Displacing kinship

This week in North Philly Notes, Linh Thủy Nguyễn, author of Displacing Kinship, write about family history in the aftermath of the Vietnam war.

I have a clear memory of the day that, at 18, I realized that my parents were refugees from the Vietnam War. Struggling to order more rice at a Chinese restaurant, confusing the waiter as I spoke mixed Chinese (mom) and Vietnamese (dad), my sister laid out the details. She had for several years been taking college courses about the history of the region and the war. It sounds like a ridiculous thing, to be so detached from family and national history, but mine is a typical second-generation immigrant story about children not knowing about their parents’ pasts. This version is now, perhaps, difficult to imagine for the generations having grown up consuming Vietnamese American cultural productions, as Viet Thanh Nguyen, Ocean Vuong, and Thao Nguyen have reached mainstream popularity.

What I encountered about the history of this instance of forced displacement and the US response to it was a vast gulf in what the children of refugees, the second generation, knew about their parents and their pasts and what policymakers and social scientists knew about them. When the first cohort of 130,000 mostly Vietnamese refugees arrived in 1975, few expected a diaspora that would amount to over 2.2  million Vietnamese Americans. Policy makers and scientists made quick work of predicting their successful assimilation into the country, speculating that their ties with the US government, projected model minority status, and proximity to white values would spare them the “downward assimilation” faced by their Black and brown neighbors. This inclusion, of course, came at the cost of their own histories and relations.

Why does it seem that so much of the art and writing of children of Vietnamese refugees is singularly focused on searching for origins and longing for parental affection? Social science and policy framings of refugee successes in America are matched in volume by narratives of familial discord and trauma by the second generation. Displacing Kinship: The Intimacies of Intergenerational Trauma in Vietnamese American Cultural Production is my response to emerging dominant narratives about family history and that war. The book was inspired by seemingly constant popular culture evocations and my students’ comments about what they called the intergenerational trauma of the war – an idea that seemed to do more to mask than explain the alienation they experienced from their parents. It is my attempt to contextualize for the children of refugees from the wars in Vietnam, but also for all children of immigrants, that the reasons for our disconnect from our histories is structural, though it is experienced interpersonally.

Second-generation texts situate themselves in relation to the past and their family history, and squarely in the war. My close readings of Vietnamese American art, music, and writing revealed that behind the emotional weight and heaviness of the texts was a sense of mourning for the family relationships that were destroyed. These were destroyed not only by the specificities of the war and its aftermath, including environmental destruction and economic embargoes, but also, as I emphasize, the larger systems of white supremacy and racial capital that shape U.S. interventions and the day-to-day lives of refugees after they have been resettled. Much of the pain and suffering described in the texts I analyze was much more about everyday experiences of fighting to make it in the U.S., stories of parents struggling to make ends meet, scenes of watching white neighbors yell racist vitriol, in short, the experiences of poverty and racism.

In Displacing Kinship, I explore the reasons the Vietnamese diaspora feels separated from family histories and ultimately call for new ways to relate to ourselves and our own communities. It is my hope that once we can identify the conditions that have alienated us from these histories, we can forge new liberatory cultural politics rooted in connection and attachment to radical possibilities, rather than increasingly conservative identity politics.

Reviewing women-centric cinema in Bangladesh

This week in North Philly Notes, Elora Halim Chowdhury, author of Ethical Encounters: Transnational Feminism, Human Rights, and War Cinema in Bangladesh, writes about female representation in Muktijuddho films.

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A modern remake of Ajoy Kar’s 1961 film Saptapadi, Shameen Akhtar’s film Rina Brown (2017) unfolds intimate geographies of love and loss among individuals from India, and West and East Pakistan. One of few independent women filmmakers in Bangladesh, Akhtar offers a tale about unfulfilled dreams of love and freedom, set in contemporary Bangladesh (or, Dhaka City), that traces the return of Rina, an Anglo-Christian, to the now-independent nation that she left during the Bangladesh Liberation War (or, Muktijuddho). Forty years after the war’s end, Rina comes back to participate in a seminar about women in conflict. She seeks out her adolescent love, Darashiko, a Bengali Muslim freedom-fighter-turned-business-executive. Over the course of a long afternoon, the two reminisce about the fading aspirations of the nationalist struggle and its unreconciled trauma.

Though Rina’s past is indelibly linked to the history of Bangladesh, she is now a stranger whose suffering is incomprehensible to the post-war generation. As the couple look out on the sweeping urban landscape of Dhaka City, and think about what could have been, a vacant footbridge bereft of pedestrians serves as a metaphor to all that the war has torn asunder and imaginary borders, intractably entrenched. War changed everything, yet as Darashiko expresses forlornly, “We could not change the country.”

The poster for Rina Brown

I begin with this vignette from Akhtar’s film—a woman-centered Muktijuddho film—because it highlights what the essays in Ethical Encounters strive to do: reimagine a Muktijuddho gender ideology that through visual culture engages with, disrupts, and incites a new imaginary for gender justice. The collection defies conventional readings of the aesthetics and politics of Muktijuddho narratives. They tell stories of the birth of a nation from its margins, constructing a ‘Bangladeshi’ identity that embraces Bengali Muslims, as well as non-Muslims and non-Bengalis, coalescing into a national cinema that crystallizes an emergent Bangladeshi modernity. Yet at the same time, this modernity also relies on a middle-class and masculinist reading of the nation and its history. Ethical Encounters, inspired by women-centric cinema in Bangladesh, illuminates a feminine aesthetic as well as the politics of disruption and agency, healing, and reconciliation.

The poster for Meherjaan

The attempt to memorialize the varied experiences of women in the Liberation War is a way to advocate for and ingrain their complex, agential roles into the national history. Notably, instead of primarily focusing on state-level negotiations or masculine combat, films in this genre highlight the intimate, domestic, or “feminine” sphere as the site of struggle and meaning. By a “feminine” sphere, I mean those spaces that are usually considered feminized—and thus subordinated—within dominant patriarchal ideology. However, reframed, they can also be read as portrayals of nonconformity, mutuality, and solidarity. By allowing the viewer to remember, imagine, and work through traumatic events such as war and conflict through a feminine aesthetic, cinema can encourages appreciatiation of the moral choices and interpretive acts of women, previously consigned to only the “feminine” sphere, cast as passive victims or witnesses. Women in these films instead make unexpected, sometimes jarring, choices: nursing a wounded enemy soldier; seeking the assistance of a sympathetic Pakistani soldier after having been raped by others like him; and embracing a child of rape even when the nation rejects them. Recognizing these moral choices is a legacy of the war that viewers learn to appreciate through the cinematic medium, and these films are an evolving archive where diverse women’s stories are memorialized, as significant and precious as the memorials and museums the state erects to commemorate martyrs.

These films redefine what humanity, loss, and justice mean for victims, and reconfigure relationships between viewer, witness, and ally. They point to the open wound that 1971 still is, especially for women. This foundational trauma remains constitutive of the nation, and Muktijuddho cinema plays a pivotal role in constructing—and disrupting—the gendered subjectivities beget by the war’s legacy. Women’s cinema, and human rights cinema, capture more broad, transnational visions of feminist filmmaking. They recast the relationships of women to war—as plunder of the nation, as dislodged women from that nation—and question the terms of what constitutes the human in these fraught circumstances.

Ultimately, women-centric Muktijuddho films emplot global human rights narratives and aesthetics that defy reductive and monolithic renditions of social reality. They offer complexity and nuance beyond just a tussle between victims and aggressors, loss and triumph, and colonization and liberation. Simultaneously, they strive for more ethical recognitions, drawing on a multiplicity of histories, struggles, and experiences. Woman-centered films provide an alternative reading toward decolonizing notions of agency, freedom, and justice; they imagine a new kind of feminist knowledge-making.