Stephen Clingman, Chair of the Troy Committee, introduced the lecture, which began at 4:30 in the Student Union Ballroom.  According to the UMass English Department website, the Troy Lecture honors Frederick S. (Barney) Troy, who was a Professor of English, an Honorary Professor of the University, and a former UMass trustee.  I can agree that this lecture is the “most important event of the year for the English Department,” as it focuses on literature, culture, and civic responsibility.

Viet Thanh Nguyen, writer and scholar, 2016 Pulitzer Prize winner, 2017 Guggenheim Fellow, and 2017 MacArthur Fellow, was chosen as this year’s lecturer.  His debut novel The Sympathizer appeared on thirty “Best Books of the Year” lists, but he is not a novice writer; in fact, his recent success follows years of toil in the groves of academe.  Nguyen is the author of Race and Resistance: Literature and Politics in Asian America (2002) as well as The Refugees, a best-selling recent collection of short stories.  Nothing Ever Dies: Vietnam and the Memory of War was a finalist for the National Book Award in non-fiction in 2016.  His is a critical voice in Asian-American Studies and exemplifies the heterogeneity we celebrate here at UMass.

Nguyen is himself a refugee; during his first decade in America, beginning in 1975, he and his family lived in San Jose, California.  It was not easy — he clearly remembers a sign in a grocery store across the street from his parents’ business that read, “Another American driven out of business by the Vietnamese.”  He regards himself as emotionally damaged by these experiences, but they led to his eventually becoming a writer.  As he grew older, he began making connections between war and memory.

In The Sympathizer, the protagonist flees to the United States, along with the other South Vietnamese lucky enough, or wealthy enough, to escape after Saigon fell to the NVA in 1975.  However, the protagonist remains loyal to the Communist regime, and his mission in America is to spy on his fellow refugees and report back to Vietnam.

Nguyen noted that in the refugee community, the war did not end when the guns fell silent.  In her novel Beloved, Toni Morrison uses the word “rememory”; for her characters, the Civil War was rememory.  Nguyen played with this concept and invented his own word, “disremembering,” with its echoes of both memory and dismemberment, to describe what was happening to the Vietnamese refugees.  He noted that Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man was also a strong influence on his novel.  Ellison understands this essential truth about all minorities: to the majority culture, they are either invisible or hypervisible as “the other.”

Another formative experience from Nguyen’s teenage years was seeing the movie Apocalypse Now; when he watched Americans kill Vietnamese civilians, he realized that the Vietnamese were not “unseen” — they were seen, but seen through.  For example, Americans know by heart the number of their own who were killed:  58,000 — but the 3 million Vietnamese dead are never talked about, nor the hundreds of thousands of dead Laotians and Cambodians.  [The 3.4 million casualty figure for the duration of the 20-year conflict was released by the Vietnamese government and is an estimate; casualty figures vary widely and remain disputed. -B]

When Nguyen began to write, he felt he had to write about refugees.  The Vietnamese, he says, are a haunted people; to them, ghosts are real.  Americans are also haunted by the Vietnam War, but of course rather differently.  For the United States, the War had some dramatic social and economic consequences: our current volunteer Army, our use of drone strikes, as examples, are direct consequences of us not wanting to fight another war like the Vietnam War.

“All wars are fought twice,” Nguyen said, “the second time in memory.”  A writer engages with war as it’s being fought the second time.  In thinking about these issues, Nguyen realized there are three dominant models of the ethics of memory:

First, we remember our own people, which translates into “We are human; the other is not.”   This is a normal human reaction — no one wants to be forgotten.

The second model is we remember other people, which comes in a liberal version and a radical version.  The liberal version says, “We are all human” — adhering to the liberal values of diversity and cosmopolitanism, we are reminded of our own humanity.  In the radical version, “We are the inhuman ones; the other is infused with humanity.”  Unfortunately, both versions are stereotypes, because the “we” and the “they” are always simplified.

The third model of ethical memory is remembering inhumanity: we are both human and inhuman; they are both human and inhuman.  In this model, slogans such as “War is hell” or “We are all human” are inadequate.  Nguyen wants to work within this mode, because he feels we need to recognize complexity.

In speaking of himself as a writer, Nguyen was adamant that he did not want to be classified as an ethnic writer or a minority writer; instead, he wanted to offend everyone (!)  Perhaps because of this attitude, he had a hard time getting The Sympathizer published (he noted that 87% of publishers in New York are white males); the book was rejected by over a dozen publishers before one agreed to take it on.  The literary device he chose for the novel was the confession, which is often a monologue.  The other technique he used was to forbear translating or explaining himself.  Instead, he was determined to write a literature of defiance.

In concluding his talk about war, literature, and memory, Nguyen added a third consideration to ethics and aesthetics, which is control.  Writers have to understand the industries which try to control memory, and strive to take that control into their own hands.