Haunting Civil Dialogue: A Postcolonial Ghost Story

Vietnamese Buddhist monk Thích Quảng Đức committing ritual self-

immolation

Photo by Malcolm Browne (1963)

While I prepare for my Civil Dialogue facilitations, I feel a haunting taking place. A

disruption of the present moment. A return of that which is denied history (Gordon 1997).

Societies are haunted just as individuals are. America is haunted by imperialism, slavery, and

genocide (Tuck & Ree 2016). And for now, I am haunted by this photograph of a burning monk.

Civil Dialogue's purported goal is to bridge dialogue across differences. To accomplish

this task, an impartial facilitator must adjudicate between different viewpoints (Genette, Linde,

& Olson 2011). My role as a facilitator strangely parallels the plot to Viet Thanh Nguyen’s novel

The Sympathizer (2015, p. 1), a story about a Vietnamese communist double-agent during the

Vietnam War:
 I am a spy, a sleeper, a spook, a man of two faces. Perhaps not surprisingly, I am also a

man of two minds. I am not some misunderstood mutant from a comic book or a horror

movie, although some have treated me as such. I am simply able to see any issue from

both sides. Sometimes I flatter myself that this is a talent, and although it is admittedly

one of a minor nature, it is perhaps also the sole talent I possess. At other times, when I

reflect on how I cannot help but observe the world in such a fashion, I wonder if what I

have should even be called talent. After all, a talent is something you use, not something

that uses you. The talent you cannot not use, the talent that possesses you- that is a

hazard, I must confess. But in the month when this confession begins, my way of seeing

the world still seemed more of a virtue than a danger, which is how some dangers first

appear.

My first memory was my family’s nickname for me, Tí Quạu, which roughly translates to

Little Grump. Ever since I was a newborn I possessed a perpetual scowl. I would later learn that

children can genetically and behaviorally inherit the trauma of their parents (Dembosky 2017),

and I always wondered if that explained my grimly expression. My second memory was learning

that this place here was a refuge from what my parents call home. Stories of the war traveled

from our community, friends, and family. And while I was too young to understand what

happened, I felt it as a collective trauma from another time elsewhere. When I was (too) young,

there was a book about the war that my mom forbade me from looking into. One day when she

wasn’t there, I took a glimpse inside. That day I learned what the dead look like, and that the

dead look back (Yountae 2016).

 When the United States invaded Iraq and Afghanistan, I again felt the ghostly presence of

the Vietnam War. The specter of Vietnam also haunts the United States. And yet the active

forgetting of Vietnam would revive American exceptionalism, leading to the escalation of

imperial occupation in the Middle East (Spanos 2008). I realized then that America was refusing

to grapple with its ghosts, and in refusing to listen to the dead, the dead were coming to haunt us.

I started to become possessed by news of the wars, plagued by a thudding pulse of questions:

How did we get back here? How many lives perished each day? How do we live in a world

without war? I would join my high school debate team as a way to put these questions to rest. In

fact my first speech at my first high school debate tournament advocated against the CIA’s

waterboarding program due to its violation of human rights (Physicians for Human Rights 2007).

I pointed to the irony that while the Bush administration defended waterboarding as legal

“enhanced interrogation,” during the Vietnam War a U.S. soldier was court marshalled for

waterboarding a North Vietnamese soldier (Weiner 2007).

I would go on to compete in intercollegiate policy debate for CSU Fullerton, and

eventually coach the CSU Fullerton debate team and several high school teams. One of the

argued benefits of competitive debate is that it requires participants to think through every side

of a topic. Being able to think critically and flexibly allows participants to assess the validity of

opposing belief systems (Muir 1993). This critical flexibility helped prepare me to facilitate Civil

Dialogue. I am simply able to see any issue from both sides. The irony though is that the “two

minded” thought process required to facilitate Civil Dialogue also require that I commit to a

critical skepticism of Civil Dialogue. Who can speak? Who is there to listen? And to what end?

While these questions haunt me, they now haunt me in the form of a photograph of a burning

monk.
 The photo is of Vietnamese Buddhist monk Thích Quảng Đức committing self-

immolation as a protest against the anti-Buddhist policies of U.S.-backed Prime Minister Ngô

Đình Diệm (Lewis 2014). While the practice of ritual self-immolation dates back centuries in

Buddhist tradition (Ohnuma 1998; Benn 2007; Sandvik & Christensen 2014), this particular self-

immolation was entangled in contestation over Vietnamese nationalism and the geopolitics of the

Cold War (Miller 2015; Neville-Sheperd, 2014). The photograph elicits the question, “What

conditions led Quảng Đức to not only refuse to speak, but to embody this refusal through self-

immolation?”

The photograph returns us to postcolonial theorist Gayatri Spivak’s (1988) central

question, “Can the subaltern speak?” This question asserts the impossibility of voicing the

oppressed group’s resistance because of their representations by dominant forces (Louai, 2012).

The subaltern is a predicament, a structured place from which the capacity to communicate is

radically obstructed (Tuck & Yang 2014). It is not that the subaltern does not speak, but rather

that others do not know how to listen. Even when the subaltern speaks, they are misinterpreted

and unintelligible to dominant discourse (Forsdick & Britton, 2001; McLeod 2000).

Communicating with subaltern groups can lead to suppression by preserving the very discursive

apartheids that compromise the legibility of their voices (Spivak 1990; Hutchings 2005; Kapoor

2008).

While rhetoric traditionally analyzes linguistic speech as persuasion, there is rich

theoretical work on the body as a rhetorical instrument. Bodies can be powerful sources of

assertion and contention when deployed for public address (Hauser 2000; DeLuca 2000). This is

especially the case when dialogue is not a magic bullet (Schudson 1997). Dialogue does not

guarantee that the dominant class will surrender their privileges upon listening to reclaimed
silenced voices (Li 2010). This is why body rhetoric is utilized by subaltern counterpublics who

otherwise have little access to linguistic rhetorical power (Cho 2009). Quảng Đức’s self-

immolation should remind us of the impossibility of dialogue with the force of one’s own

domination (Rodriguez 2006) as well the refusal to speak as an embodied resistance strategy.

Postcolonial scholarship proposes hauntology as a research method that disrupts the

present through the conjuring of these hidden subaltern histories. However, appropriating

occluded history can become a solipsistic retreat into a simulacrum of colonial memory (O'Reily

2007). When researchers theorize text as haunted by historical trauma, colonized bodies merely

play the role of cadavers for academic autopsies (Woods 2002; Tuck & Yang 2014). However in

Vietnam, ghosts are not metaphors for text, but are fully animate beings that directly confront the

living. Individuals who suffer bad deaths (chết đường) become angry ghosts (con ma), spirits

who exist in a “bare afterlife”, not yet fully entered into the realm of death. Ghost encounters are

especially prevalent due to the mass deaths that occurred during anticolonial and civil war

(Lincoln & Lincoln 2015). Ethnographic accounts of hauntings in Vietnam do not treat haunting

as a secondary metaphor, but as a visceral primary encounter with metaphysical entities:

Within a few weeks of moving to Hanoi, Sam's girlfriend [Tien] told him about

something of which he was unaware: Sam talked in his sleep and shook so violently that

the entire bed moved. The woman was terrified, primarily because the violent and

enraged statements he made during these episodes were in Vietnamese. Sam had a

rudimentary knowledge of Vietnamese, certainly good enough to communicate with his

girlfriend and his co-workers, but the fluency of his speech at night was astounding. Sam

asked her to tape him, which she did on several occasions. The invective heard flowing

from Sam's mouth was that of a native Vietnamese, utterly disturbing in its bald rage.
 "Give it to me, give it to me, give it to me," he screamed in Vietnamese. "Motherfucker,

you give it to me or I will eat your mother's soul."

Back in 1968, as he was being flown out of Khe Sanh by helicopter, one of Sam's friends

put into his hand the blood-spattered identity card of a Vietcong fighter who'd been killed

inside the lines of the American base. Such markers of identification were supposed to be

turned over to the authorities so they could keep accurate count of enemy casualties, but

sometimes they were kept by U.S. soldiers as souvenirs. Sam kept it as a reminder of his

time in Vietnam, even bringing it with him when he moved there years later. It was clear

to Sam and his girlfriend that the problems he'd been having at night came from that dead

Vietcong: he wanted his papers back and would continue to torment Sam until he got

them (Gustafsson 2009, p. 47-48).

As I facilitate the Civil Dialogue events, the years of training my “double mind” will be a

blessing and a curse. While competitive debate prepared me to facilitate dialogue across different

viewpoints, other voices will be haunting me from another time elsewhere: the voices of those

who cannot speak. Maybe this haunting is not a metaphor. Perhaps it is not the photograph of

Thích Quảng Đức that haunts me, but Thích Quảng Đức himself; his burning flesh refusing to

ascend into the realm of death. Perhaps in accordance to the role of the Bodhisattva, there is

enlightenment in tethering one’s spirit to the Earth.