Nothing Ever Dies: Vietnam and the Memory of War (8 page)

Many minorities besides African Americans also claim double consciousness for themselves. They experience this distinction between America’s dominant self—the white self—and its darker others not only in a worldly way, as part of a group cast as other, but also in a personal way. “One feels his two-ness,—an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder.”
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The black wall emerges from this divided way of seeing the world for Maya Lin, but what is also powerful about double consciousness is its universal quality, one that paradoxically arises from the particularity of black experience.

While minorities may experience double consciousness regularly, even daily, the power of the black wall is that it conveys that sense to individuals who are not used to experiencing it, and then reconciles that duality. These visitors experience the double consciousness of seeing themselves and being seen by the dead, the ghosts of the soldiers who together comprise, in the words of classicist James Tatum, “an insurrection of the dead.”
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Perhaps what the visitor who touches the black wall and is touched by it feels is the sense that she, too, is a minority, regardless of race or culture. In this instance, one’s minority identity is to belong to the living, outnumbered by the hosts of the dead. But this moment of double consciousness is reconciled for many, if not all, by the commemorative, nationalist calls that have been delivered by presidents, soldiers, and veterans around the black wall. These nationalist calls allow visitors to mourn with and for the dead, and to submerge the potentially troubling manifestation of double consciousness into the singular consciousness of national identity, of the American, the patriot, the good citizen.

Through its design and its effect, the black wall reveals the porousness between the two ethical models of remembering one’s own and remembering others. In the crudest version of the ethics of remembering one’s own, we draw a clear line between us and them, the good and the bad, the here and the there, the living and the dead (for we will smite our enemies if they are not already dead). Such an ethics motivates people to fight wars against their enemies and draws from those “thick” relations of family, friends, and countrymen described by philosopher Avishai Margalit. Thick relations are apparently natural to Margalit, but in actuality these bonds must be made by us with people who are originally other to us. We solidify these bonds over time with the stories we tell ourselves about our love for our family, friends, and countrymen. The idea of family obscures this process of thickening because many people think of family bonds as natural, even though much evidence of alienation within family exists, from murder, abuse, violence and pedophilia to apathy, rivalry, and hatred. The biblical story of Cain and Abel tells us that it is as natural to kill those close to us as it is to love them, while Freud’s psychoanalytic story tells us that the gap between self and other begins within oneself soon after birth, at the mirror stage which Maya Lin’s reflective wall invokes. But despite this alienation from others and ourselves, the lucky among us discover that our family loves us, and we learn to love them in return. Gradually we extend the circle of the near and dear to those strangers who become our friends and neighbors, then our countrymen, until some of us learn the ultimate lesson, as Bao Ninh writes of Kien: “He would understand true sacrifice: friends who would die to save others.”
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But under the sway of patriotism and nationalism, we forget that we have learned how to remember these others, that our love is acquired rather than spontaneous.

The black wall and the controversies around it both illuminate and obscure how remembering one’s own and remembering others are always at play together. For many Americans, the black wall tells the story of how some among us were cast out, how they eventually came back, and how we welcomed them, at last restoring friendship, familial bonds, patriotic feelings, and good relations between citizen and soldier. Some of the controversies around the black wall arise, however, because some visitors feel that the black wall is not inclusive or reflective enough. This is the paradox of the ethics of remembering one’s own, that to be successful, it must convince the right others that they are recognized or should want to be recognized. This is also the problem of the mirror and the sight of memory: does the mirror reflect us, or the image of us that we would like to see? Does the mirror make us feel whole or does it make us feel like an other? Some veterans and their supporters did not see themselves reflected in the black wall’s memory; feeling themselves to be excluded, to be other, they demanded better representation. The visitor to the Vietnam Veterans Memorial thus encounters not only the black wall but also two sculptures nearby, one featuring black, white, and Latino GIs, weary and contemplative as they gaze at the wall, the other with three nurses tending to a wounded soldier. These sculpted soldiers and nurses are heroic, human, and embodied, commissioned by the memorial’s authorities to address the concern that the wall, without bodies and faces, could neither represent nor recognize the veterans. These sculptures also exist, then, to remember the nation’s own.

In order to do so, these sculptures require the nation to remember some of its historical others—minorities and women. Only a decade or two before the creation of the black wall, memorials, movies, or stories of American soldiers would not have featured minorities or women as the equals of white men, in the unlikely chance they were included at all. It would not be natural to include these others in a world where characters such as John Wayne or George Washington embodied the American soldier. In a society oriented around white men in power, women and minorities are what Margalit calls “strangers”
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and Paul Ricoeur calls “distant others.”
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And yet, thirty years after the black wall’s creation, what the sculptures show is that an American military without minorities is unthinkable. This narrative of an America made powerful through its diversity is embodied in America’s first black president, Barack Obama, who had this to say about the war:

The Vietnam War is a story of service members of different backgrounds, colors, and creeds who came together to complete a daunting mission. It is a story of Americans from every corner of our Nation who left the warmth of family to serve the country they loved. It is a story of patriots who braved the line of fire, who cast themselves into harm’s way to save a friend, who fought hour after hour, day after day to preserve the liberties we hold dear.
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The recasting of this war as a heroic and patriotic endeavor is thus intertwined with optimism about reconciling the differences within American society and its military. In another thirty years, it is possible that an American military without women, or gays and lesbians, will be unthinkable, even if, for Margalit, these populations would today be strangers and distant others to many of “us.” For him, ethics covers the thick relations between the near and the dear, while morality governs the “thin” relations between “us” and our strangers and distant others.
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If Margalit indeed accepts this distinction between thick and thin as natural, the example of the memorial shows us that this distinction is not inevitable, but acquired. As people able to learn both love and hate, we expand our circle of the near and dear to include others, and formerly thin relations become thicker.

Rather than think of “our” relationship to others as a thin one existing in a moral realm, influenced by religious codes, I think of this relationship as existing in an ethical realm where people can struggle to remember others through secular acts of inclusion, conversation, recognition, and hope. The remoteness of these strangers and distant others is not only a function of geography, as Margalit implies. Sometimes we detest our neighbors and feel more affinity for those far away, as is the case with some Americans’ attitudes toward Mexico and, say, England. Those who feel such affinity believe it to be natural, even though it is actually learned. The naturalness arises from our having forgotten how we came by this affinity whereby some Americans think that they share more culturally with the English than the Mexicans. In contrast to psychic intimacy, physical proximity is not a guarantee of creating feelings of nearness and dearness. Americans did not enslave those who lived far from them, but instead enslaved those who lived with them or next door to them, including their lovers and illegitimate offspring. Men denied the vote to their wives and daughters and constricted their lives. Today, of course, slavery and the denial of political franchise to vast populations no longer seem to exist as realistic options. But there is nothing “natural” about this current state of fragile, partial reconciliation around race and gender relations. Bitter political struggle led Americans to this point. This struggle included a multitude of intimate gestures and relationships between people who chose to learn about and live with others, even to love them. The moral demand to treat our fellow human beings as we wish to be treated becomes, through political effort, the ethics of seeing them as part of our “natural” community, sharers of our national identity.

We learn to develop habits of recognition and to see strangers as kin, oftentimes by creating sites of communal identity where the sight of others, as our own, is affirmed. What makes the ethics of recalling others explicitly political is that it goes against the grain of the natural and by doing so becomes visible. In contrast, the ethics of remembering one’s own is implicitly political, for it has the luxury of appearing to be natural and hence invisible. As Ricoeur says with considerable irony, “it is always the other who stoops to ideology,” which is the “guardian of identity.”
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He is implying that those with the power to define themselves in relation to others have the privilege of believing that they themselves have neither identities nor ideologies, neither biases nor politics. These worldly matters are left to others, the ones stuck in the muck of their small concerns and their provincial territories, their bodies not inherently dark but rather darkened by the shadow cast by the tower in which the powerful reside. These powerful believe themselves to be impartial, unbiased, fair, objective, and universal, and do not like to be reminded that they are not, or that their power depends on creating and targeting others. So it is that when someone calls on her people to remember others, she identifies herself—she stands out—by committing a political act. Asking her own side to remember others, she risks being called a traitor. At best, those of her own side may call her a cosmopolitan, with the pejorative connotation that she may be a citizen of the world but not of her own nation.

Not coincidentally, the charge of treachery is often leveled most viciously at women, the ones who are supposed to bear within them both the future and the past of the nation, embodied in its children and its culture.
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Take, for example, the Vietnamese author Duong Thu Huong, war veteran and one time member of the Communist Party. Her disillusionment with the Communist Party in the years after its revolutionary victory shaped her fiction, beginning with
The Paradise of the Blind
. In this novel, she examined the notorious land reforms of the 1950s, when the party sought to redistribute land from landowners to peasants and encouraged peasants to denounce landowners. The excesses led to the execution of even minor landowners and innocent peasants, targeted by their fellow peasants and zealous cadres. Thousands died and Ho Chi Minh apologized.
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Huong’s denunciation of the party grew more strident and more contemporary in
Novel without a Name
, where she calls the party cadres of the postwar years “little yellow despots.”
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Their “blindness gave them extraordinary energy,”
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but the “herds of dreamy, militant sheep” that followed them deserved some blame.
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The novel is also notable for its evocation of Vietnam’s imperialist history, its long march south to escape Chinese influence and to occupy the lands of numerous tribes and nations, including Cambodians and Cham. The hero of her novel visits the land of the Cham and dreams of his ancestor who had fled from the “barbarians from the north” who “hunted you down. You bore arms against those who lived in the south. It was an unending circle of crimes … history is enmired in crime.”
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The party denounced her, censored her, and placed her under house arrest for committing the crime of remembering those whom the party considered to be others. Even worse, she remembered people of her own side as having committed crimes. But while the party considered her a traitor, Western publishers and readers considered her to be a dissident who spoke for justice, a heroic author who could not be contained by communism’s provincial ideology. Banned at home, her novels were published abroad, for the West likes to translate the enemies of its enemies.