If the precondition for just forgetting is just memory, perhaps it is an impossible forgetting. When, exactly, will we have a time of ethical awareness of our inhumanity, where the industries of memory are available to all, where the artistic will to claim the imagination is norm rather than exception? This is utopian. Yet, at one point, the human imagination had difficulty thinking beyond the light cast by the fire, then of the distance that the tribe could walk, then the walls of the city-state. So why can we not imagine a future where nations at war seem absurd? Novelist Doris Lessing puts it this way:
I’ve lived through Hitler, ranting and raving; Mussolini too; the Soviet Union, which we thought would last for all time; the British Empire, which seemed impregnable; the color bar in Rhodesia and elsewhere; the heyday of European empires. It was inconceivable to think these would disappear. They seemed permanent. Now not one of them remains — and I think that is a recipe for optimism.13
The impossible might yet be possible at some point in the future, which is again where art, among other agents, plays a guiding role. Sometimes art does so by imagining utopia, or, through negative lessons, dystopia. Sometimes it does so by offering us models for how to be more human or more ethical in our behavior to one another, or by demanding that we see how inhuman and unethical we can be. And sometimes art, simply by being art, by calling us into a relationship with it, is the template for reflective, contemplative, meditative thinking and feeling that might allow us to become citizens of the imagination. This is an individual, mysterious realm where art and imagination offer some hope and salve to the harsh histories of war, violence, bloodshed, hatred, and terror that continue to affect us. But while art can provoke an ethical awareness of our inhumanity that is necessary for just memory, it cannot achieve just memory alone, not while the industries of memory remain unequal.
Still, art’s potential for the individual points toward one way that solace can be achieved during times of unjust memory and unjust forgetting, during our times today. That solace is also found in forgiveness of the most genuine kind, what the philosopher Jacques Derrida called “pure” forgiveness, an “exceptional” and “extraordinary” forgiveness.14 For Derrida, pure forgiveness is distinct from the kinds of forgiveness tainted by political, legal, or economic considerations, found in acts of amnesty, excuse, regret, reparation, apology, therapy, and so on.15 Pure forgiveness arises from the paradox of forgiving the unforgivable. All other forms of forgiveness are conditional — I will forgive, if you give me something. The act of forgiving is compromised, as it is between Vietnam and America. Vietnam will forgive America, so long as America invests in it and offers protection against China. America will forgive Vietnam, so long as Vietnam allows itself to be invested in and permits the use of its territory — land, sea, or air — for America’s fight against China. Americans who return to Vietnam and feel wonderstruck by how the Vietnamese seem to forgive them do not understand that such forgiveness is conditional. While the Vietnamese surely extend some generosity of spirit to Americans, an undertone of profit exists, for Americans are walking wallets. Such forgiveness is also made possible by the deeper animosity the Vietnamese at home hold against the Vietnamese overseas, whose returns to the homeland can be ambivalent or even fraught. And the reconciliation between the Vietnamese and their French or American invaders must be measured against the hostility the Vietnamese hold against the Chinese. The Vietnamese and the Chinese have their own version of the Forever War, which began when China colonized Vietnam for a thousand years. Neither the Chinese nor the Vietnamese have forgotten that history of conflict, which is why they still repeat it.
Faced with how individuals and states compromise, abuse, and exploit forgiveness and reconciliation, its related term, Derrida argues that forgiveness “is not, it should not be, normal.”16 Rather, “forgiveness must announce itself as impossibility itself,” something not dependent on the repentance of the person or entity one might forgive.17 I must admit that on first encountering Derrida’s notion of forgiveness, I struggled with it, for it was, in his own words, “excessive, hyperbolic, mad.”18 If something is unforgivable, how can it be forgiven? Mass bombing, massacres, death camps, genocide, not to speak of the loss of an individual life — can any of these be forgiven? Not having experienced any of these myself, I cannot say. What I lost was a homeland that I sometimes do not even enjoy visiting; a relationship with an adopted, left-behind sister whom I have seen once in forty years; perhaps a happier childhood; and perhaps happier, healthier parents. But then again, if the war had not been fought and I had not lost these things, I would not be writing these words. I might not be a writer at all to whom the question of forgiveness never occurred until I wrote this paragraph. Now I think, yes, I can forgive, in the abstract, America and Vietnam — in all their factions and variations — for what they have done in the past. But I cannot forgive them for what they do in the present because the present is not yet finished. The present, perhaps, is always unforgivable.
What about pragmatic moments of forgiveness that allow things such as reparations, returns, or recognitions to happen? Are they inconsequential? In the case of my war, even these pragmatic acts are rare. The United States pays a pittance to remove the tons of unexploded ordnance that it dropped in Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia. It refuses to admit that Agent Orange damaged and damages human beings and the land in Southeast Asia. Many Southeast Asian exiles and refugees continue to hate their communist enemies, do not recognize the communist government, and are afraid or unwilling to return. The communists in Vietnam and Laos have never apologized for reeducation camps and the persecution of people who turned into refugees. The Cambodian government is reluctant to acknowledge the widespread complicity of many people, including its own politicians and leaders, in the Khmer Rouge. A list of sensible things that people and governments could do to admit to the errors and horrors of the past include: truth and reconciliation commissions to encourage face to face dialogue between enemies; trials of war criminals, or at least offers of amnesty which acknowledge that certain people committed criminal acts; returning the homes and property of refugees, which may now be owned by other historical victims; erecting memorials to dead refugees and dead soldiers of the other side; constructing a curriculum that acknowledges all sides; allowing a civil society that can dissent and discuss the past freely; and staging dramas of genuine and mutual apology, instead of the more typical dramas of grief and resentment. Any of these would be enormously difficult but would help to heal the wounds of the past and encourage people and governments to move forward without denying the past.
Instead, we have well-intentioned if flawed efforts such as the United Nations — sponsored Extraordinary Chambers of the Courts of Cambodia, its mandate to prosecute only five high-ranking individuals for the crimes of the Khmer Rouge. The trial has gone on for years and will go on for years, at least until all the aging defendants are dead, or, in the case of one, demented and beyond prosecution. This is literally political theater, one with the duration of a hit Broadway musical and much more expensive to produce. In a country where the average salary is hundreds of dollars per year, the cost of the trials runs into the tens of millions of dollars. In order to visit this theater outside of Phnom Penh, one must make reservations and arrive early. No pictures are allowed, as is the case with any theater. On the morning I visited, high school students occupied most of the seats. This drama was pedagogical, for the Cambodian people receive little education in regard to the genocide. While the court will mete out some kind of justice, this is also a show meant to assure Cambodians that their government is addressing the past, even when its efforts are weak. And it is a show meant to assure the world that the United Nations carries out its mission of staunching the bleeding of the world’s injuries, even when it cannot do so.