Le Monde  Diplomatique

December 2007

Writing the future of a post-war nation
Anti-poets reinvent Vietnam 

By Jean-Claude Pomonti 

Heroism has always been part of Vietnam’s history since it fought for centuries for independence and unity. But more than two-thirds of all Vietnamese were born after the end of the last war in 1975, so past heroism is no longer a reference for young people. According to Doan Cam Thi, a literary critic who lives in Paris: “The belief in a dual emancipation – social Marxist-Leninist, and national through war – that lay at the core of officially-approved literature, has given way to a lack of ideals among post-war youth.” 

Former resistance fighters inside and outside the Communist Party worry about this. But this kind of vacuum can obscure the emergence of a more complex society; the official heroes and villains dichotomy has weakened over the years. Cam Thi adapted a quote from Marx to describe Vietnam as being “as bereft of heroes as events”. In a short story, Do Khiem, who divides his time between France, the United States and Vietnam, quotes Kieu, the tragic heroine of a 19th century Vietnamese novel: “Barely have I unravelled a skein than it forms into another knot.” But Do Khiem, whose works are appreciated in Vietnam’s young literary circles, used the quote to assert the contrary – that “no one is tying me down”. 

After the wars, a generation of talented writers devoted themselves to writing about the misery of battle and hard times after victory. Most were from the victorious north, and their leaders included Nguyen Huy Thiep, Bao Ninh, Duong Thu Huong and Pham Thi Hoai. Their view of the war and the resultant society dominated Vietnamese literature in the period of the Communist Party’s first reforms in 1986 and the opening of the country to the world. Some also wrote about the scars left by the brutal agrarian reforms of 1955-56 in the north, or later repression. 

From the 1990s Hanoi was at the heart of a literary renewal that resonated outside Vietnam because several works were banned but distributed clandestinely in large quantities. The emergence of a new generation of writers meant the end of socialist realist literature, hypocrisy and myth. There were upheavals, but not a revolution. Faced with investigative writing, government hacks could respond only through censorship, or rewriting history. This was already rearguard action even if the reading public was kept at a distance. 

Censorship is often imposed after the event; publishers have to consider their responsibilities before taking on a book in case it is withdrawn from circulation, as happened to The Story of the Year 2000 published by Thanh Nien (Youth). Its author, Bui Ngoc Tan, relates the harsh conditions under which he was detained 30 years ago during an anti-revisionist campaign. The authorities ordered his book to be destroyed just weeks after it went on sale. Yet in 2005 Chinatown, a novel by Thuan, a young French Vietnamese writer, was published in Vietnam and was a best-seller, although it deals with the sensitive issue of the humiliation of Vietnam’s Chinese community after the outbreak of the 1979 Sino-Vietnamese war. Previously the subject had been taboo. 

But this provides no clues for the future. The authors from the first reform period challenged the myth of official history and socialist realism with force and talent. But with the exception of the human rights activist Duong Thu Huong, they have less to say about the future. The Communist Party of Vietnam (CPV, “father of victory”) is attempting to revive its legitimacy by economic expansion, the struggle against “negative phenomena” (corruption and moral degradation) and a return to national, or historic, values. Replacing a worn-out “internationalist solidarity” with Confucius might reassure a population that has been fed empty slogans for so long it scarcely notices them. 

But people do have aspirations, and they are elsewhere. Internet cafés abound all over the country. Young people, often at a loose end, are discovering a world without borders. They travel via the web in search of different values. Newspapers organise popular chats with writers, including some from Vietnamese communities abroad. Frontiers are disappearing and the young claim that the horizontal is gaining over the vertical: their answers come from over the horizon, not from the authorities on high. 

“The government wants to open doors to young poets and writers but imposes limits. It wants us to follow tradition and write about war heroes, but we can’t, we didn’t live through that. We want to talk about sex,” said Lynh Barcadi, the pen name of a young poet. She is a member of a small group in Ho Chi Minh City called the Praying Mantises (after the insect that devours its male after mating). According to a Saigon art critic who admires their audacity: “Young people discuss taboos, the erosion of the class struggle, drugs, the decline of state education, and homosexuality.” Cam Thi points out their obvious commitment and describes their literature as “worthy of interest . . . They talk about their lives and preoccupations, their dreams and sufferings, but without blinding themselves to the problems in society. They describe an opaque world and plunge into the murky depths of the unconscious, and in doing so disconcert many readers.”

Ly Doi is spokesman for a group of “anti-poets” called Open Your Mouth (mo mieng) founded in 2000 in Saigon. In 2006, he published a short text on the internet: 

“I have feelings for vast spaces, not for tradition. 

I have feelings for my own time, not for others.

I have no principles or party, religion or ideology, 

No organisation – damn it, I belong to myself. 

I have feelings for primitive freedom and for my true face. 

I want to declare war on all things commercial: the museums and critics, art historians, aestheticians and anything called “cultural forces”. 

I am convinced that true art is yet to be born, for true freedom and true justice have not been established. 

Freedom is not yet born, nor is the masterpiece of liberty.” 

These young writers flirt with nihilism. They may be coarse but never vulgar. They use provocation well to make masks fall and let in fresh air. “Provocation in language is not so important. What is important is to use the real vernacular; the principal thing is honesty,” said Ly Doi. The anti-poets do not attempt to publish their texts formally; their “publisher”, Giay Yun (waste paper), distributes photocopies and CDs. They are over-age students and proud dropouts who write in the rude spoken language of the south. Their works are the literature of bui doi (life dust), and they see themselves as the voice of the working-class suburbs in which they grew up, although they have solid cultural and historical knowledge. 

They are attempting to think and write differently and are influenced by a “citizen of the world”, Tran Quoc Chanh, (1) enfant terrible of the Saigon literary scene and author of a poem “Fuck you, right-thinking people” which caused a fuss in the literary community. Perhaps they reflect youth that is trying to combat emptiness, boredom and anguish by other means than drugs, sex and money. “They just want to live and think differently from their predecessors,” said Cam Thi. “These aren’t kids on drugs who need to be put on the straight and narrow, and they aren’t after money.” 

CPV veterans realise that a party that is both player and referee is ambiguous and has no vision. It offers no alternative or dialogue; it has no real project. A Frenchman who knows Vietnam well described “the extraordinary void left in ideology, ideas, ethics and morals by the Vietnamese Marxist-capitalist new thinkers, bogged down in the system.” The void cannot be filled by resorting to tradition or extolling nationalism. That merely deepens the divide between the political authorities and a society grappling with a novel situation: for the first time since the 19th century, a unified and independent Vietnam has to learn how to cohabit with China and find its role in a globalised world. 

In a novel published in French in 2005, A nos vingt ans (Here’s to our twenties), Nguyen Huy Thiep describes a delinquent youth who is saved by returning to nature and tradition. The story was written as a result of a personal disappointment and the author gets into the skin, or tries to get into the skin, of an adolescent from a good family who sinks into drugs and gangs. He finds salvation after being dumped on an island in Halong Bay, where he is obliged to kick his habit before being rescued by fishermen who give him a taste for life again. News of the death of his father, a well-known writer, causes him to repent and everything returns to normal. 

In 2005, on the 30th anniversary of the end of the Vietnam war, Thiep wrote: “We are pursuing a materialistic, violent and hedonistic life to compensate for the loss of traditional values.” He added that “corruption is a curse that we cannot get rid of” and “embezzlement contaminates the spirit of our youth”. But the idea of a return to nature and traditional order, also advocated by the government, is utopian and has already been discarded by a new generation of writers with different concerns. 

Vietnam has started moving on after 30 years of war, a decade of blunders and another of hesitation. An American Vietnamese artist, Dinh Q Lê, said: “These people were fighting for 20 years. They had no idea how to run a country. So they move forward, they freak out, then they move forward again. But you also have in this society something that makes it distinct in southeast Asia: a drive to improve yourself, to make something of your life”.
(1) Nguiyễn Quốc Chánh. NQT