Performing Remembering

Women's Memories of War in Vietnam

Rivka Syd Eisner

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9783319736150
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Theatre History & Criticism

This book explores the performances and politics of memory among a group of women war veterans in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam. Through ethnographic, oral history-based research, it connects the veterans' wartime histories, memory politics, performance practices, recollections of imprisonment and torture, and social activism with broader questions of how to understand and attend to continuing transgenerational violence and trauma. With an extensive introduction and subsequent chapters devoted to in-depth analysis of four women's remarkable life stories, the book explores the performance and performativity of culture; ethnographic oral history practice; personal, collective, and (trans)cultural memory; and the politics of postwar trauma, witnessing, and redress. Through the veterans' dynamic practices of prospective remembering, 'pain-taking', and enduring optimism, it offers new insights into matrices of performance vital to the shared work of social transformation. It will appeal to readers interested in performance studies, memory studies, gender studies, Vietnamese studies, and oral history.

© The Author(s) 2018

Rivka Syd EisnerPerforming RememberingContemporary Performance InterActionshttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-73615-0_1

Begin Abstract

1. Introduction: (Re)Performing the Past in Vietnam

Rivka Syd Eisner¹

(1)

University of Zurich, Zurich, Switzerland

Rivka Syd Eisner

End Abstract

Meeting the Performance Group Women¹

On a humid November afternoon I walked hurriedly down Võ thị Sáu Street on my way to the Southern Women’s Museum in the heart of Ho Chi Minh City (formerly Saigon ). I was nervous . I hoped I was not late for the rehearsal and that the director of the women veterans’ performance group was expecting me that day. A few minutes earlier, I had bought flowers from a street vendor and then cut across Lê văn Tám Park. Before the early 1980s, this city park, with its tall willowing trees, centrally placed state monument, early morning tai chi gatherings, and wading pool often brimming with frolicking children, was the site of a cemetery where notables and military personnel from French colonial times and, later, prominent individuals and officials from the former non-Communist Republic of Vietnam were buried. Although the bodies were apparently exhumed, stepping through the grass I imagined bones buried beneath my feet, some of them silently poking up under roots and between paving stones, as the dizzying fumes and rumbling din of motorbike traffic encircled the park.

Today, nothing remains of the cemetery . Every time I have walked through this park, I have thought of its rubbed-out, supplanted, doubly-buried history . No one would ever know that the cemetery once existed. It was demolished and remade so as to leave no trace (except in memory) of its presence and deliberate dismantling. The park (cemetery ) is flanked by two of Ho Chi Minh City’s most bustling boulevards, each bearing names from the country’s Communist national history. Dien Bien Phu (Điện Biên Phủ) is the site and name of the battle where the French fell to the Viet Minh (Việt Minh ) in 1954, under the command of General Võ Nguyên Giáp , ending close to a century of colonial rule in Vietnam. Võ thị Sáu Street is named for a young girl, a southern guerilla fighter captured and executed by the French who is now honored as a national martyr . Today, cities in Vietnam share many of the same street names, having been rewritten by the Communist government to mark significant people, places, events, and dates in their rendering of national history. As I approached the museum, to meet the members of the “Former Women Political Prisoner Performance Group” (Đội Văn nghệ Cựu Nữ Tù Chính trị) for the first time, I was reminded afresh of how in Vietnam, as in other places, some memories were hallowed, praised, and canonized while other memories were suppressed, erased, and governmentally disavowed . And yet, as in the park (cemetery ), subjugated memories are still present, living quietly within the shadowed recesses of private memory or buried deep within the nation’s soil.

These daydreams were displaced by the sight of three guards, relaxing in small plastic chairs at the museum gate, and inside to the left, a towering bronze statue of an older woman. The woman stood with straight back, a finely wrinkled face, hair knotted at the nape of the neck, left hand on her heart and her other arm outstretched in a beckoning stance as her eyes gazed unflinchingly forward. Behind her was a bright yellow and white French-era villa, and further behind that stood a larger, drab modern building with few windows and the words “Bảo tàng Phụ nữ Nam Bộ” (Southern Women’s Museum) over the stairwell (Fig. 1.1). Glancing back at the French villa and the small garden courtyard with the statue, I saw the words “anh hùng” (heroic), “bất khuất” (unyielding), “trung hậu” (faithful and kind-hearted), “đảm đang” (resourceful and hardworking) inscribed on a plaque at the woman’s feet. These were the “Eight Golden Words ” (Tám chữ vàng) for women set forth by Hồ Chí Minh during wartime. These eight words encapsulated women’s wartime responsibilities to the nation as well as embody what many still consider to be Vietnamese women’s culturally traditional and naturally imbued virtues . In just a few minutes I would meet a group of women who were the living embodiments, during wartime and now still decades later, of these Eight Golden Words.

Fig. 1.1

Entryway to the Southern Women’s Museum , Ho Chi Minh City . Photograph by the author

Orientations

In the greatest sense this project began, and has been made possible, through friendship. Growing up near Seattle, on the West Coast of the United States, in a family with parents who had opposed the US military intervention in Vietnam, I was told stories—some personal and some a part of national and global history—about the polarizing, devastating impacts of the war. Relocating to North Carolina not long after college, and prior to beginning a graduate program in performance studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, I happened to meet several students from Vietnam and we became friends. Through shared meals and time spent together, stories about their families’ experiences during the war began to unfold and I became increasingly interested.

Listening to my friends’ stories, I realized that although I knew a little about different American perceptions of the war, including some about the lives of Vietnamese-American refugees , I knew virtually nothing about the wartime experiences of those in Vietnam who had actively opposed the United States. A few months into graduate school, I asked one of my friends if I could interview her for a class project. Questions that emerged through these interviews generated numerous others, and eventually led me to pursue doctoral research in Vietnam, in the hope of learning about women’s memories of war and to gain a more immersive understanding of the ways in which violent pasts still powerfully live within and impinge upon the present .

Knowing of my interest in performance and memory , the Vietnamese students I had become friends with in the United States helped introduce me to the women who comprise the Former Women Political Prisoner Performance Group in Ho Chi Minh City . The performance group women and I first met and began talking over a decade ago, in the fall of 2004, during the initial months of my year-long period of sustained doctoral research in Vietnam.² Since then, during shorter research trips between 2006 and 2012, I continued to informally talk with and interview many of the performance group women, as well as attend their rehearsals and performances, meet their families , and visit with them in various formal and casual social settings such as at dinner parties in their homes, at conferences, in the hospital , or even at funeral gatherings.³ Several of the women and I have also periodically corresponded via letter and email, and our friendship continues to this day.

What I have learned from these remarkable wome...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• 1. Introduction: (Re)Performing the Past in Vietnam
• 2. Performing Survival, Ancestral Inheritance, and the Spirit of Optimism
• 3. Masquerading, (Re)Making Identities, and Familial Commemorations
• 4. Remembering Torture, Returning to Côn Đảo, and the Tradition of “Pain-Taking”
• 5. Answering to Transgenerational Violence
• Back Matter