The writer who is marked as ethnic or racial, who is categorized and looked down on for engaging in “identity politics,” must not simply accept or deny that pejorative. To do so is to be forced into accepting the impossible choice that a dominant society built on whiteness gives to its minorities: be a victim or have a voice, accept one’s lesser identity or strive to have no identity. To have no identity at all is the privilege of whiteness, which is the identity that pretends not to have an identity, that denies how it is tied to capitalism, to race, and to war. Inasmuch as victimization and voice are the particular and inevitable forms of alienation for minorities, so is whiteness the form of alienation for white people. Victimization and voice become the markers of difference and identity for minorities, while whiteness becomes unmarked alienation, manifest in the supposedly universal experiences of loneliness, divorce, ennui, and anomie, all of which are the cancerous costs of living in a capitalist society whose profits also accrue to whiteness. If it is true that identity politics is navel-gazing, then so is the whiteness of white people and the self-absorption of those in power. This whiteness and this power remains unchallenged by the kind of minority identity politics that does not call out the identity politics of whites or speak truth to the power of the war machine. Minorities must dissent from the terms that a regime of whiteness offers. They must call forth anger and rage, demand solidarity and revolution, critique whiteness, domination, power, and all the faces of the war machine. Southeast Asians must insist that the war that defines them in America is not only their war, but a war made by white people, a war that is not an aberration but a manifestation of a war machine that would prefer refugees to think of their stories as immigrant stories.
Even as a child, I always knew, however dimly, that the stories of my parents were not just immigrant stories but war stories. Some soldiers suffered more than my parents did, but my parents suffered more than many soldiers who served at the rear. These rear-echelon soldiers were never shot at or actually shot, threatened with a grenade, forced to flee, losing nearly everything, separated from their loved ones for decades, as happened to my parents and so many other refugees and civilians. Their stories needed to be told, but I always hesitated about telling them. “Terrible, terrible things,” my mother said, having told me some things, refusing to tell me others. “Haven’t you said enough?” my father said to her. I always wondered what was passed over in silence. I want to know and I also do not want to know, but the absent presence of the secret is enough, the secret that is theirs, not mine. Neither do I know the worlds evoked in those black-and-white photographs that arrived in the mail and sat on the mantel of my childhood home. These are the worlds where victims can be victimizers, where ghosts can be guilty, and where survivors can be inhuman. I could steal the stories of those victims, ghosts, and survivors, or make them up. But speaking for others is a simple and insufficient notion. Voice and humanity and victimization are not enough to fully comprehend what happened back then, over there. The aporia of the past always remains, the absence that I can neither know nor share, the silence that resists my speech, the ghosts who refuse resurrection. I would risk the substitute’s fate if I told only the part of the ghost’s story that humanizes its inhumanity. Ghosts are both inhuman and human and their appearance tells us that we are, too. To understand our fate and theirs, we must do more than tell ghost stories. We must also tell the war stories that made ghosts and made us ghosts, the war stories that brought us here.
8. On True War Stories
WHAT IS A WAR STORY, AND WHAT makes a good one? The question concerns both the content of a war story and how it is told, the former easier to address than the latter. Both comprise what we think of as aesthetics, or the problem of beauty and its interpretation, which is rendered even more challenging when considered in relation to war. On the one hand, the artist must convey both war’s seductions, the beauty to be found in parades, uniforms, medals, explosions, and glory, all the makeup painted on the face of nationalism, which is one of the primary justifications for war in our day. On the other hand, the artist must also address the evisceration of cities, bodies, and ideals, the waste left behind in war’s wake. Art’s relationship to war is not unique, just extreme, for even the most mundane aspects of life are marked by the simultaneity of beauty and horror, where the intimacies of love and betrayal are observed at close range. To do justice to both the beauty and the horror of war is difficult at the level of both content and form, and yet necessary. It is easier to retreat to the comfort of addressing the content of war stories, and yet if one speaks of doing justice in remembering war, one might also agree that such justice is found in the form of the artwork as well.
To begin with content, many people in many places think of soldiers and shooting when they think of war stories, but that is too narrow a definition. “Good” war stories that pump us up, get the blood going, that tell the “truth” about war through spectacular battles and sacrificial soldiers, also affirm the necessity of war. This limited way of thinking about war stories is one of the reasons why antiwar movies are often not actually against war. They continually place at their center the soldier, and her or his validation, as hero or as antihero, persuades even some reluctant viewers to be resigned to war. They submit to the passive-aggressive demand to “support our troops” if they oppose the war, for what ingrate would not affirm these patriots? But in providing solace to the soldier, we give license to the politicians, the generals, and the weapons-makers to continue their deceptive and cynical rhetoric of supporting the troops. This rhetoric is deceptive because what it really permits is continual war-making. It is cynical because the troops often are not supported when they come home, unprotected or inadequately protected from depression, trauma, homelessness, illness, or suicide. A true war story should tell not only of the soldier but also what happened to her or him after war’s end. A true war story should also tell of the civilian, the refugee, the enemy, and, most importantly, the war machine that encompasses them all. But when war stories deal with the mundane aspects of war, some may see them as “boring” or simply not even about “war.” These conventional perceptions of war stories blind us to war’s extensive nature, for these perceptions divide the heroic soldiers who seem to be the primary agents of war from the citizens who actually make war happen and who suffer its consequences.
Exposing the war machine fundamentally challenges these identities of soldiers, citizens, and wars. This kind of war story acknowledges how war exercises the entire body politic, the squeezing of the trigger hardly possible if the rest of the body was not involved, all of its organs and parts working in conjunction with mind, memory, imagination, and fantasy. Maxine Hong Kingston renders vividly the reality that the soldier cannot fight without the support of the entire nation in her story “The Brother in Vietnam,” from her book China Men:
Whenever we ate a candy bar, when we drank grape juice, bought bread (ITT makes Wonder bread), wrapped food in plastic, made a phone call, put money in the bank, cleaned the oven, washed with soap, turned on the electricity, refrigerated food, cooked it, ran a computer, drove a car, rode an airplane, sprayed with insecticide, we were supporting the corporations that made tanks and bombers, napalm, defoliants, and bombs. For the carpet bombing.1
From carpets to carpet bombing, war is woven into society’s fabric. It is almost impossible for a citizen not to be complicit, not to find war underfoot at home or hidden behind the curtains, as artist Martha Rosler showed in her photomontage of an American housewife pulling back the drapes to reveal the war happening right outside her window, the one that she sees and yet refuses to see while she vacuums her curtains. Thinking of war as an isolated action carried out by soldiers transforms the soldier into the face and body of war, when in truth he is only its appendage. If we do not recognize the reality of war, we are as blind to it as the housewife.