Writing the wrongs

In a theatre in Cambridge, Massachusetts, novelist Viet Thanh Nguyen readied himself to speak.

It was December 2023, and Nguyen was midway through a six-part lecture series at Harvard University. But the remarks he had originally drafted months earlier, during the summer, had begun to feel stale.

Something more recent was weighing on his mind: Israel's war on Gaza.

Since the war began that October, Nguyen had watched coverage showing Palestinian families erased overnight, neighbourhoods levelled to dust and starvation wielded as a weapon.

But he had also felt the sting of public backlash for speaking out. Criticism of the war was often accompanied by accusations of anti-Semitism or indifference to the suffering of captives held in Gaza by the armed group Hamas.

For artists like Nguyen, the consequences could be lost contracts and cancelled gigs.

Nguyen had already seen his scheduled talk at New York’s 92nd Street Y — a major cultural institution in the United States — abruptly paused after he signed a letter denouncing the violence in Gaza.

As he prepared to resume the podium at Harvard, he faced a choice: to confront what he saw as a present-day injustice — and accept the pushback — or avoid the subject entirely.

He decided to do what he felt was uncomfortable, but necessary.

"It’s easy to talk about darkness in history," he told Al Jazeera. "But are we willing to confront what’s happening right now, right in front of our faces, in Palestine?"

That lecture series became the basis for Nguyen's latest book, To Save and to Destroy, released in the US last month.

In its pages, Nguyen — the winner of a 2016 Pulitzer Prize for fiction, one of the country's highest literary honours — lays out the argument that writers are never neutral.

They are entangled in the very systems they seek to portray.

Merging memoir, criticism and political reflection, it is a book preoccupied with power: who holds it, who resists it and what is at stake when artists dare to speak freely.

Nguyen knows this terrain firsthand. After all, the currents of international power have shaped his life, starting from an early age.

Born in 1971, in the midst of the Vietnam War, Nguyen was only four years old when the North Vietnamese forces made their final push to secure their grip on the country.

Faced with soldiers sweeping south, Nguyen, his mother and his older brother fled their hometown of Buôn Ma Thuột by foot. On a boat to Saigon, they were reunited with Nguyen's father and began their journey to the US as refugees.

Confronting the history and politics of that era has been a defining theme in his work.

The Sympathizer — his Pulitzer-winning debut — explores the fractured identities and divided loyalties of a spy in the aftermath of the war. His nonfiction, including Nothing Ever Dies, offers a lens on how memories of wartime can be warped and manipulated.

“War, memory, identity — that triangle made me American,” Nguyen told Al Jazeera.

While some prize escapism in literature, Nguyen finds inspiration in confronting the thorniness of politics. His work has earned him several prestigious awards, ranging from the Guggenheim Fellowship to the MacArthur "genius grant".

"The idea that art is political isn’t a deformation of art. It’s a fulfilment of it," he said.

But the political climate surrounding the war in Gaza has presented new challenges for Nguyen and other writers.

As far back as 2016, Nguyen had expressed support for Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS), a nonviolent protest movement against Israel to support Palestinian rights.

In October 2023, he signed an open letter published in the London Review of Books, alongside more than 750 other writers, calling for a ceasefire in Gaza and condemning Israel’s military actions.

But the fallout was swift. The cancellation of his talk at the 92nd Street Y sparked national media attention and intense public debate.

"I hope there is a moral consensus that killing civilians is wrong, whether Hamas does it or whether Israel does it," he wrote in response on social media.

Still, some commenters criticised him for claiming a "moral equivalence" between the two sides.

Nguyen underscored that his platform is not a shield: He still faces backlash to his work.

"People simply don't talk to me any more, people have thrown me out of their circles, or I've lost invitations to things," he said.

Still, he acknowledged that his standing in the literary community has helped make the "price" of his choices "manageable".

"I speak from a position of privilege," he said. "My titles, my professional status — maybe they protect me a little."

Other writers, he added, are more vulnerable, and the consequences of speaking out can be more severe.

In May 2021, for instance, a 22-year-old Associated Press staffer, Emily Wilder, was fired after right-wing media resurfaced pro-Palestinian statements she made while in college.

More recently, in March, the administration of President Donald Trump detained Rumeysa Ozturk, a Turkish PhD student studying at Tufts University, and stripped her of her visa.

Her supporters say she did little more than co-write an op-ed critical of the university's refusal to "acknowledge the Palestinian genocide". Though she has been released from government custody, she continues to face deportation proceedings.

One culture writer and critic, speaking to Al Jazeera on condition of anonymity, explained that he fears that speaking out on issues like the war in Gaza could jeopardise his work visa status in the US.

In addition to his work as a writer, he has a background in film and television, having taken on roles as a director, screenwriter and editor for several international projects.

"In the last couple of months, I’ve felt this overwhelming guilt, like I’m choosing my own safety over speaking out. It’s the first time I’ve really felt that way," he said.

"I’ve done a couple of on-camera interviews for the BBC, where I wore a Palestinian keffiyeh and was very outspoken. But I don’t see myself doing that in the near future."

He added that he has friends with green cards who were unexpectedly interrogated upon re-entering the US, despite their status as permanent residents.

"After Trump’s re-election, I told myself, 'This time, I’m not going to stay angry and frustrated. I’m just going to put my head down and keep moving forward,'" he said.

Celine Parreñas Shimizu, the dean of the UCLA School of Theater, Film and Television, believes voices like Nguyen's can help break the silence that results from such crackdowns and threats.

"Critical acclaim", she explained, "enables creativity in response to the forces that seek to silence us".

But she, too, warned that no amount of accolades could fully protect an author from damage to their reputation or lost opportunities.

"Critical or professional acclaim offers no true shield against racism's fundamental dehumanisation," Parreñas Shimizu said.

The pressures on young, emerging writers weigh heavily on Nguyen, who has witnessed similar struggles among his students at the University of Southern California.

"Young writers here, they’re like writers everywhere. They’re afraid of not getting published. They’re afraid of not having a life in the audience," Nguyen said.

Those fears can lead to life-altering decisions, Nguyen explained. "I’ve had a writer who is trans. They left the US a few weeks ago, terrified, and removed themselves to another country."

When he talks to his students, he emphasises the time and difficulty involved in pursuing a career in writing, no matter the circumstances.

"What I try to do with those writers is impress upon them that it took 30 years of misery to get to where I am. Every writer is alone. You have to cultivate discipline within yourself to confront that solitude."

But even so, those closest to Nguyen wonder about the toll his writing and public activism can take.

Thi Bui, a cartoonist, first bonded with Nguyen during a writers' residency run by the Diasporic Vietnamese Artists Network (DVAN). They have collaborated on a children's book in the years since.

Bui told Al Jazeera that she admires the way Nguyen takes on each of his roles — writer, activist, father — with equal strength.

"He takes things head-on," she said. "He channels his anger into writing fast."

But she has also noticed the pressure he faces for speaking out, even at times when silence might be easier.

"He’s always carrying more than he lets on," Bui said. "Even when he’s joking or smiling, you can feel the heaviness behind it. I sometimes worry about that. As much as he works on the world, there’s always a lot of trauma he’s had to grapple with."

But for Nguyen, speaking out is part of his cultural framework — an inextricable part of himself.

"I grew up Catholic. Pope Francis just died, and I’ve been thinking about him," he said. "That tradition taught me about justice — not as a slogan, but something spiritual. Jesus was a truth-teller. That mattered."

His writing, he says, is tied to that spiritual inheritance.

"I carry that obligation with me."