When you can no longer tell
if you’re liberating yourself through expression
or selling your oppression.41
This challenge can be leveled at any ethnic author in America. This author should be rightfully paranoid about being caught in so-called ethnic literature’s defining dilemma, which is to talk about only one thing, the one grief that can be possessed, worn, and hawked. While the literary industry sees the ability to tell one’s story with one’s own voice as a sign of humanity, it is also the mark of inhumanity, as both the ethnic author and the ethnic story become commodities, sold and sold out.
Can a writer do more than intuit the problems in having a voice and speaking of one’s victimization? Trinh T. Minh-ha shows us one way, gesturing at the importance of suspicion (toward authenticity and voice) and solidarity (between women, natives, and others). Linh Dinh and Bao Phi show us another, pointing toward the simultaneity of the human and inhuman. Some other writers who are not Vietnamese provide a third way, invoking Vietnam and sharing their grief and rage, which helps to overcome the oppressor’s divide-and-conquer strategy. Here James Baldwin speaks of the Black Panthers, the Viet Cong, and America:
Nothing more thoroughly reveals the actual intentions of this country, domestically and globally, than the ferocity of the repression, the storm of fire and blood which the Panthers have been forced to undergo merely for declaring themselves as men — men who want ‘land, bread, housing, education, clothing, justice, and peace.’ The Panthers thus became the native Vietcong, the ghetto became the village in which the Vietcong were hidden, and in the ensuing search and destroy operations, everyone in the village became suspect.42
Baldwin neither denies nor bemoans the histories of war and slavery that define the Vietnamese and African Americans in American eyes. He does not simply inhabit the history given to him as a black man. He connects those histories, bringing two different spaces together so that the exercise of American power over there becomes the logical extension of American power over here — the Third World within the First, and vice versa. Victimization is not a lonely experience but is shared, which is a point that Susan Sontag also makes when she criticizes how many victims privilege their suffering: “victims are interested in the representation of their own sufferings. But they want the suffering to be seen as unique.”43 Even more, “it is intolerable to have one’s own suffering twinned with anybody else’s.”44 Sontag and Baldwin agree that victimization must be seen as more than an isolated or unique experience. Suffering can become solidarity through political consciousness and simultaneous revolution, the only ways for the natives over there and over here to confront the global force of the American war machine. First the natives of a particular place must learn that they are not the only ones victimized, that there are others who share their grief; then they have to stop identifying themselves as only victims.
So it is that Baldwin insists that war occurs not only on foreign soil, waged by soldiers against the enemy or villagers, but also on American soil, carried out by the police against blacks. Oscar Zeta Acosta makes the same charge on behalf of Chicanos when he says that “We are the Viet Cong of America. Tooner Flats is Mylai.… The Poverty Program of Johnson, the Welfare of Roosevelt, Truman, Eisenhower and Kennedy, the New Deal and the Old Deal, the New Frontier as well as Nixon’s American Revolution … these are further embellishments of the government’s pacification program.”45 To be poor and black or Chicano was to suffer from a low-intensity counterinsurgency that occasionally erupted into all-out assault, as happened to the Panthers, who the state needed to put down because the Panthers had ceased to see themselves as only being victims and began to see themselves as revolutionaries. Writer Junot Díaz agrees that war, and the interpenetration of foreign wars and domestic tragedies, is central to American life:
Where in coñazo do you think the so-called Curse of the Kennedys comes from? How about Vietnam? Why to think the greatest power in the world lost its first war to a Third World country like Vietnam? It might interest you that just as the U.S. was ramping up its involvement in Vietnam, LBJ launched an illegal invasion of the Dominican Republic (April 28, 1965). (Santo Domingo was Iraq before Iraq was Iraq). A smashing military success for the U.S., and many of the same units and intelligence teams that took part in the ‘democratization’ of Santo Domingo were immediately shipped off to Saigon.46
In this footnote from his novel The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, Díaz tells us that Americans have a bad habit of invading other countries. American memory may forget the invasion of his country, but that should not prevent us from seeing that the invasion of Vietnam (as some Vietnamese see it) was not an aberration. At least the Vietnam War has a name, an identity; confronted with how the invasion of the Dominican Republic has no proper name, Díaz, like all artists who look at war, engages in memorialization. He tells his readers that his Dominican characters live on American soil because war brought them here, the human blowback of American intervention. When we remember the wars that forced people to flee, oftentimes into the embrace of their colonizer or invader, then we can see that the immigrant story, staple of American culture, must actually be understood, in many cases, as a war story.
What the immigrant story supposedly registers is the difficult but ultimately rewarding struggle to become American, a transformation from wretchedness to righteousness, from victimization to voice. The mythical power of the immigrant story intoxicates. Even when the immigrant speaks explicitly of war as the origin of their Americanization, like Díaz and many others, many Americans hear them as speaking about the travails of being a new American and the horrors of the Old World. While not all war stories involve immigrants, and while war stories do not scar all immigrants, a vast territory exists where war story and immigrant story overlap. Segregating immigrant story from war story cools the seething histories of strangers who carry troubling memories of American wars, creating in their place narratives filled with damage, wound, and identity. Readers and writers often imagine damage, wound, and identity as the results of cultural conflict, being torn between two worlds, rather than what they often are, the calamitous consequences of war, colonization, and exploitation, conducted by foreign forces and domestic tyrants. The conventional immigrant story warms the heart, but the story of the immigrant as the collateral damage of American warfare warrants anger as much as tears.