[ndlr] Témoignage du journaliste Louis Roubaud sur l’exécution des 13 partisans nationalistes du VNQDD guillotinés à Yen-Bai le 17 juin 1930.
Viêt Nam ! Viêt Nam ! Viêt Nam !
(Cablogramme de l’exécution)
Yen-Bay, 17 juin, 6 heures du matin.
Viet Nam ! Viet Nam ! Patrie du Sud ! Patrie du sud !
Ici le petit jour réglementaire se confond avec la nuit. Il est 6 heures; il n’ y a pas vingt minutes que le soleil s’est annoncé en colorant de carmin le bois des Laquiers… et tout est fini.
Treize hommes ont subi le châtiment.
Cela se passait dans un pré qui aurait pu être un terrain de foot-hall et qui est encadré par quelques bâtiments neufs, sans étage, propres et coquets, de style colonial: la caserne de la garde indigène, la maison des passagers… Je logeais dans la maison des passagers et j’ai été éveillé cette nuit par des voix, des ordres, des coups de marteau. On dressait la machine à cinquante mètres de ma chambre à coucher ! Je suis sorti en sandales et en pyjama et j’ai aperçu dans la cour de la caserne indigène de longues caisses rangées comme des dominos; j’en comptai quinze et je demandai :
– Ils sont donc quinze?
– Non, treize, mais le chiffre a été tenu secret jusqu’à la dernière minute et nous avons compté largement pour ne pas être pris au dépourvu.
Je suis rentré, je me suis étendu sous la moustiquaire, sur mon drap moite. Le travail était fini au milieu du pré. Les coups de marteau ont cessé, les voix se sont tues. Le silence s’est emparé de la nuit; les insectes se sont emparés du silence.
La sauterelle dit : « cricri » ; le margouillat dit : « tectec » ; le toquet dit : « tock qué » ; la cigale brise ses entrailles sonores et le crapaud buffle meugle comme un ruminant. Pourtant, ce vacarme est encore du silence lorsque nul être ne parle plus.
C’était une nuit d’été tonkinois, si chaude qu’on aurait voulu demander grâce, toute remplie d’humidité, empestée ou parfumée – on ne sait plus – par la pourriture végétale. Des cancrelats mordorés avaient entrepris l’ascension de mon lit, de stupides sauterelles se heurtaient contre l’ampoule électrique que j’avais laissé allumée.
Au bout d’une heure ou deux, les hommes sont revenus, mais on les entendait à peine : huit cents pieds nus de tirailleurs frappaient l’herbe. La garnison de Yen-Bay se rangeait en carré aux quatre limites du pré.
Je me suis habillé et j’ai rejoint un groupe d’Européens qui se tenaient devant le mur de la garde indigène. En face de nous, de l’autre côté du champ, derrière la haie des deux sections de tirailleurs et de la section de l’infanterie coloniale, je voyais le public indigène assez réduit et parfaitement silencieux.
A cinq heures moins cinq, le premier homme déboucha en haut du petit raidillon qui conduit de la prison à la prairie. Je dis : le premier homme, c’était plutôt un groupe : quatre fantassins coloniaux, baïonnette au canon, deux fantassins coloniaux sans armes, pour parer à la défaillance physique des suppliciés pendant le court trajet. La petite troupe était conduite par le résident de Bottini. Elle atteignit, au pas accéléré, cette chose qui était surgie peu à peu de l’ombre, qui s’était dessinée dans l’aurore et qui ressemblait à un agrès de gymnastique. La guillotine à ras de terre, une planche à peu près de la taille d’un homme, est dressée devant la lunette…
Les soldats s’écartent, Je petit supplicié en sarrau blanc apparaît. Alors, M. d ‘Hanoï, le bourreau annamite, lui met la main sur l’épaule et lui parle, il le conduit sans cesser de l’exhorter jusque devant la planche… qui bascule comme une trappe.
– Que lui a-t-il dit?
– Il lui a dit : n’aie pas peur, on ne sent rien…
Le petit groupe est retourné à la prison pour chercher le suivant.
Treize fois, M. de Bottini a interrompu l’homme en train de tirer avidement les bouffées de tabac noir par le tuyau de la pipe à eau, la caïdieu, et il a signé treize levées d’écrou.
Presque tous les condamnés avaient accepté, avec le verre de chum-chum, les bons offices des missionnaires, les pères Méchet et Dronet, qui leur proposaient de transmettre leurs dernières volontés à leurs familles; presque tous ont écrit une ultime lettre. Les deux derniers exécutés ont été Pho Duc Chinh, « Droit et Vertu » et N’guyen Thaï Hoc ou le « Grand Professeur ll. L’un était le lieutenant, l’autre le fondateur et président du parti nationaliste annamite.
Avant eux avaient expié : Bui le Conciliani, Bui le Messager, N’Guyen le Pacifique, Ha le laborieux, Duc le Mesquin, N’Guyen le Prospère, N’Guyen le Bienfaiteur, N’Guyen le Charitable, N’Guyen le Puits de pierres précieuses, Ngo le Séducteur, Do le Quatrième fils. Tous m’ont paru marcher sans forfanterie et mourir simplement .
Afin que le secret de l’exécution fût gardé jusqu’au dernier instant, les treize condamnés ont été transférés, pendant la nuit, d’Hanoï à Yen-Bay, par train spécial.
La machine est arrivée sournoisement, dans l’obscurité.
En ville, nul ne se doutait de rien. Le fourgon qui transportait la guillotine a croisé devant la place du marché une colonne de pitres et de clowns qui faisaient en musique la parade, dans les rues de la ville, pour attirer le public jusqu’à leur cirque ambulant.
Yen-Bay, 12 juin 1930, 12 heures.
Il était six heures, ce matin, lorsque je vous ai câblé. J’ai dû me hâter, je n’ai pu tout dire.
Avant l’aurore, autour de la machine éclairée par quelques lampes électriques, ceux qui avaient surveillé le montage parlaient pour attendre l’heure légale et parce que les minutes semblaient longues. Parmi eux se trouvaient quelques inspecteurs de police qui avaient voyagé cette nuit même d’Hanoï à Yen-Bay, dans le wagon de quatrième classe, avec les treize. Ils se communiquaient leurs impressions sur chacun. Pendant quatre heures de trajet, ils les avaient vus vivre leurs dernières heures. Des condamnés, liés par une main, deux à deux, conversaient familièrement entre eux avec ceux de leurs gardiens qui parlaient l’annamite et avec le père Dronet, l’aumônier de la prison d’Hanoï, qui avait entrepris de les catéchiser.
Du était lamentable et se prétendait innocent.
– C’est vrai ! appuyait Pho Duc Chinh, aussi vrai qu’il me faudrait trois têtes pour payer ma part, la tête de ce pauvre Du est de trop.
Deux autres agonisants, effondrés dans un coin, accroupis à la mode annamite, demeuraient silencieux, blêmes de peur. Mais les neuf autres s’efforçaient de s’encourager.
– Nous allons être bien accueillis à Yen-Bay, disaient-ils, nous allons trouver sur le quai de la gare nos chers camarades Hoang, Tiep, Thuyet et Luong !
C’étaient les noms de quatre hommes exécutés dans cette ville le 8 mai dernier.
– Nous ne sommes pas des criminels, mais des vaincus.
N’guyen, le Grand Professeur, discutait avec le père Dronet.
– Pourquoi voulez-vous que je me repente ? je ne regrette rien.
Et il citait les vers français :
Mourir pour sa patrie,
C’est le sort le plus beau,
Le plus digne d’envie…
Ngoc Thinh – Puits de pierres précieuses – s’informait auprès d’un inspecteur :
– Le sergent Bouhier est-il mort?
– Malgré les trente coups de coupe-coupe que tu lui as donnés, il s’est rétabli. Ce n’est pas de ta faute.
– Alors il est juste que je meure.
Ceux qui rapportaient ces paroles concluaient :
– Ce sont tous des orgueilleux; ils ont crâné toute la nuit.
Pourtant, le matin, avant l’aurore, le père Dronet et le père Mechet parvinrent à convaincre la plupart des intraitables. Dans neuf cellules, ils versèrent l’eau sur le front, déposèrent le sel sur la langue des neuf condamnés qui avaient accepté, peut-être pour prolonger leur vie de quelques minutes, d’être baptisés in extremis.
J’ai dit que pour aller de la prison au champ du supplice, les hommes, les mains liées derrière le dos, montaient un petit raidillon. Ce raidillon est surplombé par une sorte de talus, bordé d’une barrière de bambous et où s’élèvent des paillotes. Les habitants des quatre ou cinq maisons s’étaient groupés pour voir monter les condamnés. Lorsque passa Dao Van N’hit, un garçon de vingt ans que soutenaient deux robustes légionnaires, on entendit une voix de femme :
– 0 cha oi em oi!
C’était ]a mère. Ses paroles voulaient dire : Oh! hélas! mon petit enfant!
En arrivant sur la prairie, N’guyen Van Cuu, dit « Le Charitable », s’écria :
– Toi xin noi (je veux dire quelque chose)
Mais un légionnaire lui appliqua une main sur la bouche. Quelques instants après, Nguyen Van Thinh, « Le Prospère, » commença :
– Viet Nam…
Il fut bâillonné de même. Et de même encore les autres.
– Viet Nam !. .. Viet Nam !.. . Viet Nam !… Patrie du Sud !… Patrie du Sud !…
J’entendis cela plusieurs fois et le mot retentissait encore à mes oreilles lorsque j’aperçus le dernier condamné, Nguyen Thai Hoc, le Grand Professeur, le visage gras, une barbiche de lettré. Il souriait! d’un sourire simple, sans contrainte, et il saluait la foule en inclinant la tête. Lui aussi, d’une voix forte et bien timbrée entonna : « Viet Nam!… » et la main du légionnaire étouffa son cri.
• • •
Ayant vu mourir ces hommes, je suis allé cet après-midi dans la caserne, au fort, dans les petites villas d’officiers, où erraient encore les ombres d’autres suppliciés.
– Dans cette pièce obscure, me dit un officier, j’ai aperçu mon camarade Jourdan étendu. Il tenait à la main une lanterne électrique allumée dont le réflecteur était dirigé par un hasard tragique sur son visage. Je pris la lanterne, je secouai mon ami, il était mort.
Dans ce lit, Bouhier a été lardé au coupecoupe. Devant cette grille, le sergent Damour était étendu, le crâne scalpé, le ventre ouvert, les bras tordus…
Sous cette véranda, la pauvre petite Mme Robert, une jeune femme de vingt-quatre ans, avait traîné le corps de son mari, tué dans la salle à manger. Mme Robert a passé toute la nuit serrée contre le corps qu’elle ne voulait pas abandonner. De ses mains, elle comprimait sur le front du cadavre la cervelle jaillie d’une horrible blessure.
Viet Nam ! Viet Nam !… Patrie !… Cruelle Patrie
Louis Roubaud.
Réf. : Louis Roubaud, Viet-Nam, la tragédie indo-chinoise, Paris : Librairie Valois, Enquêtes, 1931, pp. 153-163.
Aperçu de la réédition de cet ouvrage (2010) sur Google Books
I was born in Hanoi on February 27, 1939. My natal village is My-Tho in the district of Binh-Luc, Ha-Nam Province, North Vietnam. My father, Nguyen-Cong Phung, was born in 1898. He died in 1976. Before 1954, he was a low-ranking official of the Hanoi Tribunal. My mother, Nguyen-Thi-Yen, was born in 1900. She died in 1970. She was a little merchant.
I have two sisters: Nguyen-Thi-Hoan, who was born in 1923 and Nguyen-Thi-Hao who was born in 1925. Nguyen-Thi-Hao died in Hanoi in November, 2004. Nguyen-Thi-Hoan lives in Hanoi with her family.
When my parents died I was in a concentration camp called Phong-Quang in Lao-Cai Province. Once my sister Hao visited me there at the request of my mother before her death. My sister’s visit for the purpose of telling me of the death of my mother was the only family visit that I received while imprisoned for fifteen years. This was not due to callous disregard on the part of my family; it was due to deliberate constant changes of prisons and camps by the regime. Because I was not imprisoned with trials, they did not know where I was. They had to hear from released prisoners where I had been, but I would be likely to be moved by that time. Political prisoners were shuffled regularly by jailors so they would not form associations for rebellion or escape.
My brother is Nguyen-Cong-Gian; he was born in 1932. He was a lieutenant-colonel in the Army of the Republic of Vietnam and, like all other officers, was imprisoned in a re-education camp after the communist victory in 1975. His term was for thirteen years (1975-1988). He and his family came to the U.S.A. under the Humanitarian Operation (H.O.) Program, a joint agreement between the U.S. and Vietnam allowing political asylum for military officers of ARVN who had been imprisoned in Vietnam for more than three years. My brother and his family came to the U.S. in 1993, and have lived in Virginia since then. Because the times of both of our imprisonments and surveillance in our homeland did not allow us to meet, I did not see my brother Gian from the time of our youth until I arrived in the U.S.A. on November 1, 1995, a period of forty-one years. He and his family met me at the Dulles Airport.
My family was poor, but my parents did their best to give their sons and daughters a good education. It was beneficial to be the youngest in the family because the older ones helped me to learn. For example, my sister Hao taught me the French language at age six just as she had been taught in the colonial French schools. This longtime use with the language may be the basis for my interest in French novels and poetry as relaxation. My brother Gian was always studious and serious, whereas I was more interested in boxing and swimming as a youth.
During the Resistance against the French Army, which broke out on December 19, 1946, my family moved to My-Tho, our natal village, fifty miles from Hanoi. We lived in the home of a nephew of my father. This was because Hanoi was a battlefield in the war between France and Vietnam and we were fleeing danger. Everyone in Hanoi went to the countryside of the many regions of their births at this time.
At the end of 1949, my family came back to Hanoi, which was then occupied by the French Army. From 1949 to 1956 I went to high school at Nguyen Hue, Minh-Tan, Van Lang, Albert Sarraut, and Khai-Thanh. These were private schools as was common in North Vietnam at that time. After 1950 both boys and girls went to the same schools, but were so timid that we almost never talked to each other.
My sisters had married before 1945 and lived in Hanoi. When necessary we lived at the home of my elder sister, Nguyen-Thi-Hoan, and her husband and children.
On March 9, 1945, when France had been liberated from Germany by the Allied Army, the Japanese made a coup d’etat on only one night and imprisoned the French governor of Vietnam and the French Army. In the void following the Japanese surrender to the Allied Powers in August, 1945, there was a genuine revolution in my homeland. This revolution was bloodless; it was the people taking care of themselves. However it was soon co-opted by the communists with the assistance of the Soviet Union. This was the establishment of the Viet Minh and return of Ho Chi Minh. The nationalist leaders and many supporters of this Vietnamese revolution were soon imprisoned or killed by the communists.
After the Geneva Accords of July 20, 1954, nearly one million people left the North for the South, fleeing communism. My parents decided to stay in Hanoi, believing that the Vietnamese communists were patriots; they had led the people in the fight against French domination, for national independence. Moreover, their doctrine supported the poor.
That naivete would have disastrous consequences. My brother, who had been mobilized in the National Army (quan doi quoc gia) in 1954 was the only one who went to the South, by traveling with the Army. Later, he was a lieutenant-colonel. After the fall of Saigon, he was put in a re-education camp in North Vietnam for thirteen years. During the war he married a lady from Saigon.
I remember the 10th of October, 1954, as if it were yesterday. That was the day Ho Chi Minh and his Party returned to Hanoi. Like everyone my friends and I went out on the streets to welcome him. Our hearts were full of joyous enthusiasm, thinking the red banner with a golden star would brighten our fatherland! At that time, I used to invite some Viet Minh soldiers, victors of Dien-Bien-Phu, to my home for dinner, admiring them as true heroes.
My foolish exuberance, like everyone’s, soon vanished. Perfidy and violence had started their way—trampling down all basic human rights, executing and imprisoning hundreds of thousands of innocent people. Under the totalitarian yoke, the whole country turned into a huge prison. All liberties were pitilessly destroyed. No one could let out one peep against Ho Chi Minh. The Party had gagged the people’s mouths. A terrifying atmosphere pervaded the entire population. French colonialists began to be sorely missed! Compared with Uncle Ho’s socialist regime, the French colonial domination was PARADISE!
Under Ho Chi Minh’s regime, everyone was poor, and did not have enough to eat. However, this made me strong enough to withstand the starvation in the communist prisons, as well as other Vietnamese prisoners who were accustomed to a small diet and are not large people. By contrast, when the French were defeated at Dien Bien Phu and 10,000 soldiers captured and imprisoned, two-thirds of them died with a few months because of privation as well as torture by the Viet Minh using well-known communist methods.
The social changes of the communists began to take effect beginning in 1950, and were firmly in place by 1959. This is the period of my teenage years. My parents quickly began to feel they had made a mistake in not choosing to go South when they had the opportunity in 1954 and 1955.
In 1956, at the age of seventeen, I contracted tuberculosis. Unable to work, I lived a parasitic life. My elderly parents had to nourish me. In the beginning of 1957, my parents and I moved to Haiphong, a harbor town seventy miles from Hanoi. They had to sell our home in Hanoi in order to pay for my treatment, because antibiotics were very expensive. We lived with the family of my elder sister, at 136 Station Street.
Although I said and did nothing against the Party, I had much trouble with Security Forces. The authorities regarded me as “a discontented element” because my brother was in the quan doi quoc gia VN, the National Army.
In December, 1960, a high school history teacher who was one of my friends asked me to assume his task for two hours because he was ill. The required textbook was Cach Mang Thang Tam 1945 (History of the August Revolution), which was published by the Su That Publishing House in Hanoi. The textbook falsely stated that the Japanese surrender in World War II was to the Soviet Army’s victory over the Japanese armed forces in Manchuria. I explained to my students that Japan had surrendered to the Allies because of the two atom bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki by the U.S.A.
About two months later I was arrested, accused of “Anti-propaganda,” and condemned to two years in prison. In reality, I had to live three years and six months in labor camps in Phu-Tho Province and Yen-Bai Province. Although labor was hard in these camps, I was still young. Prisoners could talk to one another on our way to and from work, which was primarily agricultural, growing vegetables. About ten of us enjoyed gathering in the yard at dusk to secretly read poetry and discuss literature. This was necessarily secret because the guards would break up groups, especially those who met regularly.
During those years in detention, I created about 100 poems on the subjects of the prison scene and anticommunism. When I was released in 1964, I continued to write poetry and recite it to my closest friends who went on reciting it to others, in Haiphong and Hanoi. We did not have much money so we met in parks, on benches, in the evening. My job at this time was to do bricklaying, especially the carrying of bricks in a basket across my shoulders. The duty of reporting on others, even your own parents or husbands, to the cadres is a norm under the communist reign. Whenever anyone would pass by when we were reading or discussing poetry and politics we would change the subject until they were out of hearing range.
My friends and I rejoiced that the Americans had entered the war on the side of South Vietnam and were bombing Haiphong. We were given careful surveillance by Security Forces at all times because we were suspected of being saboteurs; however the only sabotage that we undertook was that of keeping our minds free of the demands of communism. All over North Vietnam, it was required of everyone to glorify the regime, especially in schools. If not, and the student remained silent, that student would be reported to the Party. Many friends of mine were put in prison because of their mouths.
My parents always loved me and made me feel that I had not done wrong in not adopting the ways and habits of the communists. They blamed themselves for my prison life. If they had only gone South along with my brother, they felt we would have a happy life. We wanted South Vietnam to invade North Vietnam and take over the Communist government, and felt the American bombing was not enough to end the war, let alone to remove the regime.
In February of 1966 I was arrested again. The Security Forces suspected that I was the author of the poems that were transmitted from mouth to mouth in Haiphong and Hanoi. When interrogated, I denied it, saying that I knew nothing about these “reactionary poems.” Without receiving a trial, I was sent to the concentration camps in Phu-Tho, Yen-Bai, and Lao-Cai Provinces.
I never think that I am talented, but that I was able to write poems that affected people because of inspiration, or a sacred fire that was inside me. My vitality of life was put into creating poems even if I was in stocks or irons. I used to work on poems at night, because in the daytime it was too noisy. They took several nights to write, and memorize, and revise the words carefully, before completion. If a poem was not good, I would throw it out of my mind with the same method.
First I would consider the necessary rhythm of the poem. Then I would place the words, the verses, and memorize them. The following night I would repeat them and revise them and commit them to memory. Then I would recite them to my friends in prison camp who were also poets when we gathered after work in the evening. We would help each other.
It was at the Phong Quang camp, in Lao Cai Province, that I gained my closest friendship in life, the poet Phung Cung. Because writing on paper was not allowed, everyone had ways to meter the verses. Phung Cung would use his fingers to count. He would do this with such concentration that other prisoners and jailers thought he was crazy. But he was not, he was simply counting words. I did not use body methods, even reciting aloud, just my memory. Most of my poems (about 300) were created during the second period of imprisonment, eleven years between 1966 and 1977. These are the years of my twenties and thirties.
In July, 1977, (two years after the surrender of South Vietnam) a dozen prisoners and I were temporarily liberated, making room for the increasing number of prisoners who arrived from the South. These dozen included friends and fellow-writers who had come to know each other at the Phong-Quang concentration camp where I had been taken in 1970.
Returning to my elder sister, Mrs. Nguyen-Thi Hoan, and her family, I lived at their home at number 136 Station Street in Haiphong. I was dismayed to find the house also occupied by ten families crammed into the house. Those were families of cadres and party members, of the bloc leader and also of the police officer of this ward by the name of Thanh. The ward police, the district police, the city police often came to “inquire about my health”. Under those circumstances, I did not dare to shut myself in my room of 8 m2 to write. I often rode my bicycle – its brand was a bear but it was so rickety that even a thief would not want to steal it – to an outer suburb to buy a few litres of rice brandy to sell to the dog meat stalls. When the moonshine business was busted, I went to Hanoi. Vu Thu Hien helped me find a job delivering baking flour. Mr. Trinh, a former lieutenant in the National Army, gave me a few sets of bicycle spokes, which I took to Haiphong to sell. That’s how I managed to scrape through. Friends were so preoccupied with survival that they rarely met each other.
Denied any form of employment, I made both ends meet with difficulty. People under the Communist regime always had very little food because of the policy of exporting rice grown in the conquered South Vietnam provinces to other Communist regimes instead of feeding our own people. I often went to bed with an empty stomach even when not in prison. My mother, before she died in 1970, had bought me clothes to wear when I should be released from prison. I had to sell these clothes to buy 8 kilograms (about 19 pounds) of rice to survive.
When Red China invaded the six border provinces, security forces tormented me ceaselessly. Afraid of being unable to survive if jailed a third time, I made up my mind to send my poems abroad. These poems were the first twenty years of my work. It was impossible to let them be buried with me! I went to Hanoi, deciding to run into the French or British Embassy. It took me three days to write four hundred poems from my memory on papers. So, on July 16th, 1979, I put my manuscript under my shirt and went to the British Embassy on Ly-Thuong-Kiet Street.
I found my way into the Embassy, passing the guard. One Vietnamese woman and three Vietnamese men were sitting around a table in a large room. They were civil servants hired by the British to be a local reception office for the Embassy. I told them that I came to see the Ambassador.
“Where are you from?” one of them asked. “From the foreign office,” I answered. They demanded the required paper. I told them I had forgotten to carry it. With that, I rushed to the door at the other side of the room. The woman stood up and grasped me. I pushed her down. Two men barred my way into the room. The third Vietnamese man went out to warn the police.
There was a young English girl combing her hair in a boudoir without a door on my right side. I said to her quickly in English: “I need to meet the Ambassador. Don’t fear, I am an honest man.” But she was so frightened that she dropped her comb. The two men chased me. I ran to the table and lifted it up, making everything on the table fall to the floor. Hearing the noise, three English diplomats came out. One Vietnamese man said that I was a madman. I said to the three Englishmen that I was not crazy, and I had important documents to give them. I immediately ran in the back door. The Englishmen followed me, closing the door.
I handed them my manuscript and told them about my prison life and the sufferings of my oppressed people under the communist totalitarian yoke. I begged them to have my poems published in their free country. Finally, I asked whether I could stay in the Embassy. They replied that I could not because the police were waiting for me outside. They promised solemnly that they would arrange for my poems to be published.
Satisfied, I gave them three photos. One was taken in 1958 with my parents and my niece and nephew; one was taken in the same year when I was nineteen years old, and the third one was taken in 1978, when I was thirty-nine. I shook hands with them, said good-bye, and left the Embassy. The Security Forces of the Socialist government of Vietnam arrested me in front of the British Embassy, and drove me to Hoa-Lo prison, which had been ironically called the “Hanoi Hilton” by U.S. pilots who had been shot down by Russian SAM missiles when bombing or flying reconnaissance over North Vietnam from 1967 until 1973. The original handwritten manuscripts are in the protective custody of the British government in London. They will be returned when Vietnam is free.
The Hoa Lo prison is the setting of my short stories which are based on real situations and people I knew when I was there for six years. The first three years I was in a solitary cell, in darkness. The second three years I was with common criminals. Sometimes women were in cells nearby, but mostly prisoners were gender-separated in large rooms containing about 200 people each. I was able to communicate with women when in cells, and especially enjoyed hearing them sing folk songs that I remembered from my youth. I was in cell #14. We would communicate with each other when the jailers were not there by yelling back and forth and by a system of “driving” items such as toothbrushes and other goods for trade by strings thrown to the next cell. Each person was honor-bound to deliver the item to the cell of its intended recipient and not break the chain.
I survived the terrible ordeal of prison conditions because my companions in the Hoa Lo prison, even common criminals, admired my resistance to the communist authority. They protected me as much as they could by giving up some of their small space to lie down so that I did not have to always sleep on my side.
In 1985 I was transferred from Hoa-Lo prison to B14, in Thanh-Liet village, eight miles from Hanoi. I was living there in cells where Mr. Vo Dai Ton, a fighter for democracy, was living. Other political prisoners at B14 included Hoang-Minh Chinh, Duong-Thu-Huong, Ha-Si-Phu, and Nguyen-Thanh-Giang. My health deteriorated badly due to more solitary confinement and malnutrition. The interior fire of creation went out, and after 1988 I composed no more poems because I could not concentrate.
In the ten-year period between 1977 and 1988 I created 400 poems. However, I forgot 100 of them when I was reciting them to myself after my release in 1991. I spent one year after my release to call back to my memory the 300 poems that I would write down on paper on a single day after I came to the United States, November 1, 1995.
In 1988 I was transferred to Z10 in Ninh Binh Province, seventy miles from Hanoi, where a communist general named Chu-Van Tan’s several relatives were also jailed. This was a segregated prison for Chinese supporters suspected to be spies.
Although isolated from society, I always found ways to communicate and get news from the newly arrested prisoners. That is how I learned the events of the war as they unfolded. Sometimes new prisoners were Communist Party members who had the courage to criticize their superiors.
Thanks to the collapse of the socialist regimes in Eastern Europe and the pressure of the Vietnamese Diaspora to call my situation to the attention of international opinion, I was released in October, 1991, after more than twelve years of imprisonment in my third period of being jailed without trial. Eight of those years were in solitary confinement, and in very dim light. When I was released I weighed only eighty pounds; today I weigh 139 pounds.
After my release from the third period of imprisonment, which I did not expect to survive, I knew that my poems had been published as promised by the Englishmen, first in October, 1980. I learned this in prison when angry officials showed me a book and asked if they were mine. I said that I was the author. I was very happy because I had attained my goal. They were submitted to an international poetry competition and awarded the International Poetry Award in Rotterdam in the year 1985.
All unknown to me, they were translated into several languages: English, French, German, Dutch, Chinese, Spanish, Czech, and Korean. The English translation by Huynh Sanh Thong was published as the first volume in the Lac Viet Series by the Council on Southeast Asia Studies at Yale University in that same year as Flowers From Hell. In 1988 they were translated into German by Dr. Bui Hanh Nghi and published as Echo Aus Dem Abgrund, Tieng Vong Tu Day Vuc by R.G. Fischer Verlag with an introduction by the musician Peter Gabriel. The Vietnamese musician Pham Duy who had found refuge in America set many to music as “Prison Songs” and performed them around the world.
All of this was unknown to me while I was in solitary confinement in my homeland for creating these verses with the rhymes and rhythms of freedom and resistance to tyranny. My whereabouts and my condition, whether alive or dead, was unknown to the translators and publishers. However, people all over the world were watching and I was given the “Freedom to Write” award in 1988. Perhaps it was for this reason they did not kill me.
The last three years of my imprisonment, 1988 to 1991, saw annual changes in my location. In my struggle for survival, it no longer mattered to me where I was. The numbered camps, B14 and Z10, were for people considered dangerous. In 1990 I was transferred to Ba Sao camp, in Ha Nam Province, very near to my natal village. This was a transition for my return to the outside world in 1991.
From 1991 to 1995 I was living in Hanoi with my second sister’s Hao’s family at 65 Nguyen-Cong-Tru Street, under strict surveillance. Everyone who came to see me was later threatened by the police. After diplomatic normalization between the U.S.A. and Viet-Nam I was allowed asylum in the U.S.A. under the Humanitarian Operation program. This was due to the efforts of humanitarian organizations and especially efforts of a retired U.S. Air Force colonel who lives in California, Noboru Masuoka.
The story of Col. Masuoka’s concern is an interesting one. He was the admissions officer of the Air Force Academy in Colorado. His own history includes incarceration at Heart Mountain, Wyoming, concentration camp in the United States during World War II. All persons of Japanese descent, citizens or not, were moved from their homes and their land confiscated. When “Nobby” met young Vietnamese students who had qualified for admission to the Air Force Academy, they told him of their South Vietnamese Army officer fathers who were still imprisoned in Vietnam. He was able to arrange the release of two officers and their emigration to America.
When asked by a television reporter in San Jose if he could aid a poet to leave the country who had never been a military or civilian official it was a challenge. But he worked with humanitarian organizations and government officials in Washington D.C. to get my release to improve my health. This release finally came on November 1, 1995. Upon my arrival I was asked to address the Congress of the United States, which I did in English, from my speech translated by Nguyen Ngoc Bich. It has since been translated into French. I also addressed the Parliament and the President of France, Jacques Chirac, in the year 2000.
During the last twelve-year period of detention I created about 300 poems. I had to keep them in my head. When arriving in the U.S.A. I hurried to write them on paper, fearing that the poems would leave my mind. The new poems were translated by Nguyen Ngoc Bich, a scholar who has written and published extensively on Vietnamese history and culture. He has been overseas for nearly forty years and his English is very good. I had the poems published in 1996.
I lived with my brother Gian’s family in Herndon, Virginia, until 1998, when I went to France at the invitation of the International Parliament of Writers. During three years in France (1998 – 2001) I wrote six stories of life in Hoa-Lo prison, where I had been incarcerated following my arrest outside the British Embassy in Hanoi from 1979 until 1985. These stories were not fiction; they were based on real experiences. Many incidents are of my own life in prison.
They were published in Vietnamese by Canh Nam publishers in Arlington, Virginia, in 2001. They have been translated into English by several friends who volunteered their energy and skills and I am seeking their publication in America.
In 2001 I moved to southern California, to live in the warm weather and the largest population of Vietnamese Diaspora in America. California’s climate and associations with friends has improved my health. I live as a lodger in a Vietnamese family home. I learned English and became a citizen of the U.S.A. on October 20, 2004. I give lectures and readings especially to remember the people imprisoned with me and those who are still imprisoned. I intend to write a very thorough and lengthy memoir in my original language, Vietnamese.
During my twenty-seven years of imprisonment, with no books or magazines to read, I devoted all my spare time (especially at night) to create my poems, learning them by heart. It would have been too risky, too dangerous to write them on paper. For me poetry was no luxury, it was the cruel realities of life of war and prison, the sound of sobbing of my oppressed and mercilessly tortured compatriots. It was the memory of my parents, who are always in my mind, and their love and sacrifice for their children, especially their youngest who was born to them so late in their lives and caused them such tribulation. It was not hate, but hope that kept me alive. It was the remembered sights and sounds of the street vendors and lovely girls, the coffee shop of my youthful friends wasting time in a careless way that became the hope of my miserable life. It was the remembered sights of sunset and dawn and the landscape of my homeland, sometimes only seen while laboring in the dreary concentration camps but always beautiful in the darkness of my solitary cell and unshackled imagination.
Yet the solitude continues as I am away from so many friends in my homeland, and grows deeper as they grow old and pass away. Since living in the United States, I often make telephone calls to inquire about my family, my friends. In January, 1997, on a Saturday evening, my friends gathered at the home of Captain Kieu Duy Vinh waiting for my phone call. Right at the beginning of our conversation, Le Quang Dung, the poet, told me that the poet Phung Cung, who had lived with me in prison where we had made life bearable for each other had just passed away on Friday at his home, after two weeks of severe illness. My friends were about to go to his funeral. I was thunderstruck and heartbroken. So he had gone forever and I would never have the chance of seeing him again, of watching his pensive look, of drinking a cup of tea with him and listening to his poetry.
Death is inevitable, but still I could not help feeling an excruciating sense of loss and I wept! That night, I lay down, my face against the wall. I remembered the months and years we were together. I recalled the day we met for the first time at Phong Quang, on a sombre winter day when he was standing before a red pepper plant, gazing at the leaden grey sky with an equally leaden look on his face. Then, on the day when I said good-bye to him to leave for Saigon on my way to the United States, he had held my hands not wanting to let go, his eyes brimming with tears. Very early in the morning, drifting into a doze, I dreamed of the stars, the azure blue sails flying with the wind on the Milky Way, taking his soul to the Merciful Almighty! One day, when returning to Vietnam, there will be nothing I can do but to stand in silence before a cattle-trodden mound at the end of a hamlet, where his body has been laid to rest.
I have always thought it was a miracle and destiny that I could survive. Many friends of mine, much healthier and stronger than I, died from hunger, cold, and hard labor. Graves are everywhere on the hills around the camps. Over one million people have left our homeland for Europe, Australia, and America. At least half that number additionally have died in the attempt to escape from the communist regime.
My dearest wish was, is, and will be to see everyone wake up to the fact that Communism is a great catastrophe of mankind, as people have awakened to the Nazi scourge.
Jean Libby prepared the Autobiography with Nguyen Chi Thien. She is a social activist from the 1960s civil rights movement, when she edited periodicals for the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE, 1963 – 1965), and the Palo Alto-Stanford NAACP (1966 – 1969). Jean later graduated from the University of California, Berkeley, with a degree in Social Science (1986). She also holds an A.A. degree in Professional Photography, and an M.A. in Ethnic Studies from San Francisco State University (1991). She went on to teach courses on U.S. History and Ethnic Studies at community colleges in northern California. She retired from active teaching in early 2005, and now works with textbook publishers on curriculum materials and VietCommunications, Inc. to examine reconnection between the generations of Vietnamese Americans.
In 2003 a statewide petitioners group organized a protest of the firing of the only Vietnamese American staff member at the Oakland Museum of California, which was preparing an exhibit “California and the Vietnam Era.” Jean Libby became one of the Southeast Asian Community Advisory Committee to the Oakland Museum. Jean Libby organized a seminar, “Vietnamese American Achievement in California Textbooks” at the request of community groups in October 2004, inviting the dissident poet Nguyen Chi Thien to be the keynote speaker. Since then Jean has worked with Thien on his Autobiography and to arrange lecture/readings around the country.
[ndlr] Depuis la mi-septembre, la bibliothèque numérique mise en place par le journal Nguoi Viet, le plus ancien des quotidiens d’information vietnamiens édité en Californie est ouverte à tous. Elle propose actuellement trois importantes revues intellectuelles publiées au Viêt-Nam avant 1945 : Nam Phong, Thanh Nghi, Tri Tân. D’autres collections seront disponibles dans le futur comme la grande revue culturelle Bach Khoa éditée sous la République du Viêt Nam (Sud) entre 1957 et 1975 ou la revue d’histoire Su Dia. La presse vietnamienne éditée à l’étranger depuis 1975 devrait aussi rejoindre le portail de Nguoi Viet. En particulier les revues littéraires The Ky 21, Van et Van Hoc… Une initiative salutaire et très attendue, à suivre de très près.
Présentation en vietnamien sur le site de Nguoi Viet :
Thư Viện Ðiện Tử Người Việt: Một đóng góp văn hóa mới
Trong quá trình phục vụ cộng đồng Việt Nam hơn ba thập niên qua, nhật báo Người Việt, với tư cách một cơ quan truyền thông, đã mang lại tin tức trung thực và mau chóng; các bình luận thời sự sắc bén kịp thời; các trang chuyên đề như văn học, phụ nữ, cựu chiến binh VNCH, diễn đàn… đem lại cho độc giả nhiều thức ăn tinh thần phong phú hàng ngày.
Sự kiện số lượng báo in phát hành tại địa phương gần 15,000 số mỗi ngày, và độc giả khắp thế giới vào đọc Người Việt Online cùng bản tin TV trên Youtube Người Việt đạt đến con số 150,000 trong mỗi 24 tiếng đồng hồ đã nói lên sự tin cậy của đồng bào khắp nơi đối với báo Người Việt.
Có thể nói, Người Việt đã trở thành một định chế văn hóa của người Việt Nam. Ðể ngày càng xứng đáng hơn trong vai trò của mình, công ty Người Việt vừa quyết định thành lập:
THƯ VIỆN ÐIỆN TỬ NGƯỜI VIỆT
Sẽ chính thức có mặt trên Người Việt Online từ trung tuần Tháng Chín, 2012.
Nội dung của Thư Viện Ðiện Tử Người Việt, dự trù gồm có:
Những tờ báo giá trị của lịch sử báo chí Việt Nam như Nam Phong, Phong Hóa, Ngày Nay, Thanh Nghị, Tri Tân… của thời kỳ trước 1945; báo chí thời Việt Nam Cộng Hòa như tạp chí Bách Khoa, tập san Sử Ðịa…; báo chí tiếng Việt hải ngoại như Thế Kỷ 21, Văn, Văn Học…; và hiển nhiên là không thể thiếu hàng ngàn trang báo của chính Người Việt trong mấy chục năm qua.
Sách và tài liệu tiếng Việt có giá trị về văn học và biên khảo.
Tất cả các sách, báo được đưa vào thư viện dưới dạng sao chụp bằng phương tiện điện tử từ bản nguyên thủy. Ngoài số tài liệu chúng tôi hiện có, Thư Viện Ðiện Tử Người Việt tiếp tục sưu tầm báo chí, sách vở các loại để lựa chọn, phân loại trước khi đưa vào thư viện để phục vụ nhu cầu nghiên cứu, học hỏi lẫn giải trí của độc giả. Ðây sẽ là nơi tàng trữ những thành tựu văn hóa trong dạng chữ viết; mọi người bất cứ ở đâu, bất cứ lúc nào cũng có thể vào đọc mà không kèm theo một điều kiện nào.
Ðể kho văn hóa này ngày một phong phú, chúng tôi kêu gọi tất cả quý độc giả cùng chung tay đóng góp các tài liệu mà quý vị có. Lắm khi chỉ vài số báo cũ cũng làm đầy đủ được một bộ sưu tầm còn thiếu. Lắm khi tài liệu riêng tư từ gia phả của một dòng họ sẽ trở nên cực kỳ quý giá để soi sáng nhiều vấn đề còn nghi vấn của lịch sử văn học hay chính trị. Nếu quý vị gửi cho chúng tôi tài liệu bằng giấy, nếu có yêu cầu, chúng tôi sẽ xin hoàn lại đầy đủ cho quý vị sau khi sao chụp. Nếu là tài liệu đã được scan thì càng tiện, quý vị có thể gửi bằng e-mail hoặc dạng đĩa qua bưu điện.
Mọi liên lạc với Thư Viện Ðiện Tử Người Việt xin qua các địa chỉ:
Nguyen Chi Thien, l’auteur des Fleurs de l’enfer est décédé le 2 octobre à l’âge de 73 ans en Californie. Pour son attitude critique vis-à-vis du régime, il passa 27 ans de sa vie dans les geôles du Viêt Nam communiste. A l’occasion de sa disparition, Mémoires d’Indochine reproduit ci-après sa fiche biographique parue dans The Viet Nam Literature Project. Composés de mémoire pendant les différentes périodes d’incarcérations de Nguyen Chi Thien entre 1960 et 1991, les poésies du receuil les Fleurs de l’enfer ont été traduites en langue anglaise et éditées à plusieurs reprises. Elles furent interprétées au Théâtre du Ranelagh à Paris en 1987 par Stanislas de la Tousche et Katharina Wittkowska. Une façon pour les éditions Đường Mới La voie nouvelle de rendre hommage au poète contestataire alors qu’il était encore emprisonné au Viêt-Nam.
FG
Nguyen Chi Thien
There is nothing beautiful about my poetry
It’s like highway robbery, oppression, TB blood cough
There is nothing noble about my poetry
It’s like death, perspiration, and rifle butts
My poetry is made up of horrible images
Like the Party, the Youth Union, our leaders, the Central Committee
My poetry is somewhat weak in imagination
Being true like jail, hunger, suffering
My poetry is simply for common folks
To read and see through the red demons’ black hearts
1975 – from Flowers of Hell by Nguyen Chi Thien translated by Nguyen Ngoc Bich
Nguyen Chi Thien was born in 1939 in Ha Noi. His father worked as an official in the municipal court and his mother sold small necessities in the neighborhood. At the end of 1946, when the war between France and Vietnam broke out, his family fled to their native village in the countryside.
The family returned to a more stable Ha Noi in 1949 and Thien started school in private academies. After the defeat of the French in 1954 he cheered the Viet Minh revolutionaries as they also returned to the city, proud to invite soldiers home to supper.
The drama of Nguyen Chi Thien’s life begins in Haiphong, the strongly Communist port city of northern Viet Nam. When Thien contracted tuberculosis in 1956 his parents sold their house for money to treat their son and moved with him near his sister and her family there.
The authorities already held Thien in suspicion, because his brother had joined the National Army moving to South Vietnam. One day in December, 1960 Thien unwittingly stepped over the line while covering the high school class of a sick friend.
Thien noticed the history textbook taught that the Soviet Union had defeated the Imperial Army of Japan in Manchuria, bringing an end to World War II. Oh no, he told his students, the United States defeated Japan when they dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Nguyen Chi Thien paid for this remark with three years and six months in labor camps, on a sentence of two years. He met other literary men in jail, composed poems in his head and learned them by heart. In 1966 he was returned to prison after a short release.
This time the police charged him with composing politically irreverent poems that circulated in Ha Noi and Hai Phong. He denied it, and spent another eleven years and five months in labor camps.
Authorities never brought him to trial, for lack of evidence, but they had the right man. The tubercular youth had become an outlaw whose every step and breath counted the beat of verses, poetry against oppression.
In 1977, two years after Saigon fell, Thien and other political prisoners were released to make room for officers of the Republic of Viet Nam. He had been composing poems all the while, and now seized the opportunity of freedom to write them down and bring his art to the world.
Two days after Bastille Day, on July 16, 1979, Thien dashed into the British Embassy at Ha Noi with his manuscript of four hundred poems. He had prepared a cover letter in French, but the embassy of France was too closely guarded.
British diplomats welcomed him and promised to send his manuscript out of the country. When he got out of the Embassy, security agents waited for him at the gate. Dragged to Hoa Lo prison, the famous Ha Noi Hilton now empty of US flyers, he spent another twelve years in jail and prison camps, often in stocks in solitary darkness.
It came to a total of twenty-seven years’ imprisonment. But meanwhile, the British diplomats kept their word. Nguyen Chi Thien’s manuscript collection Flowers of Hell appeared in Vietnamese in two separate editions overseas.
Nguyen Chi Thien had the great satisfaction of seeing a copy of his book waved in his face by his angry captors. He didn’t know that his poems also were translated into English, French, German, Dutch, Chinese, Spanish, and Korean. They were set to music by the great Pham Duy and sung around the world.
While their author lay in irons, Thien’s poems won the International Poetry Award in Rotterdam in 1985. Six years later the poet was released from jail, as the socialist world collapsed in 1991. He lived in Ha Noi under close watch by the authorities, but his international following also kept an eye on Thien.
Human Rights Watch honored him in 1995. That year he emigrated to the United States, due to the intervention of Noburo Masuoka, retired Air Force colonel, a career military officer who was drafted into the U.S. Army from an internment camp for Japanese Americans in 1945.
After the normalization of relations with Viet Nam, Masuoka was able to arrange special asylum for the poet in the United States. Thien went to Virginia, the home of his brother, Nguyen Cong Gian, whom he had not seen for forty-one years.
Gian himself had lived America only since 1993. A lieutenant colonel in the Army of the Republic of Viet Nam, he had been taken to a re-education camp in the North right after the fall of Saigon in 1975, to remain for thirteen years.
As if released from prison once more, Thien wrote down another book’s worth of poems from memory. The three hundred Vietnamese poems and some select English translations were published in 1996.
In 1998, The International Parliament of Writers awarded Nguyen Chi Thien a three-year fellowship in France. He lectured around Europe while he wrote and published a collection of short stories, rooted in the reality of his years in Hoa Lo prison.
Nguyen Chi Thien returned from France to Orange County, California, where he took the oath of American citizenship in 2004. He continues to improve his health and speaks regularly on humanitarian issues of interest to the Vietnamese community.
En 1987, Stanislas de la Tousche et Katharina Wittkowska interprétaient une sélection de poèmes des Fleurs de l’Enfer traduits par Jean Maïs et Bui Xuan Quang.
Comment le Royaume du Laos a-t-il disparu le 2 décembre 1975 dans l’indifférence générale du monde ? Créé en 1353 par le jeune prince Fa-Ngum, le royaume du Lane-Xang devient un Etat indépendant en 1949 dans le cadre de l’Union française. Il est entraîné dans la guerre d’Indochine jusqu’en 1954 avec la naissance du parti communiste laotien, le Pathet-Lao, qui s’allie à Hô-Chi-Minh. Dès lors, le Laos tombe dans l’engrenage de la guerre du Vietnam qui aboutit, en 1975, à la prise du pouvoir par le Nèo-Lao-Hak-Xat, pro-communiste vietnamien.
La monarchie, vieille de sept siècles, est abolie et remplacée par une République dite “démocratique et populaire” à la solde du Vietnam communiste. En mars 1978, le roi, la reine, le prince héritier ainsi que tous les princes détenus dans la capitale royale de Luang-Prabang sont déportés dans l’indifférence des monarchies asiatiques et européennes ainsi que des États signataires des accords de Genève de 1962 reconnaissant la souveraineté et la neutralité du royaume. Plus de 30 000 prisonniers politiques (fonctionnaires, militaires et étudiants) sont envoyés dans des camps de “samanâs”, véritables goulags créés par les Lao-Viets : la plupart n’en reviendront pas.
Le prince Mangkra Souvannaphouma, officier-pilote de la Royal Lao Air Force et diplômé de l’Ecole supérieure de guerre de Paris, est le neveu du dernier souverain laotien. De par ses fonctions auprès du Premier ministre, son père, du ministre de la Défense nationale et à l’état-major général. il est un observateur privilégié de la période dramatique dans l’histoire du Laos qui vit la monarchie disparaître au profit du régime communiste. Avec précision, il apporte des éléments inédits à la connaissance de l’histoire laotienne.
Søren Ivarsson and Christopher E. Goscha, “Prince Phetsarath (1890–1959): Nationalism and Royalty in the Making of Modern Laos”, Journal of Southeast Asian Studies, 38 (1), Feb. 2007, pp. 55–81.
A biography of Prince Phetsarath highlights how a specific idea about Laos and its culture was formed under French colonial rule and nurtured under the Japanese occupation and its aftermath. During these periods, Phetsarath’s understanding of Lao cultural nationalism was transformed into a political and anticolonial nationalism. While ultimately a study of failure, Phetsarath’s activities show that anticolonial nationalism did not always have to be linked to Communist movements to be ‘revolutionary’, and suggests the importance of taking into account non-revolutionary and non-Communist actors – even members of royal blood – in order to better understand the complexity that went into the making of modern postcolonial states.
[ndlr] Le grand photographe vietnamien Vo An Ninh (1907-2009) a été le témoin direct de la grande famine qui a ravagé une partie du Tonkin l’hiver 1944-1945. Le site Giao Duc.net (Education.net) a mis en ligne le 11 juin 2012 dix neuf clichés rares de cet événement capital qui fit des centaines de milliers de morts (entre 400.000 et deux millions). Un bilan très lourd puisqu’il “représente 10% de la population des provinces touchées en l’espace de cinq mois”, selon Pierre Brocheux, qui souligne qu’il paraît incalculable.
Tận mắt xem 19 bức ảnh về nạn đói năm 1945 của cố nghệ sĩ Võ An Ninh
(GDVN) – Khoảng hai triệu người dân Việt Nam chết đói tháng giáp hạt năm 1945 đã được cố nghệ sĩ Võ An Ninh ghi lại qua những tấm hình đen trắng có giá trị vô cùng to lớn trong lịch sử nước nhà để thế hệ những người dân Việt xem lại bỗng thấy xót xa, chua xót.