To save and destroy by Viet Thanh Nguyen
Nguyen[^1] is one of the best writers working today. His novel The Sympathizer smokes and sizzles and should be taught in every literary class.
A new essay/lecture collection To Save and Destroy: writings as an other breaks the ice on the meaning of a story. Stories, Nguyen argues, can save us, and destroy us. This is all the more true for those who are othered, and often can't escape that othering, especially if they are creative.
In other words, you're other if you aren't of a comfortable class, aren't able-bodied, and above all, aren't white and male. The walking force field in the hulking empire — even more so in the arts. Or if you aren't from a comfortable class.
This collection though, to me, is about the multiplicity meanings of otherness. It can be a form of stripping humanity, but it also can be a creative act, a necessary creation of something powerful — especially for those who have been stripped of humanity. How to write and the creative act of writing is a form of othering:
The primal scene of witnessing one's own otherness can be traumatic, with the treatment of our others being sometimes vicious and violent, exploitative and murderous. But willfully accessing one's otherness through something like a creative act possesses element of joy, at least for me, even if that access can usually only be found through hard work, tedious routine, and degree of pain...it is the pedestrian nature of writing — one step after the next, over and over — that allows access to those fleeting moments of joy found in the otherness of creation.
- pg. 94-95 (last graph and first graph).
Creativity can be found in Nguyen's parent's small business grocery story, or in the long hours of editing a book while a newborn sleeps.
In writing, in creating, Nguyen finds joy. He uses the writer Ralph Ellison's metaphor of comparing a poem to a shoe: a simple object that can carry the weight of the body. Nguyen needs the act of writing. I couldn't agree more.
[^1]:how to pronounce Nguyen.