The response to unjust, repetitive memory is not to cease remembering an event that has been chewed over relentlessly, but to reconsider how we remember that event, who controls the industries of memory, and who abuses memory. A project of just memory indicates two ways of dealing with the problem of excessive memories. The passive route is to recognize that time and mortality offer a solution, for witnesses inevitably pass on. Their hardened memories turn to a handful of dust, fulfilling Nietzsche’s claim that “without forgetting, it is quite impossible to live at all.”26 The other route to fulfilling his claim is active, through the struggle to ethically remember conflicted events. Acts of the imagination, the creation of memory works, and the entire artistic enterprise are crucial to this kind of just memory, but just memory can never be fulfilled solely through them. Art and ethical work are never enough to effect change without power. Just memory is only possible when the weak, the poor, the marginalized, the different, and the demonized, or their advocates, can influence or even seize the industries of memory. This struggle for what Ricoeur calls an enlightened forgetting, which leads the way to reconciliation and forgiveness, can only be done through an ethical memory that recalls one’s own and others.27
This ethical practice inevitably questions identities, for if remembering one’s own affirms deeply held notions of identity, remembering others challenges those notions. In so far as this work of just memory is done about war, it also challenges war’s identity. If we no longer accept the identities of our enemies as provided by the authorities, we might find it difficult to accept the identities of the wars those same authorities give us. Negotiating between remembering one’s own and remembering others does not mean that competing memories can be reconciled, only that submitting to only one ethical way of memory, at the exclusion of the other, will never suffice. Still, even a just memory which uses both these ethical approaches will not necessarily make us feel better about ourselves or reconciled with our deeds, our omissions, or our enemies. While just memory might lead to an enlightened forgetting of the horrors and conflicts of the past, it can also lead to a tragic awareness of what is irreconcilable within ourselves and within those near and dear to us. When it comes to war, ethical memory illuminates how war neither emerges from alien territory nor is fought by monsters. War grows on intimate soil, nurtured by friends and neighbors, fought by sons, daughters, wives, and fathers. Our ambivalence about war’s identity simply expresses ambivalence about our own identities, which are collectively inseparable from the wars our nations have fought. These are the wars for which we have paid, from which we have benefitted, by which we are traumatized. Whatever may be noble and heroic in war is found in us, and whatever is evil and horrific in war is also found in us.
When it comes to war, the basic dialectic of memory and amnesia is thus not only about remembering and forgetting certain events or people. The basic dialectic of memory and amnesia is instead more fundamentally about remembering our humanity and forgetting our inhumanity, while conversely remembering the inhumanity of others and forgetting their humanity. A just memory demands instead a final step in the dialectics of ethical memory — not just the movement between an ethics of remembering one’s own and remembering others, but also a shift toward an ethics of recognition, of seeing and remembering how the inhuman inhabits the human. Any project of the humanities, such as this one, should thus also be a project of the inhumanities, of how civilizations are built on forgotten barbarism toward others, of how the heart of darkness beats within. No wonder, then, that for Jorge Luis Borges, remembering is a ghostly verb.28 Memory is haunted, not just by ghostly others but by the horrors we have done, seen, and condoned, or by the unspeakable things from which we have profited. The troubling weight of the past is especially evident when we speak of war and our limited ability to recall it. Haunted and haunting, human and inhuman, war remains with us and within us, impossible to forget but difficult to remember.
/ ETHICS /
1. On Remembering One’s Own
DRIVE ALONG THE HIGHWAYS of Vietnam for any extended distance and you may notice, if you are looking for them, the cemeteries abutting the roads. Marking each one is an obelisk, a monument, or a sculpture, usually of a trio of heroes, sometimes including a heroine, tall enough to be visible from a distance. Draw closer and you will see a stone stela, engraved with the names of the dead. Every town and village has its own necropolis, devoted to the martyrs who died in the twentieth-century wars to unify and liberate the country. These burial grounds exist in America, too, and perhaps if I drove its freeways and thoroughfares looking for them, I would see them and think that America was preoccupied with its sacrificed warriors. This seemed the case in Vietnam, but possibly only because I had tasked myself with looking for these cities of the dead, traveling to find them by motorbike, bus, train, and private car. These cemeteries impact the geography in a way that would not be possible in the United States, for while the country is smaller than California and larger than New Mexico, there were more than a million dead to account for, if you counted only those who fought for the winning side. These dead victors inhabited every neighborhood, their resting places constituting the most visible and brooding reminders in this country of the ethics of remembering one’s own.
Among these graveyards, the most spectacular is the Truong Son Martyrs Cemetery. I think of it as the capital of the dead, a place where over fifty thousand lay interred, nearly the same number as those American dead commemorated in Washington, DC, at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial. This martyrs cemetery is found outside the provincial town of Dong Ha in the province of Quang Tri, its most prominent feature a gigantic white statue of Le Duan, the man who had taken the leadership of the Communist Party as Ho Chi Minh’s health and influence declined. Some fifty meters tall, the statue towers over a parade ground in the city center, as does a similar statue of Ho Chi Minh in the northern city of Vinh, near his birthplace. Perhaps to the locals these statues inspire awe, as they seem designed to do. To me and perhaps to other outsiders, their grandiosity seems so inconsistent with communist principles that they are absurd. But in the land of democracy and equality for all there broods a massive Lincoln on his throne, eyes fixed on the Washington monument’s white, phallic spire. Regardless of ideology, something in humanity seems to require towering heroes and monuments, as well as the more horizontal affirmations of the masses. Quang Tri, the province where Le Duan was born and the scene of terrible bombardment and warfare, offers those more democratic commemorations. They assume the form of cemeteries for tens of thousands of the war dead, regimented in death as in life. Once they stood tall; now they lay supine.