NAM TIẾNG: RECOGNISING THE CYCLIC NATURE OF DECOLONISATION AND DISPLACEMENT THROUGHOUT VIETNAM’S HISTORY OF TAKING KHMER AND CHAM TERRITORY ONLY TO ITSELF BE METABOLISED AND DIVIDED BY OTHERS.
Filmed on Dharawal Land that itself is steeped by the frontier massacres and colonisation of suburban Sydney; we rest by Salvinia infested waters with Nguyễn Thị Kim Nhung. Nhung recalls her distant homeland. She remembers the cruelty of children, of waiting for migration papers, rampant development, and family breakdowns due to an ancient curse. This curse, however, is not some external evil, but her family’s story of Land theft, an taboo and untold truth of the ongoing appropriation of Indigenous Lands and storylines by the Kinh Vietnamese ethnic majority.
Resisting conventional narratives of Eurocentric colonisation, this documentary incorporates new research by Dr Theara Thun and Nguyen’s own family testimonies to trouble the amnesia of Vietnamese-led colonial projects. Appropriating the term Nam Tiến – The Southern Progress – a Vietnamese equivalent to Manifest Destiny, this film interrogates the southward trajectory of the artist’s family. Nguyen’s grandparents were Northern Bác 54. After the fall of Điện Biên Phủ and crossing the 17th parallel in 1954, they were internally displaced refugees from the North. Like many displaced others the families benefited from the South Vietnamese Government who offered cheap land grants and concessions for their ‘Anti-Communist and pro-Catholic’ northern brothers and sisters the opportunity to occupy and take over huge tracts of so-called ‘unoccupied’ jungle to establish new tea and coffee plantations in the Vietnamese Southern Highlands. Following the American-Vietnam War and reunification, my father, along with many others, sold off some their ‘land inheritance’ and property to pay the fees charged by people smugglers and boat operators to escape. He ended up in a refugee camp in Galang, Indonesia, and was eventually resettled on Dharawal Land in Sydney. My brother and I have moved even further south, now based in the Kulin Nations-Melbourne.
This southward movement is never far from our experience of colonisation as a cycle of being relentlessly occupied and also the beneficiaries of occupying other people’s Lands. The animations are anthropological and archival 19th century French rubbings taken from the Nine Dynastic Bronze Urns of Thế Miếu – made by the imperial order of Emperor Minh Mạng (1822-1823) which celebrated the Vietnamese conquest of Cham and Khmer territories.
Accompanying these rubbings are old Khmer Bangsāvatār texts by the Venerable Pich and the Venerable Chan. Voiced by Lea Sreng, a selection of these Cambodian Buddhist chants forensically chronicle the explicit forms of torture, violent massacres, and colonisation of Khmer Lands by Vietnamese invaders just prior to French colonisation. To this day, the untold histories of land theft, environmental degradation, and the mis-appropriation of indigenous storylines that still haunts the nationalistic fervour and diasporic imagination of a so-called ‘Vietnamese Homeland.’
