Some might regard this as an overstatement, since writing back against racism, empire, and war, as Ondaatje does, takes place not on the universal scale but on the intimate scale of the individual artist and work. Scarry points to the inadequacy of individual works of art to enact significant change, with rare exceptions such as Uncle Tom’s Cabin or E. M. Forster’s A Passage to India. Many people likely share Scarry’s view about art, although with a less generous spirit. Those suspicious people who do not read literature or look at art may be skeptical about their purpose or use, questions not normally directed toward law, business, or government. But does the average lawyer or businessperson or bureaucrat make more difference, inflict more damage, or do more good than the average writer or artist? The average writer and artist, and the average book and work of art, need to be measured against their equivalents: average people in average jobs. Individual works of art should not be measured against daunting standards of making a universal difference or changing the world. Against such high standards, most of us count as failures, not just the average work of art or the average obscure writer. So compare the midlist novelist to the vice president of a regional bank; compare Shakespeare to Bill Gates; compare the novel to the computer; compare cosmopolitan education to war. Only with the appropriate comparisons can we say whether art, and the cosmopolitan impulse to see art as a means to peace, makes a difference.42
Kingston goes on to say that “peace has to be supposed, imagined, divined, dreamed.”43 This kind of dreaming will not happen without cosmopolitanism and compassion and their persistent, irritating reminder that waging war is easier than fighting for peace. If peace begins with the individual, it is realized collectively with peace movements, for peace is not simply a matter of praying or hoping, although they, like dreaming, do not hurt. Instead, peace happens through confronting the war machine and taking over the industries that make it possible, which include the industries of memory. It is no surprise, then, that peace seems so much harder to achieve than war, which offers us an immediate profit. Exploiting our fear and our greed, the cynical supporters of war can convert even powerful memory to weaponized memory. This is the kind that encourages patriotism, nationalism, and the heroic sacrifice of soldiers for the country. The strength of weaponized memory is why appeals from the high ground alone cannot stop war or realize peace. Calls to our humanity have often turned into justifications for war. This is why a need remains for memory that forces us to look at our inhumanity, which we might wish to deny. Recognizing our inhumanity, we begin remaking our own identity so that it does not belong to the war machine, which tells us that we are always and only human, and our enemies less so.
Just Forgetting
WE MUST REMEMBER in order to live, but we must also forget. Too much remembering and too much forgetting are both fatal, certainly to ourselves, perhaps to others. This is why demands to always remember and never forget eventually face calls to reconcile and forgive. The cycle works in reverse as well, when we respond to amnesia by calling for history. But when can we forget? As Paul Ricoeur argues, there are unjust and just ways of forgetting, as there are unjust and just ways of remembering. Unjust ways of forgetting are much more common than just ones. They involve leaving behind a past that we have not dealt with in adequate ways. We ignore that past, we pretend it did not exist, or we write its history to serve a prejudicial agenda. Sometimes we conduct these actions under the guise of reconciliation, as when former enemies agree on treaties that allow them to be friends, without addressing the history of violence that binds them. In regard to my war, all of these modes of unjust forgetting have happened or are happening.
Whether we are winners or losers when it comes to war, the challenge of forgetting is inextricably tied to the question of forgiving. Winners may find it somewhat easier to be magnanimous and forgiving, while losers are perhaps easier to forgive, given their suffering. But most types of forgiveness are compromised, and a just forgetting will not happen unless we meet the conditions of just memory or until we extend genuine forgiveness. Forgetting can be difficult when both war’s winners and losers attempt to portray themselves virtuously, as they usually do. They see themselves as victims, never victimizers. Defeat aggravates this sentiment, as is the case in the community in which I was raised, the Vietnamese refugees in America who lost everything except their memories. They have valid reasons to remember their past, but they also tend to forget, particularly in public commemoration, the venality of the southern Vietnamese regime, the violence committed by their own soldiers — who happen to be their fathers, brothers, and sons — and how their sentiments may be viewed from elsewhere. Hence the bracing quality of Nguyen Huy Thiep’s short story, “Khong Khoc O California,” or “Don’t Cry in California.” The story’s narrator writes from Vietnam to his brethren in exile and says, “Vietnamese people, don’t cry in California,” which is “perhaps the most beautiful place on earth.”1 He also calls out to all the outposts of Vietnamese exile: Louisiana, the thirteenth district of Paris, Berlin, Sidney, and Tokyo. He enjoins the diaspora to “Remember me, remember your homeland,” “the place you long to see.”2 The narrator, something of a mess after his lover abandoned him for California, believes these Vietnamese exiles and refugees, steeping in their melancholy, loss, and rage, should recognize what they have gained as much as what they have lost. While they might justify crying for themselves, perhaps they would stop crying if they recognized others, namely their own people who had stayed in the land that they left behind. Otherwise, they suffer the fate of all exiles, who, to borrow from Baudelaire, are “relentlessly gnawed by longing.”
One way to overcome one’s own grief and to haul oneself out of the morass of memory is to remember others, to see oneself in relationship to others, and to look at oneself with detachment. Or, as spiritual guide Thich Nhat Hanh puts it, “People have a hard time letting go of their suffering. Out of a fear of the unknown, they prefer suffering that is familiar.”3 In not so spiritual a fashion, Thiep’s narrator struggles to see his own suffering in relation to the suffering of others. Recognizing that he is a “bum” with “decaying teeth” who “deals heroin,” he reaches out to his lost love and all those like her in exile. The story reaches the level of allegory when the narrator comes to stand in for Vietnam, describing himself as afflicted with “inflation,” someone “retarded” and “backwards.” This story of two lovers lost is really a tragic love story of abandonment and misunderstanding between homeland and diaspora. They are each stuck in the past, struggling to move forward and trying to forgive one another. As always, remembering and forgetting are in a seesaw relationship, never, perhaps, to achieve equilibrium.