Nothing Ever Dies: Vietnam and the Memory of War Read Online Free PDF Page B

minds, it inevitably points to what is no longer there but in the past. 11 Industries of memory seek to turn this absent presence of memory, always and forever elusive, ghostly, invisible, and shadowy, into what one could call the present absence of characters, stories, movies, monuments, memorials. These icons assume the comforting stability of flesh, stone, metal, and image, animated by our knowledge of the absence toward which their comforting presence gestures.
    The relationship of absence to presence is the invisible dimension of the asymmetry of memory, existing beside the visible dimension of great powers dominating smaller ones. Whether a country is great or small, each one’s war machine and industry of memory seeks to establish control over memory itself. But what is stronger in this asymmetrical relationship, industrial memory or the absent presence of the past? The war machine or the ghost? The war machine seeks to banish ghosts or tame them, but unruly specters abound, if one looks carefully, if one recognizes that spirits exist to be seen by some and not by others. I encountered them in Laos, a country whose mere mention brought light to the eyes of the many Vietnamese who spoke of it as a paradise, so peaceful and calm. In some ways Laos appears to be a satellite of Vietnam, at least in the official Laotian industry of memory, which commemorates Vietnam as the country’s greatest ally. Prominent place is given to the Vietnamese flag and Ho Chi Minh in Vientiane’s museums, which follow much the same narrative as Vietnamese ones. Under the bright lights of industrial memory found in museums such as the Lao People’s Army History Museum, all white walls and chrome handrails, the presence of ghosts is weak. Their presence was likewise vague in the far caves of Vieng Xai in northwest Laos, at least in the daytime hours when I visited. The Pathet Lao took shelter here in a vast and impressive cave complex, greater than anything found in Vietnam, a subterranean metropolis replete with a massive amphitheater carved from rock. Under American bombardment, with the smells of humanity and fear, with the dust and earth falling on one’s head, with electricity faltering, the caves must have been much less tranquil than they are for the tourist whose greatest challenge is adjusting his camera for dim lighting.
    Hewn from rock and fashioned into a tourist site, the Vieng Xai caves are industrial memory on a grand scale, a successful attempt to conquer the past, to banish the ghosts. Standing on the amphitheater’s quiet stage, it seemed to me that we did build these memorials to forget, as scholar James Young would have it. 12 Many of us want to forget the complexities of the past, as well as its horrors. We prefer a clean, well-lit place that features the orderly kinds of memory offered in the temples of the state, where the line between good and evil is clear, where stories have discernible morals, and where we stand on humanity’s side, the caves within us brightly lit. But even as we memorialize the dead, perhaps what we want to forget most of all is death. We want to forget the ghosts we will become, we want to forget that the hosts of the dead outnumber the ranks of the living, we want to forget that it was the living, just like us, who killed the dead. 13 Against this asymmetry of the dead and the living, the industries of memory of countries large and small, of powers great and weak, strive against ghosts. These industries render them meaningful and understandable when possible through stories, eliminating them when necessary. In most cases, though, the industries of memory avoid them. The number of places where the living remember the dead must surely be outnumbered by the places where the dead are forgotten, where not even a stone marks history’s horrors, where there are, Ricoeur says, “witnesses who never encounter an audience capable of listening to them or hearing what they have to say.” 14 But what