Citizen, human, other: Witnessing and remembering the Vietnamese refugee in Canada

The Western nation knows human only as its citizen (Kalu, 2017). It decides who can be a citizen and is able to access the human rights it affords to its citizens alone (Kalu, 2017). Without this membership, a person can be refused this so-called “universal” array of human rights, as national interests are prioritized over concerns regarding inclusion (Nguyen, 2020). Even with legal recognition, a person's belonging and inclusion in the nation can continue to be challenged. Under the racialized, gendered, and capitalist citizenship regime of the Western nation, it is critical to ask both who counts as human and when does a person's humanness counts. With an anti-imperial and anti-colonial approach to citizenship and humanity, I begin this paper by examining the dominant conception of human-as-citizen to turn away from him and to turn toward the human-as-refugee, in particular the Vietnamese refugee in Canada. I argue that the ongoing struggle for her humanity requires witnessing and remembering/forgetting her beyond the nation, wrestling these acts of knowledge production away from national politics of recognition (Coulthard, 2014). Concluding with the provocative scholarship of Viet Thanh Nguyen (2016), I ask, what if to assert the refugee's humanity, we must assert her inhumanity too. How might recognizing human participation and complicity in “inhumane” violence transform what we know about humanity altogether? This paper's very title “Citizen, Human, Other” is inspired by Trinh T. Minh-ha's (1989) Woman, Native, Other, a seminal text that challenged such constructed binaries of human identity. Citizenship exemplifies the “simultaneous individualization and totalization of the modern nation-state” (Foucault, 1982, p. 785). There are ramifications for social justice especially in liberal democracies, as Kalu (2017) asserts “citizenship offers a placeholder for the ideal of justice for all” (p. 1). A citizen is understood as one who can claim rights through the nation because he is recognized by the nation as a citizen. This national recognition is so important, compelling people to fight and die for it (Nguyen, 2016). Citizenship, then, distributes justice first in the name and interest of the state, not of the citizen (FitzGerald, 2017). A nation's regime of citizenship reveals much about the relationships of power inside its borders. At the pinnacle of citizenship sits the national, “exalted above all others as the embodiment of the quintessential characteristics of the nation and the personification of its values, ethics, and civilizational mores” (Thobani, 2007, p. 3). He is entitled to all the discursive and material privileges of the state, for he most purely represents and is represented by the nation, embodying the tenets of (neo)liberal democracy, such as reason, competence, and autonomy. Despite the white supremacist patriarchy of Canada (Thobani, 2007), the immigrant presents Canada “as a torchbearer of rights, freedom, and democracy” against other nations (Nguyen, 2020, p. 85). Concealing the racism and sexism of its multiculturalism (Thobani, 2007), Canada positions itself as exalted, “able to rise above other, less democratic nations, in order to maintain a sense of national identity” (Nguyen, 2020, p. 85). Multiculturalism as a cosmopolitan value both domesticates difference (Nguyen, 2016) and erases difference altogether, leaving racialized and gendered others outside citizenship despite promises and presentations of “inclusion” and “recognition” (Coulthard, 2014; FitzGerald, 2017; Volpp, 2017). The gift of freedom emerges as a site at which modern governmentality and its politics of life (and death) unfolds as a universal history of the human, and the figuration of debt surfaces as those imperial remains that preclude the subject of freedom from being able to escape a colonial order of things. (p. 5) This debt coincides with narratives of bootstrapping and stereotypes of Asian immigrants as obedient, subservient, grateful, and insular (Day, 2016; Kimoto, 2018; Roshanravan, 2018; Wu, 2018). The model minority is not made invisible, rather, her visibility is made useful. As she is included, tenuously, into a nation's citizenry (Thobani, 2007), she is given an important responsibility: to produce the story of her success as a story of Canada's success. But her story is not entirely reliable. She remains ambivalent as an “incomplete” Canadian (Miki, 2004; Nguyen, 2016). She is a perpetual subject-in-formation decades after departure, arrival, and naturalization. If through the Canadian state, humanity is left undone for the Vietnamese refugee, what opportunities lie beyond “inclusion” in or “recognition” by the nation then? Human rights demand a critical re-articulation. Kurasawa (2009) and Nguyen (2016) argue that witnessing and remembering/forgetting are necessary for human rights. How might these acts be re-articulated outside the nation and be re-oriented towards humanity? Kurasawa (2009) develops witnessing as a dialectical binding between being “seen” and “seeing” beings, an “ethico-political labour, an arduous working-through” (p. 95). One such labour or task-peril she presents is remembering against forgetting. Nguyen (2016) posits acts of memory as acts of identity formation too, for “those who represent themselves are also saying… remember us” (Nguyen, 2016, p. 41). Identity, human rights, and memory are hence intimately connected. Memory is powerfully wielded, so remembering is both needed and problematic (Nguyen, 2016; Simon, 2013). Of the Vietnam War, what is remembered is the effort of the Canadian government and the Canadian people hailed around the world as the gold standard response to refugee crises (Nguyen, 2020). What is forgotten is Canada's role as the United States’ chief arms dealer, “producing traditional and chemical weapons that enabled the fighting and killing of millions of Vietnamese civilians” (Nguyen, 2020, p. 86). Instead of a national memory, Nguyen (2016) calls for a just memory. “A just memory constantly tries to recall what might be forgotten, accidentally or deliberately, through self-serving interests, the debilitating effects of trauma, or the distraction offered by excessively remembering something else” (p. 17). Nguyen's (2016) articulation of remembering though is not in opposition to forgetting like Kurasawa's (2009). A just forgetting is as necessary as a just remembering for reconciliation to take place (Nguyen, 2016). If freedom is a constant struggle (Davis, 2016), so must be remembering. How is a memory made memorable then? Nguyen's (2016) articulation of Toni Morrison's rememory is poignant. A rememory “inflicts physical and psychic blows; it is a sense that the past has not vanished but is solid as a house, present in all trauma and malevolence” (p. 65). But this is not to say memory should be all about pain or victimhood, particularly in focusing on refugee subjectivities. Entrenchment into victimhood is an obliterating kind of disremembering, “of being simultaneously seen and not seen” (Nguyen, 2016, p. 63). Seeing and remembering the refugee only as a victim is the problem. While this permits her temporary “inclusion” in and “recognition” by the White male nation, it ultimately obscures her agency, her humanity. What is possible, then, in re-imagining her humanity? As I stated in this paper, the centering of “the human” in the figure of the citizen and in the figure of the refugee is fraught with struggles against the nation-state's production of witnessing and remembering/forgetting. Nationalism is identity formation from the top-down. Alternatively, Nguyen (2016) compels us to remember beyond our own humanity and even the other's humanity, “[to] a shift toward an ethics of recognition, of seeing and remembering how the inhuman inhabits the human” (p. 19). He asserts that centering “humanity is [a] fundamental misrecognition” (p. 91) that leads us to believe inhumanity is an exception rather than a condition for humanity. What could happen if we turn to our inhumanity instead, acknowledging its co-existence with our humanity? Recognition of our inhumanity gives us the freedom to re-make ourselves more wholly and apart from the nation and its binary associations of victim-good and perpetrator-bad, those that especially accompany dominant notions of race and gender. Like many Vietnamese refugees in Canada, my family members were once Chinese migrants to Vietnam, drawn to the nation because of the economic opportunities presented by its French colonizers. Purchasing property from France, they profited from these imperial efforts, disremembering the displacement and dispossession of people who were there before them. They were perhaps emboldened to do so because of their roots in China, a nation with its own complex history of imperial violence and rule across the Asian continent. Their boldness now has been tempered by years of hardship in settlement and low-waged employment in Canada and yet, to this day, my parents keep copies of these defunct deeds in a tattered briefcase. The human must be conceptualized along with her shadow, the inhuman, to reconcile the past, live in the present, and imagine the future. She, then, can be a figure whose humanness remains unknown and beyond western and even eastern nations.

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