Warring Visions by Thy Phu

Author:Thy Phu [Phu, Thy]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781478010753
Publisher: Duke University Press
Published: 2021-10-18T05:00:00+00:00

To understand the significance of tears for South Vietnamese citizens, who were initially meant to be the primary audience of the photo book (along with Americans stationed in South Vietnam), and for the overseas Vietnamese community, which continues to cherish Hạnh’s photographs, we need to consider the adjacent image (figure 3.4). This adjacent image features a soldier—perhaps this weeping woman’s beloved or at least a proxy for him—whose face is shown in extreme close-up. Whether his face is clammy with sweat or, more likely, moist with rain is unclear. (The uncertain source of this moistness visually recalls the ambiguous cause of the moistness on the face of the cover photograph of the soldier’s intimate grenade-pin “kiss” [see figure 3.2].) However, we might recognize in this pose the now-familiar “thousand-yard stare” of conventional war photography, a trope that emerged in World War II to describe the unfocused gaze of battle-weary and traumatized soldiers. Here the unnamed soldier’s blank stoicism suggests that when it comes to war, expressionlessness, or what Rebecca Adelman describes, following Roland Barthes, as flat affect, is the only form of emotional expression acceptable for men.21 Yet this is a photograph that evokes weeping through pathetic fallacy. The woman’s tears, a proxy for the paroxysm of grief that could not be photographed, are in turn a proxy for those that are shown but withheld on the man’s face. By juxtaposing the moistness of a man’s stolidly composed features beside that of a tearful woman’s face, the photo book genders weeping while also emphasizing grief as its overall mood.

In San Jose, California, where Hạnh eventually moved after his release from a communist reeducation camp in Vietnam, photographs from Vietnam in Flames have been exhibited as part of Black April events. Taken many decades earlier, these photographs are not just a record of what has been; their melancholic mood seems to presage the devastating loss that was then still to come. In what amounts to a form of nostalgia that Svetlana Boym reminds us is as much prospective as it is retrospective—and which the colored photographs of Vietnam Pictorial exemplify22—Hạnh recounted this particular scene of ritual weeping with remarkable clarity many years after the photographs were printed, when he had become a prominent member of this diasporic community. In his remembrance of the scene, the photograph’s sorrow becomes a figure for the diaspora’s collective lament and provides the basis for a sense of community. The importance that Vietnam in Flames places on tears provides unvoiced recognition of proleptic loss.23 Here tears bring together a community in the absence of a nation. Seen in this way, these tears of sorrow—an embodied performance that unfolds communally—presage the coming loss of nation, the origin story of the Vietnamese diaspora, a community that for decades has held at its core an attachment to such scenes of lamentation. Hạnh’s photographic reenactments simultaneously help bring this community into being and provide a focus for its shared nostalgia.

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