I
A specter is haunting the academy: the figure of the ghostly, the phantasmic, and the unquiet dead. Over the last fifteen years, a large and rapidly growing number of works in diverse disciplines—sociology,Footnote 1 psychoanalysis,Footnote 2 literary criticism,Footnote 3 folklore,Footnote 4 cultural studies,Footnote 5 postcolonial studies,Footnote 6 race and gender studies,Footnote 7 geography,Footnote 8 media studies, and communication and rhetoricFootnote 9—have sought to reinterpret stories of haunting as the return of traumatic memory. Within such work, ghosts manifest not as terrifying revenants, but as welcome, if disquieting spurs to consciousness and calls for political action.
Most immediately, this interdisciplinary interest in ghosts was sparked by Jacques Derrida's Specters of Marx (Reference Derrida and Kamuf1993), a curious book that combines a profession of faith (i.e., the messianic spirit of Marxism still holds promise, deserves fidelity, and terrifies the world's rulers, even after the fall of Marxist states and orthodoxies); an audacious claim of successorship (deconstruction is the radicalization of Marx's messianism, as well as his critical spirit); and a surprising observation (spirits, spooks, and haunting loom large in Marx's writings).Footnote 10 In the course of his discussion, Derrida playfully introduced the term “hauntology”—in punning contrast to a more rigid, concrete, and self-serious ontology—to describe a concern with apparitions, visions, and representations that mediate the sensuous and the non-sensuous, visibility and invisibility, presence and absence, reality and not-yet-reality, being and non-being. The term has proved useful, as have some of Derrida's observations on spectral phenomena, although he based the great majority of his ideas concerning ghosts proper on a single literary source: Act I of Shakespeare's Hamlet. In this essay, we suggest a typology of hauntings to clarify the types and uses of ghosts that loom large in current scholarship, suggesting the need for a “critical hauntology.” We begin with a review of the theoretical literature that has been particularly influential. We then introduce a distinction between what we term primary and secondary haunting via case studies in Vietnam, where hauntology has ample local precedent and bears political, moral, and religious significance.Footnote 11 Finally, we explore the interaction between the two types of haunting at the site of a civilian massacre in South Vietnam, a village troubled by the afterlife of grievous mass death. Appendix I provides our English translation of a media source on these latter events.
Prominent among the earlier works that helped shape the new hauntology are Freud's essays on mourning and melancholia (Reference Freud and Strachey1917), the uncanny (Reference Freud and Dickson1919), and his broader emphasis on the return of the repressed; Marx's theory of alienation and the phantasmatic way human labor reappears in commodities and surplus value (Reference Marx and Fowkes1977 [1867]); Durkheim's view of spiritual beings as collective representations (Reference Durkheim and Fields1995 [1912]); Mauss' interest in the spirit of the gift (Reference Mauss and Cunnison1967 [1925]) and the social nature of mourning rituals (Reference Mauss1921); and Maurice Halbwachs's attention to collective memory (Reference Halbwachs and Coser1992 [1925]). For all these theoreticians, and others as well, the borderland between corporeal existence and some other dimension (equally real but less material) has proven an irresistible, if elusive, arena for speculation.
These lines of theory converge in Walter Benjamin's seminal essay “On the Concept of History” (Reference Benjamin, Jephcott and Jephcott2003 [1940]), which integrated most of the works just cited, made them speak to the crisis of fascism's advance, and in doing so developed a position that continues to resonate well beyond that immediate context.Footnote 12 In its fuller development, the “spectral turn” in scholarship (Luckhurst Reference Luckhurst2002: 527) is informed less by Derrida than by Benjamin, particularly in his sense that the potential for encounters between the living and the dead remains ever open; that such confrontations erupt at moments of crisis and may imply profound consequences; that the living have only partial control over these meetings but bear weighty responsibility for what comes of them; and that the stakes of this are high for the living and dead alike. Benjamin's invocation of the past as a political and moral resource for present claims—albeit one perpetually threatened by oblivion—resounds in many hauntological texts. Three of his theses are particularly relevant:
III: The chronicler who narrates events without distinguishing between major and minor ones acts in accord with the following truth: nothing that has ever happened should be regarded as lost to history… (Reference Benjamin, Jephcott and Jephcott2003 [1940]: 390).
V: The true image of the past flits by. The past can be seized only as an image that flashes up at the moment of its recognizability, and is never seen again… (ibid.).
VI: Articulating the past historically does not mean recognizing it “the way it really was.” It means appropriating a memory as it flashes up in a moment of danger.… The only historian capable of fanning the spark of hope in the past is the one who is firmly convinced that even the dead will not be safe from the enemy if he is victorious. And this enemy has never ceased to be victorious (ibid.: 391, his emphasis).
Although practitioners of the new hauntology generally take their lead from this essay of Benjamin's, they depart from it in several ways. Most obviously, nowhere did Benjamin speak directly of ghosts, phantoms, or haunting, only of remembrance, the past, the dead, and—on one occasion—the image of enslaved ancestors.Footnote 13 These authors' citations of Benjamin therefore draw rhetorical power from their literalization of a figure whose presence in the theses is only implicit, although they do take recourse to another essay in which Benjamin made brief mention of “ghostly signals.”Footnote 14 Recoding Benjamin's concern for the fate of the dead and the way they are remembered (or forgotten) as an interest in spectral phenomena extends Benjamin's language in the direction of metaphor and expands his argument toward metaphysics. Although the implications of his essay are far-reaching and its intentions are explicitly messianic, Benjamin was most immediately concerned with the politics and morality of historic memory. Accordingly, the very few concrete examples he cited—the Social Democrats erasing the memory of Blanqui and Robespierre's embrace of the Roman RepublicFootnote 15—involve actual human subjects on both sides of the rupture effected by time and mortality.
In contrast, contemporary hauntologists have primarily concerned themselves with literary representations and figures of the imaginary. Thus, although Avery Gordon writes as a sociologist, her Ghostly Matters (Reference Gordon2008 [1997]), a work possibly more influential than Derrida's, rests its argument on a close reading of two novels. In Gordon's view, analysis of these works of fiction permits one to reach beyond the accounts normally offered by social scientists who, as a point of disciplinary principle and practice, tend to ignore the less-than-empirically-verifiable “ghostly signals” (like the faint scar on a freed slave, felt ever so slightly and hidden from sight) that hint at past horrors and the systems that produced them. Accordingly, she grounds her discussion in literary texts that treat histories of mass violence and dispossession: Luisa Valenzuela's Como en la Guerra (Reference Valenzuela1977), à propos of state terror and the disappearance of Argentinians during the Dirty War, and Toni Morrison's Beloved (Reference Morrison1987), à propos of slavery and its ongoing effects in the era of Reconstruction.
Gordon thus creates space for consideration of things non-material or “ghostly” by definition: the affective, the dead and not-quite-gone, the sensed but not seen. Behind the characters in these novels, inspiring and evoked by them, stand others: real humans who suffered pain and injustice, died in terrible circumstances, and were consigned to oblivion, but somehow lingered in memory, scandal, and rumor. As these ambiguous entities come to light, first in the experience, research, and imagination of authors, then on the pages those authors write, they reach and affect living human subjects, who are moved to acknowledge, mourn, regret, and possibly take action.
Working from these novels, Gordon introduces a trope of haunting as a means to encompass disparate liberatory projects that invoke the historic imagination to compel a reckoning with violence, suffering, and injustice. To do this, however, she implicitly disarticulates ghosts from haunting, such that it is she as author, and not the returned dead, who seeks to startle, frighten, challenge, terrify, and obsess those she hails, from whom she demands more than mere attention. And toward this end, she works with materials supplied her by other authors.Footnote 16 Only at the end of multiple mediations (memoirists, court reporters, activists, researchers, novelists, hauntologists) do the dead appear as the protagonists of a disquieting story told by others, not agentive revenants.
Ghosts qua ghosts thus tend to recede in Gordon's account, replaced by “ghostly” signals, matters, and traces. Regrettably, she never considers individuals or social groups who experience haunting as something consistent with, and rooted in, their cosmology, ontology, and psychology (the latter term used in the etymologically precise sense: “theory of the soul”).Footnote 17 Rather, expanding on Benjamin, she redefines the experience of being “haunted” as a call to fight on behalf of the dead against those who sought to erase them (Reference Gordon2008: 65–67).
Perhaps the most successful hauntological study to date is Grace M. Cho's Haunting the Korean Diaspora: Shame, Secrecy, and the Forgotten War (Reference Cho2008), which goes beyond Gordon in ways. Wishing to extend the metaphor of haunting to intimate familial experience, she opens with an epigraph that states “What haunts are not the dead, but the gaps left within us by the secrets of others” (Abraham and Torok Reference Abraham, Torok and Rand1994, cited in Cho Reference Cho2008: 1). Her auto-ethnographic cultural history focuses on the figure of the yanggongju, or Korean camptown prostitute/GI war bride: Cho's mother, a Korean national who married an American GI, is her story's starting point. Seeking methods capable of breaking silence, unveiling secrets, and producing catharsis, Cho assumes a role that goes well beyond that of historian, psychoanalyst, or detective, writing to “call forth the ghosts” (2008: 24).
Drawing on her own family's half-secret history and on novels that feature similar dynamics,Footnote 18 Cho argues that the sexual labor of Korean women has been a crucial, if unspoken—and until recently, unspeakable—element of relations between Koreans and occupying powers, which provided the wherewithal for many Koreans to emigrate to and assimilate in the United States. These deeply shaming episodes were repressed—not forgotten, but never discussed openly. In such form, the occluded past was an “unhappy wind” or a “hole” in the consciousness of diasporic individuals and families (ibid.: 11). Drawing on Abraham and Torok's (Reference Abraham, Torok and Rand1994: 165–205) idea of “the transgenerational phantom” to explore the way family secrets are transmitted to children and grandchildren while remaining unacknowledged, Cho treats the figure of the yanggongju as just such a figure: “a spectral agency acting on and interacting with various unconscious forces” (Reference Cho2008: 17).
In contrast to Gordon, Derrida, and most other practitioners of the new hauntology, who theorize based on their readings of texts, Cho puts personal encounters with residues of the past at the center of her discussion. Even so, in Cho's vocabulary, the terms “ghost,” “specter,” “phantom,” and “haunting” serve as evocative tropes of troubled memory work; their meanings in non-metaphoric discourse do not enter her analysis.
II
Initiatives in the new hauntology thus typically base themselves on a scant and idiosyncratic evidentiary foundation, developing the trope of haunting without considering how ghosts are theorized by those who take them as something other than metaphor. Here, the standard English terminology provides a convenient, if arbitrary, starting point for further discussion. Thus, as indicated by their etymologies, the terms ghost Footnote 19 and spirit Footnote 20 both denote the intangible substance—moving air in the form of breath—that vivifies the body during life, but separates from it at death, at which moment bodily matter turns into a corpse, while the essential life-force persists as disembodied “spirit.”
Most religions theorize spiritual existence as no less real than the material, albeit less tangible, concrete, and mundane. It is regularly posited, however, that some unfortunate spirits fail to complete their transit to disincarnate postmortem existence. As a result, they are caught in a nebulous liminal state, maintaining some shred of materiality that renders them partially perceptible (e.g., audible but not visible; visible but not tangible; visible only to some; visible but transparent; visible to the eye, but not captured on mirrors or film) and endows them with the capacity to interact with select persons in the world they imperfectly departed. This is to say that ghosts are commonly theorized as possessing an ontological status that is ambiguous, even contradictory, minimally—but emphatically—substantial and real. To the extent that hauntology denies ghosts ontologic status and recodes the unquiet dead as persisting in texts, memory, and uneasy silences rather than spirit, it locates them inside the consciousness of those they “visit,” rather than on the borders of the physical and metaphysical, thereby rationalizing, simplifying, and perhaps also distorting aspects of the phenomena it claims as its object of study.
There are, however, other approaches that take non-metaphoric reports and experiences of haunting more seriously. Giving attention to such materials and the culturally specific beliefs that render them credible seems a necessary precondition to any serious discussion of haunting, metaphoric or not. Here, anthropological research has long played the leading role in a literature running from Tylor (Reference Tylor1871) through Frazer (Reference Frazer1933–1936), Malinowski (Reference Malinowski1916), Robert Hertz (Reference Hertz, Needham and Needham1960 [1907]), and Meyer Fortes (Reference Fortes and Goody1987) to Robin Horton (Reference Horton1993), Sharp (Reference Sharp1993), Maurice Bloch (Reference Bloch1971; Bloch and Parry Reference Bloch and Parry1982), and others.Footnote 21 Most of the older research along these lines treats African and Melanesian examples, reflecting the legacy of colonialism and a romantic fascination with “the primitive.”
More recently, however, some splendid anthropological and religious-historical studies have treated spectral phenomena in Asia, where Confucian and Buddhist traditions, among others, supply elaborate supporting cosmologies.Footnote 22 We begin with a particularly revealing example: the virtual epidemic of unsettled, intrusive, and angry ghostsFootnote 23 afflicting postwar Vietnam, as reported by anthropologists Heonik Kwon (Reference Kwon2006; Reference Kwon2008) and Mai Lan Gustafsson (Reference Gustafsson2009). In Vietnam, as these and other authors have demonstrated, belief in the presence of place-bound ghosts and their agency has been highly prevalent in the era ushered in by the market reforms of the mid-1980s. Ghost beliefs and stories, while discontinuous with the officially sanctioned worldview of socialism, remain a robust resource for expressing political as well as spiritual sentiments in postwar, post-market reform Vietnam.Footnote 24 As a matter of principle, both Kwon and Gustafsson eschew the signature features of the new hauntology—high-stakes theorizing, rhetorical bravado, and the exercise of considerable creative license—in the project of reading “ghosts” into many social and textual locations. Instead, they insist on placing their ethnographic observations, field notes, and informants' testimony at center stage.
In contrast to the hauntological texts we have previously discussed, these authors employ an unnervingly naturalistic idiom in their accounts of ghosts. Ghostly subjects appear as fully extant and active animate beingsFootnote 25 that confront the living in direct, non-mediated, and even menacing fashion. They are, moreover, numerous in postwar Vietnam due to the legacy of mass anonymous death inflicted during decades of anticolonial and civil conflict. For when an individual suffers what is culturally defined as a “bad death” or “death in the street” (chết đường)—an abrupt or unexpected death, away from home and family, when one is young and childless, and/or dying in such a way that the body is mutilated or incomplete—the funerary rituals cannot be performed that would ordinarily transform the deceased into an ancestor (tổ tiên) with whom the survivors could then maintain respectful and mutually beneficial relations.Footnote 26 Lost and disconnected, the spirits of those who have not received such treatment become unquiet, angry ghosts (con ma), leading what can best be described as a “bare afterlife.” Much like the homo sacer, Versuchungspersonen, overcomatose, neomorts, and concentration camp inmates discussed by Agamben (Reference Agamben and Heller-Roazen1998), so too do these ghosts inhabit an interstitial space between life and death, inspiring dread and guilt in those to whom they are socially proximate. There is, however, a slight, but ontologically significant difference in the specific place they occupy: whereas those Agamben associates with “bare life” have not yet fully departed the land of the living, ghosts, phantoms, specters, et al. are understood as having not yet fully entered the realm of the dead.
Further compounding the postwar difficulties of families unable to recover and bury their dead, the Vietnamese state's understanding of secularization as a necessary part of modernization initially led them to stigmatize cultural knowledge and practice that addressed the problem of how to placate angry ghosts, consigning such elements of folk religion to the category of superstition (mê tín dị đoan), associated with the feminine, the antisocial, the ignorant, and the uncivilized.
Both Kwon and Gustafsson relate a set of emotionally compelling ghost stories they collected in postwar, post-market-transition Vietnam. The following account of the experiences of an American veteran, Sam, who settled in Hanoi in the mid-1990s, serves as an example:
Within a few weeks of moving to Hanoi, Sam's girlfriend told him about something of which he was unaware: Sam talked in his sleep and shook so violently that the entire bed moved. The woman was terrified, primarily because the violent and enraged statements he made during these episodes were in Vietnamese. Sam had a rudimentary knowledge of Vietnamese, certainly good enough to communicate with his girlfriend and his co-workers, but the fluency of his speech at night was astounding. Sam asked her to tape him, which she did on several occasions. The invective heard flowing from Sam's mouth was that of a native Vietnamese, utterly disturbing in its bald rage. “Give it to me, give it to me, give it to me,” he screamed in Vietnamese. “Motherfucker, you give it to me or I will eat your mother's soul.”
Back in 1968, as he was being flown out of Khe Sanh by helicopter, one of Sam's friends put into his hand the blood-spattered identity card of a Vietcong fighter who'd been killed inside the lines of the American base. Such markers of identification were supposed to be turned over to the authorities so they could keep accurate count of enemy casualties, but sometimes they were kept by U.S. soldiers as souvenirs. Sam kept it as a reminder of his time in Vietnam, even bringing it with him when he moved there years later. It was clear to Sam and his girlfriend that the problems he'd been having at night came from that dead Vietcong: he wanted his papers back and would continue to torment Sam until he got them (Gustafsson Reference Gustafsson2009: 47–48).
As Gustafsson recounts, Sam consulted a Vietnamese medium, who successfully divined the identity of the ghost who addressed him:
“He is Hoc Van Nguyen. I see he is running at the wire at the big American Base. Others are running with him and shouting. He is shooting, always shooting. He falls over something. There is a loud explosion—so loud!—and then he is dead. His throat is open and he sees his own blood pouring. An American comes and pulls him roughly to another place with many other killed Vietnamese. He goes through his pockets and takes what is there. He [Hoc] is put in a hole with the others and covered with a bulldozer.”
[The diviner] relayed these details very slowly, as if they pained her to do so. Sam was fascinated and held the identity card he was given in 1968 just before he was flown out of Vietnam. The name on the card had been scratched out—only the number remained and place of birth. “Is that him?” he asked, holding the card out in front of her covered face. “Yes,” she replied. “He is very angry” (ibid.: 90).
After these revelations, rectification followed. At the diviner's instruction, Sam located the dead soldier's mother, paid her a visit, told her what he knew of her son's death and whereabouts, gave her the identity card (“all that is left of him now in the world”), and made offerings at the family's altar, after which she gave him forgiveness. Thereafter, he sent funds to her on a monthly basis and remained free from ghostly visitations (ibid.: 87–91, 142).
Although this story is atypical in some ways—especially with respect to the deceased spirit's possession of a stranger and a non-Vietnamese person rather than a close kinsperson responsible for its funerary rituals—for the most part it is quite conventional.Footnote 27 Its particulars underscore the immediacy, specificity, and intensity typical of recent anthropological accounts of ghosts, as well as the locally specific character of Vietnamese ghosts. The haunting involves a confrontation between two individuated subjectivities—one living, the other ghostly—that is initially unintelligible to the former, but becomes comprehensible as the ex-Marine is led to acknowledge the spirit's reality, the terrible nature of its plight, and his own responsibility for the persistence of its suffering. Finally, the situation moves toward resolution via his restitution of the documents and his gesture toward the well being of the dead soldier's family. Gustafsson does not reinterpret this ghost as a textual precipitate, collective memory, or repressed secret, but reproduces the view of the actors themselves, who understood the thing manifesting itself in Sam's dreams as a spiritual being with a personal identity that spoke directly to him, making specific threats and demands.Footnote 28
III
Although the Vietnamese examples share some features with the materials treated in the hauntological literature, the two are sufficiently different that we distinguish between two ideal-typical scenarios that we term primary and secondary haunting. We note five crucial differences. First, individuals afflicted by primary haunting recognize the reality and autonomy of metaphysical entities (i.e., those theorized as spiritual and minimally material beings) in relatively uncritical and unselfconscious fashion. Secondary haunting recognizes its “entities” in the sedimented textual residues of horrific historic events or, alternatively, as tropes for collective intrapsychic states and experiences, including trauma, grief, regret, repression, guilt, and a sense of responsibility for the wrongs suffered by victims whose memory pains—or ought to pain—their survivors.
Second, the ghostly apparitions of primary haunting are narrow and specific in whom they seek out and address. Typically, they confront either those who caused their violent and untimely death, close relatives who have not yet seen to their burial and funerary honors, or strangers who happen to live near the place where their bodies have been provisionally and unsatisfactorily buried.Footnote 29 Secondary haunting involves a much wider set of unquiet spirits (slaves, desaparecidos, yanggongjus, or Holocaust victims, for example) and engages a much wider audience whose relation to the deceased is less intimate and who bear less personal responsibility for wrongs committed and/or the task of rectification.
Third, in primary haunting, the encounter between the spirit of the deceased and the person who experiences its apparition/visitation is immediate and intense. Secondary haunting is mediated by a researcher/author and the texts they rely on and produce. They—and not the ghost—hail the audience and tell the story of sufferings past, but they do so as a living subject who speaks on behalf of the dead, not as one caught on the border of life and death.
Fourth, the two types of haunting differ in the kind of reparation they pursue. The ghosts of primary haunting seek to set right the ritual failures, historic accidents, or crimes that have kept them from achieving transition to the (culturally defined) proper afterlife where they will enjoy lasting peace. Secondary haunting aims at broader forms of repair: the arousing of mass consciousness, the mobilization of outrage, and the moving of a large group—perhaps even society as a whole—to remembrance of atrocities they might prefer to forget, while accepting responsibility for them and for preventing their recurrence. Secondary hauntings do not seek closure of specific destructive episodes; rather, they keep memory of those episodes alive as a means to transform the moral and political climate of the present and future.
Finally, the ghosts of primary haunting initially appear as terrifying figures who not only prompt existential dread, but also threaten those they hail with psychic and physical harm. To save themselves the haunted must complement their fear with compassion as they come to understand and then resolve whatever caused the ghost to be trapped between life and death. In secondary haunting, initial bafflement, amnesia, and denial give way to compassion, regret, and subsequent hypervigilance. Here, fear takes the form of horror at the atrocities others inflicted on the dead in the past, not dread at what these unquiet spirits are or might do in the present.
Although the new hauntology bears some relation to the experiences and beliefs traditionally associated with ghosts and apparitions, only rarely does it directly engage such phenomena, advance new interpretive perspectives on them, or integrate them into its theorization. Rather, the hauntological project is best understood as an initiative that adopts the discourse of haunting to describe its own operation. Should it fulfill its ambitions, secondary haunting of this sort would represent the moment when and the means through which repressed crimes and traumas break through ignorance, inattention, callousness, defensiveness, shame, and denial to galvanize a previously indifferent public. To put it differently, it represents the extension of primary haunting to its utopian extreme. Such an extension is made possible (also, perhaps necessary) by certain aspects of (post-)modernity, specifically the increased capacity of communications media to reach and mobilize a large, diverse audience that can potentially be constituted as a community of concern and action. But given that those hailed lack a direct connection to the unquiet dead (via, for example, kinship, class, national, or religious identity) and experience no dread for their own lives, health, and sanity should they fail the ghosts' demands, those interpellated by secondary haunting take redressive action at their own discretion. As Avery Gordon observes, haunting implies futurity and “something to be done”: “The ghost demands your attention. The present wavers. Something will happen” (Gordon Reference Gordon2011: 3)—but when demands for redress become vague and diffuse—nunca más or “never again”—then haunting threatens to become interminable.
IV
Hauntologists did not invent the project of secondary haunting, which also flourishes in other contexts. Consider an example from the Vietnamese diaspora, a speech that anthropologist Nguyễn-võ Thu-hương recently delivered on the anniversary of the fall of Sài Gòn.
The dead could be my grandfather, who was tortured and tossed outside to die whimpering for water within 48 hours of his arrest by the French Security Police in 1946 at the beginning of the First Indochina War. The dead could be your grandfather, who died starved, ill, or stuffed down a well, in a re-education camp in the years after 1975 at the end of the Second Indochina War, also known as the Vietnam War. The dead could be your aunt, who was raped and thrown overboard that rickety boat trying to cross the Eastern Sea in the decades of the 1980s and 1990s, following the Third Indochina War. (…)
To those whose business it is to foreclose on the past for [the sake of] national unity, for the global world and its economy, may they live under that curse uttered by Oedipus, Antigone's father. When the ruler of Thebes asks him to return from exile to die and be buried in the soil of his country, blessing it, Oedipus vengefully swears: “My ghost to haunt thy country without end.”
I want to speak that curse on this day of all days, may the dead “for ever” haunt countries—the U.S. or Vietnam, so that their history will be “for ever” disturbed, unclosed.
And I want to speak that curse to us all, so that we may remain open to the straying fragments from the past. May we be haunted, without end (2014).
The danger Nguyễn-võ Thu-hương addresses in these remarks is not so much the plight of the dead, but the complacency of the living, who wish to move on, feel good, profit, and let bygones be bygones. Against those temptations, she raises the specter of the war dead, whom she asks to torment their survivors, kinfolk, and others “forever … without end.” Here, as in secondary haunting generally, the ghost becomes an exceptional moral agent who serves as a constant goad to the living, while permanently deferring their redemption.
Through its cultivation of hauntology, a community of progressive scholars has not so much re-theorized haunting as it has initiated processes of secondary haunting. Others also undertake such initiatives, as this example shows, and they have long been favored by states and churches in their memorial and martyrological projects. As our reading of Nguyễn-võ suggests, secondary haunting can also interact in complex ways with the primary sort, as happens at Ba Chúc, a Mekong Delta village where, on 18 April 1978, two detachments of Khmer Rouge soldiers crossed the Vietnam-Cambodia border and massacred over three thousand civilians, leaving only two survivors (figure 1).Footnote 30 This episode was only one among a number of Khmer Rouge assaults on civilians during Vietnam-Cambodia border conflicts between 1975 and 1979.Footnote 31 It was, however, far the largest.
Ba Chúc and Surrounding Region. (Geo-referenced country and province boundaries: ESRI; HERE; DeLorme; MapmyIndia; GDAM; Natural Earth. Graphical representation by Jay Astle.)
Although Vietnamese sources typically treat the Ba Chúc massacre as a senseless atrocity, historic circumstances suggest that to imagine it as inexplicable is disingenuous. Indeed, this episode was framed by conflicts at nested scales, from the intra-national to the international.Footnote 32 As Morris (Reference Morris1999) argues, hostilities between Vietnam and Cambodia were partially a proxy for Sino-Soviet struggles in Asia. North Vietnam's “tilt” towards the Soviets versus Cambodia's alliance with China and, tacitly, the United States (Kiernan Reference Kiernan2002: 488) raised the stakes between the two communist regimes—as did a long history of border conflicts, racialized ressentiment, and mutual mistrust. The border and the Cambodian countryside had also served as an undeclared front of the Second Indochina War from the late 1960s, when “both sides in the Vietnam conflict [treated] Cambodia as a theatre of their ground and air war” (ibid.: 485). Both sides carried out multiple campaigns of ethnic cleansing against their respective minority populations, causing mass exodus by refugees and setting precedent for military targeting of civilians.Footnote 33
In Châu Đốc province, these events took place against a restive background: the village of Ba Chúc was a strategic base for U.S. Special Forces and their Khmer Krom Kampuchea collaborators as of 1966; clandestine Viet CongFootnote 34 organizing also allegedly took place in the village.Footnote 35 Allegations that South Vietnamese military commanders were forcing villagers to clear minefields planted by the Viet Cong in Ba Chúc were reported in U.S. media, suggesting the contested and volatile dynamics at play in the region; at that time, Ba Chúc had the second-worst rating of the American Hamlet Evaluation Survey, which measured the degree of the South Vietnamese government's control (Emerson Reference Emerson1971).Footnote 36 By the time of the massacre, the dynamics of Vietnam's internal civil conflict were entangled with the conflict with Cambodia: in the late 1970s, Vietnamese groups opposed to Hanoi were organizing in the strategic Parrot's Beak region and allegedly collaborating with Cambodian forces, threatening to destabilize the border from inside (Leighton Reference Leighton1978: 449). When, during a cease-fire, Vietnam refused to recognize its adversary's sovereignty or accept any of Cambodia's demands, the Khmer Rouge carried out the Ba Chúc massacre in response (O'Dowd Reference O'Dowd2007).
In 1984, six years after these bloody events, the Vietnamese government established a memorial site in Ba Chúc to house the “Remnants of Pol Pot's Genocidal Crimes” (Khu chứng tích tội ác diệt chủng Pôn Pốt).Footnote 37 Its features include a commemorative stele, an information center, a lotus pond, a water pavilion, Tam Bửu and Phi Lai pagodas (where villagers were executed en masse), and a visitor center displaying maps, photographs, and paraphernalia including weapons or replicas of weapons used by the Khmer Rouge. At the center of the memorial stands a set of vitrines containing the skulls and other skeletal remains of 1,700 massacre victims lacking identification save for their categorization by gender and age (figure 2). Although a similar monument was subsequently built at the Cambodian Killing Fields,Footnote 38 the display of skulls at Ba Chúc was unprecedented and it remains unparalleled in Vietnam. Docents as well as interpretive materials emphasize the brutally atavistic deaths that the Khmer Rouge inflicted on these victims (commenting, for example, that instead of shooting people, they tortured them as if it were “a thousand years ago”).Footnote 39
Display of Skulls at the Ba Chúc Memorial (Pháp luật & Xã hội 2011).
Although the literature regarding this monument is limited, travelers' weblogs and journalists' analyses remark on the chilling concretization of history at Ba Chúc's “skull pagoda.” Given the ongoing political contestation surrounding the massacreFootnote 40 and the state's complex situation with respect to its own socialist past, the representational politics on display at Ba Chúc shows how the vestiges of “bare afterlife” can be mobilized to affect viewers viscerally and arouse a sense of ongoing, indeed unending, moral responsibility that is perhaps partially discharged by offerings made at the site (figure 3). Clearly, the broader intent of this display is to impress visitors with the scale of the carnage and to prompt powerful emotions including sorrow, regret, anger, and pity. Following Verdery (Reference Verdery1999), one understands that these dead bodies have politically consequential afterlives, and the display of unburied bones at the Ba Chúc memorial provides a metaphor for the unsettled history and politics of the region, rekindling the bitter sentiments that have long inflected Vietnamese and Cambodian relations. The site constitutes an instance of state-sponsored secondary haunting, insofar as it orchestrates a jarring confrontation between the general public and a mass of unquiet, impersonal dead. Insisting that the traumas of the latter be remembered and honored, it implicitly urges that these horrors can best be rectified by ensuring such things never happen again.Footnote 41
Incense Offerings at Phi Lai Pagoda, Ba Chúc Memorial (photographer anonymous by request).
Here, however, the project advanced by the memorial produces certain contradictions, for its display of skeletal remains contravenes widely held Vietnamese conventions regarding the treatment of the dead. Thus, in exhibiting these skulls, the authorities flagrantly transgress common funerary customs that require proper and timely cremation or burial, privacy and discretion in the placement of dead bodies, offerings at the burial site, individualized treatment of the deceased, and the loving attention of surviving kin. By presenting an impersonal aggregation of mortuary remains and photographs of violated bodies alongside interpretive materials and symbols of the state, the vitrines place the dead in a political (and pedagogical) initiative that stands in tension with religious rituals and their associated beliefs, traditions, and etiquette.Footnote 42
In addition, the memorial site's presentation of the victims' remains transforms individuals who had livelihoods, families, and histories into nameless figures of permanent dehumanization and pathos. Either via photographs that show the circumstances of their murder or arrested in death as skeletal assemblages, the victims of Ba Chúc are presented not as kinfolk or citizens, but as graphically violated bodies.Footnote 43 This advances a number of political contentions. Most overtly, the dead are presented as incontrovertible evidence of the mass murder of civilians (including women, children, and the elderly) and of the brutality of the Khmer Rouge. As such, they concretize the veracity of a historical and juridical claim. And having been construed as evidence in an unsettled case of extraordinary importance, the dead and their physical remains can never be relinquished or destroyed until they have served the full ends of justice.
The memorial thus converts bodies into forensic evidence, constituting a call to remember and see justice done, enrolling the victims into a political afterlife as permanent subjects of grievous death. At the same time, they ensure that the spirits associated with these bodies will find no rest. Rather, they persist as ghosts who were created through the collaboration of the Cambodian army (which killed these people) and the Vietnamese state (which deprives them of proper burial). And if their bones inhabit the memorial's vitrines, their spirits now congregate elsewhere in Ba Chúc at a site of primary haunting.
This is the “grievous” banyan tree (cây đa oan hồn) of Ba Chúc, to which the Vietnamese newspaper Pháp luật & Xã hội (Law & society) devoted an article in 2011. As villagers interviewed for the article explained, some of the worst atrocities perpetrated by the Khmer Rouge took place at the roots of this tree, including mass executions (figure 4). In the words of one informant:
For men and youths, they forced them to kneel at the roots of the tree, then struck them in the head with a hoe. With the women they raped them, then poked tree branches into their vaginas. They even forced many people to put their heads on the roots of the tree and shattered people's heads, grabbing the feet of little children and hit them against the roots of the tree, crushing their heads.… Their evil, there is no pen that could write it, uncle. Because so many people lost their lives at the roots of this tree, people (bà con)Footnote 44 believe this tree is inhabited by the souls of those who were victims of injustice. Therefore, no one dares to trespass.Footnote 45
Atrocities at the Foot of the Banyan Tree in Ba Chúc (Pháp luật & Xã hội 2011).
These events, villagers averred, had caused the infusion of spiritual matter into the tree along with the blood of the casualties: the residue of unjust, grievous deaths (chết oan).Footnote 46 As a result, the tree assumed not just symbolic status as a reminder of atrocity, but an ominous quality: “Because of so many people losing their lives at the roots of this tree, people believe this tree is a place of grievous sacrifice, and no one dares to trespass” (ibid.: 2011). Further, as the tree stood near a main traffic artery, the numerous fatalities that occured on that road were construed as signs, and consequences, of the ghosts' continuing anguish and anger (figure 5). Kwon describes the metaphysical logic implicated in the pattern of fatal accidents at the tree's foot:
The Vietnamese express the transformation of ghosts with the concept giải oan, ‘the liberation from grievance,’ which alternatively can be called giải ngục, meaning ‘open the prison’ or ‘break the prison.’ The idea is that a history of tragic death binds the soul of the dead to the mortal drama of death and captivates it to the place of death, thus engendering a negative condition in the afterlife. The tragic or violent transition to death turns into an environment of confinement after death. The most commonly cited example of the incarceration in post-mortem ngục is where road accidents recur. In these places, the existing afterlife prisoners repeat their tragic history of death, which appears in the form of repeated road accidents in reality. This results in more new fateful inmates in the site and thus makes the site an increasingly solid prison (Reference Kwon2008: 128).
The Grievous Tree of Ba Chúc (Pháp luật & Xã hội 2011).
Responding to such perceptions, local authories proposed utilitarian solutions to the problem posed by the tree, which villagers considered inadequate and inappropriate to the ongoing spiritual dangers. As one man stated: “[O]ur local [authorities] gave us permission (địa phương chúng tôi cho phép) to remove the tree for free, but no one dares to accept.”
At Ba Chúc, two different loci thus preserve memories of those who died here in 1978: one man-made and state-sponsored, the other a natural artifact that looms large in the collective imaginary. Although the two coexist, they participate in different cosmologies and styles of haunting, the ethical implications and assumptions of which are quite opposite. Thus, where the spirits resident in the tree, consistent with the logic of primary haunting, afflict village residents, demanding they discharge their responsibility to create peace and rest for the dead, the memorial pursues the project of secondary haunting, transforming the dead into a discursive instrument with which to arouse as many people as possible from their state of complacent forgetfulness to one of troubled remembrance, vigilance, and resolve.
Considering the situation at Ba Chúc along with the other literature and materials we have previously mentioned permits one to schematize and theorize the relation between primary and secondary haunting. Both begin with a crisis in the status of those dead who have been unable to achieve the lasting peace that proper burial and funerary rites would normally secure them and move toward a resolution of that troubled and troubling situation. Primary haunting, however, takes place when a single spirit (or a small group) confronts and terrifies a small number of the living, transforming a situation where the dead alone suffer disquiet into one where the living share their state of anxiety and anguish, and are prompted to take moral action so that the living and dead can share a righteous peace.
Secondary haunting, in contrast, is much broader in scope and scale: a process in which living authors recount to large audiences the injustices suffered by the victims of brutal regimes, not with the hope of putting anyone to rest, but to mobilize a moral community to prevent such atrocities in the future. Rather than seeking specific redress from specific interlocutors for the specific sufferings of specific dead, secondary haunting aspires to keep those whom it hails in an interminable state of arousal, remorse, agitation, and vigilance. Accordingly, it defers resolution of the immediate or general crisis to a utopian horizon.
For heuristic reasons, we have tended to stress the difference between primary and secondary haunting, and it is analytically revealing to do so. It is also useful, however, to note what the two forms share—their use of ghosts (whether in metaphoric generality or semi-concrete individuality) to arouse strong emotions (terror, dread, shame, and remorse) and reconnect the living and dead, while advancing ends that are personal and social, political and moral, analytic and pragmatic. We would also underscore the importance of coupling a serious and sympathetic awareness of the social lives of ghosts, of whatever sort, with a strategic use of their power to compel mourning, humility, and compassion among the living, especially the socially powerful and the complicit. Drawn from analysis of both primary and secondary forms of haunting, these are methodological points of departure for future explorations in what we have termed critical hauntology.
APPENDIX 1: THE SAD TALE OF A BANYAN TREE [CONTAINING] THE SOULS OF VICTIMS OF INJUSTICE IN AN GIANGFootnote 47
There is a colossal banyan tree on the Tẻ highway that goes past Ha Tien (Kien Giang province). The local people assert that though the ghosts of genocide (bóng ma diệt chủng ) trace far back, almost every year the tree has taken the lives of several people.
That's the reason people (bà con) call the tree by many terms like “tree of the souls of victims of injustice” (cây oan hồn), “haunted tree” (cây ma ám), and “killer tree” (cây sát nhân).
Traveling to Ba Chúc village (Tri Ton district, An Giang province), people often remember the barbarous massacre, in which three thousand people were killed by the army of Pol Pot. More than thirty years have passed but evidence of the genocide is still readily apparent in this region, which has graves containing 1,159 skeletons, and the Ba Le and Cay Da caves where Pol Pot's army threw grenades killing hundreds of people. These don't just testify to the evil savagery; they are also the remnants of crime in Ba Chúc which continue to obsess (là nỗi ám ảnh) the local people.
The Tomb of Ba Chúc
Below the enormous grave lie the bones and skulls of 1,159 people of Ba Chúc, from newborns to old people over seventy years old who were genocidally murdered by primitive means such as a hoe-strike to the head or throwing children to the air then killing them with bayonets…. Before going into the story of the “killer tree” that takes people's lives, Mr. Nguyen Van Be, sixty-seven years old, described how his wife, his four children and his parents were massacred by Pol Pot's army, which dragged them to Vinh Thong village and struck them in the head with a hoe. Mr. Be recalled the horror: “On 30 April 1978, at the time when the people in Ba Chúc and the whole country joyfully and solemnly organized the second anniversary of Reunification Day, the Khmer Rouge army, without reason, poured over eight provinces on the southwest border and attacked An Giang many times. Because of the surprise and not believing the mass murder had happened, the people and the army of Ba Chúc didn't cope with that in time. That was why Ba Chúc remained occupied for eleven days, from 4 April until 30 April 1978, as Pol Pot's mass butchering submerged the village in a ‘sea of blood.’”
Mr. Be quietly lit incense as a sacrifice for the unfortunate, the ill-fated dead in the grave, his wife and children included, whose skeletons are frequently not intact. Many people are just left with a box containing a smeary yellow crushed and broken skull. Mr. Be sadly said: “After the Cambodians were attacked and driven back, the massacre left corpses everywhere. There were corpses lying in disorder, corpses in the fields, in the caves, in the Tam Bửu pagoda, the Phi Lai pagoda … and many corpses lying about in disorder below the roots of the grievous tree (cây đa oan hồn) on the Tẻ highway.”
Leaving Ba Chúc cemetery, we followed Mr. Be to visit the area of the “grievous tree.” On the road, Mr. Be made the point that because of the belief that the tree has deities and spirits of victims of an injustice (cây có thần linh, có oan hồn) living in it, no one “dares disturb” it. Every time they pass that colossal tree, all the interprovincial truck drivers stop to show respect, burn incense, and make an offering of fruit and sweets for an insensate tree, praying for their journeys to be safe. “The tree is very responsive to prayers (linh)!” Mr. Be says shyly: “I listened to the old people and then went to an old man who told me again, this banyan tree is the reincarnation of a giant old Dipterocarpus (dầu) tree. After that, the tree lived parasitically, possibly because the tree had sucked all the nutrients from the dầu tree, which wilted and died. When Pol Pot's army attacked Ba Chúc, the banyan tree wasn't just the witness of the mass executions, but it was closely connected with the mass evil of the many corpses at its roots.”
We've seen many giant old trees connected with extraordinary stories such as a banyan tree in the shape of an antique tomb overlaying the corpse of a headless general (vị tướng) in Cam Ranh (Khanh Hoa province), some giant old Terminalia catappa (cây bàng) trees with leaves red like blood of all the faithful and loyal fighters on the penitentiary island Con Dao (Ba Ria-Vung Tau province), or a three-rooted tree on the top of the Chứa Chan mountain (Xuan Loc, Dong Nai province), which is famed as a place with a resident mountain god, and tens of thousands of people every year go on pilgrimages to kowtow and pray, seeking fortune and healing.… But when we saw this “grievous banyan tree” with our own eyes, we must say that our surprise reached a maximum. The tree is over 30 meters tall; its circumference is spanned by four people hugging it, its roots wind and twine tightly over each other with layers and deep layers of clinging moss, such that anyone looking at it would believe the tree is a thousand years old.
Below the roots of the trees are small altars, lit incense, and joss paper … in total disorder. But the strange thing that we discuss isn't anything we've just described. It is that such a tall, large tree obstructs the road, but cannot be chopped down to avoid causing accidents for pedestrians. “No one dares to disturb this ‘grievous tree’ at all; even if we gave them gold they wouldn't dare to touch it”—Mr. Be affirmed.
Below the roots of the banyan, we also met Mr. Le Van Duc, former head of the organizing board of Tam Bửu-Phi Lai pagoda (where Pol Pot's army attacked with firearms, tossing grenades and killing hundreds of people, which was consecrated as a national site in 1980). Mr. Duc trembled when he heard us describe why the banyan tree had taken many lives, but the locality didn't cut it down. Mr. Duc's story made us feel as if we lived through those frightful days in Ba Chúc, when the invading army dragged children, women, men, and youths to the area surrounding the tree to slaughter them.
For men and youths, they forced them to kneel at the roots of the tree and then struck them in the head with a hoe. With the women they raped them, then poked tree branches into their vaginas. They even forced many people to put their heads on the rough tree roots and shattered people's heads, grabbing the feet of little children and hitting them into the roots of the tree, crushing their heads.… “Their evil, there is no pen that could write it, uncle”—Mr. Duc, again dropping his voice: “Because so many people lost their lives at the roots of this tree, women and children believe this tree is inhabited by the souls of those who were victims of injustice. Therefore, no one dares to trespass. But perhaps the presence of the banyan tree is like the accusatory evidence of their evil massacre.”
To prove what he was saying, Mr. Duc remembered an old story: “After pushing out the massacring army and removing the corpses, the citizens of Ba Chúc put their hands to rebuilding the countryside. Faced with the way the banyan tree obstructed the highway, there were people who wanted to cut it down, but after reflection, they decided not to.
Speaking with us about the matter of the “grievous banyan tree,” Mr. Thach Van Loi, vice-head of the People's Committee of Ba Chúc, bared his heart. Hearing about the tree, many people think this superstition. But faced with so many cases from many years in the past, no one has ever dared disturb the roots of the tree that keep the traces of the evil of the massacring army. “Given how many accidents the tree has caused to motorists, the regional government gave us permission to remove it, but no one dares to accept,” said Mr. Loi.
When looking at some images about the colossal banyan tree in Ba Chúc, Mr. Minh Hung, landlord of barns of giant and old trees in District 2, Ho Chi Minh City, estimated that if it could be chopped down, then moved into the city, the value of the tree would be at least 300 million dong (about US$14,000). Except for the cost of the cutting and conveyance, which would be about 50 million dong and any extra expense, the profit in this trade affair must be at least 200 million. However profitable the affair might be, Mr. Hung clucked his tongue and said: “My grandparents had a saying, ‘A banyan (cây đa) ghost—a bombax ceiba (cây gạo) ghost,’ you should not disturb it or else you'll get into trouble” (Ông bà mình có câu “Quỷ cây đa - ma cây gạo,” đừng có dại mà rớ vào mà ôm họa).
So, no one dares to touch the “grievous banyan.” Despite the devastating accidents it causes, the tree continues to lie in wait, inflicting death sentences on motorists. “An unlucky person lost his life, a colleague of mine—a teacher named Mai Van Cam, who was a teacher at the Le Tri Basic School of Ba Chúc)—Tran Van Duoc (herself a teacher at Ba Chúc Middle School) sadly remembered: “The accident happened at night, around 7:30 on 24 December 2010, as he was headed home on the road from school. We don't know if he was incited by ghosts (ma xui quỷ khiến) to crash into the roots of the tree, but he died on the spot.”
In the process of speaking with many people of Ba Chúc to learn more about the “killer banyan tree,” we heard many—especially those who had dead loved ones whose lives had been taken (thân nhân trở thành người thiên cổ) by the banyan tree—express the view that the administration of Tri Ton or the province of An Giang generally, needs to take corrective measures so that this grievous tree will not continue to cause terrible traffic accidents.
“If we confirm that the banyan tree is the remnant of an evil that can't be cut down, then why don't we move the tree to an appropriate position in the cemetery complex. If we did that, we would help cleanse the haunting that has stalked pedestrians and the local population for so long,” an old man named Dang said. “The technology of moving the tree roots away wouldn't be hard, if we are determined enough to do so. Or we could surround the area of the tree roots with many railings with fluorescent reflector lamps, so that motorists they know to avoid it.… So the banyan tree will create fewer sad stories.”
