In Michel-Rolph Trouillot’s Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History, he formulates the weight of mentioning, of moments in-passing: “I could not leave to chance the transformation of some silences into mentions or the possibility that mentions alone would add retrospective significance. The unearthing of silences … requires not only extra labor at the archives – whether or not one uses primary sources – but also a project linked to an interpretation.”[1] I think about these moments a lot in the same way that we might think about footnotes and endnotes -- enough to mention but require more labor to expand and care for. In an attempt to expand Trouillot’s articulation of the “mention,” I posit that the act of mentioning operates as the technique in which the act of gossiping and rumor production in that create possibilities for forking pathways to understand alternative truths. I define gossip and rumors here as potentialities for alternative facts, or truths, as seeds for counter-narratives to dominant histories.
Roughly five years ago, I began going through salvaged family photos dating back to 1940-1960s, which situates these photos in the midst of the Vietnamese resistance in the French Indochina war and transition into the Vietnamese civil war, otherwise known as the American war in Vietnam. These photographs indexed my paternal grandparents’ travels, friendships, and interactions early in their marriage and into the creation of our family, and by extension our family history. Amongst these photos included a photo of my grandfather next to a man that looked vaguely familiar, like him, but marginally thinner and older. The photo was black and white but from what I could identify, his hair was beginning to white and he had some visible wrinkles. I asked my dad who this was to which he replied that it was his uncle, my great uncle. He was my grandfather’s older brother who the family seldom speaks of because he allegedly fought for the Communist North Vietnam whereas my family concretized their ideologies as Anti-Communist Southern Vietnamese. This decisive moment produced both the weight of silence and mentioning that I came to know as my family history-- a history siphoned in favor of Anti-Communist ideologies and narratives. In this utterance, I wondered what narratives and stories this great uncle could produce, or what possibilities could be transformed out of this brief mention.
Further, I often think about one of the last coherent letters my paternal grandmother wrote where she mentioned her belief in Communist ideologies as ideal but struggled with its implementation in Vietnam, which led to our family’s exodus. [2] From this letter, my family often recollects her commitment to our family and her strength as a mother rather than acknowledging how this commitment was also tied to her political commitments to colonial resistance and her strength as Viet Minh (Vietnam’s nationalist liberation front against the French).[3] Jeannette Bastian notes that constructions of history vitally rely on who is reading and interpreting such records and such utterances, or interactions, of interest are often “whispers in the archive.”[4] For me, redefining “whispers” in the context of rumor production and the act of gossiping within family narrative production begins to materialize as a point of entry to understand the weight and possibility of “the mention.” Here, I’m contending with the ways in which my own family collectively continues to reproduce my grandmother in the family imaginary as strictly filial through their own storytelling. My interventions could disrupt this truth in the same way that rumors and gossip disrupt truth.
As I am working through these interactions within my family, I am left to toil with major questions including: how do I work in absence of materials? What can my methods look like when my primary sources aren’t materially tangible in the context of documents, especially when rumors temporally exist in the present as opposed to a past? In trying to work through these questions, Saidiya Hartman presents “critical fabulation” as a method through which she tries to explicitly work within such moments of impossibility.[5] This method becomes particularly useful as a physical and discursive means to meditate on silences, ruptures, inconsistencies, and/or nonexistence. Working through my paternal grandmother’s letter, my maternal grandmother’s voice recordings, and family albums, I realize that I am working within the interstices of existing silences, a silence within a silence, just as Trouillot is working with “a war within a war.”[6] To further think through specifically matrilineal silences, I invoke Trinh T. Minh-Ha’s notion of stories and truth that grounds storytelling as a means of understanding the story as quotidian truths; Trinh says, “I do not remember having asked grandmother once whether the story she was telling me was true or not.”[7] Here, to locate truth in the story is not necessary because the affect in the story’s ability to “make each other cry, laugh, or fear”[8] remains. To think through gossip using critical fabulation, I meditate on the insistence on the possibility of an utterance to be true when materialized by the affect of the piece of gossip. For example, the affect that my grandmother’s mention of her political ideology had on changing the landscape of my family history. Truth in matrilineal storytelling materializes through the body’s ability to believe, or feel moved by, in an alternative telling, something Other Than what we dominantly know.
[1] Trouillot, Michel-Rolph. Silencing the past: Power and the production of history. Beacon Press, 1995, 58.
[2] In 2000, after my paternal grandparents fiftieth wedding anniversary and in the wake of my grandmother’s Parkinson’s and dementia diagnosis, she wrote a letter to her childhood best friend recollecting her life, which she decidedly shared with her children and grandchildren after realizing the contents of this letter might be important to share with her family as well. At the top of the letter she writes, “Reading this letter over, I realized that there are many things that relate to our family. Since you were young, you may not have had the chance to share these experiences with me. So I’m using this letter to open my heart to you, my children and my grandchildren.”
[3] Vu, Ky T. Ky T. Vu to Khoa Nguyen, West Covina, CA, September 20, 2000.
[4] Jeannette Bastian, “Whispers in the Archives: Finding the Voices of the Colonized in the Records of the Colonizer,” In Political Pressure and the Archival Record, Margaret
Procter et al eds. (Chicago: Society of American Archivists, 2005), 33.
[5] Saidiya, Hartman. "Venus in Two Acts." Small Axe 12, no. 2 (2008), 11.
[6] Trouillot, 67.
[7] Trinh, Thi Minh-Ha, and Thi Minh-Ha Trinh Trinh. Woman, native, other: Writing postcoloniality and feminism. Vol. 503. Indiana University Press, 1989, 121.
[8] Trinh, 121.
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