Speak of the Dead, Speak of Viet Nam: The Ethics and Aesthetics of Minority Discourse

Abstract

Speak of the Dead, Speak of Viet Nam:The Ethics and Aesthetics of Minority Discourse Viet Thanh Nguyen (bio) "[Y]ou must not tell anyone what I am about to tell you." Maxine Hong Kingston, The Woman Warrior As a child, I was always aware of the presence of the dead. Although my Catholic father and mother did not practice ancestor worship, they kept photographs of their fathers and their mothers on the mantel, as was the custom, and prayed to God before them every evening. In the eighties, news of my grandparents' passing into another world arrived one after the other, accompanied by more black-and-white photographs of rural funeral processions marching through a bleak northern landscape, of mourners dressed in simple country clothes and white headbands, of wooden coffins lowered into narrow graves. We mourned their deaths from a distance of both space and time. The space was one of an ocean. The time was a separation of twenty years for my mother, and forty years for my father, before they were reunited with their families in Viet Nam. I knew the fathers and mothers of my father and mother only through their photographs, in which they never smiled and posed stiffly. Visiting [End Page 7] the homes of other Vietnamese friends, I always paused to study the photographs of their relatives, invariably captured in black and white. These photographs, emblematic of a lost time, a lost place, and, in many cases, of lost people, were universal signs of our place in the world as refugees, found in every household as keepsakes of memory, hallowed signs of our haunting by the past. Photographs are the secular imprints of ghosts, the most visible sign of their aura, and the closest many in the world of refugees could come to living with those left behind. For many refugees, the clothes on their backs and a wallet full of photographs were all the things they carried with them on their flight. In the strange new land they found themselves, these photographs transubstantiated into symbols of the missing themselves, as in le thi diem thuy's The Gangster We Are All Looking For. The narrator's mother keeps the only treasured photograph of her own mother and father safe in the attic. When their home is demolished to pave the way for gentrification and the family is evicted, the mother forgets to take the photograph with her in the family's frantic attempt to rescue their belongings. Watching the destruction of her home, the mother calls out to her lost parents, "Ma/Ba." The narrator, a child, listens to her mother's cry and thinks of the world as "two butterfly wings rubbing against my ear. Listen . . . they are sitting in the attic, sitting like royalty. Shining in the dark, buried by a wrecking ball. Paper fragments floating across the surface of the sea. There is not a trace of blood anywhere except here, in my throat, where I am telling you all this" (le thi diem thuy 2004, 99). This passage, and much of the writing, art, and politics of Vietnamese refugees, is about the problem of mourning the dead, remembering the missing, and considering the place of the survivors in the movement of history. This problem is endemic to refugees, for whom separation from family and homeland is a universal experience. When civil and revolutionary war causes that separation, the imperative to remember becomes more than simply nostalgic. It becomes, as Nguyen-Vo Thu-Huong (2005) argues, a "political and ethical act involving choice," leaving us with this question she poses: "[H]ow shall we remember rather than just appropriate the dead for our own agendas, precluding what the dead can tell us?" (159). [End Page 8] Common in the world of refugees are memories and stories of the dead, the missing, and the ones left behind, those relatives, friends, and countrymen facing the consequences escaped by the refugee. In some cases, the refugee may even benefit from telling about those consequences. Speaking of the dead in a different context, Maxine Hong Kingston (1989) captures perfectly the ethical challenge for the writer when she...