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1. Reading Revolutionary
Prison Memoirs

Peter Zinoman

A remarkable feature of the personal memoirs (hoi ky) published in northern Vietnam following the establishment of the Communist state in 1954 is how little they have to do with personal memories. Like virtually all forms of writing about the past that were sanctioned by the cultural authorities of the Vietnamese Workers Party (VWP) during the 1950s through 1970s, autobiographical memoirs were fashioned to shape a collective public memory rather than to express an individual private one. As a result, Communist Vietnamese memoirs from the era tend to provide much greater insight into the thinking behind official state projects than the putatively timeless and subjective dimensions of human experience.

Prison memoirs (hoi ky nha tu) form an important subgenre of revolutionary memoirs (hoi ky cach mang), a new literary form pioneered and promoted by the VWP after it came to power. While they describe the party's leading role in colonialera labor and peasant movements and during the heady days of the August Revolution in 1945, a striking number of revolutionary memoirs relate tales of political imprisonment and episodes of prison resistance. Indeed, the genealogy of the genre is often traced back to two classic first-person prison narratives from the late 1930s. According to one party literary critic, “Le Van Hien's Kontum Prison (1938) and Cuu Kim Son's Prison Break (1939) mark the beginning of the genre known today as the revolutionary memoir.”^[1] These works, along with a handful written during the anti-French

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resistance, anticipated the vast quantity of revolutionary prison memoirs produced after 1954.^[2] With the publication and massive dissemination in 1960 of Ho Chi Minh's Prison Diary—a poetic rendering of the subgenre—the prison memoir emerged as the primary autobiographical vehicle for the leaders of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (DRV).

It is tempting to read Vietnamese revolutionary prison memoirs as part of a rich transcultural and transhistorical tradition of writing from confinement. Indeed, the themes that have dominated prison writing historically—prison as a refuge, prison as a catalyst for intense friendship, prison as a matrix of spiritual rebirth—may also be found in the Vietnamese texts.^[3] More remarkable, however, is the absence within the subgenre of what W. B. Carnochan has called “the larger metaphorical pattern” of prison writing—the theme of artistic expression itself as liberation or freedom from constraints.^[4] While this absence may be difficult to discern within any single text, a consideration of the subgenre as a whole brings it into sharp relief.

A survey of revolutionary prison memoirs reveals little variation in terms of form, content, or thematic orientation. Virtually all works within the subgenre highlight the political education and successful resistance efforts of jailed Communist activists. They employ structurally identical episodes to illustrate colonial cruelty and Communist heroism. In some cases, different memoirs even use the same stylized language: poor sanitary conditions in colonial prisons are part of a strategy to “murder inmates bit-by-bit” (giet dan giet mon); Communist prisoners, however, maintain an “indomitable spirit” (tinh than bat khuat) and struggle to “transform the imperialist prison into a revolutionary school” (bien nha tu de quoc thanh truong cach mang).

The proliferation of such narrative and linguistic repetitions implies that works within the subgenre should not be read—like the Autobiography of Malcolm X or even Gramsci's Prison Notebooks—as acts of individual resistance to the coercive power of a total institution. On the contrary, they suggest that revolutionary prison memoirs must be understood as versions of the “revolutionary master-scripts” that Christoph Giebel finds in the commemorative installations exhibited in the official museums built by the Communist state.^[5] Like museum exhibits, they function to “trumpet the accomplishments of the Party, provide shining examples of anti-imperialist heroism, and teach the younger generation the lessons of past struggles.”^[6] This is not surprising, since they were commissioned, subsidized, and sometimes even transcribed or ghostwritten by state-controlled publishing houses and literary associations

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under the authority of the same Ministry of Culture that supervised museum construction (fig. 1.1).

Given the circumstances in which revolutionary prison memoirs were produced, an analysis of the subgenre yields insight into the efforts of the leaders of the new Communist state during the late 1950s and 1960s to construct and promote an official public history of their rise to power. As I will suggest, there are several reasons why prison narratives by Communist leaders played an important role in these efforts. First, images of confinement figure prominently in two literary traditions that were familiar to the reading public: the classical Vietnamese tradition and the French romantic tradition. Second, the notoriously brutal colonial prison system provided a particularly dramatic setting in which to stage heroic revolutionary performance. And third, an emphasis on prison experiences drew attention away from the upperclass backgrounds of Communist leaders during an era in which the party's proletarian and peasant origins were an important component of its public image. In addition, I will suggest how the subgenre systematically highlighted certain features of colonialera juridical incarceration while simultaneously suppressing others to accomplish the goals it had been created to accomplish.

THE LITERATURE OF CONFINEMENT
IN THE CLASSICAL TRADITION

Before examining the way in which political considerations during the 1950s and 1960s shaped the conventions of Communist prison memoirs, it is useful to consider how older literary traditions may have influenced the genre. It is significant that many of the party leaders who determined the parameters of cultural production during the early years of the DRV came from literati families and therefore possessed some familiarity with a classical literary tradition in which images of exile and incarceration figured prominently. Such images anticipated some of the thematics of Communist prison narratives in their emphasis on displacement, isolation, and spiritual resistance. Hence, when the party began to promote the prison writing of its leadership in the mid-1950s, it benefited from the fact that the political classes, if not the reading public more generally, possessed a cultural familiarity with the basic conventions of the genre.

Images of confinement first appear in the classical tradition through poetic depictions of Buddhist monasticism. As with Communist prison

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writing, early Sino-Vietnamese Buddhist poetry frequently portrayed scenes of enclosure and segregation. A good example is Le Thieu Dinh's fifteenth century quatrain, The Cloister on Mount Le De:

	Deep in the mountains runs a crystal brook.
	Above the ancient cloister drift white clouds.
	To visitors the monks won't say a word—
	wind's blown through pines and opened their closed gate.[7]

By emphasizing the remoteness (“deep in the mountains”) of the “ancient cloister,” the poem recalls important similarities between monastic and prison life. Further affinities can be found in the distinctly carceral

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image of the “closed gate” and in the sharp contrast drawn between insiders (“monks”) and outsiders (“visitors”). This reading of the poem follows David Marr's provocative analysis of the connection between Buddhist monasteries and colonial prisons:

Colonial jails in Indochina might be described as fulfilling a religious function. They forced a significant segment of the Vietnamese intelligentsia to withdraw from the world, endure privation, sort out their thoughts and attempt to master the self and external reality. In this sense, prisons were not unlike Zen monasteries except that the acolytes were not there by choice and those in charge were not seen as teachers but as the enemy.^[8]

Images of confinement in Buddhist poetry extended beyond perceived similarities between jails and monasteries. Compassion for human suffering prompted poets working within the Buddhist tradition to focus on the plight of the poor and destitute. Three centuries before Le Thieu Dinh, the Venerable Huyen Quang, the third patriarch of the Truc Lam Buddhist sect, composed a poem about the emotional devastation suffered by the families of prisoners. Entitled Pity for Prisoners, it is among the oldest surviving Vietnamese poems about jail and prisoners.

	They write letters with their blood, to send news home.
	A lone wild goose flaps through the clouds.
	How many families are weeping under the same moon?
	The same thought wandering how far apart?[9]

While the thematics of early Buddhist poetry may recall features of twentieth-century prison writing, the Vietnamese Confucian literary tradition anticipated the modern genre more directly. This tradition included a subgenre of plaintive appeals by imprisoned scholars, a good illustration of which is Nguyen Trai's A Cry of Innocence, produced after the famous scholar was arrested for treason in 1430.

	Through ups and downs I've drifted fifty years.
	My love for my old mountain I've betrayed.
	False honors bring real sorrows—such a joke!
	Many traduce one loyal man—woe's me!
	When I can't dodge what comes, I know there's fate.
	If culture will survive, it's Heaven's wish.
	In jail, a shame to read the overleaf:
	how is my plea to cross the Golden Gate?[10]

The prison poetry composed by Cao Ba Quat in the mid–nineteenth century offers another example of writing from confinement within the Vietnamese Confucian tradition. An influential official during the 1850s,

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Quat was imprisoned, tortured, and eventually executed for launching a popular insurrection against Emperor Tu Duc. Quat's depiction of his own personal state in jail contrasts sharply with the overwhelmingly defiant tone of Communist prison writing. In Benighted, for example, the prisoner's feelings of impotence and liminality are explored:

	Night falls, the flood spills over,
	Cold winds have driven Autumn hence.
	My eyes are weary with following the days
	Suspended between heaven and earth, a poet lies in jail
	Pillowing my head, I see my sword lying there inert.
	By the dim light of the lamp, I contemplate my ragged coat.
	Full of the ardent force of life
	I must remain walled in, voiceless and mute.[11]

Imprisoned Vietnamese poets sometimes reflected on their own confinement by conjuring up sympathetic images of caged animals. Around 1750, the scholar Nguyen Huu Cau led a failed revolt against the Trinh family in the North. Cau, who was arrested and eventually put to death, is credited with writing the poem The Bird in a Cage while in jail awaiting execution.^[12]

	In all the world one cage holds this small self
	whose eyes once roamed the space of winds and clouds!
	But why, oh, why did I get snared and caught
	to brood, to moan, to mourn my gift of flight?
	I used to preen my feathers, flap my wings—
	and now I sing of freedom in a jail!
	Orioles dip and dart by the north hedge.
	Phoenixes chirp and coo on the south branch.
	Let carpers, east and west, all wag their tongues.
	At my first chance, from bondage I'll break loose.
	Straight-winged, I'll soar and race toward yonder blue.
	I'll smash my chains and visit the suncrow.
	Upon this earth, who knows my heart?[13]

Echoes of Cau's imprisoned but undefeated bird can be found in The Lu's wellknown poem Memories of the Jungle, in which a caged tiger is employed to symbolize the predicament of Vietnam under the French.^[14] Another metaphorically pregnant caged tiger appears in What's My Crime, a revolutionary poem penned by Tran Huy Lieu in 1938.

	You've bolted me in prison—What's my crime?
	I love my country—do I break the law?
― 27 ―
	A furnace tempers iron into steel.
	Fire tests true gold and leaves no room for doubt
	A tiger waits his chance to flee the cage
	The dragon bides his time to break the lock
	Pull any dirty trick you may devise—
	just try and shake my purpose, I dare you.[15]

For Communist literary critics, the insertion of prison writing by party members into an older, indigenous literary tradition brought Vietnamese Communism's nationalist character into sharp relief. For example, in 1960, Tran Huy Lieu likened the spirit of Ho Chi Minh's Prison Diary to the “strong and proud will” of Nguyen Huu Cau's imprisoned bird.^[16] In 1966, the poet and critic Xuan Dieu drew similar comparisons between Ho's poetry and Nguyen Trai's A Cry of Innocence.^[17] The most elaborate effort to place revolutionary prison poetry within an indigenous literary lineage was carried out by Dang Thai Mai, ^[18] who traced “a long and powerful tradition of prison poetry” from a handful of classical Chinese and Japanese prison poets (Lac Tan Vuong [Lo Xinwang], Ly Thai Bach [Li Po], and Van Thien Tuong [Wen Tienxiang]) to the nineteenth-century prison verse of Cao Ba Quat and his nephew Cao Ba Nha.^[19]

Communist prison writing also drew on a more recent tradition of prison poetry produced by patriotic scholargentry who had been arrested and jailed for political subversion in the early decades of the twentieth century. Much of this work emerged after 1908, when French security forces cracked down on the Eastern Travel Movement (Phong Trao Dong Du), the Eastern Capital Free School (Dong Kinh Nghia Thuc), and an outbreak of antitax demonstrations in Annam. Several dozen scholars involved in these movements, including the influential anticolonialist Phan Chau Trinh, were deported to penitentiaries at Con Dao and Lao Bao and held for the following decade.^[20] To pass time in prison, the scholars formed poetry-writing clubs, which they ironically referred to as thi dan after the literary associations for cultivated men that were popular during the imperial era.^[21] Although many of the poems composed in the prison thi dan were lost (or never written down to begin with), some were preserved in memory, copied down, and published by prisoners after their release.

The most energetic anthologist of this early twentieth-century prison poetry was Huynh Thuc Khang.^[22] In 1904, Khang turned his back on a superb educational career and promising prospects in the imperial bureaucracy to join forces with other Confucian literati devoted to

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modernizing Vietnamese society and expelling the French. After serving thirteen years on Con Dao for political activity between 1908 and 1921, Khang founded Tieng Dan (People's Voice), which became Indochina's longest-running Vietnamese-language newspaper. Between September 1937 and April 1938, Tieng Dan published a large body of poetry composed by scholars who had been imprisoned with Khang in Con Dao.^[23] In 1939, he republished many of the poems in an anthology entitled Thi Tu Tung Thoai (Prison Verse). Khang provided both Chinese and Vietnamese versions of the poetry, annotated and explained numerous classical references in the verse, and supplemented the collection with a host of anecdotes about prison life.

While the poetry of imprisoned scholargentry tended to convey a more melancholy tone than the relentlessly upbeat writings produced by Communist prisoners in the 1930s, the traditions shared certain thematic preoccupations. For instance, the Communists'attempt to link incarceration and education originated with the writings of Huynh Thuc Khang's generation. On Con Dao in 1908, Phan Chau Trinh advised Khang to try to turn the prison into a “natural school” (truong hoc thien nhien), a comment that anticipated a common trope within Communist prison writing that linked incarceration and political education.^[24] Moreover, the emphasis in Communist prison writing on spiritual resistance despite physical confinement mirrors a common theme in scholar-gentry prison verse. It can be seen, for example, in Phan Chau Trinh's Dap Da Con Dao (Breaking Rocks on Con Dao):

	A man stands tall upon Con Dao
	he makes a din that makes the mountain shake.
	Hammer to shatter heap on heap of rocks.
	Break stone by hand to hundreds of small chips.
	To granite turn your body day by day.
	Can sun or rainstorm daunt an iron heart?
	When they're laid low, those who will save the world
	endure and let no trifle bother them.[25]

Although the popularization of scholar-gentry prison poetry intensified with Huynh Thuc Khang's efforts in the late 1930s, political prisoners jailed earlier in the decade were not unaware of the older tradition. In a memoir of his incarceration for political activity published in 1935, future Communist Party member Ton Quang Phiet recalled speculating that imprisonment will make him as famous as Ngo Duc Ke and Le Huan, two prominent prison poets from the generation of patriotic

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scholargentry.^[26] Likewise, in the prison memoir Doi trong Nguc (Life in Prison), the militant Nhuong Tong described how he quietly recited Phan Chau Trinh's Breaking Rocks on Con Dao as he was hauled off to jail in 1929.^[27]

FRENCH ROMANTICISM
AND THE CULT OF INCARCERATION

Just as the early cultural czars of the DRV were exposed to images of confinement from an older Vietnamese literary tradition, they were also familiar with a wealth of prison narratives found in nineteenth-century French romantic literature.^[28] During the early twentieth century, Vietnamese students studied Michelet's famed account of the storming of the Bastille and Pascal's depiction of spiritual redemption in a solitary cell.^[29] In the 1920s, Ho Bieu Chanh became Indochina's first broadly popular prose novelist by rather shamelessly adapting plots from Alexandre Dumas and Victor Hugo.^[30] His first blockbuster, The Ship Master of Kim Quy Island (Chua Tau Kim Quy), lifted completely the narrative structure of The Count of Monte Cristo, including a melodramatic version of the spiritual rebirth in confinement of the hero Nguyen Van Anh (Dantes in the Dumas novel).^[31] Chanh's second commercial success, Ngon Co Gio Dua (Blades of Grass in the Wind), a Vietnamese reworking of Les Mise´rables, followed the tribulations of Le Van Do, a petty thief whose fortunes take a dramatic turn after he, like Jean Valjean, escapes from prison.^[32] The aquatic prison escape in Nguyen Hong's classical colonial novel Cua Bien (The Ocean's Mouth) is also frequently compared to Jean Valjean's.^[33]

Victor Hugo, whose “lifelong obsession” with the death penalty and images of crime and punishment is well documented, was perhaps the most beloved writer in the colony.^[34] First translated into Vietnamese in 1913, his novels were serialized repeatedly in newspapers and magazines, and his poetry became a staple of the elite Franco-Vietnamese educational curriculum.^[35] By 1925, Hugo had developed such a reputation among the budding southern middle classes that the Saigonese bureaucratic functionaries who founded the syncretic Cao Dai religion in 1925 placed him alongside Jesus, Confucius, and Buddha as a patron saint of the faith.^[36] His portrait still graces the entranceway of the Holy See in Tay Ninh.

In a revealing interview conducted in 1991, party General Secretary

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Nguyen Van Linh forthrightly claimed that Victor Hugo was his favorite novelist and that “Hugo and Les Mise´rables, not Karl Marx and Das Kapital, pointed him toward communism.”

I started reading Les Mise´rables and the image of Jean Valjean was very striking to me—a poor man, so poor he had to beg for his daily bread. … It touched the strings of my heart directly—I was very moved. I decided, I could not be satisfied with a society where there is an enormous gap between the rich and the poor.^[37]

Linh's affection for Hugo's tales of crime, punishment, and redemption may also be connected to the fact that he spent over ten years in colonial prison prior to 1945.

Evidence suggests that French romantic carceral images exerted a powerful influence over the welleducated Vietnamese youth who entered radical politics in the 1920s and 1930s.^[38] Such influence is apparent in the widespread use of the Bastille as a potent symbol within leftwing anticolonial rhetoric. In 1925, the fiery radical journalist Nguyen An Ninh published a provocative account of the storming of the Bastille in his Saigon newspaper, La Cloche Feˆle´e (The Cracked Bell), and questioned why Vietnamese history had never witnessed an equivalent event.^[39] During the 1930s, revolutionaries intensified their employment of Bastille imagery in the legal oppositional press and in underground publications.^[40] Consider the following Vietnamese-language leaflet seized by the Security Police (Suˆrete´) at a Bastille Day parade in Qui Nhon in 1931:

Brothers and sisters. Each year in Indochina, as in France and her other colonies, the imperialists spend hundreds of thousands of piasters to commemorate the 14th of July. As spectators, our compatriots unconsciously assist in the celebrations. Here is the origin of this observance, which we mistakenly call French Tet. On July 14, 1789, the Republican Party revolted in Paris. An armed mob demolished the monarchy's great prison, the Bastille, released the political prisoners who demonstrated in the streets. The French decided to celebrate annually, July 14, in order to commemorate their great victory and the triumph of liberty over the absolutist regime. Brothers and sisters, in celebrating July 14, French imperialism extols its love of liberty but conceals its ferocious and barbarous sentiments evidenced here by the prisons of Hanoi, Saigon, Quang Ngai, and all the provinces and in which suffer a considerable number of our compatriots. Brothers and sisters, rise up. Unite with one heart and protest against these arrests and imprisonments, overthrow French Imperialism, and in the spirit of the Parisian revolutionaries on July 14, 1789, destroy the prisons of Hanoi, Saigon, and the provinces and deliver our brothers and sisters who are condemned there.^[41]

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Other evidence exists of the popularity of French romantic prison imagery among radical Vietnamese youth. In 1928, the Suˆrete´ seized a Vietnamese-language copy of Silvio Pellico's My Prisons from an illegal publishing house in Saigon.^[42] This account by the Milanese liberal who spent a decade in Metternich's political prison, the Speilberg, had enjoyed a stunning success in nineteenth-century France, where five separate translations had been completed following its publication in the 1830s.^[43] Dang Thai Mai, the dean of party literary critics, claims to have read Pellico's memoir while a student in Hue in the late 1920s.^[44]

Still, the sensational prison narratives of Dumas and Hugo, replete with dramatic escape attempts and feats of great personal courage, appear to have exerted the widest impact among Indochinese youth.^[45] In his 1929 memoir Sitting in the Big Jail, Trotskyist Phan Van Hum compared his own predicament to that of the protagonist of Hugo's The Last Days of a Condemned Man.^[46] Hugo and Dumas also figure in Pham Hung's 1960 prison memoir, In the Death Cell.^[47]

In the Central Prison there was a library for the French. I borrowed some books and after reading them, summarized the stories for the other prisoners. To their delight, we read Les Mise´rables by Hugo and Les Trois Mousque-taires by Dumas.^[48]

REVOLUTIONARY SCHOOLS
AND HEROICPRISONERS

The central theme of revolutionary prison memoirs is the transformation of colonial jails into revolutionary schools. Education and imprisonment are prominently linked in titles such as Hoang Anh's Nha Tu De Quoc Tro Thanh Truong Hoc cua Chien Si Cach Mang (Imperialist Prisons Become Schools for Revolutionary Fighters), Tran Huy Lieu's Tu Hoc trong Tu (Self-Study in Prison), Nguyen Luu's Nha Tu Son La, Truong Hoc Cach Mang (Son La Prison: A School for Revolutionaries), Nguyen Thieu's Truong Hoc trong Tu (Prison School), Nguyen Duc Thuan's Truong Hoc Xa Lim (Cell School), and Nguyen Duy Trinh's Lam Bao va Sang Tac Tieu Thuyet trong Nha Lao Vinh (Writing Newspapers and Novels in Vinh Prison).^[49] In the scholastic prisons of such accounts, revolutionaries spend their first months in confinement studying Marxism-Leninism and practical skills and then apply what they have learned to protest poor conditions, organize fellow inmates, and convert non-Communist offenders to the revolutionary cause.

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Tran Huy Lieu's depiction of Communist prisoners in Con Dao penitentiary in the early 1930s is exemplary:

Under French colonialism, owing to powerful conviction and innovative and skillful organization, communists turned prisons into schools for the study of literature and revolution. The imperialists tried to use prisons to kill revolutionaries, but we made prisons into a place to recruit and train cadres. After graduating from such schools, many cadres displayed not only a heightened skill and an indomitable spirit but an increased cultural level as well.^[50]

Tran Huy Lieu's reference to the “powerful conviction” and “indomitable spirit” of imprisoned cadres points to another preoccupation in revolutionary prison memoirs. Successful resistance, in these accounts, is always a function of the superior will and psychological doggedness of Communist prisoners. Le Duan's recollections of his experience on Con Dao make the point:

In prison, wherever we chanced to meet, we, brothers and comrades from the north, center and south, spent our time pondering, planning, discussing how to struggle to defeat the imperialists and colonialists. Right from the outset, we decided to turn the prison into a school. When still at large, we had joined the revolution out of love for our country and hatred for the imperialists. But in prison, thanks to our indomitable will, we were able to read, and study and consequently to understand Marxism-Leninism, and thus we became confident in the victory of the Vietnamese revolution.^[51]

In addition to drawing attention to the importance of revolutionary training and political commitment, another concern of revolutionary prison memoirs is to portray Communist prisoners as dauntless and heroic figures. Many accounts contain clearly hyperbolic depictions of physical endurance and courage or episodes in which Communist prisoners masterfully, almost effortlessly, outwit their guards. Elaborate depictions of dramatic escape attempts, a ubiquitous feature of the genre, most clearly reflect this tendency.^[52] For example, in We Escape from Prison, Nguyen Tao fills nearly three hundred pages with three separate accounts of Communist prison breaks, each more daring and oddsdefying than the last.^[53]

DISTORTIONS AND ELISIONS

Revolutionary prison memoirs function not only through the experiences they repeatedly convey but also by those they continually suppress.

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For example, despite the fact that ordinary lawbreakers made up the overwhelming majority of the colonial penal population, revolutionary prison memoirs give the impression that most inmates were political offenders. Based on memoirs set in Con Dao Penitentiary immediately following the suppression of the Nghe Tinh Soviets in 1931, one would never guess that, even after the massive crackdown on suspected “subversives,” political prisoners remained in the minority on the island. In 1932, roughly 75 percent of the penitentiary's population had been jailed for commonlaw offenses, most for crimes against property.^[54] Naturally, in periods of relative political calm, the proportion of common-law to political prisoners was even greater.^[55]

Compounding their neglect of common-law prisoners, revolutionary prison memoirs never mention that the punitive regime applied to ordinary lawbreakers was considerably more onerous and brutal than the one to which political prisoners were subjected. Transported to an inhospitable frontier region, fed an insufficient diet, and forced to perform dangerous corve´e labor from which political prisoners were normally exempt, commonlaw inmates had few opportunities to embark on the ambitious program of self-improvement and personal cultivation compulsively described in revolutionary prison memoirs. For most uneducated and impoverished petty lawbreakers, it is likely that a stay in a colonial prison was less like a semester in school and more like a night-marish term in a concentration camp.

Exemplary is the tragic experience of Con Dao prisoner Nguyen Van Vien, whose case was brought to the attention of a colonial inspector in 1932. Caught stealing a buffalo in 1898 at the age of twenty-three, Vien was exiled to Con Dao by an indigenous provincial tribunal. As a result of a series of bureaucratic mishaps, Vien remained confined on Con Dao for the same theft almost thirty-five years later. That Vien is rescued from historical oblivion by virtue of an apparently sympathetic passage culled from a French inspector's report and not from the voluminous writings of fellow political prisoners is symptomatic of the limited field of vision exhibited by revolutionary prison memoirs.^[56]

While “revolutionary prison memoirs” typically ignore the existence of common-law prisoners, several are instructive in the open contempt they display toward criminals. Such an attitude is evident in one of the genre's progenitors, Huynh Thuc Khang's Thi Tu Tung Thoai [Prison Verse], first published in Hue in 1939:^[57]

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In prison there are gangs of scoundrels so violent-tempered that a dirty look or a small comment will provoke them to fight. For prisoners to be murdered in their sleep is unexceptional. During the initial months of our captivity with the common prisoners, we felt miserable. During the day we would rest and at night we'd discuss literature and talk politics—we didn't dare to interact with the common-law prisoners.^[58]

To further explain the absence or denigration of nonpolitical pris-oners in revolutionary prison memoirs, it is important to recognize how strictly the VWP's cultural authorities policed the content of published material in general and prison narratives in particular after coming to power in 1954.^[59] A pertinent example is the party's heavy-handed response in 1955 to Phung Quan's loosely fictionalized adventure novel, Vuot Con Dao (Escape from Con Dao).^[60] In a disapproving review article published in Van Nghe (Literary Arts), critic Vu Tu Nam chided Phung Quan for subordinating the heroism of imprisoned Communists to the courage and savvy of common-law prisoners:

Phung Quan's book depicts party leaders on Con Dao as excessively simple-minded and naı¨ve. In reality, the ward of solitary-confinement cells, where our best and brightest cadres were concentrated, was the nervecenter of the island. According to Phung Quan's description, inmates in this ward were demoralized and broken in spirit. Phung Quan deliberately glorifies common soldiers and ordinary prisoners while ignoring the mighty political strength of cadres and party members.^[61]

Vu Tu Nam's critique was buttressed and elaborated in attacks launched by powerful cultural officials such as To Huu and Tran Do, who, unfortunately for Phung Quan, were also former political prisoners.^[62] As Phung Quan was besieged by the ideological assaults and prison credentials of his critics, Escape from Con Dao fell into disrepute, and he was forced to undergo public self-criticism.^[63] Apparently, Phung Quan's reprimand was not lost on future authors of fictional and putatively nonfictional prison narratives, virtually all of whom made sure to relegate common-law prisoners to the distant margins of their accounts.^[64]

Like common-law offenders, non-Communist political prisoners are also underrepresented in the accounts of revolutionary prison memoirs. From the 1920s through the 1940s, the colonial state imprisoned anticolonialists of different political persuasions, including various kinds of anarchists, Stalinists, Trotskyists, nationalists, and radical Buddhists, as well as members of syncretic religious sects, secret societies, and underworld gangs. During the late 1930s, French-language newspapers in Saigon

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aggressively covered the arrest and imprisonment of such unortho-dox non-Stalinist radicals as Nguyen An Ninh, Phan Van Hum, Ho Huu Tuong, and Ta Thu Thau.^[65] However, other than the well-documented armed conflicts between Communists and members of the rival Nationalist Party (Viet Nam Quoc Dan Dang) on Con Dao in 1934, non-Communist political prisoners barely appear in revolutionary prison memoirs.^[66]

In the rare cases when non-Communist political prisoners are mentioned, it is only to compare their feebleness in captivity with the strength of the Communists. Le Duan's recollections are typical in this regard:

Among the political prisoners, there were also non-communists, such as members of the Nationalist Party, adherents of the “national revolution” tendency such as Mr. Nguyen An Ninh, and Trotskyists such as Phan Van Hum and Ta Thu Thau. But none of them could equal the communists in endurance, dauntlessness and self-sacrifice. The more difficulties and hardships they met, the more the communists were steeled and tempered. They survived the most atrocious ordeals while others did not.^[67]

An irony of Le Duan's comments is that Trotskyists Phan Van Hum and Ta Thu Thau did in fact survive the “atrocious ordeal” of colonial imprisonment, but upon release in 1945 they were executed by Le Duan's Viet Minh during sporadic roundups of prominent figures from rival nationalist groups.^[68]

The tendency of revolutionary prison memoirs to focus solely on Communist prisoners further distorts the historical record by conflating the eighty-year history of imprisonment in Indochina with developments after 1930, the year the Communist Party was founded. While the highly organized defiance of Communist inmates after 1930 represented a qualitative change in the nature of colonial prison resistance, it is important to recognize that the colonial penal system had been generating significant levels of collective violence since its foundation in 1862. In fact, it is arguable that the sporadic and largely uncoordinated resistance to the penal system spearheaded by prisoners during World War I actually surpassed the level of violent opposition attained under Communist leadership in the 1930s. Moreover, enduring features of the colonial penal system that promoted successful Communist activity in prison (i.e., architectural shortcomings, administrative instability, discontented guards, confused and neglected systems of classification, inadequate supervision for forced labor) were equally responsible for facilitating

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collective resistance during earlier eras.^[69] One effect of revolutionary prison memoirs, therefore, is to elide such continuities and to convey the questionable impression that the effectiveness of Communist prison agitation developed independently of the chronic dysfunctions that had long plagued the colonial prison system. In revolutionary prison memoirs, successful prison resistance does not grow out of the defects of the colonial penal system but derives solely from the uniquely prescient tactics and iron discipline of the Communist Party.

Also missing from revolutionary prison memoirs are vivid depictions of the texture of colonial prison life or evidence of the development of distinct subcultural formations behind bars. Descriptions of food, labor, discipline, hygiene, and the complex triangular relations obtaining between guards, prisoners, and French penal officials, for example, seem schematic and vague as compared with the meticulously detailed accounts of political education, self-improvement, and collective resistance. Moreover, revolutionary prison memoirs pay little or no attention to the prurient obsessions of French prison writing; there are few tales of betrayal, corruption, or rivalry among inmates and virtually none about suppressed desire, rape, or homosexuality.^[70]

In 1991, following the first significant relaxation of state censorship in northern Vietnam since the mid-1950s, the Institute of History posthumously released a brief prison memoir by Tran Huy Lieu, an important revolutionary from the 1930s and the DRV's most prolific historian. Originally written in 1950 and entitled Tinh trong Nguc Toi (Love in the Dark Prison), the account detailed Lieu's own loneliness and unrequited longings while incarcerated on Con Dao during the early 1930s. In one unusually frank passage, Lieu admitted to a temporary fascination with “brother T,” a fellow prisoner who had performed in drag in a play staged within the ward:

After viewing the play performed during Tet in Bagne II, I sent a letter over ten pages long to brother T, who, on that day, had played the role of a female courtesan. As the prison regime suppressed family sentiments and petty bourgeois romantic sentiments, we were often forced to seek other outlets.^[71]

The meaning of the passage is arguably ambiguous, but it is instructive that while many of Lieu's prison accounts were published during the 1960s, the memoir containing this passage was not released until after the Renovation (Doi Moi) policy of 1986. It is tempting to conclude that the decision to suppress its publication during the late 1950s and early 1960s was driven by a perception that the memoir alluded to

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the existence of homoerotic impulses among political prisoners, during a period in which the party was promoting a distinctly sexless image of the “new socialist man.”

MORALE-BUILDING AND PROLETARIANIZATION

To further understand the most prominent elisions and distortions characteristic of revolutionary prison memoirs, it is useful to reconsider the genre's function within the political culture of the DRV. As has been suggested, one reason for the wide dissemination of the genre is that naked oppressiveness of the colonial prison system provided a dramatic setting for heroic performance. Revolutionary prison memoirs depict Communist militants fearlessly confronting the colonial state's most thoroughly repressive apparatus. They often juxtapose denunciations of sadistic guards, torture, and cramped quarters with celebrations of mass demonstrations, hunger strikes, and prison riots. “Prison writing,” according to party critic Hoang Dung, “simultaneously denounces the cruel crimes of our enemies, describes our intense feelings for the landscape of our homeland, and relates the miseries endured by martyred comrades in prison.”^[72]

In the early 1970s, the Institute of Party History and the Youth Publishing House endeavored to gather and publish Communist prison verse from the colonial era. Anthologists solicited submissions through literary newspapers and, in some cases, visited exprisoners in their homes to record poems that had been committed to memory but never written down.^[73] Prefacing their two-volume collection, Tieng Hat trong Tu (Songs Sung in Prison), the editors justified their efforts on didactic grounds: “The poetry of revolutionary fighters created in the prison of the French imperialists, from the foundation of our party to 1945, holds excellent educational value for the younger generations who grew up after the August Revolution.”^[74] At the time, the party's need to harness the “educational value” of prison poetry was based on anxiety about public morale raised by the American War. Thus, the compilation concluded by drawing links from colonialera prisons to those of the American-backed South Vietnamese regime: “Over the past few years, similar verse has unceasingly echoed in prisons of the American puppets in the south.”^[75]

Representations of revolutionary heroism were thought to possess a unique capacity to motivate and inspire in wartime. During Vietnam's war with China in the late 1970s, the Culture and Information

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Committee of Son La Province published an annotated collection entitled Tho Ca Cach Mang Nha Tu Son La 1930–1945 (Revolutionary Poems and Songs from Son La Prison 1930–1945).^[76] In the introduction, editor Nguyen Anh Tuan linked the timing of the anthology's publication to the national mobilization effort then under way to resist “the hegemonistic expansionism emanating from Beijing.”^[77] “Today, we reread prison stories from a period of ‘blood and chains,’” Tuan wrote, “and we find the precious souls of imprisoned communist fighters in the pages. Each of us must use this opportunity to reexamine ourselves, to cleanse and purify our souls in order to fortify our courage and expand our love for the entire nation.”^[78]

Besides portraying the VWP's leading figures as heroic, courageous, resourceful, and unswervingly dedicated to the revolutionary cause, revolutionary prison memoirs serve the party in another important way. By depicting colonial penal institutions as schools, revolutionary prison memoirs help conceal from their readership something particularly unsettling for the party about the social composition of its founding members. One of the striking things about the VWP is the high percentage of its early leaders who sprang from an elite background.^[79] According to Bernard Fall's comprehensive study of party leadership in the 1950s, approximately 75 percent of high-level party cadres come from solidly middle-class or upper-class families.^[80] This is clearly reflected in the privileged educational backgrounds many of them possessed. For example, Pham Van Dong and Truong Chinh received baccalaureate degrees from the exclusive Lyce´e Albert Sarraut in Hanoi. Vo Nguyen Giap and Ho Chi Minh, among others, attended the prestigious Franco-Vietnamese Quoc Hoc high school in Hue. And numerous top-level cadres, including Pham Hung, Le Duc Tho, and Le Duan, came from lowranking mandarin families who ensured that their sons received significantly more education than did most Vietnamese at the time.^[81]

Not only are the exalted educational careers of Indochinese Communist Party (ICP) leaders passively ignored in revolutionary prison memoirs; they are actively obscured by the obsessive comparisons offered between prisons and schools. In other words, a depiction of colonial prisons as the “universities of the Vietnamese revolution” conveniently draws attention away from the fact that the leaders of this explicitly proletarian and peasant revolution were products of the most elite educational institutions the colonial state had to offer. In this sense, revolutionary prison memoirs should be understood as serving a function similar to the party's well-documented proletarianization (vo san

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hoa) movement of the late 1920s and early 1930s.^[82] That is, it allowed party leaders to reconcile their inherited class background with their adopted ideological inclinations.^[83] Significantly, though, whereas proletarianization involved, in some cases, a genuine attempt by self-consciously elite party members to effect a transformation of their own “class outlook,” revolutionary prison memoirs were penned by party leaders not to change their own perceptions but to reshape the public's.

It is in a similar context that the publication and massive dissemination of Ho Chi Minh's Nhat Ky trong Tu (Prison Diary), also in 1960, might be understood.^[84] During the 1920s and 1930s, when his future colleagues in the Politburo were earning revolutionary credentials in French jails, Ho was abroad carrying out Comintern directives. The fact that Ho did not possess the same colonial prison record as virtually all his colleagues was neatly effaced by the public appearance of the Prison Diary, which he supposedly wrote while incarcerated in 1942 by a warlord in southern China. Released almost twenty years after it was allegedly written and at the outset of a campaign to spread revolutionary prison memoirs of ICP leaders, the Prison Diary, which is easily northern Vietnam's most widely published and translated literary work as well as a core secondary-school text, suggests an explicit attempt to bring Ho's revolutionary credentials in line with those of his comrades.

CONCLUSION

Revolutionary prison memoirs reveal much about the forces shaping cultural production in the Democratic Republic of Vietnam. The party's need to reassert the legitimacy of its monopoly over political power required a popular literary form that cleaned up, embellished, and celebrated the history of its heroic struggles and sacrifices. The “prison-as-school” trope not only could play such a role but also proved useful in its capacity to obfuscate the exalted family and educational backgrounds of many party leaders. Moreover, revolutionary prison writing could draw on colonial and precolonial literary traditions that were both familiar to the reading public and genuinely popular among the Western-educated but nevertheless traditionally oriented leaders of the party. In short, while revolutionary prison memoirs may obscure more than they reveal about the history of imprisonment in French Indochina, they do reflect the political strategies, class anxieties, and distinctive sociocultural background of the first generation of the Communist Party leadership.

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NOTES

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