After the Massacre: Commemoration and Consolation in Ha My and My Lai (review)

A reader looking to After the Massacre mainly for a detailed historical account of how the survivors of My Lai have gathered the traces of their shattered community in the nearly 40 years since the killings, have sought to make sense of what befell them, and have negotiated the problem of commemoration might finish this book feeling somewhat disappointed. This is not a story yet told in the West, except in fragments; nor is it a story that Heonik Kwon has really attempted to tell. The book offers revelations, certainly. We learn that the survivors were reluctant to participate in the official state commemorations of the massacre that attracted most notice abroad; that the remains of many of the victims were moved in the 1990s from mass burial sites to ancestral graves, as economic liberalization restored control over land to private individuals and families; that the ghosts of the victims continued to be seen and heard, initially around the killing sites and then, after reburial, in family homes; and that the spirits of other victims of the war in villages close to My Lai were held by their relatives to be jealous of the commemorative attention directed to those killed in the massacre. In general, though, Kwon's descriptions of memory and mourning in My Lai seem to function primarily as corroborative evidence for the broader salience of insights generated by his more substantial study of the aftermath of the massacre committed by Korean Marines in Ha My, near Da Nang, in 1968. The inclusion of My Lai within the project may reflect the imperatives of publication, as it was always likely to enlarge the audience for the book. That My Lai is incidental to Kwon's overall analysis, however, may also reflect the changing interests of the authorities in Quang Ngai Province, where My Lai is located, who rejected Kwon's requests to make additional research visits to the area because of their desire in the era of normalization "to move beyond past tragedies in foreign relations" (p. 144).

Nevertheless, Kwon has still constructed a wonderful book, capturing the rich, complex, and dynamic patterns of memory in Vietnamese communities affected by the experience of mass civilian death. He brings an anthropologist's subtlety and discretion to the study of the rituals of Vietnamese ancestor worship and the felt presences of ghosts and spirits in the lives of those left behind. Presences, not just absence and loss, were the legacies of the massacres for the survivors and their families: the desolating knowledge of close relations buried without appropriate ritual in a mass grave had an existential concomitant in the haunting of local streets and paddies by their unsettled ghosts. In contrast to the priorities of the Vietnamese state, at least up to normalization—which were to valorise the sacrifice of soldiers over that of civilians or, in the exceptional case of My Lai, to exploit the memory of civilian massacre as a resource for internal and external propaganda—the deepest desire of survivors was to rebury the massacre victims as best as possible in ancestral graves and, by so doing, bring their wandering spirits back inside the family home. The end of the Cold War, and the subsequent process of economic liberalization, finally afforded them the opportunity to fulfil this desire.

Much of the originality of Kwon's study lies in the attention it pays to the impact of the Cold War, specifically the polarizing patterns of its violence, on communal traditions of worship and spiritual belief in a post-colonial setting. Now those polarizations have decayed, and the disturbances they produced in the ghost-worlds of the Vietnamese have finally been contained. Probably we should be glad. As Kwon argues, the return of massacre victims to the realm of home and kinship, "free from traditional ideologies and political control," is consistent with "the universal ethic that all human beings have the right to be remembered" (p...