{"id":3247,"date":"2016-08-01T00:00:27","date_gmt":"2016-08-01T07:00:27","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/vietnguyen.info\/?p=3247"},"modified":"2017-03-05T21:24:23","modified_gmt":"2017-03-06T05:24:23","slug":"memories-vietnam-memoriam","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/vietnguyen.info\/2016\/memories-vietnam-memoriam","title":{"rendered":"Memories of Vietnam in Memoriam"},"content":{"rendered":"

Micharl Orr reviews Viet Thanh Nguyen’s book<\/em>\u00a0Nothing Ever Dies: Vietnam and the Memory of War for Origins<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n

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The Vietnam War Memorial serves as a vivid example of the ways in which memorials reflect not only those who have died, but those who view the dead and choose to remember them.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

How do people talk about wars they remember?\u00a0 Do they reference famous films or novels about the conflict?\u00a0 Do they recall images made by famous journalists, taken in moments of pain or horror?\u00a0 Do societies remember war, or do they invest deeply in suppressing much of that memory to protect the stories they tell about themselves?<\/p>\n

In Nothing Ever Dies: Vietnam and the Memory of War<\/em> Viet Thanh Nguyen, a professor of American Studies at USC and a Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist, reflects deeply on the mechanisms of memory which have shaped and controlled the images and understandings of the Vietnam War.\u00a0 He does not confine himself to Vietnam, drawing broad strokes across the Pacific from Korea to Cambodia, across the Philippines and to the United States.\u00a0 In the same way, the book ranges across sources from war memorials to movies, from novelizations to videogames.<\/p>\n

This is a complex work.\u00a0 Equal parts philosophical treatise, historical analysis, manifesto of memory, and memoire, it is hard to put\u00a0Nothing Ever Dies<\/em>\u00a0into any conventional boxes.\u00a0 The book is divided into three broad sections, each subdivided into three chapters.\u00a0 The sections are titled \u201cEthics,\u201d \u201cIndustries,\u201d and \u201cAesthetics.\u201d These are prefaced with a fantastic introduction titled \u201cJust Memory,\u201d which seeks to outline the author\u2019s ideas about what constitutes cultural memory, about how societies divide that memory between a memory of self and a memory of other, and about how he envisions the possibility of an understanding which crosses the barrier of self and other.\u00a0 \u201cWar\u201d Nguyen states, \u201cgrows on intimate soil, nurtured by friends and neighbors, fought by sons, daughters, wives, and fathers.\u201d (p. 18) If we are to have an ethical memory of war, Nguyen believes, we must bring the self and the other, our humanity and our inhumanity together.<\/p>\n

\u201cEthics\u201d explores the ways in which groups build and justify policies of remembering and forgetting.\u00a0 By delving into the distinctive qualities which are found in forms of memory through the three chapters Nguyen examines cultural memory as products of a vested interest.\u00a0 This vested interest, which Nguyen names an \u201cindustry of memory\u201d works to create narratives of the self which refute blame, cover misconduct, and glorify the dead.\u00a0 At the same time, the memories of others become simplified and dehumanized, only victim or enemy.\u00a0 The result, according to Nguyen, is that the industry of memory seeks to create a history of humanity that ignores the inhumanities which are committed during war.\u00a0 He ties this need for recognition of inhumanities to his core principle of an ethical \u201cjust memory\u201d.<\/p>\n

The second section, \u201cIndustries,\u201d examines the ways in which these narratives of memory are created and distributed.\u00a0 The author identifies the camera, the screen, and written word as vital parts of the war machine. Nguyen looks deeply into the examples provided by American films of the Vietnam War, Nguyen seeks an explanation of how the acts of killing, raping, and pillaging are glorified on the screen, largely separated from the identities of the individuals upon whom these acts are committed.\u00a0 He also takes an original, if somewhat controversial among some circles, tack of including videogames in the sphere of war machines.\u00a0 First Person Shooters, in particular, he explains, are, \u201cbuilt on the aesthetics of sweat and viscera and is about identifying one\u2019s self with the shooter and feeling the joy and excitement of participating in slaughter.\u201d (pg. 111)<\/p>\n

The final section, \u201cAesthetics,\u201d examines how all of this is delivered to the public.\u00a0 The chapters \u201cOn Victims and Voices\u201d, \u201cOn True War Stories\u201d, and \u201cOn Powerful Memory\u201d spend much time looking at the forms of art which Vietnamese, Americans, and Vietnamese Americans use to capture their concepts of self, other, and war.\u00a0 Wars, Nguyen posits, creates deep reverberations in the spirits of those who are affected by them for generations afterwards.\u00a0 Looking at the writing of his contemporaries he says, \u201cthe odor and the flickering shadow of war\u2019s burning corpse still haunts Vietnamese American literature.\u201d (pg. 213)\u00a0 The results, for Nguyen, are war stories used to capture elements of warfare, both vital to the furtherance of violence and deeply rooted in the memories of the wars which have passed.\u00a0 He examines the critics of war stories, soldier-writer, and the refugee-writer, showing the relationships each has to the self in war, and the self after war.\u00a0 The crux of the true war story according to Nguyen lies in insisting, \u201con this dreadful knowledge of the inhumanity which exists in the human.\u201d (pg. 236)<\/p>\n

In all, this book is compelling and difficult.\u00a0 It challenges many conventions of memory and understandings of conflicts, nationhood, and collective memory by insisting that these are ideas that have been built, bought, and sold by each side. In this sense, memories are inherently political for Nguyen, and he infuses this broadly philosophical outline with his own travels and photographs across Southeast Asia.\u00a0 Nothing Ever Dies<\/em> is most certainly a scholarly work, drawing from a wide swath of philosophical schools and delivering tangled and sometimes challenging problems in confronting warfare and its aftermath.\u00a0 By drawing heavily on a range of cultural examples and biographical excerpts he builds a work that is not only readable, but deeply engaging.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Micharl Orr reviews Viet Thanh Nguyen’s book\u00a0Nothing Ever Dies: Vietnam and the Memory of War for Origins. How do people talk about wars they remember?\u00a0 Do they reference famous films or novels about the conflict?\u00a0 Do they recall images made by famous journalists, taken in moments of pain or horror?\u00a0 Do societies remember war, or […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":3248,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_mo_disable_npp":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[208],"tags":[511,145,244,512,131,10],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nMemories of Vietnam in Memoriam - Viet Thanh Nguyen<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/vietnguyen.info\/2016\/memories-vietnam-memoriam\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:label1\" content=\"Written by\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data1\" content=\"Viet\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:label2\" content=\"Est. reading time\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data2\" content=\"5 minutes\" \/>\n<script type=\"application\/ld+json\" class=\"yoast-schema-graph\">{\"@context\":\"https:\/\/schema.org\",\"@graph\":[{\"@type\":\"WebPage\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/vietnguyen.info\/2016\/memories-vietnam-memoriam\",\"url\":\"https:\/\/vietnguyen.info\/2016\/memories-vietnam-memoriam\",\"name\":\"Memories of Vietnam in Memoriam - 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