This week, our editors report on (attempts) at elucidation in the humanities and the cruelties of historic expatriation; the instating of Living National Treasures in the form of indigenous practitioners and their singular crafts; and a word that is meant to sum up a year.
Thuy Dinh, Editor-at-Large, reporting on the Vietnamese Diaspora
The National Museum of Immigration History in Paris, France is currently offering a sobering exhibition on the history of Indochinese workers-soldiers, called les lính thợ or les công binh. As colonized subjects, twenty thousand men from Indochina—i.e., Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia—were brought to France at the onset of World War II to help with the war effort. Aside from a small percentage of educated volunteers who wished to escape the colony’s lack of social advancement, the majority, ranging from ages 18 to 30, was forcibly recruited from the poor peasantry to work in France’s defense industry.
Besides the exhibit, recollections by surviving workers have been compiled in recent years by various sources, such as the photographic essay “The Forced Oblivion” by Alejandra Arévalo, the graphic memoir “Les Lính Thợ: Immigrés de force, les travailleurs indochinois en France 1939-1952” (2017) by Pierre Daum and Clément Baloup, the film Công Binh, la longue nuit indochinoise (2013) by Lê Lâm, and the Vietnamese-French monograph, Những người lính thợ – Les travailleurs indochinois requis by Liêm Khê Luguern (2010).
When Germany invaded France in June 1940, the Indochinese workers were evacuated to the free zone in Southern France, where they worked in forestry and pioneered the rice-growing industry in the Camargue region. Both state-run and private companies employed these workers, but salaries were either paid to the French government, or distributed to the workers at rates significantly below those paid to locals. When Germany invaded the free zone in 1942, the workers were conscripted by German occupation troops to work in weapon factories. Besides harrowing working conditions, the men suffered physical and mental trauma due to prolonged exile and mistreatment by their superiors.
When the war ended, the workers’ repatriation process was delayed for nearly a decade, due to France’s encompassing need to send more troops to Indochina for its reconquering campaign. Some of the workers, aided by their fluency in French, married local women and participated in French society—thus gaining social mobility—while others acquired better-paying jobs and felt galvanized by the independence movement led by Ho Chi Minh. Many did manage to go home, but were arrested as soon as they landed in Viet Minh-occupied territory, branded for being French “collaborators” during their conscripted years abroad.
As attested by literary and visual sources, the travails of the Indochinese workers constitute compelling microhistories that illustrate the complexities of colonialism, border crossing, and self-determination. Nevertheless, the ending paragraph from the museum’s précis is disturbing, reflecting a blithe defense of French colonialism and a Darwinian approach to history:
Ultimately, France captured the elite of the requisitioned workers and released back into the colony the proletarianized peasantry needed for the independence of Vietnam. Beyond individual destinies, the Indochinese workers requisitioned in 1939 and who settled in France collectively appear as the product of a social selection carried out upstream and reinforced by colonial management. (Translated from the French by Thuy Dinh.)
Alton Melvar M Dapanas, Editor-at-Large, reporting from the Philippines
2024 will soon see the conferment ceremony of nine newly-heralded National Living Treasures, as declared by the Malacañan Palace’s Proclamation No. 427 on December 15, 2023. Organised by the National Commission for Culture and the Arts, the Order of National Living Treasures (Gawad Manlilikha ng Bayan or Orden ng Manlilikha ng Bayan) is the state’s highest honour conferred to traditional and indigenous artists—a counterpart to the Order of National Artists for imitable practitioners of modern Philippine art.
Out of the nine new National Living Treasures, four are leading exponents of oral literature: Adelina Romualdo Bagca (b. 1946), Rosie Sula (b. 1968), Abina Conguit (b. 1951), and Samporonia Pagsac Madanlo (b. 1949).
Adelina Romualdo Bagca, a mandállot or dállot songstress from Ilocos Norte, remains as one of the very few—if not the only—living practitioners of the oral storytelling tradition, the dállot dumidinallang; the dállot is an Ilocano long verse improvised and staged during special occasions such as courtship and wedding ceremonies. She also performs the duwayya (lullaby), dung-aw (lamentation), and other folk songs. Rosie Sula, on the other hand, is a doyenne of the lingon or lomingon, particularly of the lingon holohok or the chanting of the T’boli epic Tudbulul.
Believed to be chosen by the deity Tuma to be a matugo—a virtuoso of folk knowledge and belief systems to her people at Agusan del Sur, Abina Conguit is a chanter, baylan (shaman), mananabang (midwife), and an embroiderer of the suyam, the traditional Agusan Manobo craft of baskets, threads, mats, beads, and textiles. The same title of matugo can also bestowed upon Samporonia Pagsac Madanlo from Davao Oriental: a chanter, healer, and dagmay textile weaver with her embroidery, beadwork, basketry, and dance that retell the story of the Mandaya goddess Tagamaling.
Joining them as National Living Treasures are the igal dancer and educator Sakinur-Ain Mugong Delasas (b. 1954) of the Sama peoples from Tawi-Tawi; the paglala ho ikam sodsod mat weaver Marife Ravidas Ganahon (b. 1967) of the Higaonon Manobo from Malaybalay City in Bukidnon; the manu’bak and ameru artist Amparo Balansi Manabang (b. 1955) of the Ga’dang peoples from Mountain Province; the kem tau temwel metalsmith Bundos Fara (b. 1965); and the t’nalak and mewel textile weaver Barbara Fanuy Kibed Ofong (b. 1960)—the latter two being both of the T’boli of Lake Sebu in South Cotabato.
The award stupendously contrasts the Philippine government’s previous actions: violently closing 216 schools for the Lumad (non-Islamised indigenous peoples) as part of its so-called anti-insurgency and counter-terrorism campaigns, and failing to let 17,067 Moro families (85,335 individuals of Islamised indigenous peoples) return to their homes after their displacement by the Marawi siege. In 2023, watchdog Global Witness revealed that out of sixteen murdered environmental defenders in Asia, eleven are from the Philippines—making the country “the worst places in Asia for land and environmental defenders, with 281 people killed since 2012.” Filipino indigenous peoples—already ‘red-tagged’ and accused as conspiring with so-called ‘enemies’ of the state—have been the most vocal in speaking out against mining, energy, logging, and water dam projects in their occupied, militarised ancestral lands.
Andriana Hamas, Editor-at-Large, Reporting from Bulgaria
Recently, Kak se pishe? (“How do you write it?”), Bulgaria’s go-to platform for answers to the most common writing questions, released the findings of its annual survey for the word of the year in the local context. The 2023 top ten, selected by a pre-appointed jury out of a pool of suggestions (that everyone could contribute to), include terms such as “war,” “Schengen,” and “artificial intelligence”—but also “time shelter.” The latter represents one of the key literary events of the last twelve months: the International Booker Prize that Georgi Gospodinov received for his eponymous novel (by the way, Asymptote has previously published several of his poems).
In a reflective article that appeared on the independent media website Toest, Pavlina Varbanova, founder of Kak se pishe? and the person behind the abovementioned campaign, shared her thoughts on the significance of the results, paying special attention to “time shelter”:
I will be following with great interest whether or not ‘time shelter’ would truly cement itself into the language. Firstly, because a writer created it, and it is not every day that a Bulgarian writer coins a new word; secondly, because it is a complex word, which has a specific meaning that leans toward the abstract. While trying to figure it out for myself, I wonder: does the time shelter (outside the novel) shelter us in or from time itself? These are the kinds of questions that compound words give rise to, because when their two parts merge into a single whole, a bunch of new relationships are formed between them. In my opinion, the word received so many votes because we, Bulgarians, are still capable of appreciating our compatriots’ success and feeling happy for them.
And, if I may add, still capable of appreciating the value of words.
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