‘The specters of ancestors becoming’: negotiating layered colonial histories
A personal review of the exhibition ‘Say It Loud’
On a visit to the Bonnefantenmuseum in Maastricht during a grey October day, my friend and I skipped up the big entryway steps past the permanent collection and delved directly into one of their new temporary exhibits, Say It Loud. Just as we were reaching the end of our visit, I heard the unsteady and emotional singing of the old South Vietnamese national anthem carrying over from the next room. I rushed towards the sound, which I had only ever heard sung by my grandmother in tender moments at home, and found myself in the center of an exhibit hall with a video installation piece taking up the entire room. It was Tuấn Andrew Nguyễn’s The Specter of Ancestors Becoming. I spent the next several minutes entranced, twisting my head to try and absorb the videos playing all around me. I returned a few weeks later to appreciate the film piece in its entirety.
This work by Nguyễn is one of many pieces examining colonial legacies as part of Say It Loud, an exhibit at the Bonnefantenmuseum curated in collaboration with eleven other Dutch museums as part of “Musea Bekennen Kleur” (Museums Acknowledge Color). It is a joint venture engaging in critical self-reflection on the colonial legacies and racism within these museums, as well as a push to give artists of color more visibility in such predominantly white, exclusive institutions. The exhibit at the Bonnefantenmuseum features works which are both diverse in their nature and their creators, and many reflect on contemporary post-colonial struggles around the globe.
The Specter of Ancestors Becoming is one of Nguyễn’s several video artworks which aim to process the postcolonial and refugee experience. Nguyễn himself was born in Saigon, Vietnam -- now Ho Chi Minh City -- and came to the United States with his parents in 1979 by boat. After finishing his university education, he moved back to Ho Chi Minh City, where he lives and works today, creating short films which reflect on the notion of the “diasporic subject.” The diasporic subject is an individual who develops an identity (or lack thereof) by traversing different socio-cultural domains, one who can never truly belong to one given territory or culture. Their experience is characterized by a dissonance between their experiences of different locations, heritages, or social groups. Perhaps they escape colonized territory only to encounter deep-rooted racism in the next place they inhabit, or maybe they cannot find an identity which resonates with how they perceive themselves in relation to the colonial legacies which surround them. These experiences can materialize into a sense of loss, a longing for a definite identity or motherland which is not quite accessible. In an interview with ArtNews earlier this year, Nguyễn explained that his work tries to capture these feelings, which signify “the intangible voids that we have from the colonial project.” As a Vietnamese-American, most of his films explore multiple timelines (real or imagined) before and after the Vietnam Wars, focusing on the resounding consequences of French colonialism and one of the bloodiest civil wars in modern history.
The Specter of Ancestors Becoming examines the nostalgia and grief of persons displaced by the first Vietnam War, which occurred between 1946 and 1954. The conflict was between French forces and an anti-colonial Vietnamese insurgency led by Ho Chi Minh, ultimately leading to the division of Vietnam into North and South states until the end of the second war in 1975. In order to minimize domestic opposition to the war, France refrained from drafting their own citizens and instead deployed thousands of troops from their African colonies, including Senegal, to suppress the Vietnamese resistance. By placing these colonized populations in juxtaposition to each other, France strategically created a colonial hierarchy in which Senegal was the dutiful colony and the foil to Vietnam’s insurgence. The Senegalese troops, referred to as tirailleurs sénégalais, occupied the unique and difficult position of colonial subjects who were themselves engaging in the oppression of other colonial subjects. It is easy to reduce colonialism to a colonizer-colonized duality, but we fail to acknowledge that most of the great Western colonizers occupied swaths of land spanning across continents and inevitably placed different colonized populations at odds with each other.
While in French Indochina, many Senegalese men married Vietnamese women and had children. When the French chose to retreat in 1954, they left their troops with a dilemma: return to France or Senegal, where security and safety awaited them; or remain in Vietnam with the families they had built but risk persecution (and often, execution) at the hands of the Viet Minh, who would spare no mercy for the men they saw as part of the colonial apparatus. Most returned to Senegal, and many left their Vietnamese families behind. Some brought their children but not their wives.
The Specters of Ancestors Becoming is a 28-minute video installation exploring the fractured families and identities which emerged from this conflict. The short film is split into three scenes with one interlude (the South Vietnamese national anthem which I first heard), in addition to beginning and end sequences. Each scene was written by a member of the Senegalese-Vietnamese community and reflects on a possible outcome of the decisions made by Senegalese soldiers and their families in 1954 and beyond. By focusing on individual or familial histories, Nguyễn allows for more detailed stories to emerge from a typically fragmented narrative of colonial history: “I think it’s those personal histories that mean more, because that notion of finding roots or a whole sense of identity isn’t possible as a diasporic subject” (ArtNews). The nuances in the individual stories offer more insight into the complexities of both the subjects’ lived experiences and the state conflicts which impacted them.
The scenes, which are read aloud by the writer, are all dialogue-based. In his interview with ArtNews, Nguyễn explained these Senegalese-Vietnamese conversations represent a conflict arising from within colonized populations. “I aim to create a dialectic by looking at conflict through two positions, essentially a discussion, where opposing desires are pitted against each other. This idea of a dialogue, for me, relates back to the Vietnam War being a civil war. It could’ve been a space to discover or develop other potentialities between two very different outlooks as to how the country should move forward after coming out of colonialism, but unfortunately became extremely destructive armed conflict.”
The viewer of the short film is placed in the center of the room, surrounded by four large screens playing different clips simultaneously. For each scene, one screen displays a video of the writer and narrator of the scene reading the dialogue out loud. Another screen depicts two actors playing out and lip-syncing to the dialogue. The other two screens show either a different angle of the actors in the same scene or a sequence of related clips consisting of archival footage from Vietnam, shots of family memorabilia, or other actors engaging in choreographed movements similar to Tai Chi.
Because the four screens are all constantly playing something different, the viewer feels compelled constantly to rotate and try to watch as much of the visuals as possible. The two screens not depicting the narrator or the scene itself change their content constantly, which, combined with the already-intense stimulation of four massive screens, create an overwhelming sense of fragmentation resulting from one’s inability to absorb everything at once. This fractured and uncomfortable experience is exactly what Nguyễn is trying to convey about the postcolonial experience: those affected by these conflicts do not have the privilege of methodically processing and sorting their experiences into a single, cohesive narrative or identity. They are always pulled apart by different perspectives and locations.
The scenes take place in either Saigon (now Ho Chi Minh City), Vietnam or Dakar, Senegal, with characters who struggle to feel at home in either country. The first two scenes provide different perspectives on the difficulties experienced by the métis (mixed) children of Senegalese soldiers and Vietnamese women and examine the uncomfortable colonial hierarchy France created by using colonized troops to suppress a different colonized population, both nonwhite. The Vietnamese view Senegalese troops simply as black Frenchmen actively enforcing colonial rule, whereas the Senegalese soldiers feel a dissonance between their own oppression and the subjugation they are enacting. They are only French as long as they put their bodies on the line for a country which would gladly kill them had the situation been reversed. Nonetheless, there is an awareness on both sides that the Senegalese have been granted superiority in the colonial order. The Senegalese soldiers in these two scenes grapple with whether it is worth removing their children from their homes in Saigon in order to raise them with more privilege and opportunities in Senegal. The first scene, an argument between a husband and wife in the midst of the French defeat in 1954, ends unresolved.
The second scene, although depicting a different family, picks up where the first left off and provides a possible outcome for this dilemma. Over twenty years ago, a Senegalese soldier left his Vietnamese wife behind in Saigon brought his son with him back to Dakar to settle after the war; he chose to bury the past by marrying a Senegalese woman and raising his son as purely black and Senegalese. The son, who discovered his true heritage ten years prior and has now given his daughter a Vietnamese name, demands that his father acknowledge his past in Vietnam and cease from his efforts to repress his progeny’s Vietnamese roots. The son leads a stable and secure life in Senegal, as his father hoped, but he also feels robbed of a homeland and a culture which he represents with his appearance yet feels no connection to, this “intangible void” which Nguyễn describes in the ArtNews interview.
The struggles depicted in this film are not my own, yet watching these scenes play out elicited an intense emotional reaction. As the child of a Vietnamese refugee, I have spent the last few years trying to connect more consciously with my cultural and colonial heritage, and I often find myself drawn to any art that encourages reflections on my own identity. Reading Nguyễn’s biography prompted comparisons to my connection to Vietnam. His life story is similar to my mother’s and the thousands of other Vietnamese children who were displaced to the United States during the second Vietnam War. Like my mother, Nguyễn was born in Saigon (now Ho Chi Minh City) but emigrated with his parents to Southern California in the 1970s, where he spent the rest of his childhood and education.
The similarity ends there, however. Unlike Nguyễn, who moved back to Vietnam, my mother assimilated into American society, marrying a white man and raising her two mixed daughters with an acute awareness of, but little connection to, their Vietnamese heritage; she never spoke Vietnamese to me or immersed me in the culture. The vestiges of Vietnam I can cling onto come directly from my grandmother. Whenever she is around, Vietnam is ever-present in the household: she speaks Vietnamese to my mother, cooks Vietnamese food, listens to Vietnamese music. But I never made the move to reach past my Americanized mother and engage directly with my heritage. I grew up with tangible traces of Vietnam around me, but I am never able to grasp onto them and bring them closer to my heart. I feel a strong dissociation between the Vietnamese heritage I know I have and the awareness that I am of the whitest of all my Vietnamese family members: light-skinned, pointy-nosed, monolingual.
On the other hand, living in Western Europe has left me unable to identify as white. Here in the Netherlands, I am the perfect level of ethnically ambiguous, exotic but not so unfamiliar as to be a foreign threat. People may choose whether to exclude or include me at their convenience, Orientalizing me one moment and affirming my whiteness the next. I live in the liminal space shared by any other mixed-race person living in a Western country, the disembodiment of being too far removed from the original motherland but too foreign to belong in the society they are supposed to call home.
While I do not have to navigate the difficult confrontation of two colonies, the experiences of the characters Nguyễn displays resonated with me. The man brought to Senegal as a child feels a nostalgia for a Vietnam he never knew, but without a connection to a Vietnamese mother, he lacks the tools to connect to his heritage. The métis Vietnamese-Senegalese individuals occupy a colonial purgatory: they are neither Vietnamese nor Senegalese, and despite being the direct result of French influence, they cannot relate to French identity either -- even though the dialogue of the film is all in French, the common colonized tongue.
Many mixed race people feel uneasy settling into an identity as a colonized subject because they may sometimes benefit from the privileges of the oppressors, whether by being white-passing or just as the superior colonial subject relative to others. Those with Vietnamese roots additionally have to manage a history of civil war and find themselves at a loss when trying to piece together a cultural identity fractured by the bloody chaos of war and colonialism.
Nguyễn’s notion of the diasporic subject allows the space for these conflicts to exist without a clear resolution. It is possible to feel Vietnamese yet not-Vietnamese, to occupy the positions of oppressed and oppressor simultaneously. These conflicts were so complex that they will continue to unsettle people in unique ways for generations to come, and it is important to acknowledge the struggles that they will encounter in navigating their identities.
The Specters of Ancestors Becoming was inspired by Nguyễn’s own struggle to ground himself within his Vietnamese-American existence. When he moved back to Ho Chi Minh City, he realized that a physical return to the motherland still would not repair his fractured cultural identity; he was still an outsider, now as a Việt Kiều, a non-native Vietnamese person. The existence as a diasporic subject is “a condition that one can’t escape” (ArtNews). Nguyễn realized that he would never find a sense of belonging in an entire nation or a culture, but he could instead root himself by deepening his connection to his grandmother and understanding her own involvement in the Vietnam War. “I had this belief that if I could anchor myself in that very specific history, her history, then I could find more empowerment in that than in a generalized, essentialized idea of a motherland,” he told ArtNews.
I spent several years trying to place myself in a Vietnam that was never mine, turning to books and documentaries to tell me how to feel about the country my mother came from but did not share with me. It was only in the last year and a half that I engaged in more extensive conversations with my own grandmother about our connection to Vietnam. A year ago, I interviewed her for an oral history project about our family history and her relationship to French colonialism. I discovered two things during that process: first, that my Vietnamese family’s story was just as complex as the war which sent them scattering; and second, that even my grandmother does not feel stable in her own identity, which is so steeped in French colonialism that it is barely Vietnamese anymore. She is just as much a diasporic subject as I am.
The Specter of Ancestors Becoming reminded me that while I may never be able to establish a meaningful relationship with an abstract concept of a Vietnam I have never been to, I am able to strengthen my relationship to my grandmother and her own stories of the country she used to call home. This film is a breathtaking visualization of the fragmented narratives and identities resulting from the colonial and civil conflicts in Vietnam during the 20th century. Even for people with no personal connection to the country, the film is sure to evoke reflections on the long-lasting effects of colonialism and provide insight into the diasporic subject’s experience.
Say It Loud is on view at the Bonnenfantenmuseum in Maastricht until April 18, 2021. If you live nearby, I highly recommend visiting and taking the time to absorb the unique narratives presented by each artist.
https://www.artnews.com/art-news/artists/tuan-andrew-Nguyễn-interview-1202683390/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l8eAcDYFkGA
(The South Vietnamese national anthem, sung a cappella by a man as an interlude between scenes in the video piece. (The photos of the man in the blue polo shirt.))
