Quỳnh N. Phạm

Third World Historical articulates a research agenda for a project suggestively housed as a special section in the pages of CSSAAME (42.2).The editor’s community webpage on Borderlines features experimental writings that enact the project’s attention to questions of form. Here, the intention is to engage in a collaborative project that is its own form of archive building, a portal that speaks to the wider themes of the Third World Historical. The essays in Borderlines highlight the visceral and the relational as distinct from abstract concepts of revolution as complete breaks. The words in these pieces are never failure, or defeat but stories of complicity, compromise, and fragmentation. By emphasizing relationality, movement, and complicity we aim to think concretely about moving between a world overwhelmed by structural forces that preclude action and an imagined world filled with boundless agents detached from history, an equally self-defeating proposition.

Revolutions enter history as extraordinary events: they mark a radical shift from an old to a new order. They are archived with turning points, famous leaders, and unequivocal ideologies. Finding this focus on the historic and the monumental blinding, I turn to ordinary people and unexceptional stories, to a memoir almost not written. The memoir was penned by bác Ba,[1] who was born and raised in làng Cổ Lão, a farming village in Thừa Thiên - Huế. He wrote it when he was ninety years old and named it Khoảng Lặng Đời Tôi.[2]

***

Côn Đảo was a prison that the French built on an island about a hundred kilometers off the southern coast of Việt Nam. It was reserved for those deemed most dangerous: colonized subjects who dared defy France’s civilizing mission. If known at all in the West, the island prison is notorious for chuồng cọp (“tiger cages”) and torture, which carried on from French rule to the U.S.-backed southern regime.[3] In Việt Nam, Côn Đảo is also noted for the courageous spirits who left the earth there. Among them was Võ Thị Sáu. She participated in anti-colonial resistance since she was very young, and was executed by a firing squad when she was nineteen. In the world-historical time of revolution, she died two years before the French surrendered at Điện Biên Phủ, which Frantz Fanon proclaimed as a victory belonging to every colonized people.[4] In the time of ancestral veneration, people continue to visit and pay respects to Võ Thị Sáu’s resting place, along with the graves of many others, marked and unmarked, at the island cemetery today. As history and legend go, Võ Thị Sáu refused to be blindfolded in the face of the colonial executioners. When the squad was getting ready to shoot her, in one version of the story, she cried out: “Down with the French colonialists! Independent Việt Nam forever!” I prefer to remember a somewhat different tale that gets passed on: she was singing until her last breath. She might not have sung battle hymns such as Lên Đàng or Tiểu Đoàn 307.[5] She might have sung a folk ballad. Or a Buddhist chant.

Anh Ba Côn Đảo (brother Ba Côn Đảo) was one of bác Ba’s nicknames, besides anh Ba công đoàn (brother Ba trade union), anh Ba tù yêu nước (brother Ba imprisoned for loving the country), anh Ba điếc (brother Ba deaf). These names may sound endearingly light in Vietnamese, yet each is weighty in meaning and experience. Bác Ba’s trade union activities among railroad workers were a way of organizing to end colonial rule in Việt Nam. “Công đoàn” — necessarily underground then — meant that he risked being thrown into prison any time, even if covert informers merely suspected him of subversion. Indeed, that was how bác Ba was jailed and tortured the first time: for being “Suspect VM,” as recorded in the French dossiers.[6] He ended up being held captive three times, throughout the resistance against the French and the U.S.’s occupying forces. His third time of imprisonment lasted more than seventeen years, well into bác Ba’s late fifties. This was the “silent interval” (khoảng lặng) in his life alluded to in the title of his memoir.

Côn Đảo occupied more than half of those years. On the first day taken to the island prison, bác Ba was grouped among those deemed “những phần tử ngoan cố” (recalcitrant elements) and locked in chuồng cọp right away. If the French had jailed one person in each “tiger cage,” he notes, the U.S.-backed southern regime crammed in three to five people, at times ten to twelve. As resistance grew, the latter had to build more prison cells, just like its predecessor. The incarcerated population was swelled with multiplying dissidents, be they (suspected) communists, students, artists, Buddhists, or women and men who refused to salute the regime’s flag.[7]

Bác Ba’s experiences of being beaten and tormented in mainland prisons were harrowing. Yet in his recollection, they hardly came close to the terrorizing years at Côn Đảo. The phrase “chết đi sống lại” hints at what cannot be fathomed: becoming dead, and alive again. Here I want to dwell on something else that is unimaginable in this “địa ngục trần gian.”

Shackled and crammed in chuồng cọp, bác Ba and fellow captives were not able to so much as lie straight. Despite this, they creatively used elaborate codes to message each other from cage to cage. Through secret transmissions, they not only apprised each other of news and the wardens’ tactics but also coordinated collective strategies and actions. Their watchers, even when standing above their heads, had no clue about the vibrant network below. The jailers saw only bare life, and could not conceive that emaciated stomachs were full of ideas, that mute figures were talking, that chained bodies were in motion.

Bác Ba and comrades turned cages into classrooms. Politics, math, literature, English, French, Chinese… the whole gamut. They taught each other mornings and afternoons, through ingeniously clandestine inscriptions, between heat, hunger, and bent torsos. If the jailers tried to come up with “hàng trăm cách ngăn cấm” to surveil and subdue the detainees, bác Ba attests, the latter devised “hàng vạn cách để đối phó” to outmaneuver them.

More than surviving, the prisoners wove an intricate web of political life right under the noses of their torturers. At a place defined by brutality, they persisted in demanding humaneness, even as their demands provoked crueler punishments. They were going to perish here, in unmarked graves if buried at all, and still, they were learning literature and math, readying each other for a free tomorrow.

What does it mean to be barely alive and fully alive at the same time?  

***

Côn Đảo was on my mind when I read Elaine Scarry’s The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World in graduate school. I appreciate her raising the political and ethical stakes of others’ pain by situating its incommunicability within a context of world deconstruction. I also value her critique of how power perversely converts this pain into fraudulent self-magnification, especially in torture and in war.

Yet when Scarry theorizes physical pain as language-destroying, world-obliterating, and self-disintegrating, I wonder about the disappearance of the colonized in these claims of nullification. My sentipensamiento[8] can’t help but turn to the classrooms in the “tiger cages,” to Võ Thị Sáu’s singing in front of the muzzles, to “anh Ba tù yêu nước” and his poetry in multiple languages.

In chuồng cọp, bác Ba composed a poem in English, called “A few lines to jail’s stools.” He had picked up the foreign tongue in previous jails, and was then helping his cellmate learn it. His poem envisions self-disintegration, not in physical anguish but in time:

… My corpse may be decay

My flesh and bones may

For worms and trees’ food be made

But with you, stooges of the others

I don’t hate, but consider as my mates ...

How does the tortured not dissolve into senselessness, but craft rhymes in another language learned in prison? How does s/he not resent the torturers, but regard them as fellow (in)mates? How is this body in pain not terrified of its final decay, and is instead at peace with death, as a contribution to others and to the world: “for worms and trees’ food”?

There is a longer temporality here than time spent on earth. It reminds me of another body in pain in a faraway land, though perhaps not in a very faraway world. He was singing in a different language from Võ Thị Sáu’s, though maybe not in a very different spirit. They broke his guitar-playing fingers, and shot him forty-four times. They broke his recordings too. Yet from Santiago 1973 to today, we are still singing Víctor Jara’s songs.

… Ningún cañón borrará

El surco de tu arrozal

El derecho de vivir en paz …[9]

What if neither torture nor napalm obliterates the music and poetry of the colonized? “… Indochina es el lugar mas allá del ancho mar, donde revientan la flor con genocidio y napalm…”[10] What if their world continues to breathe after their body becomes a corpse?

***

One story has stayed with me since I first read bác Ba’s memoir over a decade ago. It is related to bác Đạt, whom he met in a special prison. After bác Ba’s third arrest, and before he was written off as too incorrigible for mainland jails, the southern regime put him there. This was in 1958. After aiding France’s efforts to recolonize Việt Nam in vain, the United States was now backing an administration that was persecuting communists with zeal. Under the Diệm-led “Tố Cộng, Diệt Cộng” campaign[11], terror reigned against all opposition, critics, and suspects. With mass arrests and killings peaking in 1958–59, the regime slaughtered numerous people who had fought for independence from France.

Meanwhile, in the special prison, physical torture was not the immediate method. Rather, coaxing was artfully orchestrated to turn resisters away from their cause. Honeyed invitations to cooperate were repeatedly dangled. Bác Ba was advised, in the most mellow tone, to keep up with the times and quit his outdated path. Worse, it was none other than his former comrades who were engaging in long talks to turn him around. The revolution-makers of yesterday, with torture scars etched on their flesh, were today’s revolution-breakers. The regime counted on ex-comrades and family members as its tenderest and most lethal weapons. 

Under such pressure, bác Đạt agreed to cooperate, though he continued to feel conflicted. The coaxers sensed his vacillation. They sought to win him over by generously granting him a vacation and a visit to his mother.

When bác Đạt arrived home, his mother, without looking at him, told the escorting policemen: “Người ni mô phải con tui. Con tui tập kết ra Bắc rồi.” His mother’s refusal to recognize her son stunned him into speechlessness. “Nghe vậy, Đạt sửng sốt đứng chết lặng một hồi, rồi ôm mặt khóc.”

Out of all the powerful and moving stories in bác Ba’s memoir, I am unable to forget this one. What happened in that moment of non-reunion that weighed more than any fear or temptation for bác Đạt? Was it what his mother uttered or something unutterable between them that lay beyond the regime’s matrix of calculability? Did this transient meeting accompany bác Đạt through being tortured to death?

How did his mother feel not looking at her son after a long time of separation, amidst upheavals? Did she regret it afterwards? Was she forsaking him at that moment or reaching out to him? Did she, too, waver when bác Đạt held his face in tears? How did she endure the loss of her son, the first time and the second time?

Revolution is typically cast as a clean break, between the future and the past, the radical and the conservative, the revolutionary and the counter-revolutionary. Thus projected, it leaves little to no space for entanglements, for wavering, for crossing back and forth.

But if revolution, like everything else, is immersed in relations, the clear-cut divide seems illusory. Could it also be that profound and tenacious bonds do not simply complicate revolution, but actually sustain it? Bác Ba owed his life to many people who risked theirs to shelter and feed him. Mothers who did not give birth to him, neighbors who were battered and did not disclose his hideout, prison cooks who secretly slipped a bit of water to make rice swallowable… All these relations extend far beyond family members and comrades. When we make sense of revolution in terms of fundamental disruption, might we miss the heart of the matter?

***

Rereading bác Ba’s memoir, I notice details that I do not recall from before and now find arresting. This minor anecdote for instance: where bác Ba was first held captive, the prison guards were from Senegal. When they learned through conversation with him that his group was jailed for opposing French rule, “họ rất cảm tình và nể.” They expressed their respect and sympathy for bác Ba and company through affectionate gestures, such as saving them some bread with meat every morning and letting them rest a few minutes early from prison labor.

This was not the only time when bác Ba engaged with prison guards from another French colony. On a different occasion, he confided to a Moroccan guard that the indignity of being an enslaved people had compelled him to join the revolution. The guard listened attentively. Bác Ba detected sadness when the Moroccan admitted that the anti-colonial movement in his country was not as strong as what he saw in Việt Nam, and that it was a shame to help France oppress another people, but that he didn’t have a choice. Having heard this, bác Ba trusted the Moroccan enough to ask for help with escaping the prison. The guard seemed to consider the matter carefully. He feared that he would be jailed himself, with consequences for his wife and child. He further reasoned to bác Ba that the station was too stringent to arrange a successful escape.

Perhaps the guard not helping bác Ba was predictable. What I find curious is the mutual affect and confidence across two sides of the prison bars. Why did bác Ba divulge his long-hatched plan to get out and risk stricter surveillance? What made the guard justify, in earnest, his decision not to assist bác Ba? Wasn’t it his duty to prevent the latter from breaking out? Might he have discerned that he was an inmate in the colonial prison as well, despite his role? Maybe he, too, yearned to get out. The Moroccan guard’s answer was not so predictable after all.

Although the structure of imprisonment did not change in either instance, the Senegalese, the Moroccan, and the Vietnamese related to each other beyond their assigned places in partitioned quarters. I am drawn to these moments of intimacy among colonized people, in hushed corners and in the smallest gestures. They are unlikely to be found in the official pages of History, colonial or anti-colonial. Off the record, these everyday encounters hold meanings and possibilities of their own. Segregated and pitted against each other as they were, colonized people still recognized themselves in each other.

They were not planning revolt together at the moment. Pero mañana ¡quién sabe![12]

***

Bác Ba’s memoir could easily not have been written, or read. It does not record the life of the Nation or the Party, though it does narrate the life of someone who joined the movement to defend their home-land. Khoảng lặng, or silence, in the title diverges from the postcolonial state’s discourse of sheer triumph. There is knottiness, fluidity, and uncertainty here that is not allowed there.

Multiple contingencies could have made “Khoảng Lặng Đời Tôi” silent entirely: If bác Ba had not composed it near the end of his life, or made it to that age. If he had met the fate of bác Đạt instead. If he had been unable to go to school, as was the case for his siblings and many children in their farming village. The ability to read and write was as accidental for bác Ba as it was inaccessible to countless others. And there is also khoảng lặng not archived in memoirs, or articulable at all. Especially in the life of women fighters and prisoners.

Then there is khoảng lặng hidden in what is archived and articulated. As I write this, I dread rendering silences into stories, categories, English, expressibility. I hesitate to use terms that are so loaded they seem like traps. Like revolution. I wish to remember the unimaginable without taming it into words that make sense. “Chết đi sống lại” already attempts to describe the indescribable, and something is further lost with “becoming dead, and alive again.” I struggle with translations that erase more than convey meanings. “Địa ngục trần gian” and “hell on earth” are distinct spiritual lands. Too much gets collapsed and flattened in a tongue that comes to me disciplined rather than intuitive. Here and there I have left untranslated some parts of the Vietnamese language and life. Like bác Ba's memoir title, they signal visibly what is inaudible throughout the text: the gulf between worlds.

***

[1] Bác is a term of address for those who equal in age or in relation an older sibling of one’s parents.

[2] “Khoảng Lặng” can be translated as “silent interval” and “Đời Tôi” means my life.

[3] From 1862 to 1975, more than twenty thousand prisoners were murdered here.

[4] “The great victory of the Vietnamese people at Điện Biên Phủ is no longer strictly speaking a Vietnamese victory. From July 1954 onward the colonial peoples have been asking themselves: ‘What must we do to achieve a Điện Biên Phủ? How should we go about it?’ A Điện Biên Phủ was now within reach of every colonized subject.” Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth (New York: Grove Press, 2004), 30-31.

[5] These songs were popular in the war against French colonialism, and their popularity continued into postwar Việt Nam.

[6] VM stands for Việt Minh, a movement for Việt Nam's independence from the French empire. It also played a vital role in opposing Japan’s fascist occupation and fighting against France’s attempt to re-colonize Việt Nam after the end of World War II and the Vietnamese declaration of independence in 1945. The United States gave direct financial and military assistance to France’s campaign of recolonization.

[7] In the documentary Hearts and Minds (directed by Peter Davis, 1974), Father Chan Tin, a Catholic priest “in hiding from the South Vietnamese government,” described the omnipresent repression as follows: “People can be arrested at any moment, by any organization, and then tortured in inhuman ways in all the prisons, and above all, in police stations. And then imprisoned for years and years without trial. Their only crime is loving their country. They have the courage to tell the truth. They ask for the liberation of political prisoners. They ask for an end to the war. They ask for peace, for national reconciliation. And all that is considered a crime by the government of Thiệu. (…) And so you see, when a Vietnamese works for peace and for liberty, [they are] considered a communist. It is an honor for the communists to have to work for peace and justice. So it is the government which gives validity to being a communist, because they continue to say that the people who work for justice and for peace are communists.”

[8] I learned the word sentipensante from Eduardo Galeano: “que no separa la razón del corazón, que siente y piensa a la vez, sin divorciar la cabeza del cuerpo, ni la emoción de la razón.” He learned it from a fisherman in Colombia as he told the story in a conversation with Juan González and Amy Goodman: “I was always looking for a language who could integrate everything that has been culturally divorced… for instance, heart and mind. So I was looking for a feel-thinking language, sentipensante, “feel-thinking.” (…) I didn’t invent the word. It’s a word I heard years ago in the Colombian coast. A fisherman told me, “Hay gigrere en las palabras sentipensantes,” when I told him I was a writer. (…) And he asked me if I was using a sentipensante language, a feel-thinking language. And so, he was a master. I mean, I learned a lot from this sentence forever.” “‘Voices of Time’: Legendary Uruguayan Writer Eduardo Galeano on Immigration, Latin America, Iraq, Writing – and Soccer,” Democracy Now, May 19, 2006, https://www.democracynow.org/2006/5/19/voices_of_time_legendary_uruguayan_writer.

[9] From Víctor Jara’s song El Derecho de Vivir en Paz (1:35-4:45): “…No cannon will wipe out the furrow of your rice field, the right to live in peace…” Recently, the song was powerfully sung by protesters in Chile in 2019.

[10] Also from El Derecho de Vivir en Paz: “…Indochina is the place beyond the wide sea, where they burst the flower with genocide and napalm…”

[11] The name of the campaign can be translated as “Denounce communists, annihilate communists.”

[12] This reference is from “Un Paseo por la Tierra de Los Anamitas” in José Martí, Obras Completas (vol. 18) (La Habana, Cuba: Editorial de Ciencias Sociales, 2011). For further details, see Quỳnh N. Phạm and María Jóse Méndez, “Decolonial Designs: José Martí, Hồ Chí Minh, and Global Entanglements,” Alternatives 40:2 (2015).

Quỳnh N. Phạm is an Assistant Professor in the International Studies Department at the University of San Francisco. She received her PhD in Political Science at the University of Minnesota, with a double focus on international relations and political theory. Her current research project investigates the global devaluation of peasants, subsistence agriculture, and rural life.