In ‘To Save and to Destroy,’ a clarion call for literature of dissent

This article was originally published by The Emancipator.

Viet Thanh Nguyen is one of Asian America’s literary A-listers, having achieved that rare trifecta of critical acclaim (Pulitzer Prize winner for fiction), academic gravitas (he is the Aerol Arnold Chair of English at the University of Southern California), and Hollywood bona fides (his most famous novel, “The Sympathizer,” was adapted in a critically acclaimed mini-series by HBO).

Nguyen writes across genres, but always returns to the same distinct themes: the long shadow of the Vietnam War, colonialism, war, memory, and the redemptive love of family. Many younger Asian American writers — myself among them — claim Nguyen as a role model as we grapple with our personal and political selves.

In these turbulent times, I find myself turning to Nguyen’s leadership as I think through and write through issues of race, gender, community, and belonging.  

I was grateful, then, to read Nguyen’s forthcoming “To Save and to Destroy” (out next week with Harvard University Press), adapted from a series of lectures he delivered to students. “To Save and to Destroy” is true to its didactic roots, it is both patient and challenging, an ode to literature, but also a call to political activation for writers of color.

Nguyen urges readers to resist national borders in our analysis of the world, to strive toward solidarity, and to understand that our freedoms depend on it. 

Nguyen spoke to The Emancipator about our terrifying political moment — full-fledged war on DEI, First Amendment violations of protesters, and weaponization of American border security against students — and what it means to call for the literature of dissent at a time when the right to dissent is under attack. 

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Malavika Kannan: A lot of your writing draws from a coming-of-age experience as a Vietnamese American man, being a son and a student — and now you are a professor and father yourself. For the young people who are coming of age now, in historically unprecedented times — with two Trump presidencies, a pandemic, and global genocides — what advice would you offer us? 

Viet Thanh Nguyen: If we look at the history of the United States — what has been done to Black people and Indigenous peoples, and the kinds of warfare that the U.S. engaged in — it helps to know that we’ve collectively survived all these kinds of things. That doesn’t alleviate the danger that we face today, but it gives us a lesson that the things that we cherish — things like diversity, equity, inclusion — are the results of collective struggles of solidarity that have taken place over centuries.

That gives me hope that collectively we will survive what we’re going through right now if we do what our forebears have done, which is to refuse to be divided, to recognize real peril, but also real possibilities in resistance with community. 

This is really heartening to hear. My friends joke that we were told that, when we grew up, we’d get more conservative, but really we’re just more historicized. But I do want to hear your perspective on these current perils. How do we — students, writers, scholars — respond in times like these? 

When I was a student, I was very proud to graduate from UC Berkeley with two majors, three degrees, and four misdemeanors. I was arrested in student protests for things that we would now call diversity, equity, inclusion. Back then, it might have seemed trivial that we were protesting for multiculturalism, faculty diversity, and curricular diversity, especially [because] the previous generation had fought against apartheid in South Africa.

But the culture wars, as they were called back then, are the same today. There’s no way to separate culture wars from actual wars, which is why we’re seeing pro-Palestinian advocates being detained and threatened with deportation. It’s unfortunate that we turn collectively as a society to students to give us moral leadership!

It doesn’t make being a young person any easier, but it does make you realize that one of the benefits of being young is a sense of fearlessness. During the ’60s, the slogan was: Don’t trust anyone over 30.

Now that I’m over 30, I think it’s up to people like me to prove that we’re the exception, hopefully. 

You’ve built a literary career writing about the legacy of a war that, to many Americans, belongs in the past, and also contemporary racial injustice within the U.S., but now you’re setting your sights wider, toward Palestine. I read an interview in which you discussed MLK’s more radical speeches on Vietnam — and pointed out that he was assassinated a year later.  Do you have fear in transgressing some of the oldest boundaries of what is “OK” to say in American liberal discourse? 

My personal war, the Vietnam War, is now regarded as ancient history — but connecting it to other wars? Now, that’s threatening. You can talk about your civil rights, you can talk about your particular identities, but to connect those to the larger operations of the American empire, like our support for Israel, is connecting the dots in a way that structural power doesn’t want you to connect. 

When I say structural power, I don’t mean just the Republican Party, but also the Democratic Party. Learning to speak up for Palestine in my own minor way did draw a retribution greater than anything I’d experienced before. I came back from Italy a couple of days ago, and I have to say, sitting in my hotel room in Milan, wondering if I could possibly get back into the country, filled me with a sense of dread that I hadn’t experienced in a long time, and gave me just the slightest inkling of what it might feel to be been deported or exiled or separated from family.

I do feel trepidation, but I also feel it’s beholden on me to speak out, because that burden should not be on the younger people or students; it should be on older people like myself, who have more resources to try to weather any kind of storm that comes our way.

You draw power in connecting struggles, like Vietnam and Palestine, or racism at home and colonialism abroad. Where are the points of connection for you?

I came into political consciousness around Asian American causes of rights, identities, and recognitions, which were framed as an issue of anti-racism, access to the United States, and belonging to this country. Over the last couple of decades, I’ve [begun seeing] all those things as subsidiary to a greater cause of decolonization.

If we recognize that the political struggles that we’re engaging in should be around decolonization, then we can recognize how these seemingly disparate identities and histories are actually really connected.

To connect the causes of civil rights and minority empowerment in the United States to the cause of anti-genocide and pro-Palestinian advocacy reveals how colonization deploys all these things in order to exploit and separate us. 

There are perils to such things as identity politics. The way we inoculate ourselves against that is to constantly understand that we’re in a web of relationships. We need to keep up these connections of solidarity, and we need to realize that sometimes we are disempowered and exploited, and other times we might be on the side of power.

This is why, again, the issue of Palestine is so unsettling, because many people are being forced to realize they might be disempowered as so-called minorities in the West, and yet they are also a part of an imperial machinery that exploits and oppresses Palestine.

I’m curious what you hope literature will look like in response to current events, conceptually and formally. Literature changed and was written in response to the first Trump presidency. What were some of your takeaways from that literary moment? How do you feel writers should respond differently this second time around?

[In recent decades] we witnessed a moment of optimism that multiculturalism had triumphed. We looked back upon American history and we realized it’s not a White Christian nationalist nation, it’s also a very diverse nation and we need diverse storytelling.

And the apotheosis of that, obviously, was the Obama administration. President Obama was a very likable gentleman, I’m sure, but also someone who authorized enormous numbers of drone strikes, increased the imperial power of the presidency, and deported enormous numbers of people. Multiculturalism and liberalism are invested in the global hegemony of American power, too. 

And so if there’s a shift in the literary landscape, I hope it’s a recognition that simply telling diverse stories isn’t gonna be enough. Is the price of diversity going to be inclusion in imperialism? I hope contemporary literature — especially literature written by people of color, queer people, trans people, anybody who identifies in some way as minority — can grapple with a fundamental contradiction.

What does it mean to want to belong to an empire? That’s such an enormous ethical, political, moral aesthetic challenge that I think should be invigorating for contemporary literature. 

That makes me really hopeful to hear. That’s something that I talk about with my friends all the time, like, we didn’t choose this wack-ass country, but we’re here now, so how do we engage with it? You suggest in your book that we could try writing with a “capacious grief.” What does that mean? 

The book is about my personal relationship to literature, shaped out of my refugee experiences. I like to say that history ripples through us through our emotions, which means that a lot of people are really messed up by these histories of settler colonialism and war and migration.

For me, the personal consequences were that I was numb to myself. To learn how to feel was crucial to me as a human being, son, and father, but also as a writer because I don’t think anyone can be a very good writer if they can’t feel.

Learning how to feel grief for what my family had been through, for the people we had left behind, was enormously important to me. But what was also important was this idea of capacious grief, this idea that our grief is not singular. 

When we’ve been devastated by history in some way, it’s very tempting and normal to feel that we’re the only victims in the world, but that’s simply not true. What it means to have capacious grief is to understand other people’s grief, because if we only understand our own grief, we turn ourselves purely into victims, and unfortunately, the line between victim and victimizer is really thin.

We saw that after 9/11 — the United States felt victimized, got the world’s sympathy, and what did the United States do but turn around and just bomb a whole lot of people. Victims who are focused purely on their own grief, but don’t have a capacious grief, are actually very dangerous people. 

To end with a more hopeful question: You write a lot about otherness. The corollary to that is belonging, which, as you urge, can come from building community in expansive and unexpected ways. What are the places that you have found belonging in your life, especially recently? Are there spaces where you feel you have successfully created belonging across differences?  

You know, when October 7th happened, it was not a political cause I had been very active with before. There was some controversy around the things I said, certain invitations were rescinded and all that.

But it felt to me that as much as I might have lost in that respect, some friends or allies or opportunities, a whole other world opened up as well, a different kind of belonging, with people committed not just to Palestine, but to greater anti-colonialism.

And that to me was such a beautiful trade-off. I would do it again without hesitation. 

But to end on a very happy note, and possibly a sentimental note, I am a father. I don’t think everyone should be a parent, but I became a father, and so far my kids seem to be pretty happy with me. I have discovered all kinds of emotional depths of myself, a greater capacity for grief because I have a greater capacity for love as well.

And if I’ve never felt completely at home in the United States, I know I feel completely at home with my family. We should all have that opportunity to form our own kin, and our own communities.

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