Revolutions enter history as extraordinary events: they mark a radical shift from an old to a new order. They are archived with turning points, famous leaders, and unequivocal ideologies. Finding this focus on the historic and the monumental blinding, I turn to ordinary people and unexceptional stories, to a memoir almost not written. The memoir was penned by bác Ba,[1] who was born and raised in làng Cổ Lão, a farming village in Thừa Thiên – Huế. He wrote it when he was ninety years old and named it Khoảng Lặng Đời Tôi.[2]
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Côn Đảo was a prison that the French built on an island about a hundred kilometers off the southern coast of Việt Nam. It was reserved for those deemed most dangerous: colonized subjects who dared defy France’s civilizing mission. If known at all in the West, the island prison is notorious for chuồng cọp (“tiger cages”) and torture, which carried on from French rule to the U.S.-backed southern regime.[3] In Việt Nam, Côn Đảo is also noted for the courageous spirits who left the earth there. Among them was Võ Thị Sáu. She participated in anti-colonial resistance since she was very young, and was executed by a firing squad when she was nineteen. In the world-historical time of revolution, she died two years before the French surrendered at Điện Biên Phủ, which Frantz Fanon proclaimed as a victory belonging to every colonized people.[4] In the time of ancestral veneration, people continue to visit and pay respects to Võ Thị Sáu’s resting place, along with the graves of many others, marked and unmarked, at the island cemetery today. As history and legend go, Võ Thị Sáu refused to be blindfolded in the face of the colonial executioners. When the squad was getting ready to shoot her, in one version of the story, she cried out: “Down with the French colonialists! Independent Việt Nam forever!” I prefer to remember a somewhat different tale that gets passed on: she was singing until her last breath. She might not have sung battle hymns such as Lên Đàng or Tiểu Đoàn 307.[5] She might have sung a folk ballad. Or a Buddhist chant.
Anh Ba Côn Đảo (brother Ba Côn Đảo) was one of bác Ba’s nicknames, besides anh Ba công đoàn (brother Ba trade union), anh Ba tù yêu nước (brother Ba imprisoned for loving the country), anh Ba điếc (brother Ba deaf). These names may sound endearingly light in Vietnamese, yet each is weighty in meaning and experience. Bác Ba’s trade union activities among railroad workers were a way of organizing to end colonial rule in Việt Nam. “Công đoàn” — necessarily underground then — meant that he risked being thrown into prison any time, even if covert informers merely suspected him of subversion. Indeed, that was how bác Ba was jailed and tortured the first time: for being “Suspect VM,” as recorded in the French dossiers.[6] He ended up being held captive three times, throughout the resistance against the French and the U.S.’s occupying forces. His third time of imprisonment lasted more than seventeen years, well into bác Ba’s late fifties. This was the “silent interval” (khoảng lặng) in his life alluded to in the title of his memoir.
