A review by archytas
Nothing Ever Dies: Vietnam and the Memory of War by Viet Thanh Nguyen
challenging
informative
reflective
medium-paced
4.25
"This invocation of Vietnam as quagmire, syndrome, and war speaks neither to Vietnamese reality nor to current difficulties in Iraq and Afghanistan. It speaks to American fear. Americans think defeat in these wars is the worst thing, when winning in Iraq and Afghanistan today only means more of the same tomorrow: Somalia, Pakistan, Yemen, and so on. This is the most important reason for Americans to remember what they call the Vietnam War, the fact that it was one conflict in a long line of horrific wars that came before it and after it. This war’s identity—and, indeed, any war’s identity—cannot be extricated from the identity of war itself."
Nguyen is a thoughtful and compelling writer - one of my favourite writers - so this is always an engaging and provoking read. He is a novelist capable of visceral, emotional, hilarious and delicate fiction, but here he displays his academic credentials with analytical and precise language. Nevertheless, or because, simply because of this, I have a lot of complicated thoughts and feelings about this book, which may take 'some time to sort out. Possibly starting with the central contention that the Vietnam-US war can more be analysed as an entity of war than as a specific conflict about particular power and ideological ideas. While I get that, I also feel as if something is lost in the process.
It feels as if Nguyen is writing for an audience who have grown up with Vietnam as code for war, and it made me examine my own context a bit more. I grew up alongside kids born in Vietnam, who had lived most of their lives as refugees in one place or another. I knew Vietnam as a place, and as a civil war long before I understood it as a war dragged out by the US and Australia. I also grew up alongside kids born in Cambodia, most related to Vietnamese, who had lost parents to Pol Pot's killing fields and took a different view on the North Vietnamese government. Of specifics as a kid I understood little, but I knew that what was happening and had happened in those countries was big, and complicated, and hard. And that the hold it had on my friends was different to the hold it had on their parents, but different was not lesser. As I got older, I met North Vietnamese youth, with another different range of beliefs and perspectives.
By the time I saw Apocolypse Now I was a young adult, and hated the way it used Vietnam as the background to a US story, just like the military used the country as a pawn for its own interests. (the machismo probably didn't help). So I struggle with the idea that this war is somehow reducible to something less complex, or less lived. And those ideas, which mattered a great deal to my friends' parents just as they did to the huge numbers who fought, feel like an essential part of the story.
Nguyen here delves into various pop culture and cultural forms of memory keeping to interrogate how the war is enshrined and reinterpreted. This includes, of course, Coppola's epic but also fiction and non-fiction by US writers and Vietnamese diaspora writers. There is less coverage by authors from post-war Vietnam, but there is an extensive section on the war tourism and museum memory industry inside Vietnam. I did feel, possibly unfairly, that the perspectives of Vietnamese who supported the revolution were given less space than other perspectives, but that may be unfair. Certainly, Nguyen argues strongly and persuasively for the importance of allowing space for all memories, for not fossilzing 'flattening' memory into neat stories. It is this quality which draws me so strongly to Nguyen's writing, I think, his capacity to hold multiple perspectives and honour them. He also notes the problems of denied voice to those without English:
"While those who live in what the scholar Werner Sollors calls a “multilingual America” speak and write many languages, America as a whole, the America that rules, prides itself on trenchant monolingualism. As a result, the immigrant, the refugee, the exile, and the stranger can be heard in high volume only in their own homes and in the enclaves they carve out for themselves. Outside those ethnic walls, facing an indifferent America, the other struggles to speak. She clears her throat, hesitates and, most often, waits for the next generation raised or born on American soil to speak for them. Vietnamese American literature written in English follows this ethnic cycle of silence to speech. In that way, Vietnamese American literature fulfills ethnic writing’s most basic function: to serve as proof that regardless of what brought these others to America, they or their children have become accepted, even if grudgingly, by other Americans. "
The book which shoots off in many directions, Nguyen less troubled by trying to push a forceful argument than by following the threads of what he knows to be real and then examining where that takes us. Some parts are just so pithily put, that feeling that you have always known this just as it probably never seemed so clear.
And in the end, the book matters a great deal as a reminder that, just as the 'truth' is not one thing about this war, it is also never one thing about our present - a warning that feels particularly important in an era where being in a camp can feel like a substitute for self examination of the impact of our actions. For this alone, the book is worth being widely read.
"We must continue to look at the horrors done by humans like him if we are to learn anything, if we are to imagine not just a hopeful utopian future but also an alternate dystopian one where, if the Khmer Rouge had succeeded, Duch would not be a devil but an angel. This would force us to ask whether those we imagine as angels today are not simply triumphant devils who have written their own stories, in the manner of so many bomb-launching bureaucrats and elected officials with ghostwritten memoirs."
Nguyen is a thoughtful and compelling writer - one of my favourite writers - so this is always an engaging and provoking read. He is a novelist capable of visceral, emotional, hilarious and delicate fiction, but here he displays his academic credentials with analytical and precise language. Nevertheless, or because, simply because of this, I have a lot of complicated thoughts and feelings about this book, which may take 'some time to sort out. Possibly starting with the central contention that the Vietnam-US war can more be analysed as an entity of war than as a specific conflict about particular power and ideological ideas. While I get that, I also feel as if something is lost in the process.
It feels as if Nguyen is writing for an audience who have grown up with Vietnam as code for war, and it made me examine my own context a bit more. I grew up alongside kids born in Vietnam, who had lived most of their lives as refugees in one place or another. I knew Vietnam as a place, and as a civil war long before I understood it as a war dragged out by the US and Australia. I also grew up alongside kids born in Cambodia, most related to Vietnamese, who had lost parents to Pol Pot's killing fields and took a different view on the North Vietnamese government. Of specifics as a kid I understood little, but I knew that what was happening and had happened in those countries was big, and complicated, and hard. And that the hold it had on my friends was different to the hold it had on their parents, but different was not lesser. As I got older, I met North Vietnamese youth, with another different range of beliefs and perspectives.
By the time I saw Apocolypse Now I was a young adult, and hated the way it used Vietnam as the background to a US story, just like the military used the country as a pawn for its own interests. (the machismo probably didn't help). So I struggle with the idea that this war is somehow reducible to something less complex, or less lived. And those ideas, which mattered a great deal to my friends' parents just as they did to the huge numbers who fought, feel like an essential part of the story.
Nguyen here delves into various pop culture and cultural forms of memory keeping to interrogate how the war is enshrined and reinterpreted. This includes, of course, Coppola's epic but also fiction and non-fiction by US writers and Vietnamese diaspora writers. There is less coverage by authors from post-war Vietnam, but there is an extensive section on the war tourism and museum memory industry inside Vietnam. I did feel, possibly unfairly, that the perspectives of Vietnamese who supported the revolution were given less space than other perspectives, but that may be unfair. Certainly, Nguyen argues strongly and persuasively for the importance of allowing space for all memories, for not fossilzing 'flattening' memory into neat stories. It is this quality which draws me so strongly to Nguyen's writing, I think, his capacity to hold multiple perspectives and honour them. He also notes the problems of denied voice to those without English:
"While those who live in what the scholar Werner Sollors calls a “multilingual America” speak and write many languages, America as a whole, the America that rules, prides itself on trenchant monolingualism. As a result, the immigrant, the refugee, the exile, and the stranger can be heard in high volume only in their own homes and in the enclaves they carve out for themselves. Outside those ethnic walls, facing an indifferent America, the other struggles to speak. She clears her throat, hesitates and, most often, waits for the next generation raised or born on American soil to speak for them. Vietnamese American literature written in English follows this ethnic cycle of silence to speech. In that way, Vietnamese American literature fulfills ethnic writing’s most basic function: to serve as proof that regardless of what brought these others to America, they or their children have become accepted, even if grudgingly, by other Americans. "
The book which shoots off in many directions, Nguyen less troubled by trying to push a forceful argument than by following the threads of what he knows to be real and then examining where that takes us. Some parts are just so pithily put, that feeling that you have always known this just as it probably never seemed so clear.
And in the end, the book matters a great deal as a reminder that, just as the 'truth' is not one thing about this war, it is also never one thing about our present - a warning that feels particularly important in an era where being in a camp can feel like a substitute for self examination of the impact of our actions. For this alone, the book is worth being widely read.
"We must continue to look at the horrors done by humans like him if we are to learn anything, if we are to imagine not just a hopeful utopian future but also an alternate dystopian one where, if the Khmer Rouge had succeeded, Duch would not be a devil but an angel. This would force us to ask whether those we imagine as angels today are not simply triumphant devils who have written their own stories, in the manner of so many bomb-launching bureaucrats and elected officials with ghostwritten memoirs."