Review of Viet Thanh Nguyen’s “The Committed”: The Multiplicity of the Colonial Self
Review of Viet Thanh Nguyen’s “The Committed”: The Multiplicity of the Colonial Self
by Jonathan Paul
“Why should I worry about deviating from the masses when I am also me and myself? Am I not a mass? Am I not already a collective? Do I not contain multitudes? Am I not a universe unto myself?”
The unnamed “man of two minds” from Viet Thanh Nguyen’s Pulitzer Prize-winning The Sympathizer returns in The Committed, out today (Grove Atlantic, 2021), now entangled in the criminal side streets of France. No longer a spy or a sleeper, but most certainly a spook, our two-minded narrator is tormented by contradiction, infinitely dialectical in his ability to sympathize with conflicting perspectives.
Set against the noir backdrop of 1980s Paris, Nguyen’s long-awaited sequel is something between a thriller, philosophy, and a ghost story, confronting the dark red stain left on the narrator by colonialism and the Vietnam War. Unflinching in tone, ambitious, witty, subversive, and profoundly haunting, The Committed challenges an America that hears “Vietnam” and thinks of “napalm, and burning girls, and bullets to the head.”
Unflinching in tone, ambitious, witty, subversive, and profoundly haunting, The Committed challenges an America that hears “Vietnam” and thinks of “napalm, and burning girls, and bullets to the head.”
Our narrator is the son of a French priest and Vietnamese mother, who, in “The Sympathizer,” spied on the anti-Communist refugees in America for the North Vietnamese. Us readers of The Committed find him and his brother Bon after they have fled re-education, fresh-off-the-boat in Le Gaule, ie. Paris, i.e. City of Light, i.e. the Fatherland. It’s at these pearly gates that the narrator assumes the name Vo Danh, which literally translates to “nameless”—a word printed on Vietnamese gravestones for the unidentified victims of war.
Nguyen’s long-awaited sequel is something between a thriller, philosophy, and a ghost story, confronting the dark red stain left on the narrator by colonialism and the Vietnam War.
His half-French identity makes this arrival in Paris a homecoming of sorts, a return to the savage and seductive hand of the metropole. Trying desperately to outrun their pasts, Vo Danh and Bon turn, naturally, to capitalism’s most shiny enterprise: drug-dealing. Vo Danh pretends to be a waiter with Bon at “the worst Asian restaurant in Paris,” selling hashish to his aunt’s intellectual friends. Never mind the obvious moral contradiction—he is, after all, a man of two minds, as divided as the 17th parallel.
Unlike the United States, which flaunts its parasitic legacy with a certain swagger, the absoluteness and subtlety of the French mark on the Vietnamese diaspora is something of extreme discomfort for Vo Danh. As the son of a Vietnamese father who first sought refuge in France, I found Nguyen’s prose particularly incisive in investigating this relationship. “Loving a master who kicks you is not a problem if that is all one feels,” Nguyen’s protagonist writes, “but loving and hating must be kept a dirty little secret, for loving the master one hates inevitably induces confusion and self-hatred.”
Vo Danh is a victim of a political Stockholm syndrome, a product of minds whittled into subjugation from years at the lycée. Ring the French bell of civilization and liberty and we drool like Pavlov’s dogs. Here in Paris, this self-hatred turns into rivalry among the post-colonized, evidenced by the escalating drug war between the Asian and Arab gangs.
Vo Danh is a victim of a political Stockholm syndrome, a product of minds whittled into subjugation from years at the lycée.
The biggest conflict in this story, however, has nothing to do with the politics of drug dealing, but rather the spectral war of his past which haunts all the exiles of the world alike. Nguyen swiftly backgrounds the actual incidents of the novel—the rival narcotics war, the pageantry of Fantasia: a Vietnamese show of song and dance, visits to a prostitution ring—while simultaneously foregrounding Vo Danh’s narration. The result is a postcolonial voice as fastidious as Proust, as embodied as Césaire:
“My life as a revolutionary and a spy had been designed to answer one question… WHAT IS TO BE DONE?”
It’s this voice that allows Nguyen’s multitudinous narrator to speak as the collective, honoring the shared memory of the Vietnamese diaspora. As he does in The Sympathizer, Nguyen gives us point of view shifts, fragmenting Vo Danh’s narration from first-person to second-person to first-person plural perspectives. But even when speaking as the singular “I,” Vo Danh is speaking as the “we” inside “I,” the nameless and interchangeable colonial body that has long been degenerated by Western eyes.
Vo Danh bares his teeth at the ‘Repressive State Apparatus’ and colonialism—isn’t that commitment to revolution enough? Can one choose a side in the revolution’s theatre of the absurd? How can we affirm life in the red aftermath of brutality and violence?
Unable to extricate himself from the shackles of his past, Vo Danh must contend with the philosophical contradictions that haunt all colonized peoples—communism vs. capitalism, violence vs. nonviolence, pilgrim vs. refugee, him vs. himself. He must, too, try to reconcile his two closest friends, whose politics place them at opposite ends of an ideological battlefield.
Vo Danh bares his teeth at the ‘Repressive State Apparatus’ and colonialism—isn’t that commitment to revolution enough? Can one choose a side in the revolution’s theatre of the absurd? How can we affirm life in the red aftermath of brutality and violence?
The Committed is too smart to answer these questions—but don’t mistake this for ambivalence. As Nguyen writes it, there is, too, a resistance even in the narrator’s most sympathetic tendencies, even in doing nothing. If dual-mindedness can be described as a lukewarm compromise, the narrator’s rejection of the political binary is resistance at its most fiery, stubborn, realized development.
If dual-mindedness can be described as a lukewarm compromise, the narrator’s rejection of the political binary is resistance at its most fiery, stubborn, realized development.
– Jonathan Truong on The Committed, by Viet Thanh Nguyen
COUNTERCLOCK Journal
Jonathan Paul is from Southern California. He is currently an undergraduate student in New York City studying English and philosophy.