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Transcript:
Speaker 1:
…. Author interview program afterwards. Pulitzer Prize winning author Viet Thanh Nguyen reflects on how society can build allegiances beyond racial identity and have more global solidarity. He’s interviewed by writer Ijeoma Oluo. Afterwards is a weekly interview program with relevant guest hosts interviewing top nonfiction authors about their latest work.
Ijeoma Oluo:
Hello, Mr. Nguyen. It’s such an honor, honestly, to speak to you. I must admit, I am actually nervous, I enjoyed these lectures so much and I’m really excited to talk with you about them today.
Viet Thanh Nguyen:
It’s such a pleasure to be here with you, Miss Oluo.
Ijeoma Oluo:
Thank you. I would love to actually get started with the process of developing these lectures and giving them. I think for a lot of people who may not be familiar with them and the book that is the of these lectures, I would love to know a little bit about what it was like for you.
Viet Thanh Nguyen:
It was actually really stressful. I’m a professor, I’ve been trying to get out of academia for many years, and then when I received this invitation to deliver these Norton lectures at Harvard, I groaned inside a little bit because I knew I wouldn’t be able to turn those lectures down because I am a good student and good students always rise to the challenge. That basically met however that the rest of my year was consumed by planning and writing these lectures. And I actually knew very little about the Norton lectures before I received the invitation and then I looked at the list of people who’ve given them, people like T.S. Elliot, Jorge Luis Borges, Toni Morrison was the last writer to give these lectures. So it was certainly an intimidating genealogy to find myself in, but also an opportunity to talk about some of the issues that I care the most when it comes to literature and culture.
Ijeoma Oluo:
It’s beautiful. I can only imagine how intimidating and exciting that must have been. And it’s so interesting to me because in these lectures you talk a lot about the other, and I’m curious as to what it is like to be ruminating on being the other in these vaunted halls while knowing that your name is going along those like Toni Morrison. Do you feel like the other even in the context of these lectures and how they sit with lectures of the past?
Viet Thanh Nguyen:
Absolutely. The first lecture began with this sense of mistaken identity, like maybe this invitation was sent to the wrong Viet Nguyen. And that may not be that unusual because my name is actually very common in the Vietnamese context. I have a friend in LA who is a TV director named Viet Nguyen, he gets mistaken for me. When I was at college university at Berkeley, there weren’t very many Vietnamese-American English majors, but the only other one was named Viet Nguyen. So there’s always been the sense of doubleness duality, mistaken identity. And of course coming to a place like Harvard, I think a lot of people might feel imposter syndrome, particularly if they happen to be of some kind of marginalized or minoritized background.
And Harvard has loomed large in my life for a long time because my brother went to Harvard. We both came as refugees in 1975, neither of us had English. He was 10 years old. Seven years later he graduated as valedictorian of his high school and went to Harvard. So he did exactly what he was supposed to do as a refugee success story, as a prototypical model minority. And I was rejected from Harvard, so I felt like a failure. So in some ways it was interesting to be invited back and to deal with this issue of imposter syndrome, which I leaned into because I don’t think the response to feeling inauthentic is to try to claim authenticity, or in this case mastery, but to be skeptical of these very ideas of authenticity and mastery and genuineness that so many of us as others should be skeptical of.
Ijeoma Oluo:
I love that. And what’s funny, it reminds me, the name Viet Nguyen being a name that’s very common and yet of course in America is treated as this very exotic thing, and just like as Ijeoma, I have four Facebook friends named Ijeoma and people will always say, “You don’t hear that name every day,” and I say, “I actually do, I literally hear it every day, it’s my name.” And there was a poet named Ijeoma and I got an invitation to be the Poet Laureate for my state and I was laughing hysterically because I am not that Ijeoma. And so these invitations really do often come with mistaken identity. But of course, your work being as beautiful as it is, this invitation was absolutely for you.
You say in your prologue, writing about how stories can offer salvation, you add, “They also have the capacity to destroy us or our others, our demons, our monsters, and anyone who has ever been marked an other or outsider knows well the capacity of words to do this.” And it has me thinking a lot about story, and as a writer as well, I’ve been thinking about this, how we look back at the stories that often justify great violence and often it’s in hindsight that we see this and we can examine the stories that helped contribute to violence we see against those deemed as the other. What stories right now are you seeing that are currently happening that might concern you when it comes to defining an other or justifying violence against an other?
Viet Thanh Nguyen:
That’s a great question and unfortunately there are a lot of answers to that. Certainly when I was growing up, I felt the shock of being in other, encountering myself in movies and books about Vietnam, for example, in which the Vietnamese were dehumanized in various racist and sexist and violent ways. So I knew very intimately and intuitively this idea that before people could be killed physically or harmed physically, they had to be damaged symbolically through storytelling.
So of course what’s happening now in the world today in events that concern Americans are things happening in Palestine and in El Salvador. So after October 7th, I remember one of the things that really triggered me besides the death of human beings was when one of the Israeli ministers described Palestinians as human animals. And I had a very visceral reaction to that because I knew exactly what that meant. When you classify a population as human animals, you’re rendering them vulnerable to all kinds of violence, and that’s exactly what has taken place.
Now with El Salvador and this, I don’t know if deportation is the right word, I’ve been using the word rendition, this renditioning of hundreds of people, most of whom have no criminal convictions, to El Salvador from the United States is another example of something that’s been justified by storytelling. When President Trump was campaigning for the first time, he described how he was going to seal the border and defend the country against what he described as “Rapists from Mexico.” That language changed just a little bit in the last campaign when he said he was going to take on, “Venezuelan gangsters,” alleged Venezuelan gangsters who he now calls terrorists. And the justification for renditioning these people is the invocation of the 1790 Alien Enemies Act. So he’s equating immigrants and Venezuelans as being gangsters and gangsters with being terrorists.
This is a narrative, this is a story with enormous consequences, certainly for those people who have been renditioned, but for anybody who might be classified as others. So I think that any of us who might fall into that category should be rightly fearful now that this rhetoric of being inherent criminals and therefore terrorists and therefore deportable or renditionable could be applied to us as well.
Ijeoma Oluo:
Absolutely. And I must say as a writer, it has meant so much for me to see you speak so openly about these issues and especially about Palestine. And there’s so much pressure on writers and on academics to be silent around this. I mean, there’s pressure on everyone, but I think because of the power of story especially, there is a lot of pressure. And so seeing you give these lectures in Harvard, in an institution right now facing immense pressure from the Trump administration and talking about Palestine in one of your lectures, it meant a lot. And I was just curious as to why you decided to include that lecture and what it meant for you to be able to do so.
Viet Thanh Nguyen:
I remember when I first arrived at UC Berkeley, I grew up in San Jose, California in this Vietnamese refugee community, but I went to a very elite high school and basically came out of that experience with the tastes of an adolescent angst-ridden white boy. And then I got to Berkeley and I was exposed through Asian-American studies, ethnic studies, Black studies to a whole other set of stories and narratives about what has made the United States and encountering those stories was a tremendous shock. It was an eye-opening experience.
And it helped shape me into wanting to become a writer and feeling this urgent need to tell stories because I recognized the impact of the stories that I had heard from the writers that I had read at Berkeley and my professors and so on. And so I always felt that for me to be a writer was both about the beauty of the art, absolutely, but was also about the commitment to notions like justice and truth. And of course a university should embody those things, and certainly that is a part of Harvard’s reputation, its justification, its brand is a term that I hate, but is obviously also true as well.
And so I did not actually plan to give a lecture on Palestine, but after my second lecture, October 7th happened, and I felt that there was no world in which I could not say something about what the October 7th meant and what the response of Israel meant as well, and to locate that within a much longer history, both of Israel and Palestine, going back to at least 1948, but also Israel’s relationship to the United States, Israel’s role as a settler-colonial country, which reverberates profoundly with our American history of being a settler-colonial society, which extends into the present. And because I feel myself completely implicated in this settler-colonialism as a refugee who has come to this country and who has benefited from settler-colonialism, and as someone who’s been deeply exposed to the propagandistic narratives that have justified Israeli settler-colonialism, I felt there just had to be a response, an intellectual and artistic response certainly, but also a deeply personal one as well.
Ijeoma Oluo:
And it was beautifully done, and I’m so grateful that it exists. Thank you for that. And I’m so glad that we have it in print as well so that everyone can access that. When you write about writing and writing particularly in English, as I was reading your essays around this, I was reminded of the Chinua Achebe quote, “Let no one be fooled by the fact that we may write in English, for we intend to do unheard of things with it.” And it reminds me of this kind of strain and conflict and subversiveness of those of us who write and speak in English because of the immense violence of colonialism and what it means to occupy that space and resist the immense pressure to write to whiteness while writing in a tongue that was forced upon us.
And I was curious about, you’re very strong and passionate in your advice to writers to really continue to stay in that space of other and to write to it. And when you talk about how you’re not an other as long as you are writing for yourself because you contain multitudes, it was so beautiful to me. What does that pressure look like, especially in the different spaces that you’re in as a writer but also I’d say especially as an educator?
Viet Thanh Nguyen:
That’s a great Chinua Achebe quote, I wish I had included it in the set of lectures, although I do quote Achebe elsewhere because his experiences growing up and being exposed obviously to this English Anglo canon deeply shaped him as a writer and affirmed his acknowledgement that his colonization proceeded through English, but his resistance proceeded through English as well. And I feel that same sense of burden and opportunity through my appropriation of the English language.
So those of us who are writers, we are familiar with this idea that what we have to achieve is the discovery of our voice. It’s a very mystical concept, but I think it applies to many different people in many different kinds of occupations and vocations. But I think specifically for writers, this idea of voice, it’s not simply that we can speak, but that we are able to access what is genuinely authentically true about ourselves. Again, very mystical notion. And the only way that I could find how to do that was to write. It took me 30 years, I think, of writing to access this interiority and this sense of genuine authenticity within myself of who I was and what I believed in.
And I think that discovering that voice through this monastic sense of discipline of writing was incredibly powerful. I think it takes a lot of, I don’t want to aggrandize this experience, but a little bit of suffering to try to get to that voice and a little bit of courage to use it and to speak it out loud. And what that means, I think, is that if we can do that, we can produce as writers the most powerful art that we can. And it’s hard for writers to do that, I think, and it’s such a joy to discover writers who can.
But it does extend to other parts of our lives. So as a teacher for example, I do try to encourage that in my students to find their voices, but certainly in myself to be as genuine as possible in the classroom situation, whether that’s as a mentor or as a lecturer. And that’s difficult to do as well, I think, because right now we are certainly living in a time in which the scene of the classroom, of teaching, of pedagogy is deeply politicized. It’s always been politicized, but it’s certainly even more politicized at this moment where people who deal with books and ideas and stories from librarians to teachers and professors, I think we’re all feeling the glare of being looked at by people who are intent on suppressing the diversity of voices within this country and certainly the diversity of voices who are skeptical of some of the foundational acts and principles of the United States.
Ijeoma Oluo:
Yes, absolutely. And the way you’re talking about this, it makes me think too of a difference with which many BIPOC, many marginalized other peoples approach writing of the self. Because while you talk about really finding this and writing about this, you also spend a lot of time, especially speaking for an other, talking about the limitations of that or recognizing where you live in that space.
And that is something actually that I find that many writers who are used to their voice being expected in a space don’t do, right? There is this idea that this is my story and it is the only story. And knowing the responsibility that many of us writers have who are often maybe the only voice in the room speaking toward our experience of recognizing what we speak for and what we don’t speak for was so intriguing to me, especially as a Nigerian-American whose father also was in the genocide in Biafra, recognizing what part of his story is his story, my story is my story, what part is Americanized is a responsibility that actually makes me feel quite anxious around approaching it, and you have so much care around it. And what does it mean to insist on your story being told while also knowing who you’re responsible to or the limitations of that story and perhaps carrying with you the stories that might never be told?
Viet Thanh Nguyen:
I think that sense of a relationship between freedom and responsibility is so important because in the United States, we live in a very individualistic society. And I think the notion of freedom is oftentimes construed as simply individual freedom, and that’s related to artistic freedom so the artists should only be obligated to that genuine, authentic voice inside of themselves. And I think there’s a lot of power to that. I mean, I do believe that that is valid and true. However, of course, those of us who come out of communities that have high expectations from us, families and communities that have been shaped by history would not exist as diasporas or as minorities in the United States without the histories and realities of war and colonialism, for example, these families and communities have oftentimes sacrificed enormous amounts to make our existence as writers possible.
And so for some of us, probably many of us, if not most of us, that sense of pursuing artistic freedom and finding our own voice is in constant or enormous tension with this sense of obligation and guilt and responsibility. And many other fine writers before me have grappled with that from Toni Morrison to one of my own teachers, Maxine Hong Kingston. I cite her book The Woman Warrior, her memoir, which has been so influential. It’s a memoir of herself, but it’s also a memoir of her family and the Chinese-American community. And that book breaks with the notions of memoirs being purely an individual phenomenon and talks about memoirs being individual and collective and talks about the real dangers that when we speak our truths as writers, we also probably betray people.
Now, that’s such a huge responsibility. How can I be true to myself and yet how can I also risk betraying the ones that I love and who have loved me? There’s no easy answer to that. But that sense of responsibility and obligation I think gives those of us who are willing to address those things an ethical and political and artistic challenge that can be very burdensome, but is also I think an enormous opportunity because what it does is that it forces us to think about our art in creative ways that both resonate with the mainstream of the United States, but also probably differs from it in a lot of ways and a lot of very provocative ways as well.
Ijeoma Oluo:
That’s beautiful. And I think one of my absolute favorite lines from these lectures was when you were talking about your childhood and you said, “Unbeknownst to ma, she was raising one of the most frightening creatures you can ever find in your house: a writer.” And I laughed hysterically because there’s usually only one writer in a family and no one knows what’s in their midst, who’s recording for later. And actually, this was one of the first times I had really thought about that and thought about all of my mom’s struggles that make it into stories and wondering how differently it might’ve been had she known that a little person was recording secretly in her brain for future stories what was happening here. And I love that you hold that and hold that up to the light because I do think that often writers, and even readers, don’t think about what it means to live in the midst of that. It made me laugh, and it also made me very glad that as far as I can tell, my children have no desire to be writers. I’m so curious-
Viet Thanh Nguyen:
Unfortunately, I just have to say my son said he wants to be a writer, I was completely shocked when he said it. First he said he wanted to be a video game designer, which I thought, “Okay, that also causes me some issues too,” but I reconciled to that. And then he said, “Oh, I want to be a writer.” And I had honestly mixed feelings, but also a sense of pride that I would be proud if he wanted to be a doctor or a lawyer too, but a sense of pride that he hasn’t been… So, I don’t know, it is very hard to put into words, but the sense of gratification that our own children can appreciate the importance of storytelling, not just as consumers, but as creators as well. So it’s a mixed blessing in some ways to have that writer in your family.
Ijeoma Oluo:
I would likely probably be happy if my children were writers, but instead they’re rebelling quite hard and have sworn that they will never ever write a book. So that’s where I’m at with that right now.
When we’re talking about the other in here, I’m curious because you talk so much about all of the different ways in which we are othered and of course the consequences of that. And when it’s held up to the light in its totality, there are so many of us othered. And I was curious then of what does it mean to put that to words? Does that become a story of othering or does it become something that pulls others into the same room? And does that shift the experience of being othered? To give these prestigious lectures on the other, to hold these stories that often we’re told I think to keep quiet, there’s so much shaming with regard to being othered, what does it mean to hold it to the light and then maybe pull other people who have been othered towards you? Has that changed your experience with feeling othered? Do you think it changes our overall experience with it when we write these stories down?
Viet Thanh Nguyen:
It’s absurd in some ways for me to proclaim myself as an other when I’m also a tenured professor and I have titles and I’ve been invited to Harvard, etc, but I think it’s perfectly valid that that can take place. Going back to that idea of imposter syndrome, it really doesn’t matter how high one ascends, one can always be other. We saw that with President Obama, for example. But I think I want to draw out one of the crucial distinctions in otherness, which is that I think otherness is a universal experience. I think many of us at some moment in our lives, no matter how much power or privilege that we have possibly have probably felt a sense of our own otherness where we have felt out of place at some moment. But that’s an individual phenomenon. And the people who experience that the most intensely, many of them do go on to become artists and writers because they are really other, they’re really strange in some way in relationship to their families and their communities and societies.
But there’s a different sense of otherness where otherness is imposed on you, it’s a collective thing that you haven’t asked for. So I came to the United States as a refugee, I was Vietnamese of course, but I wanted to become an American because I came when I was four years of age, but my otherness was constantly imposed on me by people like my classmates, for example, who would make jokes about my name or by American society as a whole, which would make and watch Vietnam War movies in which the Vietnamese were definitely other. So this sense of collective otherness is in constant tension with the individual sense of otherness.
But I think that talking about these things is crucial because what it does is helps us to think about how people should embrace that sense of otherness. The rejection of otherness is really dangerous, whether it’s an individual suppressing their own sense of otherness in ways that damage them and make them act out badly sometimes, or the sense of communities having to suppress their otherness to go into hiding or to go into distort themselves in some way. So being able to embrace one’s otherness I think is a way of embracing fully one’s humanity, one’s flawed humanity, a flawed humanity that includes our capacity to be inhuman at the same time.
So in this discussion of otherness, one of the things we have to be really careful about is not to also elevate otherness into some kind of sense of idealized sense of being that others are victims and angels. I mean, they could be that, but others are also potentially really dangerous as well. But being able to talk about the complexities of individual and collective otherness to embrace that, to work with that is a way of forestalling some of the most dangerous consequences of rejecting our otherness.
Ijeoma Oluo:
That’s beautiful. And when you were talking about the political othering, this imposed othering on people and talking about imposter syndrome, it actually reminded me of my friend, another writer, Ruchika Tulshyan, who always likes to point out, for many of us, imposter syndrome isn’t a thing that lives in us, we talk about getting rid of it like it’s a bad habit we have, but it’s something imposed upon us that we didn’t enter into the things we love thinking, “I’ll always be awful at this because that’s inherent to our nature,” or not good enough because it’s inherent to our nature. But that is a feeling imposed upon us, and I think that that is so important for us to understand these externally imposed things.
When you’re talking about solidarity, I feel like this discussion is so important right now, especially when we do have so many different populations being targeted by this administration, by past administrations and by global capitalism in general. And we talk about what solidarity means, and you talk a lot about these shallow definitions of solidarity based on immediate safety and not deeper solidarity. And I would love to talk a little bit more about that in this time and really about how the stories we tell can contribute to a deeper solidarity that isn’t just about immediate safety or access to power and privilege.
Viet Thanh Nguyen:
I think that there is a sense of a possibility of limited solidarity that many of us are familiar with. And typically when we experience limited solidarity, we don’t even call it solidarity, the very word solidarity implies something else. But I’ll just give an example, which is when I came to the United States, I came as a Vietnamese refugee, my parents were Vietnamese refugees, we didn’t consider ourselves Asian. My parents called themselves Oriental at the best if they were speaking in English. So to come to Berkeley and encounter Asian-American communities in the student population and among the professors was a radicalizing experience for me. Because what that meant was that people who had considered themselves different from each other in some way, let’s say Koreans and Chinese and Japanese and Vietnamese and Filipinos, none of us would’ve called ourselves Asians in Asia, for example, here in the United States, because of the pressures of anti-Asian racism in its long history, young people came up with this idea of calling ourselves Asian-American. Now, that is solidarity right there.
And at the time that people came up with this term in the late-1960s, it was pretty radical, that idea of an Asian-American solidarity. Now I think, and here we see the ways by which solidarity can change meanings over time, that kind of Asian-American solidarity can oftentimes be really limited because a lot of Asian-Americans have embraced this kind of solidarity, not to advance a sense of justice beyond themselves, but in order to just advance Asian-American self-interest which is why we see a lot of Asian-American neoconservatism or Asian-American neoliberalism, platforms or positions that can help Asian-Americans, but not other people. So I go back to that moment of the late-1960s and think that those Asian-Americans who called themselves that, they were always a minority because most people who are Asian did not call themselves Asian-American back then.
So what I take from that is that this sense of a more expansive and radical solidarity almost always comes from a minority position, is people who really embrace being minor and embrace what that means, that being minor is always politicized, that are able to build this sense of radical solidarity with other minority populations that we recognize. And we really need that today because part of what’s happening in the Trump administration is that Trump, through various speeches and positions, is offering a story of a very limited solidarity, that is the limited solidarity of ‘Make America Great Again’, which requires not building an expansive solidarity amongst all Americans, but making sure that there is very much an outgroup, a demonized other who are now at this moment immigrants, undocumented migrants, so-called gangsters and so on, against whom a limited solidarity can be built. And for those of us who believe in a more expansive solidarity that includes more and more people, we really have to be aware of that very dangerous narrative of limited solidarity, and we must oppose it and offer an alternative with a more capacious and expansive and compassionate solidarity.
Ijeoma Oluo:
I think that’s beautiful, and I really hope that we can do more of that. And in the way in which you write these lectures, I do think in many ways you demonstrate that. And I found as a Black American, the presence of Black thought and Black politic in these lectures to be very present. And it made me happy, it made me feel hopeful to read these.
And I was thinking a lot, in fact, when you were talking about the creation of the identity of Asian-Americans, about this identity as choice, this very political choice that people make, and it made me think about the choice of being Black, right? There is the imposition of Blackness defined by white supremacy, but then there’s also the political choice that many Black people make where Black becomes this political powerful identity, but what does that mean at its core? And recognizing the limits of that and the possibilities of that, and even when we’re talking about in the ways in which many were inspired by Black identity when talking about Asian-American identity, and yet the divisions that exist and can be easily exploited between us. And I would love to ask you a little bit more about the influence of Black writers and Black thought in these lectures and in your work, because it did feel so present to me.
Viet Thanh Nguyen:
Absolutely. And again, a little bit of autobiographical background, when I came to San Jose, California as a Vietnamese refugee, it’s a city in which there’s very few Black people. I think 3% is the demographic estimate. So I actually did not know very many Black people when I was growing up and so I was immersed in a community of the white working class, Vietnamese refugees, Asian immigrants and Mexican and other Latino immigrants. But I had a deep curiosity about other people and other experiences of otherness because I felt my own otherness. And so actually my first ethnic studies class that I ever took was Chicano Studies because I grew up in a neighborhood with a lot of Chicanos or Mexican-Americans and Chicano literature and the experiences of La Raza was actually really important for me to learn about. And I took that sense of otherness with me always. I mean, I took a lot of Asian-American Studies classes and read Asian-American literature, and obviously that was crucial to me, but I knew I had to find other sources of thought as well.
So I would never forget taking Afro-American Literature with Professor Barbara Christian at Berkeley and reading deeply into Black literature all the way back to slave narratives and to Phillis Wheatley and going through W.E.B Du Bois and Richard Wright and James Baldwin and Zora Neale Hurston and Toni Morrison and many others, and recognizing in the experiences of Black people, but also of Black writers and Black thought a resonance with my own. Not exactly the same, but when Du Bois says, when he invokes this idea of double consciousness, always feeling oneself as other, I felt so strongly that that was also true for me as well. And when I read Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, of course I knew I wasn’t Black and this is not my narrative, but I also felt I’m invisible too, and there’s parallels and analogies that I can learn from reading Black literature.
And even more than just Black American literature, I was also really shaped and formed by global Black thought, so writers like Aimé Césaire and Frantz Fanon and this project of global decolonization that was being led significantly by Black intellectuals from different parts of the French Empire, that was also really crucial for me as well. And if we read into this history, we see there have always been connections there. So when George Floyd was murdered and he said, “I can’t breathe,” and that became a rallying cry for people, some people invoked Frantz Fanon. So if you go and you read Black Skin, White Masks, there’s a moment when he says that under colonization people can’t breathe. They took that quote very selectively because if you go and you read the entire context, Frantz Fanon is actually talking about the Indo-Chinese under French colonization. He’s invoking the idea of Indo-Chinese revolution against French colonization to describe Ho Chi Minh’s project as an effort to get the knee off the neck of Vietnamese people.
So these connections have been there for a long time. And it’s not to say that everybody who’s subjected to racism and colonization feels that sense of connection with other groups and that sense of expansive solidarity or intersectionality, but these predecessors exist. And it’s important for those of us who are aware of those previous connections, these previous efforts at global decolonizing solidarity and revolution, to remember those things and to talk about those things and to point out that they’re still relevant today because the project of racism and white supremacy and colonization has always been to divide us and make us weaker, preventing us from seeing current connections, but also past connections that can lead to a future of connected and global decolonizing solidarity.
Ijeoma Oluo:
Yeah, that’s very beautiful. And when I think about the erasure of our history, I’ve been trying to point out to people as well that when we look at our movements for liberation, often what’s erased from the history books is the cooperation, is that collective thinking because it’s boiled down to one solidarity figure. And I was in conversation with Alexis Pauline Gumbs a few weeks back, and she said something that really struck me, which was that individualism is so unnatural to us that it must be enforced by violence. And I think that right now, especially when we’re seeing the kidnapping and arrests of protest leaders, of people building solidarity on campuses, we are seeing that violence that’s meant to force people into this survivalist individualism and away from the collectivism that can save us.
Viet Thanh Nguyen:
Absolutely. And I feel that very… I was just going to say that I feel that very strongly as well because that happened on my own campus at the University of Southern California. And when we speak about expansive solidarity, I think that extends not only to what the students were doing in invoking genocide and Palestine and Israel’s bombing and so on, but it’s also there needs to be an sense of expansive solidarity between professors and students. That’s our obligation to also support our students as well.
Ijeoma Oluo:
Absolutely, absolutely. And those divides, I feel, are quite strong, right? Where your sense of survival as a educator, professor or staff member on campus is often pitted against the survival of the students and what does it mean to kind of cut those lines in that kind of rigid structure? And when I am on campuses and I’m talking with students and I ask them, especially students who are trying to really fight for change, what their biggest obstacles are, unfortunately, they often point to the faculty assigned to them, to their advisors. And yet when I talk with the advisors, they’re of course wrapped with trying to figure out how to balance this all.
And I wonder what it means, what it would mean to try to break down those barriers in these spaces to build a stronger solidarity because the ways in which these campuses seem to be crumbling under pressure from these administrations and eagerly volunteering, and to be fair, I do understand that there have always been elements within our education system that are heavily invested in white supremacy and in controlling the populace. But to watch the way in which those who would, I think, often be with students are feeling this pressure and falling so quickly under it, it helps me see the power of keeping people separated and keeping people in this kind of survivalist mode.
Viet Thanh Nguyen:
I think you can see it in campus rhetoric that universities are not built to teach solidarity, I mean, at least in this Western or American context, they’re built to train people to be individuals. You tout yourself as an individual when you apply, you’re trained for individual success and sent off for individual careers, and faculty are celebrated for their individual accomplishments. The greatest sense of solidarity typically that you’ll see is team spirit rallying around the football team, for example. But of course, that’s also being built in competition with other teams and other universities. And right now, so many of us have been shouting one way or another at our university leadership saying, “You have to exercise solidarity.” If individual universities are trying to defend themselves out there, of course they’re probably going to lose against the collective weight of the government. So solidarity is absolutely crucial for academic survival as an institution as a whole at this point in the United States.
But of course, those academic leaders should have learned the lessons from what the students were doing when they were trying to protest and expressing a sense of solidarity. But universities since at least the 1960s and the anti-Vietnam War protests have been doing their best to try to break down that sense of student solidarity. University leadership typically finds that very dangerous, and of course that sense of danger is affirmed by a considerable degree of conservative political leadership in this country. So the suppression of student voices should really concern us all, both inside and outside of the university.
Ijeoma Oluo:
Absolutely, absolutely. When you’re talking about, you talk about watching stories of Vietnam and feeling this act of violence of how you are portrayed as this perpetual stunned victim. And I’m curious right now because it actually had me thinking politically right now of this, I do feel like many of our populations, especially who have a historical bone-deep knowledge of systemic violence, I do feel like that violence is being used to keep us feeling quite frozen. I think we’re being kept in a traumatized state by story, story that reduces us to this state of victimhood, to forever waiting for the next massacre or trying to survive the next massacre. And it has us in this moment where we actually need to be coming together feeling like there’s nothing we can do, like it is inevitable that we will all suffer and die. And I do think that this administration is eagerly putting that messaging forth with these horrific shows of violence happening so quickly after inauguration.
What role can story have… Well, first if you agree or not, but if you do, what role can story have in countering that and helping us understand how we get through this?
Viet Thanh Nguyen:
Well, of course, I mean, what we have to recognize is exactly as you said, all this violence is justified by storytelling. There’s a narrative who we are as a country that’s being advanced by the Trump administration and by its supporters. And it’s a narrative, of course, of limited solidarity and of a particular kind of white supremacist identity politics, patriarchal identity politics too. And it’s reinforced by real, real power in terms of what the government can do both domestically in the United States, but also in terms of our military foreign policy and what kind of military aid that we give to other countries.
So before all of that, as you said, there’s a sense of trauma as we see these acts of violence being inflicted, whether it’s Gaza or whether it’s on people being renditioned. But there’s also a sense of helplessness as well. What can we as individuals do before such enormous power when we don’t have the tools of the state and we don’t have these weapons and so on?
And so I think here the storytelling does actually really become crucial. And I think back to the Vietnam War, the war that traumatized me, and I think back to how there was a transformation in the sense of story about what the country was before the Vietnam War. This was the country when it came to war that was defined by a John Wayne narrative that of course, American power was valid from the conquest of the frontier to America’s wars in Asia, that seduced a whole generation of Americans to go and fight in the Vietnam War. And yet there was a contradictory story that was being advanced by all of these horrifying images that were being beamed into the living rooms of the United States, shocking people, radicalizing people leading to the anti-war movement, which generated its own story about the evils of that war and the complicity of the United States. And fundamentally, I think, destabilized this John Wayne version of the United States. Now we’re seeing an attempt to bring back that kind of John Wayne idea of unrestrained American power.
And so that’s daunting. But again, taking that previous lesson from the Vietnam War and the resistance against it from many parts of American society, I find some hope in this idea that we can mobilize storytelling in order to mobilize ourselves. So one of the signs of hope from this is that Palestinians have been resisting, they’ve been sending images out from Gaza, they’ve been making it undeniable, I think, what is taking place over there with our complicity as Americans and the weapons that we send. And that has been a powerful narrative that has been shaped by Palestinians themselves and has been amplified by the supporters of Palestinians here.
Opening people’s eyes is crucial to that act of storytelling. But then what comes next? It’s the sense that the story has to be about mobilizing people into mass acts of solidarity, whether it’s through each of us having conversations with the people in our lives, each of us taking action in our workplaces and in our communities, but all of us collectively trying to mobilize and be visible in the streets, but also on social media through the acts of storytelling that each of us can do. And collectively, I hope that that mass act of populist, expansive, solidarity storytelling can act as a really powerful mode of resistance to what is taking place.
Ijeoma Oluo:
Absolutely. I feel like not only are the lectures in this book a great example of that storytelling, but I also feel like a very helpful guide for those of us looking at how we think of these stories and write these stories. One thing that was very clear to me as I was reading through these was the immense amount of love that you have for your family and community and your history and the various stories that often aren’t told, and who gets to tell these stories or not. And I just was curious as to, I think right now in these times anger takes center stage, and rightfully so, there are a lot of things happening in the world to be angry about, but what role does love play even in writing some of the most horrific stories that people don’t want us to tell?
Viet Thanh Nguyen:
I don’t think anger in and of itself is a bad emotion. I think anger that overwhelms us, takes us over and is our primary emotion, our only emotion, that is a dangerous version of anger. But I do think there’s a righteous anger, a justified anger at the injustices that we see and that we shouldn’t turn away from. And for me that anger is always there, not as something overwhelming, but as a pilot light to keep myself warm, to keep myself ready, then when I really need to turn that anger up at specific points and purposes, then that anger is really useful.
But love is also really important, as you say, too. And I think in these lectures, but also in my memoir Man of Two Faces, I talk about the fact that being a refugee damaged me much more than I thought it did. I always thought that I was undamaged by the refugee experience, that I was relatively well-adjusted, I mean, the real trauma belonged to my parents and what they had gone through but for me growing up in the United States basically as a middle-class person, what damage did I have? I think my first sense that I was damaged was when I started going out with my future wife and I told her, “Hey, I’m a pretty well-adjusted person.” And she said, “No, you’re not.”
So I had to do some work to try to figure out where her perception of me as being a damaged person came from, and I think it was from that experience of being a refugee, being a child who was separated from his parents, who was exposed to all kinds of racism, who watched his parents being shot in their store on Christmas Eve. I mean, all these kinds of things I had to suppress and deny and be numb about. So one response to traumatic experience is to be numb, and that was the path that I chose consciously and unconsciously. And what that meant was that I wasn’t capable of love. I was not capable of saying, “I love you,” but even more important than that, I think I was not capable of feeling love or knowing that what I was feeling might be love. And so it took me decades to get to this point of being able to discover that capacity to love within myself.
And I think that this is one way by which I understand that history and its damage is something that is not just a collective experience, is not something that should only be discussed through these broad political concepts and theories and so on, part of which we’ve been talking about. But history ripples through all of us individually and emotionally damages us in ways that many of us can’t even understand.
And I’ve been grateful for being a writer because being a writer has allowed me time to drill within myself and to see and to discover what those damages are, and to discover a sense of love that I can express through writing, my love of writing, but my ability to depict love itself in the writing. And I’m grateful for being a husband and a father. Not to sentimentalize that because not everybody should be parents, but for me, it’s been powerful to have a sense of responsibility to other people and to discover that in fact, I can love them as well. And that has been redemptive for me. It’s been my own personal trajectory in terms of being able to cope with the unquantifiable damages that racism, war and colonialism can inflict on people.
Ijeoma Oluo:
That is so beautiful. And I have definitely felt similarly in my experience as a writer. I think it’s so hard for us to understand that we can’t love things that we’re too afraid to lose. And when you’ve experienced great loss and hurt and harm, you close off parts of yourself. And when I started writing, I realized suddenly I was crying all the time for everything, crying joy, crying sadness. And I was never a crier before I started delving deeply in facing the horrors of parts of my experience in this world. And then I was able to face the worst of what can happen to me and then I was able to love more fully. And so I feel that so deeply, I think a lot of times we think we’re functioning well because we’re functioning, and that means healing, I think, in a capitalist society. But healing includes being able to face some of these really horrifying things about the world.
I would love to finish up with asking about the unique space that we have here in the United States. And I feel like in reading your lectures and also reading in Omar El Akkad’s One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This, this desire to reckon with the contradictions of coming from a place so deeply harmed by Western imperialism while then also finding yourself a part of the imperialist machine. And I would love to ask about what role that plays in how you write about and how you talk about your experience in the world, but also what’s happening in the world today.
Viet Thanh Nguyen:
I think to become a citizen of another country, in my case to move from Vietnam to the United States, I think there is a sense that many of us feel of obligation not just to our family, but to the country that we find ourselves in to adopt the narratives of that country. And of course, there’s also a sense that we should be grateful for having been rescued and welcomed to a new place. And I do feel a sense of gratitude for that. I feel a sense of gratitude for all the benefits and privileges of my education and being ensconced in American power and wealth and so on. But as I say in my novel, The Sympathizer, maybe we wouldn’t have needed to be aided by the United States if we hadn’t been invaded by the United States in the first place.
And it’s that kind of complexity that I think is expressed in my work, but also in Omar El Akkad’s work as well, and so many of us who have been colonized or subjected to racism or war that the United States has been at least partly responsible for, the sense that our existence is complicated, it can’t be reduced to simple narratives. And the narratives of ‘Make America Great Again’, or the narratives of waving the flag or being grateful to the United States, these are simple narratives that don’t express or grapple with the complexities of who we are as Americans.
And for me, those complexities go back to the very origins of the country itself. And I think to confront those origins requires some courage to understand that this country is both something beautiful, but also something brutal as well. And the beauty is found in these ideals of democracy and freedom and equality that I’ve benefited from and that I’m grateful to, but I also recognize that not everybody has had access to those things, that this country has also been built on brutality, and that the brutality has made the beauty possible, the brutality of enslavement and genocide and colonization and war, things that have persisted to this day.
And I think that it is an obligation of citizenship, of belonging to this country to recognize these kinds of complexities. It’s also an obligation of patriotism, as both Martin Luther King Jr. and James Baldwin said in their own ways, that to love this country means also that one has the obligation and the opportunity to criticize it as well. And I think that’s also true for writers, and that’s our obligation. Our obligation is to address the complexities of who we are as human beings, the complexities of our families, the complexities of our communities, the possibilities that we are both human and inhuman at the same time, both our enemies and our loved ones, human and inhuman at the same time. Our country, human, and inhuman at the same time. It’s a challenging task to have to rise to, but it’s also something that gives me hope because if we can confront that individually and collectively, our inhumanity and simultaneous humanity, we can love each other, we can love ourselves, and we can produce greater art.
Ijeoma Oluo:
Thank you. That is a beautiful way to end this discussion. It has been such a privilege to talk with you and to read your words, and I want to thank you for your work.
Viet Thanh Nguyen:
I appreciate all of your questions, they’ve been amazing and I’ve loved this conversation.
Ijeoma Oluo:
Thank you.
