The Committed (The Sympathizer #2)

by Viet Thanh Nguyen

Like most people, he believed that lies, no matter how often you told them, never became truth. Like my father, the priest, I was the kind who believed quite the opposite.

the seduction of subjugation.

Even “hashish” sounds charming, or at least exotic, in comparison to “marijuana,” America’s drug of choice, despite how both come from the same plant. Marijuana was what hippies and teenagers smoked, its symbol the terminally unfashionable band called the Grateful Dead, whom Yves Saint-Laurent would have lined up and shot for popularizing tie-dyed T-shirts. Hashish evoked the Levant and the souk, the strange and the exciting, the decadent and the aristocratic. One might try marijuana in Asia, but in the Orient, one smoked hashish.

What reeducation had taught me was that dedicated communists were like dedicated capitalists, incapable of nuance.

Politics is always personal, my dear, she said. That’s what makes it deadly.

The average person of any race was not good-looking, but while the ugliness of others only confirmed prejudices, the homeliness of one’s own people was always comforting.

The American Way of Life! Eat too much, work too much, buy too much, read too little, think even less, and die in poverty and insecurity. No, thank you. Don’t you see that’s how the Americans take over the world? Not just through their army and their CIA and their World Bank, but through this infectious disease called the American Dream?

wore the Bruno Magli shoes with pride and polished them weekly, succumbing to the capitalist seduction that Marx warned about: loving a commodity, a thing, as if it were an actual living being, an affair that could only be short-lived at best.

Whoever said the road to Hell was paved with good intentions had gotten it all wrong. If you looked more closely, you could see that the road to Hell was paved with excuses.

“The colonized is a persecuted person whose permanent dream is to become the persecutor.”

Those who believe in revolutions are the ones who haven’t lived through one yet.

Revolutions need to be judged fifty years later, a hundred years later, when the passions have cooled and the revolution’s accomplishments have had the time to take root and flourish.

As for Mao, he was being infinitely dialectical, realizing, unlike Stalin, who the Vietnamese communists have followed, that you cannot allow the revolution to calcify into the state. Once that happens, the revolution will be corrupted by its own power, which is why you ended up in a reeducation camp. The revolution, like the dialectic, must be perpetual!

Nations, without exception, disposed of body parts all the time. How could we bear ourselves otherwise if not for the mass graves of our forgetting?

Over the next hour, as I wondered whether Madeleine or BFD would emerge from behind the curtains first, I spoke with the eschatological muscle about Césaire, Fanon, and my fear that in this tempest of a world, I was what Césaire considered Ariel. Was my reluctance to continue subscribing to Césaire and Fanon’s vision of violence as being inevitable in the struggle against colonization a sign of theoretical revision on my part, based on my revolutionary experience? Or was it simply an excuse to justify my reluctance to commit in the way they saw commitment, as a demand for violent uprising?

To come out of my hole? Yes. Or put it another way. You lived through what Gramsci called a war of maneuver. Violence, revolution, or at least confrontations in the streets. Me, I am in what Gramsci called a war of position. The war for ideas, for alliances, coalitions, new movements; the struggle for a new vision—

forgave her that bit of camouflage, since I myself, in disguise as a harmless foreign student, was unlike how I appeared, not that any of us are exactly how we appear.

Racist love is still racist! As for me not being universal—why? Because I’m yellow? Because I’m only half white? Because I’m a refugee? Because I’m from your former colony? Because I have the wrong accent? Because my looks are disdained? Because my food is offensive? If Jesus Christ, child of refugees, born poor in a stable, a colonized person, a hick from the backwaters, despised by his society’s leaders and by the rulers of his leaders, a humble carpenter—if this Jesus Christ became universal—then so can I, motherfucker!

If the metropolitan center of postcard Paris was an architectural feast of swoon-inducing traditions, this unappetizing colony of the banlieue was architectural fast food.

But Islam was a religion like Catholicism was a religion, and all religions were built on quicksand. They needed people who needed to believe in something.

But the only revolution you can commit to is the one that lets you laugh and laugh and laugh, because the downfall of every revolution is when it loses its sense of absurdity. This, too, is the dialectic, to take the revolution seriously but not to take the revolutionaries seriously, for when revolutionaries take themselves too seriously, they cock their guns at the crack of a joke. Once that happens, it’s all over, the revolutionaries have become the state, the state has become repressive, and the bullets, once used against the oppressor in the name of the people, will be used against the people in their own name. That is why the people, if they wish to survive and to dodge those bullets, must be nameless.