. So their ideas were also generated out of moments of collective political resistance and revolution. And I think there’s hope in that, that there’s hope in that anonymity versus hope only in the names of famous individuals.
Raoul Peck:
I will agree to this.
Viet Thanh Nguyen:
Raoul, it was such a pleasure to be talking with you tonight.
Raoul Peck:
Well, likewise, and I hope we will continue our discussion.
