Abstract
Vietnamese scholar Ngô Tự Lập recently attempted to establish Hồ Chí Minh as the birthfather of futurist fiction in Vietnam by reading a 1949 story called “The Ten-year Sleep” by Trần Lực, later said to be Hồ Chí Minh. To give credibility to his claim, Ngô cites Brent Hayes Edwards’ praise for the futuristic power of an earlier story signed Nguyễn Ái Quốc, whom Edwards unproblematically narrates as the future Hồ Chí Minh. I read the “Ten-year Sleep” and a biography said to be written by Hồ Chí Minh himself to argue that the story stages the founding of the nation through the omnipresence of the figure of Hồ Chí Minh within that story, enabling a nationalist prophetic temporality that erases the heterogeneity of time in the same way that the name Hồ Chí Minh erases the heterogeneity of the various authors of the texts attributed to him. The article considers the politics of such a move in order to recover the rich potentials at the intersection of black and Vietnamese studies.
In 2010, Ngô Tự Lập, a Vietnamese literary scholar trained in France and the US, wrote a short piece published in the People’s Public Security journal entitled “Towards the 120th anniversary of the birthday of chairman Hồ Chí Minh (19 May 1890 – 19 May 2010): Birthfather of futurist fiction in Vietnam.” 1 This article was an elaboration on an earlier short piece in which Ngô Tự Lập cites Alain Guillemin to claim “Nguyễn Ái Quốc [was] not only one of the earliest but the most successful of Francophone writers.” 2 Similarly, in “Birthfather,” Ngô Tự Lập cites Brent Hayes Edwards’ praise of the futuristic powers of Nguyễn Ái Quốc’s story “L’Enfumé” as “stunning” 3 to establish Hồ Chí Minh as the birthfather of Vietnamese futurist fiction. 4 To cement Hồ as the birthfather of a whole genre of such fiction in Vietnam, 5 Ngô Tự Lập points to a 1949 story, “The Ten-year Sleep” (Giấc Ngủ Mười Năm), written in Vietnamese by Trần Lực, which Ngô Tự Lập reveals as another pen name of Hồ Chí Minh. Ngô Tự Lập’s reading aims to show that the value of futurist fiction lies in its prophetic powers, as both stories accurately predict the end of French colonial rule in North Africa and Indochina. Given that a genre of Vietnamese futurist fiction exists neither in nor out of Vietnam in any appreciable corpus, what is it in Edwards’ argument that enables Ngô Tự Lập’s claim of a birthfather? And why the emphasis on futurism?
As part of his larger project on circuits in the black diaspora, Brent Hayes Edwards argues in “The shadow of shadows” that it was the intercolonial exchanges in Paris as the metropolitan capital of “men without a country” in the post-First World War years that allowed Nguyễn Ái Quốc to write the colony against a hostile colonial archive, a project that could be read as one of founding a discourse on the colony and its anti-/post-colonial future in the form of the nation. 6 It follows from this that the authors of a discourse on “what a colony really is” are in the plural both in persons and in the colonial locations that preoccupied them—Lamine Senghor, Kojo Tovalou Houénou, Jean Ralaimongo, René Maran, Nguyễn Ái Quốc; Sénégal, Dahomey, Martinique, Indochine, etc. 7 Yet, Edwards makes his argument by way of reading these intercolonial traces in a set of texts that he attributes to a single person as its author, a Nguyễn Ái Quốc whom Edwards unproblematically narrates as the future Hồ Chí Minh. These texts not only found a way to describe the condition of the colony as an intercolonial condition tied to racism, but also to imagine the colony’s alternative future. One text in particular receives much of Edwards’ attention, “L’Enfumé,” a futurist short story foretelling a triumphant African Federative Republic independent from French colonial rule. I am advocating for an extension of Edwards’ plural and heterogeneous reading to the authorship of the texts themselves, thereby exploring the ways in which futuristic time is deployed in the founding of the nation. I read the “Ten-year Sleep” to argue that the story stages the founding of the nation through the omnipresence of Hồ Chí Minh within that story, enabling a nationalist prophetic temporality that erases the heterogeneity of time in the same way that the name Hồ Chí Minh erases the heterogeneity of the various authors of the texts attributed to him. I make this last point through a reading of a biography, Những mẫu chuyện trong cuộc đời hoạt động của Hồ Chủ Tịch by Trần Dân Tiên, a text that perhaps doubles as autobiography because, like the Nguyễn Ái Quốc and Trần Lực texts, the author is later said to be Hồ himself.
The claim that someone, anyone, has fathered a genre of Vietnamese futurist fiction seems just as stunning to me as the futurism in “L’Enfumé,” given that Vietnamese literature has no appreciable body of futurist fiction in or outside Vietnam, save the isolated story here and there. 8 What very little there is comes sporadically from very different impulses than the two stories ascribed to Hồ Chí Minh. 9 One is the feminist impulse in such early fiction as The Story of Nguyễn Tuyết Hoa (Nguyễn Tuyết Hoa Tiểu Truyện), published in 1930 under the name Trường Hoàn. 10 The impulse in this story seems to be toward supporting women’s liberation through technological advances brought about by women and women’s social organizing that could be traced to a different lineage.
In the story, the title character disguises herself as a man and travels to Japan to work in a factory where she learns technological skills allowing her to later help women to build a hydroelectric dam at Trị An (Ngô Tự Lập should find this plot line “prophetic” in that the Trị An hydroelectric dam actually came to be built decades later), adopt the use of planes and trains, and invent mechanical prosthetic wings that allow people to fly as a means of transport. Judging that these futurist techonological innovations by women alone would not bring about their advancement, the heroine also proposes to organize societies of activist women who eschew marriage as an institution of patriarchy, and who run cooperatives to provide work for men and women circumventing capital and its organized exploitation. Published some eight years after “L’Enfumé” and 19 years before “The Ten-year Sleep,” Tuyết Hoa’s feminist project seems to mine the modernist technological utopian speculative vein, rather than a masculinist militant revolutionary one. 11
If the birthfather of Vietnamese futurist fiction has no progeny, what is at issue here? Entertaining as Ngô’s claim turns out to be, what intrigues me is not that Hồ Chí Minh founded no tradition of futurist fiction in Vietnam. What interests me is how the act of founding deploys futurist imagining. Although not argued out as such, Ngô’s claim that Hồ Chí Minh is the father of a genre of futurist fiction implies two further arguments: (1) fathering/founding is to bring the postcolonial nation into time through futurist imagining here deflected onto an argument about the founding of futurist fiction as prophesy, and (2) the person who has done so is Hồ Chí Minh. I argue the biographical coherence of the second is the necessary condition of the first.
Ngô Tự Lập’s deployment of Edwards also raises questions about what power relations amongst locations of knowledge production are at work when scholars in Vietnam appeal to the prestige of theoretical discussions in the academy of the West (with its own set of politics) for purposes caught up in local relations of power. In this particular case, building up the veneration of the long dead Vietnamese leader legitimates the Party’s monopoly of rule in Vietnam as it integrates the country into the neoliberal global economy. 12 If theorists in the West, particularly the American academy, often seem to work out of an anti-authoritarian impulse, how careful should we be in following it through complex histories and multiple contexts of deployment? Ngô Tự Lập seems well-positioned to use in his Vietnamese publications scholarship produced in the academy of the West. He got his Master’s in France and his PhD from Illinois State University, and he has been working in his post at the National University in Hanoi. Edwards, from the most prestigous places of the American academy, has done influential work in diaspora studies from his rich scholarship in black cultural politics. Appearing in the journal positions, “The shadow of shadows” in effect stages an intervention into Asian studies from black studies. How are we to think about this cross-over, this cross-fertilization between black studies and Vietnamese studies, but within the uneven power relations between the academy of the metropole and that of the postcolony?
Into time: Futurist writing as an act of founding
The … revolution … cannot draw its poetry from the past, but only from the future.
13
“L’Enfumé,” published in L’Humanité on August 20, 1922, includes a dedication to a real-life Algerian who had been murdered by a French colonial officer the month before, an epigraph by Indochina Governor General Albert Sarraut lauding the colonial enterprise, and the place of a fictitious capital city of Haoussas as well as the future date of January 1998. 14 The paratextual materials reference the facticity of the presence in the news of the murder and Sarraut’s speech to prepare the space of truth-telling in setting the place and time of a future as response. The present murder as evidence of colonial hypocrisy vouches for the truth of the fictional colonial atrocity and the legitimacy of the future vision. The story itself opens with a description of the 50th anniversary of the African Federative Republic, a historical event set 76 years into the future. The opening paragraph ends with the introduction of Papa Kimengo, nicknamed l’Enfumé.
L’Enfumé or “the one who is smoked” is the survivor of a colonial atrocity in which the white resident chief, to collect taxes, gives an order to smoke Kimengo’s people to death in a cave, an act described as “savage” by Kimengo. 15 Race here circuitously allows colonial atrocity because violence produces race as the marker of the limit of the human. 16 Kimengo understands this logic when he calls the act savage. In his 1950 Discourse of Colonialism, Aimé Césaire points to racial differentiation underpinning European sovereign power to problematize the assumption that European violence could be understood apart from its colonial relations. His formulation of the choc en retour shows the colony as the originary site of modern European violence, which would boomerang back to Europe in the form of genocidal murder. Because the colonizer dominates by treating the native as an animal, he transforms himself into an animal. 17 As if anticipating Césaire, Kimengo holds the colonizer responsible for the dehumanization that European atrocities produce. Instead of allowing the perpetrator to define himself as universal man in relation to those who are deemed not human, Kimengo insists the colonial killer loses his humanity in such an act. Kimengo’s ordeal turns him from victim to fighter in the revolution, and consequently to one of the founders of the “black Republic.” Kimengo tries not only to “wake brothers of the same race,” 18 but also to unite other oppressed races in the common fight. By identifying and resisting oppression as the condition that produces savagery in the oppressor as this oppressor seeks to produce the conflation of race and savagery in the oppressed, Kimengo could reclaim his life and human agency as well as his race, eschewing the oppressor’s false claim of universal man. Kimengo’s glory in old age is described with features of his blackness: “his snowy mane brilliantly frames his ebony face.” 19
Edwards cites the opening paragraph, which sets both the time and place of the short story, and describes it as “stunning” in both its futurist imagining and its intercoloniality. 20 Edwards writes, “‘L’Enfumé’ is exceptional, a singular effort to practice intercolonialism. A story about a futuristic Africa, written by a Vietnamese…” 21 Edwards’ preoccupation with futurism could be understood in relation to the impulse at our moment in the American academy to recuperate the future as a chronopolitical terrain in the wake of the bankruptcy of utopian thought made flesh in the various neoliberalizing socialist states, 22 and to counter what Kodwo Eshun calls the “futures industry,” that “positive feedback between future-oriented media and capital,” which either reproduces outright racist formulations or occludes race. 23 Futurist fiction from the mid-20th century on, in its most popular form of science fiction, tends to celebrate technological inventions that could serve to inspire speculation and investment in high-tech capitalism, including public investment in research and development that would then benefit industry. Of course the forward temporal projection of futurist thinking also feeds speculative modes of financial capitalism. Such works of science fiction at times may seem to come from an older utopian/dystopian impulse of critique, yet race is curiously occluded. Richard Pryor is often quoted as lamenting “ain’t no niggers” in the 1970s dystopic science fiction film Logan’s Run, which leads him to conclude that “whitefolks ain’t planning for us to be here.” 24 When black people do appear, they mark the space of dystopia. Africa, for instance, becomes of the space of “absolute dystopia” within developmentalist discourses. 25 Within this context, it seems vital for fictional and critical works to emerge that could politicize the future by creating alternative genalogies of the present, ones that allow for black futurity. Afrofuturism as a critical formation responds to this need. As Kodwo Eshun puts it, “Afrofuturism, then, is concerned with the possibilities for intervention within the dimension of the predictive, the projected, the proleptic, the envisioned, the virtual, the anticipatory and the future conditional.” 26
Through the lens of Afrofuturism, black imaginings of an alternative history or future for people of African descent has precedents well before “L’Enfumé.” Martin R Delany’s Blake; or the Huts of America, written in the 1850s, imagines a West Indian slave leading violent revolution in Cuba and the American South as an international solution to slavery. 27 One could speculate that this liberatory tale must have taken into account the historical event of the Haitian Revolution, itself utopian in its Enlightenment thinking. 28 Science fiction writer and critic Samuel Delany identifies “Sutton E. Griggs and his novel Imperio Imperium (1899) in which an African-American secret society conspires to found a separate black state by taking over Texas,” and “Edward Johnson, who, following Bellamy’s example in Looking Backward (1888), wrote Light Ahead for the Negro (1904), telling of a black man transported into a socialist United States in the far future.” 29 Therefore, in terms of black writers imagining an alternative future of black liberation, “L’Enfumé” was certainly not the first. What Edwards emphasizes is the fact that this futurist tale of black liberation is imagined by an Asian diasporic, and that the black and Asian diasporas overlap at the condition of intercoloniality.
The intercoloniality here must be understood to have been staged on both the knowledge about the condition of colonies as well the realm of the Francophone as a battle ground for ruler and ruled within the French empire, and soon would have to contend with négritude. The texts under the name of Nguyễn Ái Quốc appearing in periodicals of this period were all published in French, acknowledging that this shared intercolonial condition must happen in a shared language. Where Edwards merely lauds the story’s intercolonial move to imagine a future 1948 communist victory in Africa which history did not bear out, Ngô ascribes to the story a prophetic power, which according to Ngô is proven yet again in the 1949 story “The Ten-year Sleep” authored by Trần Lực. 30
The narrator of this story, Nông Văn Minh, is from the minoritized tribe of the Nùng in the north of Vietnam. He suffers every humiliation of one who is exploited and oppressed. The last days of the Second World War offer an opportunity for the great anti-colonial armed struggle, as Japanese troops are bombed into submission by the Allies after the Japanese forces had earlier overthrown the French authorities in Indochina. Nông Văn Minh joins the Viet Minh under the leadership of Hồ Chí Minh, and suffers a head wound for his battlefield bravery. Passing out from blood loss, Minh wakes up 10 years later to find the resistance has triumphed, and the now unified and independent Democratic Republic of Vietnam has delivered every promise it has made from the eradication of illiteracy to equality for all and goodwill toward other nations, including the defeated France. 31
Following Minh’s first shock upon learning about the passing of time—10 years’ worth of it—during which the wife of Minh the buffalo herder is the new hamlet chief, and the daughter of Minh the hungry servant is now a medical student, he asks himself if the world has not upended: “hay là thế giới đổ lộn nhào?” 32 Minh quickly recovers his bearing in time and space by uttering to himself: “Possible. Possible. If the French lost and Vietnam is now unified and independent then what is there that we cannot accomplish?” 33
What is it that has been made “possible” in this story?
At the story’s writing, the Viet Minh was waging guerilla warfare from bases in mountainous and distant areas; the cooptation of the minoritized races who resided in these areas was therefore a necessity. Minh’s minoritized status is the product of the colonial administrative tool of the census, but he doubles here as another kind of subject in the emerging nation. If in “L’Enfumé” Kimengo’s race at the limit of the human is redeemed in the “black Republic,” Nông Văn Minh as the new minoritized therefrom racialized subject of the emerging nation marks the limit of its future universal citizen. The specificity produced by racialization marks the limits of universality, in this case of national citizenship, enabling its very possibility. It follows that the racialized figure is excluded by virtue of its inclusion in its liminal function. Minh’s race is signalled via his last name Nông and his servitude. Yet through this elapsed time of the nation, it becomes occluded in nationalist ideology that says the nation is of homogenous stock because it is of homogeneous will. The occlusion of his minoritized race is earned as Minh becomes a soldier in the army of the nation while it wages its birthing war. The process is complete when Minh wakes up into national citizenship demarcated by his occluded minoritization and racialization.
The story also makes possible something else. Minh asks his daughter to recount to him all the events that led up to the triumph and birth of the new nation. In the daughter’s account, the historical situation with the Japanese defeat and the maneuvers by Vĩnh Thụy (the abdicated Emperor Bảo Đại) and the Quốc Dân Đảng are spelled out, battle developments are retold, and war strategies are described. The daughter also relays prescriptions that led up to the victory, prescriptions that were part of actually on-going Viet Minh programmatic mobilization at the time of the story’s publication. It is the recounting of events and strategies leading up to the triumphant future that allows for something to become present (its presence in time) through the future. It is this future that makes the present of the nation (its presence) a possibility in time. 34 Minh is the witness that allows for that gap between present and future to close. His waking from his sleep allows for time to flow, for the 10 years to take place, for the arrival of the nation into time’s flow toward the future. What Minh’s tale makes possible is time itself, and the new nation’s bearing in it.
In this way, imagining a future allows the nation to become present. Edwards’ emphasis on the futurist dimension of “L’Enfumé” seems to be about making present something that would have seemed impossible, not the prophetic power of fiction itself to bear out in actually unfolding events. Yet, Ngô Tự Lập deploys Edwards’ praise of the first story’s futurism to claim both stories prophetic. Prophesy brings the future into view, but it also demands fulfillment, thereby foreclosing all other possibilities. Ngô Tự Lập has reasons for trying to read the stories as prophetic. For one, such interpretation reaffirms the human-enacted historical determinism in such prophetic temporality. There is necessarily only one outcome in that future. For another, the ruling party of the nation in our time demands it. The current authority, in its incessant affirmation of its legitimacy, rewards readings of history that show how the present is necessarily the future of that past. As something is brought into the flow of time, into existence, it emerges in the terrain of human action and becomes chronopolitical. Yet in this interpretation, the future becomes depoliticized in its prophetic realization. Minh upon waking up needs to hear an account of the 10 years that portrays not Vĩnh Thụy the former emperor, or the Quốc Dân Đảng, but the Viet Minh as the sole legitimate champion of the just nation, emplaced in the flow of the past into this present, and this present into that future, necessarily.
If the prophetic temporality demands redemption from the determinate future, it does so by providing a coherence to time, giving it a unidirectional flow. Through Minh in “The Ten-year Sleep,” the reader could witness the redemption of the racially marked subject in the universal citizen, and of the present in the future. Such redemption is made possible by Minh’s sovereign, the other Minh—Hồ Chí Minh. Minh the sovereign is the inversion of Minh the minoritized and racialized figure at the limits of the citizen. It is through Minh the sovereign that the heterogeneity of time is eliminated, allowing for only one of the possible futures to seemingly become a function of the present. Hồ shows up as a constant presence that sutures the present (of on-going war) to the future (of victory) across the 10-year lapse in time. Being told by his daughter that he is in the convalescent home named after Hồ (Dinh Dưỡng Đường Cụ Hồ), Minh asks where Hồ is and if he is in good health: “Cụ ở đâu? Cụ mạnh khoẻ không, đồng chí?,” to which his daughter answers, “Cụ mạnh khoẻ luôn.” 35 Indeed Hồ is not limited to one location in space as he is always present in time, being “always in good health.” Omnipresent, Hồ exists unmarked by race in an undifferentiated temporality, always already leading his people to victory. Victory is assured because it is already here, in the present. As is the nation. The daughter tells him that fighters who are captured by the enemy, while their flesh is being scooped out and their tendons cut, when they are being slaughtered, shout out: “Long Live Independent Vietnam. Long Live Chairman Hồ.” 36 Hồ alone redeems the cut tendons and the scooped out flesh of his various subjects as universal citizens because Hồ alone gives birth to the nation by anchoring its presence in undifferentiated time. In closing the story, Minh the narrator tells us that the first thing he does upon coming home is to pen a letter to the sovereign Minh to “thank Him and wish Him good health.” 37 And the second thing Minh does is to pen his tale. The constant presence of the sovereign is the first condition of the flow of narrative and prophetic time.
Biography
Thus my life is a flight and I lose everything and everything belongs to oblivion, or to him.
38
And who is penning Minh the narrator’s tale? The story is signed Trần Lực, but it is collected into a volume of Hồ Chí Minh: Stories and Essays (Hồ Chí Minh, Truyện và ký) published by the Hanoi Literature House in 1985. 39 Ngô Tự Lập cites it to identify Trần Lực as Hồ Chí Minh. It seems the one penning Minh the narrator is Minh the sovereign. It is the name Hồ Chí Minh that vows for the present nation through its future redemption from both within and without the story.
Outside the short story, the occasion is Hồ Chí Minh’s 120th birthday. Ngô Tự Lập makes an offering to the dead ancestor, an act Vietnamese often derisively call cúng cụ, which usually garners favors for the one making the offering in a context where the earnest market-adopting Party resorts to cultivating Hồ Chí Minh the father of the nation as its ideological source replacing both Marx and Lenin, now defunct in an era of global neoliberalism. The name Hồ Chí Minh is used as the place holder, the empty site of projection. We see his image and his name evoked in public spaces across Vietnam. Slogans like Chủ Tịch Hồ Chí Minh Sống Mãi trong Sự Nghiệp của Chúng Ta may anchor one space amidst the other slogans of the market, advertisements that exist side by side with images of Hồ lifting weight as the fitness model in posters exhorting citizens to exercise, or the larger than life-size Hồ in khaki as the youth activist, etc. Hồ must be present, always, to ensure the flow of prophetic time, serving the current agenda of the ruling party. Hồ is all that you can be. Hồ is the corpse mummified and entombed, defying death from the nonplace of death. Hồ is everywhere because he is nowhere. Instead, Hồ is in undifferentiated time. Where is cụ Hồ? Cụ Hồ is “always in good health.”
Anne McClintock reminds us that fathering is a masculinist act plagued by anxiety. 40 It requires constant maintenance. Ngô Tự Lập’s birthday offering to Hồ is to make literal his act of founding the nation into time by claiming that Hồ Chí Minh the person wrote these prophetic stories, fathering both the nation and its futurist literature. Ngô Tự Lập conflates Nguyễn Ái Quốc and Trần Lực into Hồ Chí Minh as the father of Vietnamese futurist fiction, a biographical move enabled by a biographical text signed Trần Dân Tiên, but given credibility by Edwards’ reading of a set of texts, “L’Enfumé” included, attributing them all to Nguyễn Ái Quốc as a single author and a single person. Edwards identifies Nguyễn Ái Quốc parenthetically: “Nguyen Ai Quoc (who was later to be better known as Ho Chi Minh).” 41 Although the Trần Dân Tiên text has already made this identification, Ngô Tự Lập implicitly assumes its veracity but does not cite it. Instead, he cites Edwards because the latter, issuing from the Western academy, has more credibility to Vietnamese audiences weary of official propaganda.
Edwards’ unproblematic authorial identification is peculiar since he advocates a reading that reveals the “not-one” of a text. Edwards writes, “in the writings of Nguyen Ai Quoc and Lamine Senghor,” the task of “colonial studies” to tell “what a colony really is” requires not only a “flood of hard data and testimonies of oppression, but also a prose that stretches into symbolic fable and speculative fiction, conte et récit, memoire and allegory. The form of intercolonialism can only be imagined as not-one.” 42 Why not extend this “not-one” reading to the authorship of the texts themselves?
Sophie Quinn-Judge, one of the many biographers of Hồ Chí Minh, notes the difficulty of interpretation, of attribution, of selection when “every new document presents its own new problem of interpretation.”
43
The task of the biographer is of course to settle on an interpretation of the fragments she gathers and selects. Nevertheless, there are gaps that the careful biographer hesitates to fill. One of these gaps is the authorship of the various texts signed Nguyễn Ái Quốc written and/or published from 1919 to 1923 in Paris. This problem is exacerbated when Trần Dân Tiên, another biographer of Hồ Chí Minh, elaborates on the authorship of these texts that are signed Nguyễn Ái Quốc. Trần Dân Tiên is later revealed to be Hồ Chí Minh in Vietnamese official sources.
44
Biography seems here to blur into autobiography. The Demands of the Vietnamese People presented to delegates at the 1919 Paris Peace Conference was the first text to be signed “For the Group of Vietnamese Patriots, Nguyễn Ái Quấc” or Nguyễn the Patriot. The spelling was much later standardized to Nguyễn Ái Quốc. Regarding this text, Trần Dân Tiên in this (auto)biography of Hồ Chí Minh writes: “It should be mentioned that the idea to present the demands was Mr. Nguyễn’s, but it [the Demands] was written by the lawyer Phan Văn Trường, because at the time, Mr. Nguyễn could not yet write in French.”
45
Regarding the later newspaper articles, Trần Dân Tiên writes: Ông Nguyễn không đủ tiếng Pháp để viết và phải khẩn khoản yêu cầu ông Phan Văn Trường viết thay. Ông Trường viết giỏi nhưng không muốn ký tên. Mà ông Nguyễn đã phải ký tên những bài báo. Nhược điểm về tri thức làm cho ông Nguyễn rất khó chịu. Nhất là ông Trường không viết tất cả những điều ông Nguyễn muốn nói.
46
(Mr. Nguyễn did not know enough French to write and had to insistently request Mr. Phan Văn Trường to write in his place. Mr. Trường wrote very well but did not want to sign. Mr. Nguyễn had to sign the newspaper articles. His intellectual shortcomings bothered Mr. Nguyễn. Especially when Mr. Trường did not write all that Mr. Nguyễn wanted to say.)
The name Phan Văn Trường refers to an anti-colonial activist with a rap sheet by the time Nguyễn Tất Thành arrived in Paris. Phan Văn Trường had been imprisoned in 1914 on charges of coordinating support for anti-colonial activities in Indochina. According to Quinn-Judge, the French feared Trường for his mastery of the art of political argument during his legal studies in Paris. 47 He and Phan Chu Trinh might have toward the end of the First World War started a group called the Vietnamese Patriots Association, the group behind the Demands mentioned above. 48 Some members later resided at 6 Villa des Gobelins. These many activists often did not fully agree with each other’s politics, frequently quarreled, and would ultimately part ways. Nguyễn Tất Thành, the latecomer, possibly assumed an increasingly prominent role among these activists because both Phan Văn Trường and Phan Chu Trinh were in trouble with the law. 49 Quinn-Judge, relying on Trần Dân Tiên’s (auto)biography, writes that Phan Văn Trường “probably did much of the writing of articles submitted to the French press in 1919 in the name of Nguyễn Ái Quốc.” 50 The volume of writings alone should raise questions about the single authorship of these articles. Multiple articles signed Nguyễn Ái Quốc would appear in single issues of Le Paria. Several would appear in the space of a few days, sometimes in rapid succession in multiple periodicals including Le Populaire, La Vie Ouvrière, La Revue Communiste, Le Libertaire, in addition to L’Humanité and Le Paria. For example, articles under the name Nguyễn Ái Quốc appear in La Vie Ouvrière dated May 29, 1922, and in L’Humanité on May 30, May 31, and June 1, 1922. 51 This rate of production would go on for the good part of these Paris years.
If the authorship of the texts looks to be at least collective rather than individual, it follows that Edwards’ emphasis on Nguyễn Ái Quốc’s exchanges with activists from other colonies, giving rise to writings that advocate an intercolonial understanding of colonialism, should have been extended to others in this loose grouping of activists. Edwards afterall mentions in passing that Nguyễn Ái Quốc lived with Phan Văn Trường without pursuing the latter’s activities and possible authorship or coauthorship of these texts. Phan Văn Trường leaves but a trace in Edwards’ text. He was a radical who participated in all the groupings and forums that Edwards credits with founding a discourse on the colony. In 1920, an article signed Nguyễn Ái Quốc appeared in L’Humanité entitled “Colonial policy.” The article addresses ideas from Lenin’s “Theses on national and colonial questions.” Quinn-Judge thinks the article “may again have been written with Phan Văn Trường’s help.” 52 Phan Văn Trường attended with Nguyễn Tất Thành the first as well as subsequent meetings of the Intercolonial Union, having been invited by the Magalasy lecturer Stéphany Oju Oti. 53 The Union’s executive committee consisted of those from Indochina, Réunion, Dahomey, Guadeloupe, the Antilles, Martinique, and Guyana. Phan Văn Trường, Nguyễn Tất Thành, and later another activist from Indochina, Nguyễn Thế Truyền, helped run the Union’s paper Le Paria which appeared in 1922. The activists who came together for purposes of working for the colonies would soon part ways because of differences in their politics. Nguyễn Tất Thành would leave for the Soviet Union in 1923.
How and when Nguyễn Tất Thành came to assume the identity of Nguyễn Ái Quốc and the accomplishments of a collective was never entirely pinned down in the French security police documents with its fragmentary accounts from informants. But how Nguyễn Ái Quốc became Hồ Chí Minh is easier to trace as it happened in a series of narrative acts in published texts. The very first of those texts was the above mentioned Trần Dân Tiên (auto)biography published in 1948 in China, 1949 in France, 1955 in Vietnam, and republished or reprinted at least 10 times in Vietnam by 2011. In the book’s preface, the author Trần Dân Tiên claims that Chairman Hồ Chí Minh, busy with official business, did not have time to tell his life story. Instead, Trần Dân Tiên had to seek out the many witnesses whose lives at some points had intersected with the chairman’s. The result is necessarily a collection of fragments of stories told by these witnesses coming together to narrate the chairman’s life as an activist. Sophie Quinn-Judge assesses the value of this (auto)biographical text as a historical source: “While it is based on fact, its omissions, embellishments, and insistence on Ho Chi Minh’s proletarian virtue made it an element in the construction of his myth rather than a serious record.” 54 I am not concerned here with the construction of the myth of the virtuous leader, although the text very insistently is that. I am more interested in how such a narration is able to pull disparate personalities, spaces, and time into the one author of these texts, and consequently the author of the nation and what it contains.
Paul Ricoeur proposes that personal identity is always narrative identity: It therefore seems plausible to take the following chain of assertions as valid: self-understanding is an interpretation; interpretation of the self, in turn, finds in the narrative, among other signs and symbols, a privileged form of mediation; the latter borrows from history as well as from fiction, making a life story a fictional history or, if one prefers, a historical fiction, interweaving the historiographic style of biographies with the novelistic style of imaginary autobiographies.
55
The interconnectedness of personal and narrative identity raises the question of identity as sameness or continuity across time. Ricoeur calls this a problem of the “permanence in time” of the one being narrated into being. 56 I detect three moves through which Trần Dân Tiên’s text accomplishes the task of pulling the multiple times and places of the many persons into the one. The first is the simple parenthetical move whereby an earlier name is included in parentheses next to the name Nguyễn Ái Quốc. For example, the first time we are formally introduced to Nguyễn Ái Quốc in the forward-moving narrative is on page 34 in a passage on the Versailles Peace Conference; the name is followed by the phrase “that is Brother Ba” in parentheses: (tức là Anh Ba). Before this point in the text, Brother Ba is first introduced on page 15 as a young man seeking employment and passage on the Unified Transport Company (hãng Vận tải hợp nhất), and who gives his name as Ba on page 16. Ba refers to the order of birth in a family and anyone could be called Ba (third) or less often Hai (second), and so on. This ubiquitous moniker was not explicitly linked to any previously named person. Instead, it is peculiarly linked to the future Chairman Hồ by the second narrative move.
The (auto)biography itself starts out with the sentence: “Hồ Chủ Tịch sinh năm 1890” on page 11. From this beginning moment, each eyewitness’s story is concluded with either an acknowledgement or astonished realization that the person he knew in the past is in fact Chairman Hồ of an infinite future in that he is and always will be Chairman Hồ. For example, the first witness receives the confidence of a young man seeking to go to France to learn ways to help his people. The witness concludes his story about the nameless young man by saying: “Later I knew only that the patriotic young man full of conviction is Nguyễn Ái Quốc, our Chairman Hồ of today.” 57 Another witness, after telling about his Brother Ba during the passage from Indochina, concludes: “I would never guess that my little friend, that innocent Brother Ba, diligent and humble, would become our Chairman of the Government, the one who built up our Republic.” 58 Yet another witness was asked after finishing his story if he knows what Brother Ba has become, to which the witness replies that he does not know. The passage ends with Trần Dân Tiên urging the witness to look at the portrait of Chairman Hồ, and when the witness “turned his head, opened his eyes, let his mouth fall, and scratched his ear. And he sprang up yelling: ‘Chairman Hồ! Our chairman Hồ! Amitābha Buddha! But how do you know? Are you telling the truth?’” 59 The witness goes on to exclaim that his children would be so happy to find out their father had known the Chairman in the past. 60 This kind of narrative move presents the moments during which Brother Ba or other unnamed persons are recognized by witnesses to be the chairman of the present. In exchange for that recognition, witnesses are rewarded with the honor of playing a role in the achievement of the great leader as they are hailed to become citizens of a nascent nation. It is within this new national community that witnesses recognize their character as the chairman and in turn are recognized themselves. 61
In the cited passages and others, narrative strategies are employed to provide the identity of the persons known as Brother Ba, Mr. Nguyễn, Nguyễn Ái Quốc, and Chairman Hồ as the same person and continuous with one another. In achieving the effect of permanence in time, Ricoeur differentiates between same and self where sameness may be demonstrated through such elements as “emblematic character,” and selfhood through the keeping of one’s word across time. 62 The emblematic character is spelled out in this case to be the hard-working young man who cares deeply about the fate of the oppressed. The unbelievability expressed by one of the eyewitnesses above about the gap between the humble Ba and the revered chairman is of course the very source of believability as Chairman Hồ is all about diligence and humility even at the apex of power. The chairman has kept the brother’s word, as well as the word in the political texts signed Nguyễn Ái Quốc, in delivering salvation to his oppressed people, yet remains true to his emblematic character traits of diligence and humility.
The third narrative move is the use of the eliptical. Gaps in the story allow for the leader’s sameness and self to move across persons, identities, and places toward the destiny manifested in the present as fulfillment of prophetic time. Phrases like “once again, [he] disappears,” 63 or “once again we lose the thread,” 64 only to pick up the story in a different locality with a different personality or identity would advance the plot as a progression toward the destined leader of the destined nation in prophetic time. These are the points of disappearance and scene-shifting: he disappears from Marseille to appear in Africa, from London to appear in Paris, from Paris to appear in Moscow, from Moscow to Hong Kong, from Chiang Mai to Canton, and from Canton to Pác Bó, etc. These empty spaces in knowledge about the progress of the life of the leader serve as the space of imminence that allows for the leader to become visible by emerging from it. It is these empty spaces that demand that readers fill in the gaps themselves, with the content becoming unavoidably believable to readers who imagine them. At one point, author Trần Dân Tiên cites a Chinese proverb to say a good artist does not paint a whole dragon, instead he paints “a dragon that now hides now appears in the clouds.” 65
At the same time as texts like Trần Dân Tiên’s narrate the multiplicity of names and selves into the one, there is the reinforcing inverse story emerging in news accounts and government official records where Hồ Chí Minh the one had to split into the many in order to accomplish his mission of national salvation. According to an article in the official newspaper Nhân Dân, 66 Hồ Chí Minh used a total of 30 names during his career. Some of these names may have been shared with or appropriated from others. This pattern continues after he later became an agent of the Comintern working from various locations—Moscow, Canton, Siam, Hong Kong, Vietnam. Now here, now there, like an apparition. There are even rumors that Nguyễn Ái Quốc died in Hong Kong, only to resurrect in Vietnam as Hồ Chí Minh. 67 Attempting to stop all this movement and flight, one anti-government author from the diaspora tried to pin down all the selves that Hồ had at some point inhabited or coinhabited with others and came up with 217 names. 68 Nguyễn the Patriot was constituted of patriots in the plural—the plural whose existence is conflated in the one: Nguyễn Tất Thành, Nguyễn Ái Quốc, Trần Lực, Trần Dân Tiên, more names signed and sealed different texts, and finally Hồ Chí Minh as the future self that must be made to contain all 30 or all 217 names, many of whom contained other persons. Hồ Chí Minh became the personage that cannibalizes all others.
Black-Vietnamese cross-cultural politics
In an interview, Edwards highlights in his preoccupation “a critical orientation towards issues of diaspora,…towards multiple languages, cross-fertilizations, voyages (geographic or imagined), the complexities of intellectual connections and influence, what Wilson Harris calls ‘cross-cultural poetics’.” 69 “The shadow of shadows” is a move to trace such “cross-cultural poetics” among African, Caribbean, and Asian diasporas in Paris before essentialist nationalism took over, much of which came as a result of strivings by some of these celebrated “men without a country.” The impulse to trace these cross-fertilizations is admirable and should open up new venues of fruitful research revolving around race and coloniality. Nevertheless, much more careful scholarship must accompany considerations of the political and theoretical implications of such “cross-cultural poetics.” Edwards’ impulse to place emphasis on futurist imaginings within this context of multiplicity and cross-fertilization is an admirable one. Yet, it is clear from this discussion that the reason why the futurism in “L’Enfumé” might be important in Edwards’ context is not the reason why it is important in Ngô Tự Lập’s. If Edwards’ text is concerned with intercolonial imaginings of a black future, Ngô gestures to a futurity in order to justify the Vietnamese present as prophetic fulfillment. Where Edwards looks for discrepancies and suspects putative origins, 70 Ngô Tự Lập’s project is precisely to establish an origin, a birth in order to attribute a birth father to the act of founding; a move that reveals that such prophetic projection of the future has always depended on a personality to anchor it. Edwards’ text neglects to problematize the way in which futurist imaginings may anchor its temporal presencing on a sovereign presence existing outside historical time. This failure to pursue the discrepancies in the authorship of the celebrated texts is disturbing in that it works to remove such future imagining from the realm of political contention, an oversight in Edwards’ argument that Ngô Tự Lập exploits for ends that match those of the Vietnamese state at the moment.
In his exploration of the political potentials of the black diapora, Edwards has advocated a conceptualization of diaspora as composing not only articulations or translations that allow one part to connect and move through its joint with another part, but also the untranslatable gaps that allow the articulations in the first place. 71 The unassimilable difference here is between the various persons or names and the later figure of Hồ Chí Minh with its political function at various historical moments from the late 1940s onward. Phan Văn Trường was one of those missing untranslatable gaps. And it is Edwards that leaves out Trường as one of the authors of the texts Edwards examines. It is Edwards that ignores the leftover in order for a particular articulation between the African diaspora and the Indochinese one to take place in his text. Are we left to speculate that an articulation via multiple authors most of whom are less well-known than Hồ Chí Minh would diminish the prestige of Edwards’ picture of black-Indochinese intercolonial collaboration? It would be unfortunate if it were so, because Edwards has opened up an important line of inquiry following race and coloniality that can make the best of cross-fertilization between black and Vietnamese studies. This article is one attempt to participate in what promises to be a fruitful endeavor. Yet, to do so, I must critique the ways in which this project has been appropriated. Surely, there are other ways to stage black-Vietnamese studies articulation, ones that heed Edwards’ own urging that we pay attention to “the points of misunderstanding, bad faith, unhappy translation,” and that they “must be considered a necessary haunting.” 72 Yet, should we not, as scholars, be discriminate about the kind of politics served by such articulation through “bad faith” and “unhappy translation”?
Considering the various points of cross-fertilization between Vietnamese and black cultural politics from colonial subjugation, the anti-colonial discourse of such writers as Fanon, Vietnam in radical political imagining, to anti-racist activism in the US, it makes sense that all these intersect to culminate in a critical location. Yet, we must be acutely aware that any cross-over between black and Vietnamese studies must be triangulated through the location of the Western academy.
Conclusion
Writing from the American academy, Edwards erases in his text the collective in favor of the individual authorship of a new discourse on the colony, and certifies that this author is indeed singular in the person of the future leader of the postcolonial nation. Edwards gives credence to the account that narrates the many—the heterogeneity of persons, politics, and time—into the one.
From within the postcolonial nationalist context, Ngô Tự Lập appropriates Edwards’ scholarship with its American prestige to validate a prophetic futurism grounded in the fetishization of the founder at the moment when his professed heirs in the current leaders of the nation seek to divest it of Marxism-Leninism and integrate it into the neoliberal global order. Indeed the nation is not only founded by “men without a country,” its continued imaginability is always being propped up from without, in metropolitan, and hence seemingly country-less, places like Paris or various American universities.
Despite Edwards’ intentions at revealing the multiplicity and cross-fertilizations at the intersection of black and Vietnamese studies, both Edwards’ and Ngô Tự Lập’s texts re-enable the act of founding as temporal presencing to be anchored by a singular sovereign subject that exists across time by existing outside time as a terrain of politics. Prophetic futurism is so deployed in the founding of the nation, and now in its maintenance, by grounding its forward movement of time in a figure of the father divested of chronopolitics. But to what effects?
Fanon, in reading Marx’s gesture toward the “poetry of the future,” sees redemption in the future of the present when he asserts: “The Vietnamese who die before the firing squads are not hoping that their sacrifice will bring about the reappearance of the past. It is for the sake of the present and future that they are willing to die.” 73 Fanon, like so many other anti-colonial theorists and leaders, would try to prescribe the future by spelling out its necessary programmatic content, in this case the violent redistribution of wealth in a revolutionary futurity. 74 We are by now familiar with critiques of Fanon’s masculinist, heterosexual model of violent struggle. 75 But it is this programmatic closing of future possibilities, thus ironically removing the future from the realm of politics as contention over the ability to decide, that leads Kara Keeling to queer time by gesturing toward a future whose poetry renders it fragmentary and indeterminate, rather than programmatic. If at Fanon’s moment of writing, this futurity is programmatic, at Ngô Tự Lập’s present moment, it has been made prophetic to redeem the legitimacy of a late socialist regime doubling as a neoliberal one. Speaking from a location within the current racist and homophobic order akin to Fanon’s colonial conditions, Keeling asks, “Might we allow those rhythms [of the poetry from a future] to move us to repel the quotidian violence through which we currently are defined without demanding of the future from which they come that it redeem our movement now or then?” 76
Footnotes
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: The author received small financial support from the UCLA Asian American Studies Center for the research and writing of this article.