Ursula K. Le Guin, the Vietnam War, and Me
When the precise stylist put aside subtlety to make a polemic point about war in The Word for World is Forest
The Vietnam War is the instigating event leading to me sitting in this room, in this house, where I’m writing this.
It’s not because of my own family, although my father was drafted into the Marines in the mid-1960s. He never deployed to Vietnam, instead serving his military time at Camp Pendleton Marine Base, where I came on the scene in December 1967. But none of that led directly to my sitting here typing on my computer in Northern Virginia.
The actual instigating event was the fall of Saigon in April 1975, when the U.S. evacuated its embassy and I was finishing up my successful stint as a third grader. Over on the far side of the world that I was only vaguely aware of through the NBC Nightly News, the first of my future in-laws escaped Vietnam with her family (she worked for the embassy). Skip forward to 2002, when I meet my future husband — his mother brought them over when they were sponsored by her older sister, above — while playing tennis.
Toss in a wedding and a slew of aunts, uncles, cousins, and nieces and nephews, and here I am, living with the history of Vietnam in a way I never would have, or could have, predicted.
Two things I need to acknowledge here. First, this is an exceptionally narcissistic lens through which to view the Vietnam War, but it’s important to understand our connections to history beyond just what we learn in textbooks (and trust me, I’ve learned a lot more about Vietnam than most Americans do just by listening).
Second, I also realize that the “instigating event” game is a bit silly when talking history because history is an endless series of cause and effect. I could easily cite the end of French colonialism in Vietnam at Điện Biên Phủ as the instigating event since that’s what brought the U.S. into the country with its Domino Theory of containing communism. But the fall of Saigon is the event where my aunt-in-law was present and specifically led to the family emigration, so that makes the most sense.
All a long-winded way of saying I ended up living with the aftermath of the Vietnam War in a way that most non-Asian Americans don’t, even though my memories of the war are hazy and childish at best. Which brings me to Ursula K. Le Guin and the power of a polemic.
Le Guin is an author I associate with subtle and beautiful writing, although I will admit that I am not as fully versed in her work as I should be. My touchstones for her thus far are The Dispossessed and The Left Hand of Darkness, as well as some short stories, particularly “Those Who Walk Away from Omelas.”
“Omelas” is a little masterclass in that subtle, beautiful writing, working up to a gut punch. (Spoilers coming for a short story written in 1973). Omelas is a utopian city of immense prosperity and freedom, a city without want, without kings, without suffering. Well, without suffering except for one specific instance — all the wealth and prosperity and happiness of the city depends on the degradation and suffering of one young child. Every citizen learns this terrible fact when they reach maturity; some of those then become the title people, the ones who walk away from the city, assumed unable to bear a happiness for many that depends on the suffering of one.
The gut punch is that the ones who walk away are the minority.
My little summary removes the subtlety of the story — you should read it if you haven’t, it’s hugely influential and often referenced (Star Trek: Strange New Worlds straight-up ripped it off in its second season episode, “Lift Us Where Suffering Cannot Reach,” and did it well). Le Guin takes a scalpel to the human, and specifically the American, moral condition.
Which brings me to The Word for World is Forest, where Le Guin drops her scalpel and grabs a brickbat.
Published as a novella in Again, Dangerous Visions (1972) — I’m reading that collection now in preparation for the decades-delayed The Last Dangerous Visions scheduled for October 2024 — The Word for World is Forest is Le Guin’s Vietnam novel and it is not subtle. Le Guin declared it “disagreeable” to write in her afterword to the story:
“What I wanted to write about was the forest and the dream … But the boss wanted to talk about the destruction of ecological balance and the rejection of emotional balance. He didn’t want to play. He wanted to moralize. I am not very fond of moralistic tales, for they often lack charity. I hope this one does not.”
The novella doesn’t completely lack charity, though it is remarkably stingy with it towards its human characters. But that’s what makes it work.
Plot-wise, it’s a straight-forward story about the human colonization of Athshe, a world of primarily water with a small continent’s worth of islands grouped in one hemisphere. These lushly forested lands are inhabited by the Athsheans — derisively called “creechies” by the humans — who are genetically related to humans via ultra-ancient world seeding. Despite the close genetics, humans use the diminutive and green-furred Athsheans as slave labor in their deforestation, harvesting wood for resource-starved Terra. Selver, an Athshean laborer, is left disfigured after attacking the human Capt. Davidson, who raped and killed his “creechie” wife.
Selver, who is taken in by the company anthropologist with whom he exchanges language proficiencies, goes on to lead a rebellion against the humans, driving Davidson to ever more psychotic acts of violence, and introducing his own people to the concept of war and murder. Ultimately, the humans are forced off world while Selver and the Athsheans are left to cope with the aftermath of their disrupted society.
The allegory is blunt, from the dense forest evoking the American vision of Vietnamese “jungles” to Davidson’s campaign of violence mirroring the massacre at Mỹ Lai. The “boss” in Le Guin’s head is certainly moralizing but it’s not off-putting, it’s compelling. Her precise language isn’t missing; it abounds throughout the novel, describing the human perception of the dense and overwhelming forest as “the total vegetable indifference to the presence of mind,” and the dry humor in Davidson describing the recreational options for the all-male colony being sports, drugs, and imported women “[f]or those unsatisfied by the Army’s rather unimaginative arrangements for hygienic homosexuality.”
The beauty in the story lies with the supposedly lowly “creechies” and their pacifist, women-governed, dream-focused society. An elder Athshean talks to Selver about Selver’s journey into revolution and violence:
“Four years it has been ripening, that fruit of the deep-planted tree. We have all been afraid for four years, even we who live far from the yumens’ cities, and have only glimpsed them from hiding, or seen their ships fly over, or looked at the dead places where they cut down the world, or heard mere tales of these things. We are all afraid. Children wake from sleep crying of giants; women will not go far on their trading-journeys; men in the Lodges cannot sing. The fruit of fear is ripening. And I see you gather it. You are the harvester. All that we fear to know, you have seen, you have known: exile, shame, pain, the roof and walls of the world fallen, the mother dead in misery, the children untaught, uncherished . . . This is a new time for the world: a bad time. And you have suffered it all. You have gone farthest. And at the farthest, at the end of the black path, there grows the Tree; there the fruit ripens; now you reach up, Selver, now you gather it.”
That gorgeous and damning passage highlights what makes Le Guin’s Forest so different from the many other science fiction stories that use the allegory of Vietnam or Native Americans, drawing from the cliches of Apocalypse Now and Dances with Wolves. Naturally, James Cameron comes to mind because he’s done both allegories with Aliens (Vietnam) and Avatar (Native Americans), but it’s a common trope.
But where those usually focus on the struggle against oppression, usually with a white savior, and the exultant, climactic victory, Le Guin’s concern is how those systems and that oppression changes the people who fight, even win, against them.
The Athshean pacifism is distressingly literal — their instinctive act to de-escalate conflict is to lie prone on their backs with their throats stretched to maximum exposure, an instinct that causes their slaughter by the thousands at the hands of humans. Selver, in finding the only way to save his people from the psychosis of humanity, has to take that fruit from the end of that black path. And that fruit isn’t just violence, it’s severing themselves from their own history and nature, making their society into essentially a new species. Also, Selver/sever — again, not subtle.
This altered society now has more in common with their cousins, the humans. There is no elegiac victory for Selver’s people, only an elegy for what they’ve lost. Even Davidson, the ham-fisted, cartoonish villain ends in pathos, not fear or glory, laid low by a helicopter crash he causes through crazed ineptitude. Cowering before his previous victims, he appropriates their prone, open-throated position to beg for his life. Selver declines to kill him, instead exiling him to isolation on a distant and deforested island where he will be fed but otherwise ignored.
So, The Word for World is Forest is an obvious allegory for Vietnam but it’s not an allegory from the American perspective. It’s not about how America lost its soul or its way in the pursuit of anti-communism; it’s not about how the U.S. could come to grips with evils it did in the name of freedom. It’s an allegory for the other side, the ones who refer to the whole thing as The American War.
Because lord knows, the war changed Vietnam. While I know some of my in-laws would disagree on parts of this point, the West overall has been a total historic shit-show for Vietnam. I’ve known for a long time about the long-lasting political and cultural effects of French colonialism on the country but we tend to focus on the fusion of cuisines more than we do the fuckery the French inflicted on Vietnamese society (the same as every colonialist government ever did everywhere).
I didn’t know, until back in 2015 when I was doing a bunch of reading on World War I, that Hồ Chí Minh petitioned the powers that be during the post-war Versailles conferences of 1919. He was in his exile in Paris, a 29-year-old waiter still living under his original name, Nguyễn Ái Quốc. The petition drew on the language of the Western powers and their ideal of self-governance to argue for autonomy for the Vietnamese people.
His petition was dismissed out of hand by America’s premier racist and eugenicist, President Woodrow Wilson, and the victorious (and equally racist) European powers. Which solidified his view of Western powers as hypocrites (although in later years he would definitely quote American founders like Jefferson, because if you go back and read those guys, they were pretty radical on paper, if not in practice), pushed him into Marxism-Leninism (to oversimplify) and set us on the path to Điện Biên Phủ, the Domino Theory, the fall of Saigon, and my little Cape Cod in Falls Church with a Buddhist altar holding pictures of my late Vietnamese relatives who sacrificed and risked their lives to get to America.
Talk about inciting incidents.
So, The Word for World is Forest is a different tone for Le Guin than I’d known or expected and I absolutely loved it. While this is a small detour from what I originally envisioned as my project here for “Flashback,” I think I’ll throw in some additional, non-SF-magazine content on occasion. It’s too fun not to! Actually, this is likely the inciting incident for me to finally pick up the Earthsea series and the rest of her Hainish cycle.
After-note: Any errors or offenses in my interpretation of the history of Vietnam are my own and should not be attributed to my Vietnamese family, who already put up with enough from me and don’t need extra troubles from my white ass.
This was a great Sunday read. So wonderful to savor your writing again.