On Apr. 9 at 7:30 PM, Pulitzer Prize-winning author Viet Thanh Nguyen addressed the Hamilton community in the Chapel as this year’s featured speaker for the Winton Tolles Lecture Series. Prior to the talk, Nguyen met with students and faculty over dinner at the Philip Spencer House.

The Tolles Lecture Series was established by the class of 1951, and brings writers from the fields of literature, journalism and theater to speak at Hamilton. Past speakers include Pulitzer Prize-winning author Colson Whitehead, novelist Zadie Smith, film director, writer, and producer Mira Nair, and author Salman Rushdie.

Nguyen achieved popular and critical acclaim for his novel

The Sympathizer

, which won the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, in addition to other prestigious literary honors. Broadly, the book centers on its narrator, a spy embedded in the South Vietnamese army as parts of the group are exiled to the United States in the aftermath of the Vietnam War. Blending genres and spanning time and space,

The Sympathizer

is at once comedic, grim, and meditative.

Nguyen and his family came to the United States from Vietnam as refugees after the fall of Saigon in 1975. He said his childhood experience as a refugee in America informed much of his later work as a writer, including

The Sympathizer

and his other two books,

Nothing Ever Dies: Vietnam and the Memory of War

and

Race and Resistance: Literature and Politics in Asian America

.

The lecture was titled “Out of Place: Refugees, Immigrants, and Storytelling,” and Nguyen began with a joke, describing himself as going “from refugee to bourgeoisie.”

He then pivoted to his childhood, detailing the feeling of arriving in the United States as a refugee and being temporarily separated from his parents and siblings by government agents, adding that his experience shared many of the same traits as those of refugee and immigrant children at America’s Southern border who are separated from their parents today.

Nguyen said the United States has long stigmatized the idea of a “refugee” relative to an “immigrant,” noting the outcry that accompanied some media outlets referring to displaced citizens as refugees in the wake of Hurricane Katrina in 2005. He said he makes a point to share his and his families’ refugee history with his son as part of a larger effort to heighten awareness of their history and that of families like them. Further, he rejected a false binary in perceptions of refugees and immigrants as “good” or “bad,” instead calling for an America where “immigrants and refugees have the right to be mediocre just like everybody else.”

After reading a few select passages from

The Sympathizer

, Nguyen transitioned the talk into a discussion of what he called “Models of Ethical Memory.”

In his 2013 essay “Just Memory: War and the Ethics of Remembrance,” Nguyen says questions of ethical memory ask: “How can we recall the past in a way that does justice to the forgotten, the excluded, the oppressed, the dead, the ghosts?”

First, Nguyen said the “Ethics of Remembering Our Own” means, “We are human, they are inhuman.”

Second, “The Ethics of Remembering Others (the liberal version)” means, “We are human, they are human.”

Third, “The Ethics of Remembering Others (the radical version)” means, “We are inhuman, they are human.”

Finally, “The Ethics of Recognition” means, “We are human and inhuman, they are human and inhuman.”

Nguyen said these evolving stages of ethical memory are found in his work as well as many other forms of art.

He added that calls for more representation of minority groups in art and culture too often fall under the “Ethics of Remembering Our Own” category and fail to adequately address the persistent racial and economic inequality that undergirds the need for greater representation in the first place. Instead of merely giving these minority groups a voice, he said, we must also hear what they have to say. Further, he argued that while increased representation in the arts and society is important, it is not an end point but one of many necessary steps.

Here, he pointed to the publishing industry, saying that even as minority writers become more visible, the industry remains 87 percent white, including many of the most influential decision-makers. When one student asked what college students can do to address these kinds of inequalities in the workplace, Nguyen said a crucial first step is publicly acknowledging and discussing the white colonial history of these industries.

“If your workplace is 87 percent white,” he added, “there’s a problem.”

On the topic of colonialism, Nguyen stressed that the “massive transfer of wealth” to American society in its formative years stemmed from colonial practices like slavery that carry with them “long-term, systemic power implications” in the modern day. This embedded colonial history, he said, illustrates why representation alone is not enough to address issues of inequality.

In his work, Nguyen said he “writes in solitude but works in solidarity.” Instead of being a “voice for the voiceless” (as some reviewers called him after

The Sympathizer

was published,) he strives for narrative plentitude, wherein there are many voices producing not only great works, but mediocre and bad ones too.

In an essay for

The New York Times

in Aug. 2018, Nguyen wrote, “The real test of narrative plenitude is when we have the luxury of making mediocre movies. And after having made mediocre movies, we would be rewarded with the opportunity to make even more mediocre movies, just as Hollywood continues to make enormous numbers of mediocre movies about white people, and specifically white men.”

Achieving narrative plentitude, he said, involves owning both the means of representation and production, a difficult but vital task.

It was fitting, then, when he ended the talk with a message to immigrant and refugee parents, saying, “Encourage your children to become artists.”