When Heaven And Earth Changed Places

Je cherchais à lire un ouvrage vietnamien. Voilà que ce livre me fut conseillé par les gens d'ici. L'auteure est vietnamienne.

Est-ce cette libraire voulait seulement me vendre quelque chose? Je ne connais absolument rien de leur littérature, mais la guerre s'illustre ici comme une mémoire sanglante mais essentielle. Vous pourrez juger. Je suis un peu sceptique, mais je veux lire du local. Difficile de trouver des librairies...

Voici un extrait:

-Of course, the Viet Cong cadremen, like the Republicans, had no desire (or ability, most of them) to paint a fairer picture. For them, there could be no larger reason for Americans fighting the war that imperialist aggression. Because we peasants knew nothing about the United States, we could not stop to think about how absurd it would be for so large and wealthy nation to covet our poor little country for its rice fields, swamps, and pagodas. Because our only exposure to politics had been through the French colonial government and before that, the rule of Vietnamese kings), we had no concept of democracy. For us, ‘‘Western culture’’ meant bars, black markets, and xa hoi van minh-bewildering machines-most of them destructive. We couldn’t imagine that life in the capitalist world was anything other than a frantic, alien terror. Because as peasants, we defined politics as something other people did someplace else, it had no relevance to our daily lives- except as a source of endless trouble. As a consequence, we overlooked the power that lay in our hands: our power to achieve virtually anything we wanted if only we act together. The Viet Cong and the North, on the other hand, always recognized and respected this strength.

We children also knew that our ancestral spirits demanded we resist the outsiders. Our parents told us of the misery they had suffered from the invading Japanese (‘‘small death’’, our neighbours called them) in World War II, and from the French, who returned in 1946.
…

Now, the souls of all those people who had been mercilessly killed had come back to haunt Ky La- demanding revenge against the invaders. This we children believed with all our hearts. After all, we had been taught from birth that ghosts were simply people we could not see.

Phung Thi Le Ly Hayslip
Octobre 1988