{"id":4054,"date":"2017-10-20T11:27:53","date_gmt":"2017-10-20T18:27:53","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/vietnguyen.info\/?p=4054"},"modified":"2019-10-07T09:25:04","modified_gmt":"2019-10-07T16:25:04","slug":"in-tunnels-where-ghosts-dwell-war-memory-and-identity","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/vietnguyen.info\/2017\/in-tunnels-where-ghosts-dwell-war-memory-and-identity","title":{"rendered":"In Tunnels where Ghosts Dwell: War, Memory, and Identity"},"content":{"rendered":"

Peter Admirand reviews Nothing Ever Dies for newbooks.asia.<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Viet Thanh Nguyen. 2016.
\nNothing Ever Dies: Vietnam and the Memory of War<\/em>
\nCambridge, MA: Harvard University Press
\nISBN 9780674663042<\/p>\n

\u2018Pack Your Bags.\u2019 The Sergeant slapped the back of my father-in-law, a young marine at the time in the 1960s. \u2018Pack your bags,\u2019 the Sergeant grunted. The young marine hesitantly began to ask where they were going. \u2018Pack your bags,\u2019 was the reply.<\/p>\n

Vietnam was the answer the Sergeant could have given, but the young marine would\u00a0 find out soon enough. A few more memories: of an uncle who was ready to flee to Canada if the draft rolls had his name on it; of a best friend\u2019s father, while a soldier in \u2018Nam, ambushed in the jungle, the Vietcong soldier aiming his gun and pressing the trigger, but the weapon\u00a0 jammed, and in tears and fear and desperation, my friend\u2019s father fired back, his first and haunting kill; of ubiquitous Vietnam war movies, always frightening, demon-like with American soldiers high and murderous, raping; and then my father-in-law again, years later at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, DC, crying, for the first time doubting what it was all for. An American child of the 1980s, I was (and remain?) afraid of Vietnam, a word and place (a war) connoting failure, atrocity, and darkness.<\/p>\n

\u2018This is a book on war and memory and identity\u2019, Viet Thanh Nguyen opensNothing Ever Dies: Vietnam and the Memory of War<\/em>. Nguyen encourages and expects readers to imagine, contextualize, and reinterpret their own experience with such realities and concepts. The book thus is a lyrical, haunting gift to readers, exploring from low and high ground, the role and place of memory and forgetting, by a child refugee from the Vietnam War, the American War, \u2018my war\u2019, as he writes, now a Pulitzer Prize winning novelist and academic in California. Weaving reflections and photos from his journeys and pilgrimages to sights of violence and loss in Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos, interspersed with analysis of key academic texts and novels on memory, forgetting, forgiveness, and the Vietnam War, Nguyen constructs, deconstructs, and reconstructs memories of his war and the ripples, aftershocks, and parallels to past, present and future wars.<\/p>\n

Forgetting and Remembering<\/strong>
\nWhile the relationship between memory and forgetting is messy, and Nguyen highlights how disproportionate power relations give stark asymmetry to who and what is remembered, the book itself is tightly structured, symmetric like Palladian architecture. There are three sections, Ethics, Industries, and Aesthetics each with three chapters, bounded by an opening prologue followed by a self-contained chapter titled \u2018Just Memory\u2019, and closing with a final self-contained chapter titled \u2018Just Forgetting\u2019, and then an epilogue. Rifts and reflections on various types of memory interpenetrate throughout the book, with the ultimate aim of wondering how a just memory and a just forgetting can establish and promote peace while also serving justice (p. 254). Such would be a powerful memory, overcoming weaponized memory, which in the service of the culture and war machine, perpetuates a need for forever war, obfuscating or denying any stringent calls for accountability, truth, and solidarity across the lines of war. Such combatting carries over into challenging industrial memory and memory that has been capitalized for profit, rarely for those who were the victims of the violence or those left behind and in need of some remuneration.<\/p>\n

Much of Nguyen\u2019s thoughts revolve around the mystery of the human person, compiled of both human (humane) and inhuman (inhumane) tendencies but dominated by our unjust and disproportionate application of such tendencies, especially through what we choose to remember or forget, if I echo some of the language of James Baldwin in his\u00a0The Evidence of Things Not Seen<\/em>.<\/p>\n

Such entails why we choose to remember one\u2019s own at the cost of truly and virtuously remembering others, in terms of the thick memory of theorists like Avishai Margalit. For the Vietnam War, Americans of course remember their own soldiers \u2013 and partly because this obligation was seen as tainted from the unpopularity of the war, got reinvigorated during the Gulf War in patriotic fervor to support our troops. Acknowledging or remembering terrorists in Iraq or Afghanistan \u2013 or the Vietnamese \u2013 whether North or South, civilian or military (or even acknowledging such a distinction) is rarely embraced. Not surprisingly, witness testimony becomes crucial to such a project, whether through memoirs or the imaginative work of artists, novelists, and poets. It demanded Nguyen travel to places of torture and loss, from Cambodia\u2019s S-21 prison to war cemeteries (cities of the dead \u2013 and often the forgotten), war memorials and museums throughout Vietnam. He also travelled to Laos, where the role of perpetrator and victim become all the more complicated for Americans and for the Vietnamese, both having concealed their roles and acts of violence through denial and now ongoing gaps and silences within official history and memorialization.<\/p>\n

To combat such false or unjust memories, Nguyen highlights three crucial steps. First, we need real and candid acknowledgement of the universal truth of our humanity and inhumanity, nuancing and muddying our identities beyond American or Vietnamese, refugee or citizen. Secondly, just memory requires \u2018equal access to the industries of memory, both within countries and among countries\u2019 (p. 283). Such perhaps utopian aims can only happen with a greater transformation and sharing of wealth and power, but the call remains pragmatic and candid: powerful countries, the victors, can use all the resources at their disposal, hard and soft power (Hollywood films in the context of the United States) to promote their version of preferred history. Even where elements of injustice are depicted, the powerful can present them coated and varnished around initially good intentions or a return to those intentions: a lesson learned or mission still accomplished. Thirdly, the power and use of the imagination can envision \u2018a world where no one will be exiled from what we think of as near and the dear to those distant realms of the far and the feared\u2019 (p. 283). Not surprisingly, Nguyen\u2019s latest fiction book, titled\u00a0The<\/em>\u00a0Refugees\u00a0<\/em>aims to give voice to such forgotten and exiled.<\/p>\n

An Ethics of Recognition<\/strong>
\nThe Israeli novelist Amos Oz has praised how the power of literature encourages us to see and feel the Other, expanding and refining our sense of empathy that can begin to break down mass demonizations of the Other. Nguyen has similar hopes, calling for an ethics of recognition (p. 79). The novels, artwork, documentaries, and films he highlights, particularly by Vietnamese, Hmong, and Vietnamese-Americans, serve as anchors and gateways to reach out to those Americans for whom the Vietnamese, or the Iraqi, Afghan or Syrian remain separate, often inhuman (justifying current and future violence to protect one\u2019s freedom or allegedly to spread democracy and peace). The hope is to see more of the humanity of the Other and consequently and tragically more of our own inhumanity in the process. Could such a humbling (as I would describe it) conjured ironically as a powerful memory become a truly just remembering which also entails some just forgetting?<\/p>\n

Nguyen rightly notes how his insights came not only from the privilege and space of thinking and reflecting, but in \u2018walking and crawling through caves where ghosts dwell, or sweating in museum with peeling walls\u00a0 and barred windows or swearing at the heat\u00a0 and the grime and the vomit and the nauseating toilets\u2019 (p. 252). The sentence continues, listing more of his obstacles and setbacks, but arguing that such a low ground, in dialogue with the high ground is needed for perspective and nuance. Of course, such an opportunity can seem like a privilege, to fly multiple times to Vietnam and then back to California for life as an academic and acclaimed writer, but these tunnels with ghosts are within and all around us. It is only a matter of whether we are willing, truly, to see. My fear of Vietnamese war movies touches on some of these hidden truths, the ones of my father-in-law and uncle, and friend\u2019s father less so. They paint a picture of Americans as reluctant warriors, some with little choice because of class and poverty (which is also true). Nuances within nuances are needed. But going beyond remembering one\u2019s own is needed, and Nguyen\u2019s voice and book propels and calls us to do just that.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Peter Admirand reviews Nothing Ever Dies for newbooks.asia. Viet Thanh Nguyen. 2016. Nothing Ever Dies: Vietnam and the Memory of War Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press ISBN 9780674663042 \u2018Pack Your Bags.\u2019 The Sergeant slapped the back of my father-in-law, a young marine at the time in the 1960s. \u2018Pack your bags,\u2019 the Sergeant grunted. The […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":4055,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_mo_disable_npp":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[208],"tags":[145,244,131,9,10,281,120],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nIn Tunnels where Ghosts Dwell: War, Memory, and Identity - 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\/2017\/in-tunnels-where-ghosts-dwell-war-memory-and-identity\" \/>\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=\"7 minutes\" \/>\n<script type=\"application\/ld+json\" class=\"yoast-schema-graph\">{\"@context\":\"https:\/\/schema.org\",\"@graph\":[{\"@type\":\"WebPage\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/vietnguyen.info\/2017\/in-tunnels-where-ghosts-dwell-war-memory-and-identity\",\"url\":\"https:\/\/vietnguyen.info\/2017\/in-tunnels-where-ghosts-dwell-war-memory-and-identity\",\"name\":\"In Tunnels where Ghosts Dwell: War, Memory, and Identity - 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