Nothing Ever Dies: Vietnam and the Memory of War (34 page)

9

On Powerful Memory

IN AN 1899 ILLUSTRATION OF
Rudyard Kipling’s poem “The White Man’s Burden,” Uncle Sam and his British counterpart John Bull climb up a mountain “towards the light” of civilization, each carrying a basket on his back full of “your new-caught sullen peoples / Half devil and half child.” Kipling’s proimperial paean about the tragic necessity of waging “savage wars of peace” was addressed to Americans, then waging war to subdue the Filipino rebels who thought at first that the United States had come to liberate the Philippines from Spain. Kipling warns Americans of “the hate of those ye guard.” And for all the blood and treasure that Americans would expend, he cautions that they will “Watch Sloth and heathen folly / Bring all your hopes to nought.”
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This characterization of the natives certainly describes how many Americans view the people they are supposedly trying to help. A century later, his poem may as well describe my war and its aftermath in our current American wars in the Middle East. All a reader need do is replace the light of civilization with the promise of democracy and freedom, the one that Americans offered to the people of the Middle East after offering it to us. As for those people being carried ever upward, among whom I count myself, we remain half devil and half child in much of the American and Western imagination.

If Kipling proved prescient in implying the need for civilizing warfare, at least from the perspective of the civilized, so did his illustrator, Victor Gillam. What he depicts is that we do not descend toward enlightenment, civilization, or God, for that is too easy. We must carry our burden upward, toward peaks rather than valleys, closer to the eternal heavens, the ultimate high ground, which of course we can never reach in this life. I understand this impulse, as well as Kipling’s tone of self-satisfied suffering and resignation in describing the savior’s pain in saving an ungrateful people. Although I may be half devil and half child, forever ready to nip at the hand of my benefactor and to reject any piety, I have also been baptized and dressed in the clothes of civilization. I know what it means to aspire, to climb, to carry, and to speak and write in the language of my masters. This entire book is an exercise of labor to reach the moment of revelation and inspiration, and ultimately of publication, which takes place not in the depths where a text cannot be seen but in the bright heights, where God also delivered to Moses the commandments. Perhaps unsurprisingly, I turn to high-minded ideas about ethics to challenge the idea that we need to burden ourselves with war, that war must always be a part of our identity.

But writing this book also involved excavation. My insights, so far as they exist, come not only from achieving some airy plain, or finding respite in a clean, well-lit, and air-conditioned archive, or thinking enlightened thoughts, but from walking and crawling through caves and tunnels where ghosts dwell, or sweating in museums with peeling walls and barred windows, or swearing at the heat and the grime and the vomit and the nauseating toilets and the rough roads and the swindlers and the cheats and the broken finger incurred in Vientiane, which led to infection and two surgeries in two countries. All of this is to say that the high ground, as desirable as it may be to some of us, including myself, is also compromised. From the high ground, we cannot see into the caves and tunnels where the ungrateful and unrepentant and uncivilized hide from our gaze, our armed force, our moral authority. They live to subvert, and to curse. I am not immune, either as the one who curses and who is cursed, or as the one who takes on the authority of calling for ethical behavior. I am among that group of “committed writers,” as the critic Trinh T. Minh-ha calls us, “the ones who write both to awaken to the consciousness of their guilt and to give their readers a guilty conscience … such a definition naturally places the committed writer on the side of Power.”
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And power, even when carried out with the elevated intention of justice, incites rebellion from those below and suppression from those above.

With this warning about the danger of power and commitment—after all, taken to the extreme, power and commitment justify the greatest of excess, regardless of ideology, from death camps to atom bombs—this final chapter is on the need for a powerful memory to fight war and find peace. As fraught as engaging with power may be, one must confront it and hope that one can manage it, and oneself, ethically. Our use of power must be done with the full awareness of our own humanity and inhumanity, our capacity for both good and bad. Even those who seek to withdraw from power, to some kind of hermetic or monastic life, must emerge if they seek to change more than themselves. One might be able to climb the mountain toward enlightenment individually, but one cannot change the world without touching on, or being touched by, power. Struggling with power, one might be tempted to see oneself as someone carrying a burden up that mountain. So it is that the story of heading upward as a sign of progress seeps into my narrative as I begin from the low ground and work my way to the high ground.

Both territories are crucial for powerful memory: the low ground forces us to confront our persistent inhumanity, the high ground reminds us of our potential for humanity. Under the cone of utopian light by which this book is written, the high ground is where we need to be, but in the dystopian shadows that surround this light, the low ground is where many of us are now. The power of the low ground was most evident to me on my first visit to the museum of Tuol Sleng, formerly the Khmer Rouge political prison S-21, in the summer of 2010. On the same day, I also made my pilgrimage to the killing fields of Choeung Ek, on the outskirts of Phnom Penh, a typical foreigner’s itinerary for a day in the city (most Khmer tourists prefer to visit the beautiful Royal Palace, and who can blame them?).
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I must specify the time, for the museums and memorials of Southeast Asia transform over the years, much as memory and forgetting themselves do. Museums, memorials, and memories change because their countries change. What is suitable at one moment in time becomes a hindrance, or out of fashion, in another moment. As for me, I too changed, so that my second visit a few years later to Tuol Sleng and Choeung Ek did not impact me as much. I was a little more hardened, as I was on my second and third trips to the War Remnants Museum in Saigon. My eyes, now habituated, were mostly concerned with taking good photographs. Looking at the same thing twice—even an atrocity—can have that effect.

But that first time, I was still left numb even though I had read about Tuol Sleng and Choeung Ek before visiting, and so knew what to expect. Archivists are sorting through the documents that the security apparatus maintained at S-21, which include the photographs taken of all the inmates on their entry, and other photographs taken of some after death. Many of those black-and-white photographs are arranged in display cases in neat geometrical rows that resemble the layout of photos in American high school yearbooks, except that almost none of these prisoners are smiling, and none are named. A visitor cannot help but look at these faces with knowledge of their doom, and many of those photographed probably had a sense of what was to come. Foreboding thickens the air, but at least the museum is mercifully quiet, most of the time. The tourists speak in low, sometimes nervous voices, for what should one say, exactly, as one walks through interrogation rooms where shackles and bloodstains remain, preserved as visceral proof of the tortures inflicted on so many by teenage guards, some of whom were also fated to have their photograph taken.

And what does one say if one confronts an actual survivor of the prison. Chum Mey emerged from a room in one of the wings and looked exactly as he did in Rithy Panh’s disturbing documentary
S-21
, where Mey and the painter Vann Nath, another survivor, returned to the high school that had been turned into a prison. Under the punishing gaze of Panh’s camera, Nath confronted several of the prison guards in a dialogue about what they did and who bore responsibility, but Mey was too overcome with emotion to participate. His family died here, and he survived by mere chance. What the scholar Khatharya Um says is true: “The feeling conveyed by survivors is one of living with ‘one body, two lives’—one before, and one after Pol Pot.”
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He wore a short-sleeved red shirt and gray slacks in the film, the same ones he wore when I saw him. His white hair was trimmed short in the same manner. He took me to a narrow brick cell like the one where he had been imprisoned and reenacted how he was shackled and made to use a rusty American ammunition box for a latrine. As my interpreter translated, he described the torture done to him, and he wept as I saw him weep in the film and in the testimony that he offered at the trial of the prison commandant, Duch. Does he weep every time he tells his story to someone like me? I cannot remember now whether I asked for a picture, or whether he offered, but we stood side by side and he embraced my sweaty back with his arm and pulled me tightly to him. I think I smiled—it is not a photograph I care to look at again—because that is what one is supposed to do.

My interpreter drove me on her motorbike to Choeung Ek, where the S-21 guards took prisoners at night, by truck. As one enters the park-like grounds with its green lawns, a majestic stupa is the focal point. Drawing closer to the stupa, one sees behind its glass windows racks and racks of bones and skulls. The empty sockets return one’s gaze. These remains serve as both the guardians of this site and its prisoners. If there are ghosts, are they angry that so many strangers trespass on the place of their demise, or are they pleased to be remembered? As for the green lawns, which dip and swell gently, handwritten signs indicate the locations of mass graves, point to the tree where the killers bashed the heads of babies, and inform visitors that bones still emerge from the soil after it rains. Thousands died here, clubbed over the head as they knelt before the open graves, the sounds masked by the hum of a generator. This was not a place I would ever visit at night, without lights. I prefer to take my photos during daylight, as does the monk in the saffron robe who stands at the edge of a swell, framing the scene in his digital camera. The heat is oppressive. When I return to my hotel, the first thing I do is shower. Then I lay down and the numbness seeped down deep into my mind and body.

I had visited the Dachau concentration camp outside Munich, and while it was a solemn experience, I had not felt as immobilized, exhausted, and shocked, emotionally and physically, as I did in my boutique Phnom Penh hotel. Was it because this history seemed closer to me, in time, in history and in culture? Or was it because by the time I visited Dachau in 1998 the veil of memorialization had already been lowered? The horrors of that place could no longer be seen so immediately, but were instead filtered through a gauze created by the erasure of the visceral, through years of exposure to other people’s memories of the Holocaust and its transformation into a mnemonic relic, like Christ’s body hanging on a cross in every Catholic church, bloody but remote. It was not that historical detail was absent in Dachau. The degree of detail, and its polish, was much more evident there than at either Tuol Sleng or Choeung Ek. The Germans had processed their history over decades, and with the resources of a wealthy country had built the finest of memorials and museums dedicated to the Holocaust, attuned to Western standards of aesthetics that had become universal by dint of Western power. The archives of photos, from the victims in happier days to the victims in their skeletal phase, were rich in extent, presentation, and captioning. Victims’ mementoes, from personal belongings and clothing to even things like locks of hair, were artfully exhibited. The grounds of the concentration camps were manicured, belying the corpses that were once strewn there. This is the work of memory conducted from the higher ground, erected with the power of industrial memory. This work calls for sobriety, contemplation, reflection, for respect and reverence for the dead. It urges us to further our resolve never to allow this atrocity to be forgotten or repeated. But what I also took away from my visits to Germany’s memorial network was how horror can be framed in beautiful ways. For many of us, even horror must be rendered artfully, lest one disrespect the dead or discomfort the living.