After the Massacre: Commemoration and Consolation in Ha My and My Lai

1. The Bipolarity of Death

Chapter 1 The Bipolarity of Death 11 Dead people, in popular Vietnamese culture, can be powerfully sentient and salient beings who entertain emotions, intentions, and historical awareness. The ethnological literature about their mortuary customs and religious imaginations confirms this. Remembering ancestors means, in Vietnam, according to Le Van Dinh, relating to them “as if they were alive.”1 A French Jesuit missionary to Vietnam and author of classical studies on Vietnamese popular religions, Léopold Cadière, wrote that the Vietnamese perception of the world incorporates the awareness that the life of the dead is intertwined with that of the living, and that the Vietnamese idealize a harmonious relationship between the two forms of life.2 Their social life consists in both relations among the living and interactions with the dead, according to Nguyen Van Huyen, and it follows that the history of war, for the Vietnamese, can be as much about what to do with the dead here and now as about how to interpret the past events of destruction.3 In Vietnamese mortuary knowledge, the souls of the dead may refuse to depart from the living world, and their unwillingness is expressed when, for instance, the coffin suddenly crushes the shoulders of the pallbearers with unbearable weight. In a funeral that I saw in a suburb of Da Nang, the pallbearers complained of the excessive weight of the coffin of an unmarried man when they were passing by a particular house in the community. People speculated that the problem was caused by the young man’s affection for the daughter of the family in the house. The man’s family persuaded the reluctant young woman to come out to the street and console the deceased so the journey could continue. She was instructed to speak to the coffin, to say she regretted having stolen the man’s heart, and her parents supplemented this gesture of apology with gifts of votive objects. Whether the woman knew about or had anything to do with the man’s feelings was not an issue. It was the feeling of the dead man, with or without her knowledge, that made the woman culpable for the complication in his fateful journey. The drama about a spirit of the dead with unfulfilled wishes may take on an explicitly political meaning. At the funeral of a young schoolteacher in the city of Quang Ngai, the family was alarmed by the state of the corpse. They believed that the man’s corpse refused to close its eyes for an unknown reason. The crisis continued until the school principal arrived at the scene. The principal approached the corpse of his junior colleague and acknowledged publicly that he had bullied the hardworking man for years. Apparently the principal had conspired against the wishes of the schoolteacher, who had wanted to join the Communist Party. If personal anguish and unfulfilled desires complicate a funeral, death without a funeral complicates even further the deceased’s afterlife. The dead who do not benefit from an appropriate burial continue to inhabit the space between am, the world of the dead, and duong, the world of the living—expressing the Vietnamese concept of the duality of life.4 The dead whose final moments were violent also have problems in making the mortal transition, and a violent, “unjust” death whose fate is not ritually recognized presents particularly critical problems. Such a tragic death means the deceased does not really leave duong nor really move to am, a condition that Arnold van Gennep conceptualizes as perpetual liminality.5 In popular Vietnamese knowledge, the souls of those who died a tragic death roam between the margins of this world and the periphery of the opposite world, and being unsettled in either world, they can be unsettling to the inhabitants of both. The Vietnamese address these unattached and undetached mobile spirits of the dead with the kinship and interpersonal referential term co bac (“aunt” and “uncle”; more precisely “[paternal] junior aunt” and “senior aunt/uncle”) in distinction to ong ba (“grandfather” and “grandmother”).6 The distinction between co bac and ong ba, or between displaced wandering ghosts and ritually appropriated ancestors and deities located in designated places, relates to the contrast between “bad death” and “good death.” The Vietnamese mortuary culture shares with other agrarian traditions a house-centered morality of death. Dying a good death is 12 The Bipolarity of Death “to die in the...