Page 4 of
5 The ghosts of the American
War By Heonik
Kwon
Hickey argues with reference to
pre-war village life in the southern delta region
that the Vietnamese ritual association with ghosts
is intended to protect home from the errant
spirits of the dead and "to avoid their wrath".
Cadiere proposes the binary scheme of genies
bon versus genies mauvais (beneficiary
spirits versus malignant spirits) and argues that
the latter take "pleasure in annoying and harming"
the living. Following these characterizations, it
appears that people would offer food and other
votive gifts to ghosts in the way that they would
hand over food and valuables to vagabond bandits
in the hope of avoiding
content their menace. However, classical
Vietnamese literature gives a very different
picture as to the meaning of the gift for ghosts.
Nguyen Du, the eminent 18th-century mandarin
scholar, wrote the following verse, "Calling all
wandering souls." This verse is recited widely
today as a ritual incantation in many modified and
improvised forms:
Those who died beheaded Those
who had many friends and relatives but died
lonely Mandarins Those who died in the
battlefield Those whose death nobody knew
about Students who died on the way back from
exams Those who were buried hurriedly with no
coffin and no clothing Those who died at sea
under thunderstorms Merchants Those who
died with a shoulder hardened by too many bamboo
poles carried on it Innocent souls who died
in prison ... All spirits in the bush, in the
stream, in the shadows, beneath a bridge,
outside a pagoda, in the market, in an
empty rice field, on a sand dune You are
cold and you are fearful You move together,
young ones holding the old We offer you this
rice gruel and fruit nectar Do not fear
Come and receive our offering We pray
for you, we pray.
Nguyen Du's
poetic world shows that sympathetic relations with
the displaced, socially excluded spirits of the
dead are a core aspect of popular religious
morality and the ethics of memory. It introduces a
multitude of displaced and wandering spirits of
the dead, and these beings appear as close
companions to the living in their arduous journey
of life rather than a menacing force. Nguyen Du's
poetic rendering of this intimacy between humans
and ghosts reflected his own life history as a
mandarin official alienated from the court (due to
a dynastic change) and the tendency of some
classical scholars shifting their philosophical
interests from Confucian texts to popular spirit
beliefs when they were estranged from the
political order, which drew its legitimacy partly
from the Confucian ritual order.
We can
draw from the last point that the moral identity
of ghosts is a variable, relational phenomenon.
When people are at home with the memory of their
ancestors, ghosts appear as strangers to their
perceived order of life. This is a version of the
world from a particular vision. In this
perspective, the place of ancestors confronts the
world of displaced spirits of the dead as its
contrasting background, thereby creating the
impression of an ordered social existence
surrounded by and militating against the anarchy
of chaotic relations. Thus, Bloch observes in
Madagascar, "there is no worse nightmare than that
one's body will be lost ... 'Bad' death occurs at
the wrong place, away from the ancestral shrines
to which the deceased's soul cannot therefore
easily return." When people are in exile and
become themselves the subject of what Casey calls
"dwelling-as-wandering" in contrast to
"dwelling-as-residing", however, the moral
imagination about displaced spirits of the dead
changes accordingly. In this situation, ghosts are
no longer strangers to the order of social life
but become a mirror for the worldly existence in
displacement. Life in displacement offers a
different association with ghosts than life in
settlement.
It follows from the last point
that social intimacy with ghosts in contemporary
Vietnam may have its own historical background.
The ritual familiarity with the displaced spirits
of the dead may be an expression of the actors'
own intimacy with a history of mass displacement.
If this is the case, we can argue that ghosts, as
a discursive phenomenon, are constitutive of the
Vietnamese self-identity just as ancestors are.
The vital existence of ghosts may be another
expression of the historical self rather than
merely an antithesis of the social self
symbolically united with the existence of
ancestors.
Liberation from
grievance Hertz writes that the "negative
space" of death (the space for bad deaths) is
where "death will be eternal, because society will
always maintain towards these accursed individuals
the attitude of exclusion". However, this space is
also, according to Taussig, "pre-eminently a space
of transformation".
Ghosts in Vietnam do
not always remain as anonymous strangers to the
community. They can transform to heroes, if their
bodies are entombed in the cemetery of war martyrs
and their identities are properly inscribed in the
state-issued death certificates displayed in the
homes of their families. They can also transform
into family ancestors, if their bodies are brought
to the family graveyard and their identities are
enshrined in the domestic altar. Among those who
are unable to take either of these trajectories,
there are many ghosts of war across communities
who are now vigorously transforming to tien or
than, powerful guardian spirits or community
deities.
When ghosts emerge from anonymity
and join the community of the living with the
above identities, this process is called giai
oan or giai nguc - meaning "liberation
from grievance" or "liberation from incarceration
in grievous history". The concept suggests that
violent death imprisons the spirit of the dead in
the perpetual drama of re-experiencing mortal
violence. It also indicates that the living have
the ethical responsibility to help free these dead
from their traumatic histories. The grievance of
the dead is a somatic condition: the souls of the
dead are believed to feel the pain of violent
death (through the soul's physical elements called
via) and to be cognizant of the unjust
circumstances of the death (through its spiritual
elements called hon).
The grievance
is also an inter-subjective phenomenon: it rises
not only from the history of violent and unjust
death (chet oan) but also from the absence
of social acknowledgement of the unjust history.
Whereas history incarcerates the spirit of the
dead in grievous memory, in this scheme, society
can exacerbate the spirits' grievances with its
indifference to their suffering. In other words,
the living may actively augment the grievance of
the dead by their inaction.
Likewise,
genuine liberation from the incarceration in
grievous history should be a collaborative work.
It ought to involve not only appropriate
intervention from sympathetic outsiders in the
form of ritual actions but also the spirit's
strong will for freedom from incarceration in a
grievous history. The living must ritually help
the dead in order to free them from the symbolic
state of imprisonment, whereas the dead should
show signs that they are trying to overcome the
vexing and mortifying memory of experiencing an
unjust event. Apparitions and spirit possessions
are considered signs of the growth of
self-determination for freedom on the part of the
prisoners of grievous history.
We may
understand the two episodes introduced in the
beginning of this essay in the scheme of
"liberation from grievance". The apparition of the
mother and child spirits spurred the reburial of
their remains in a newly established lineage
graveyard. After reburial, the relative from the
city had a dream in which the spectral family
appeared happy and the children were dressed in
fresh outfits. When this story was communicated to
the village, the locals understood it as a
conclusive sign that the spirits had less grievous
feelings. The event of the elder brother ghost
similarly led to finding his remains in a remote
area in the highlands, assisted by a local spirit
medium specializing in body finding, and this was
followed by his reburial in the family ancestral
graveyard. Before the reburial, the brother ghost
expressed his grievous feelings in a seance with
the medium.
His accusations were furious
and pointed to the fact that his younger brother
and the party official had been unsympathetic to
their mother's wishes. For years after liberation,
the official's mother was preoccupied with finding
her missing son, and this provoked a series of
conflicts within the family. (It is known that the
younger brother, preoccupied with post-war
economic reconstruction, argued with his mother
that the family, like the nation, should look
forward rather than backward.) His mother
continued her search privately, against the wishes
of her children. She also wished to build a family
altar so that she could lay the photograph of her
dead son on it and clashed with her son, who
disapproved of it. (In the house of an acting
official of the Communist Party, this wish was
unacceptable, particularly so when it concerned a
politically impure death.) Against this public
accusation from his elder brother, the official
had to admit his misdeed in the presence of his
younger siblings to whom he had played the role of
the eldest son.
These moments, which
people called xac or nhap xac ("the
spirit enters the body"), contributed to breaking
the social and political obstacles to the memory
of the dead. When people experienced what they
understood as a face-to-face encounter with the
spirit of the missing dead, it was practically
impossible to ignore the identity, even if it was
an uninvited one. The intrusion of ghosts was
typically interpreted as their claim to the right
to be remembered. In this situation, people were
justified in reorganizing the domestic ritual
space, against political convention if necessary,
for the initiatives to do so, in shared cultural
understanding, were not necessarily their own but
originated from the grievous dead.
These
two episodes are drawn from the area in the
central region that the international community
has known as My Lai, the site of a large-scale
civilian massacre committed in March 1968 by
American ground troops. The My Lai area has a
memorial and state-run museum for the victims of
the 1968 civilian massacre as well as several
memorials and large state cemeteries for the
revolutionary combatants who came from the local
villages. The provincial authority holds a regular
official commemorative event for the victims of
the tragic killing in the presence of high-ranking
party officials and the foreign press.
However, it is only in recent years that
villagers were allowed to openly hold family-based
rites of remembrance and consolation for their
dead relatives. Many villages in the vicinity of
My Lai
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