The Country of Memory "ss2.05"

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

― 38 ―

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

― 39 ―

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.