One outstanding value in Trinh Cong Son's antiwar music is its humanity. All the songs in this category, which he composed between 1960s and 1970s, during the most violent phases of the Vietnam War,reveal not only Trinh's melancholy and compassion for his fellow countrymen in the senseless war, but also his immense loving kindness toward humans for their losses and sufferings.
Trinh was born when World War II broke out, and when Vietnam was still fighting against the French domination. He grew up in Hue after Vietnam regained its independence from Japanese fascism and French colonists. As a teenager and a young adult, he was haunted by the death of his father and his elder brother, and later had to witness many war atrocities, especially during the Tet Offensive in 1968 (when he was 23), and the notorious Red Summer of 1972 (when he was 33). His "Bai Ca Cho Nhung Xac Nguoi" (A Ballad for the Corpses)is a graphic description of Hue and its vicinity after the attack, with dead bodies scattered all over, in front of a temple, on the steps of the church, under the ditches along the roads, on the house roofs or hidden among farmlands of corn and potato plants. In many of his antiwar songs, such as "Nguoi Con Gai Vietnam Da Vang" (The Tan-Skin Vietnamese Girl), "Dai Bac Ru Dem" (The Shrapnels' Night Lullaby), "Ca Dao Me" (A Ballad for Mom), one can find the images of war and war victims from all walks of life: wounded women, mothers crying over bodies of their children, or waiting for their sons who never come back, a corpse in a coffin which was exploded into pieces by a mine buried in the road during a funeral procession (hence, "a person who died twice"), a night street sweeper apprehensively listening to the echo of far-off shrapnel explosions, the lonely homeless old man in the park, a naked little boy shocked by bomb explosions, as well as multiple images of huge swords, barbwires, grenades, shrapnels, claymore mines, and lines after lines of military trucks carrying ammunition and soldiers to the fronts....
Trinh pointed out the barbaric and ferocious aspects of the war, and chose not to side with neither the North nor the South, just as he refused to enlist to become a soldier. He had friends on both sides, but he remained a neutral witness, and found the only way to reassure himself in composing antiwar songs and getting drunk, in order to chase away the haunted ideas about loneliness, death and human sufferings. Sometimes he expressed his longing for peace and national reunification. Once he described national helplessness through the image of a chained slave seeking for peace and freedom, leaving both the North and the South behind.
According to Khanh Ly, Trinh had explained and shared with her the circumstances in which he created his antiwar songs, their meanings and implications. Khanh Ly herself also admitted that Trinh's antiwar songs, specifically those in the collection "Ca Khuc Da Vang" ("Songs for the Tan Skin People") were her favorites. In her own writings and in public interviews, she said Trinh's advice to her about the meaning of life has become a compass which guides her throughout her life: In life we only need a good and kind heart, even if it will soon be gone and blown away by the wind.
It has been ten years since Trinh passed away; yet his legacy of kindheartedness remains a great inspiration to all of us. As long as there are wars on earth, Trinh's antiwar message in his songs continues to have priceless values to peace-loving people all over the world.
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