Looking at German graphic novelist Reinhard Kleist’s sketches from Vietnam takes the writer back to his childhood memories of living in Kolkata ruled by communists.
The United States Consulate General in the eastern Indian metropolis of Kolkata stands on a street named after Vietnamese revolutionary leader Ho Chi Minh. The communists who governed the city and the state of West Bengal for 35 years carried out act the renaming at the height of the Vietnam War. It was a cruel joke on the consulate, described as “one of the most beleaguered American diplomatic posts anywhere” by the New York Times. For those of us who grew up in communist Kolkata – the Left alliance was voted out of power in 2011 – Vietnam is somewhat like Xanadu or El Dorado.
German graphic artist Reinhard Kleist’s “bilder” (photos in English) of his travels in the country open up a window to many of us who grew up with the communist slogan in Bengali: “Amar naam, tomar naam, shobar naam Vietnam (My name, your name, our name Vietnam)!” Travelling to Vietnam is not uncommon for Indians. There are direct flights from Kolkata to Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City, with the average flight time being 10 hours. And, last year nearly 170,000 Indian tourists visited Vietnam. But looking at the country through Kleist’s sketches is different from trawling the Instagram feed of the tourists. It is more similar to reading a piece by Pico Iyer or Paul Theroux.
Comics as journalism or non-fiction is not a new genre, but newer possibilities are emerging. Personal histories such as Art Spiegelman’s Maus (1980) and Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis (2000) have been followed by Joe Sacco’s Footnotes in Gaza (2009). ““Illustration can be a very, very powerful form of storytelling,” says Carrie Ching, the creator of an animated video accompanying the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists’ Panama Papers project. Several other journalists identified three genres – policy stories, histories, and sensitive investigations – as perfect subjects for contemporary comics journalism.
Kleist’s own work has explored different genres through comics, such as biography – Cash (2006) and Der Boxer (2011). The latter tells the story of Jewish boxer Harry Haft who fought death matches organized by Nazi officers in the Auschwitz concentration camp. Kleist seems to be exploring the genre of the travelogue through sketches of his impressions of Vietnam and other places. Again, this is not new for the artist. His 2008 novel, Havana, explores the Cuban capital through 100 pages of sketches and detailed drawings. The Vietnamese sketches are part of a triptych of sorts, also including Laos and Cambodia. All three nations were theatres of one of the fiercest proxy wars of the Cold War.
The Vietnam section, however, is the longest among the three – it has 23 sketches, compared to 12 for Laos and 11 for Cambodia. It is also richer in colour, variety of setting, characters, and, perhaps most importantly, humour. Take for instance the second last bilder in the series. We see a soldier in his green fatigues, perched on the seat of a parked motorcycle. He has a poker face. A bag with a flask or tiffin carrier hangs from one of the handles. A young boy peeps into the rear-view mirror on the other. Though we don’t see the boy’s mouth, we know he is smiling from his eyes. Vietnamese soldiers are not uncommon cultural signifiers – especially because of films such as The Deer Hunter (1978), Apocalypse Now (1979), and Full Metal Jacket (1987). The juxtaposition of the soldier and the boy is perhaps a narrative of the country’s transition from the horrors of war to relative economic prosperity in recent years.
Another image of Saigon shows a crowded street and high rises. It is done in black and white – except for the billboards which are in colour. The number “40” is the only thing on the billboards that shines through, hinting that Kleist would have travelled to the country in 2015, when it was celebrating four decades of the victory of the socialist North over the US-aided South. There is no other text. “After the military victory, Vietnam’s socialist model began to collapse,” writes Nick Davies for The Guardian. “ Now its economy is booming – but so is inequality and corruption.” Kleist abstains from commentary, but his choice of images is striking enough to communicate the ambivalent attitude the writer has towards the political and socio-economic choices of his subject.
Perhaps the image that incorporates all of this is the one Ho Chi Minh’s mausoleum in Hanoi. It is, again, devoid of colour, depicting a series of serious-faced visitors walking – one might imagine, in silence – around the embalmed body of the socialist leader. The body itself glows a little, giving out a little light. But, this is not a wholly serious picture; the perspective (of the artist? The reader?) is distant, out of the frame. In the end, there is a slight, harmless mockery of the deification on display – a healthy scepticism of a professional journalist.
