Organizer and Chair: Hue-Tam Ho Tai, Harvard University
Chair: Rubie S. Watson, Harvard University
Discussant: Marilyn B. Young, New York University
The experience of war and revolution remains vivid in Vietnamese collective memory and still shapes the way history is written. But whose vision of war and revolution should prevail? The leadership's vision that they were part of a long tradition of heroic resistance against foreign domination is enshrined in a commemorative project which draws on a wide array of visual, verbal and performative instruments. But, on both sides of the 17th parallel, it is being contested, subverted or merely circumvented.
Local people shun commemorative structures that do not retail their experience. Official rites for the war dead are found inadequate on a personal level. In some cases, the symbols are redeployed; terms used to construct the master narrative are inverted. Familiar symbols used to celebrate heroic sacrifices are reinterpreted as emblems of senseless suffering. The official project also suffers from the collision between political and economic aims. Thus, the lucrative transformation of war sites into tourists sights is having a profound impact on their commemorative power. Meanwhile, young Vietnamese are intent on forgetting.
In examining how war and revolution are represented, remembered or forgotten by different actors, the papers in this panel shed light on the tensions between past and present, official history and private memory in postwar Vietnam.
Reading Revolutionary Prison Memoirs
Peter Zinoman, University of California, Berkeley
On May 1, 1960, in a speech celebrating the 30th anniversary of the founding of the Vietnamese Communist Party, Ho Chi Minh declared that the thirty-one current members of the VCP's Central Committee had spent a cumulative total of 222 years in French colonial prisons. Available evidence does support Ho's general point that imprisonment in colonial jails was an experience shared by most of the VCP's top leaders. Ho's speech signalled the start of a campaign to highlight the prison credentials of the VCP's founding fathers. The campaign's main feature involved the creation of a new literary genre: "revolutionary memoirs" produced by both leading and ordinary members of the VCP. A striking proportion of these memoirs relate tales of political imprisonment and of prison resistance by communist revolutionaries.
But the picture of penal imprisonment under French colonialism painted in these memoirs is partial and misleading. Not only does the genre impose artificial uniformity on the diverse experience of political prisoners, but it also conceals, distorts or belittles the experience of the non-political prisoners who constituted the majority of the penal population.
The production and dissemination of these revolutionary memoirs since l954 provides insight into attempts by VCP leaders to construct a usable image of themselves and their history. My paper attempts to explain why imprisonment became an integral component in the collective public identity of the VCP leadership and to explore the tensions generated through the promotion of this particular experience.
Framing the National Spirit: Viewing and Reviewing Painting Under the Revolution
Nora A. Taylor, CIEE, Hanoi
Beginning in the 1940s, painters were hired to make propaganda posters and encouraged to produce paintings that embodied the "national spirit." After Doi Moi, art critics began reviewing the art from the 1940s to the 1980s and selected three painters as "Masters of Vietnamese Contemporary Art." Unlike other artists in their generation, the chosen three, Bui Xuan Phai, Nguyen Sang and Nguyen Tu Nghiem, had not taken part in the revolutionary struggle, or participated in propaganda painting campaigns. They were not admitted to the National Artists Association until late in their careers because their work did not contain what was considered to be the "national spirit." Ironically, since his death in 1988, Phai, famous for his paintings of desolate Hanoi streets, has become revered as a portrayer of the spirit of the people.
This paper will argue that, although artists who had previously been rejected by the Artists Association are finally receiving recognition, their current prestige is based on criteria not very different from those used by the Association earlier; but the content of the criteria has changed. During the revolution, "national spirit" was defined as heroism, optimism and solidarity. After the revolution, it became collective despair, sadness and loss. The revisions in art history echo the changing views on revolution and war elsewhere in Vietnamese public discourse. The hero is now the one who suffered the most, the true artist the one who painted what he wished in spite of restrictions.
"The Motherland Remembers Your Sacrifice": Commemorating the War Dead
in North Viet Nam
Shaun Kingsley Malarney, International Christian University
The outbreak of the American War in Viet Nam presented a fundamental challenge to the leadership of the Democratic Republic of Viet Nam. As North Vietnamese soldiers died in increasing numbers, ways had to be found so that war death did not seem like meaningless annihilation. The main response to this need at the village level was the creation of an innovative funeral rite held by state officials to commemorate fallen soldiers. Based on field research carried out in northern Viet Nam, this paper will explore the nature of this rite and the local response to it. As will be discussed, official rites, which drew heavily on local practices, sought to publicly express the state's gratitude to the families of those who had given their lives while simultaneously integrating the deceased into Viet Nam's heroic tradition of sacrificing one's life for the good of the country. Although official rites were appreciated by those who lost loved ones, their message was largely political and did not address local concerns about the ultimate fate of a dead soul, particularly one in which the body was mutilated or not present for burial. To this end, a different set of innovative family rites, which also drew on local practices, was created to help put the dead souls to rest. The paper will therefore argue that although state declarations of the nobility of war death were compelling, they were ultimately inadequate for resolving the fundamental existential problems that war death created.
Museum-Shrine: Revolution and its Tutelary Spirit in My Hoa Hung Hamlet
Christoph Giebel, Cornell University
In 1988, the Commemorative Area for Ton Duc Thang was inaugurated in Ton's village of My Hoa Hung in An Giang Province, in time for the 100th anniversary of this revolutionary hero and second president of the DRV. The site consists of Ton's childhood home-restored and made into a shrine-and a newly constructed exhibition hall in the vicinity which mostly duplicates the contents of the Ton Duc Thang exhibit in the An Giang Provincial Museum in nearby Long Xuyen.
Unlike my previous, more general investigation into forms and functions of state-sponsored history museums in contemporary Vietnam, my focus in this paper will be on just this one commemorative area and its place in the historical, political, and especially cultural landscapes of Vietnam. While the site's symbolic, ideological and cultural messages are manifold, the paper will be primarily concerned with the ways in which revolutionary history becomes increasingly localized in the late socialist era, consciously roots itself in traditional practices and regional identities, and liberally quotes from the pre-modern Vietnamese cultural repertoire. Not unlike the heroes of the 14th-century compilation of Vietnamese protective spirits-the Viet Dien U Linh Tap-the shrine of Ton Duc Thang can be seen as mediating between "power" and "people" in their symbiotic relationship, especially in times of crisis, between political authority and its ideal image, and between history and memory