I’m preparing my notes to teach Le Ly Hayslip’s memoirs, When Heaven and Earth Changed Places (1989) and Child of War, Woman of Peace (1993), and I realise that defining authorship in them is quite complicated.
Hayslip, born in Vietnam in 1949, moved to the USA in 1970, when she married Ed Munro, a civilian contractor –her ticket out of the devastating war. She spoke little English and, indeed, not enough to write a book on her own even years later, by the time she decided to narrate her life. Her teenage son Jimmy, educated in America and computer-literate, helped by taking down what she dictated, presumably partly the stories she had been painfully writing alone for years. Once she sold her first book, this was completed with the help of Jay Wurts, a Californian writer who advertises himself on his own website as co-author, developmental writer and editor. Wurts is, thus, credited as co-author on the cover of Hayslip’s first book (“with Jay Wurts”) though not on the second, where an adult James Hayslip is named even though the copyright notice only cites ‘Charles Jay Wurts’ as co-author. Complicated…
Of course, this is nothing new, as many autobiographies and memoirs are co-authored by writers like Wurts or by plain ghost writers (yes, I’m thinking of Polanski’s adaptation of Robert Harris’s thriller…). The other Vietnam memoir I’ve taught, Ron Kovic’s Born on the Fourth of July (1976), is not his alone, either, as he mentions in his acknowledgements that his friend and editor, Joyce Johnson, spent “countless hours… helping construct this book.” I’m well aware that editors play in American publishing a prominent role quite unwelcome in Spain, where both authors and readers prefer what could be called ‘purity in authorship.’ I wonder, though, why Johnson is not credited as co-author whereas Wurts is; it must be a matter of the actual writing done but, again, no idea how this is measured.
This ‘purity’ hadn’t bothered me much regarding Hayslip and Kovic until I came across Allen Carey-Webb’s article “Auto/Biography of the Oppressed: The Power of Testimonial” [The English Journal, 80: 4, Apr., 1991, 44-47]. In this essay Carey-Webb offers a list of Third World “testimonials” that might interest American students (college, I assume), ranging from Rigoberta Menchú’s to Hayslip’s. He, surprisingly, denies that testimonials are autobiographies (=texts worth literary studies attention) as “they are recorded and written down by a second person… Testimonials are a sort of Third World ‘auto/biography’ that brings to the center the experience of the unlettered, marginalized, and oppressed. They are ideal texts in which students and teachers alike attempt to hear the voice of the voiceless, investigate cultural and social differences, and raise questions about what it means to be ‘culturally literate.’”
Third World sounds to me here appallingly patronising precisely because Kovic is First World and he still needed, like many other of the “unlettered, marginalized, and oppressed” (or the simply untalented for writing) help from an editor. By placing Menchú’s or Hayslip’s co-authored written texts in a separate category on the grounds of their oral origins I think that Carey-Webb undermines their importance in increasing that ‘cultural literacy’ that we, teachers and students, so direly need –and as autobiographies, and what this implies for the genre. Actually, Hayslip, for all her pro-American bias, teaches an important lesson in how to acquire a mixed cultural literacy (under pressure from war). Her books, by the way, are very well written, in particular the first one. And, surely, many memoirs and autobiographies by First World persons are based on oral interviews, which is not quite Hayslip’s case.
Another essay, Killmeier and Kwok, “A People’s History of Empire, or the Imperial Recuperation of Vietnam? Countermyths and Myths in Heaven and Earth” [Journal of Communication Inquiry, July 2005, 29: 256-272] shows how Oliver Stone’s film version of Hayslip’s books, the underrated Heaven and Earth (1993), does something peculiar with language, having Le Ly use correct English in scenes where only the Vietnamese appear –though they miss that they’re played by an assortment of Asian actors– and pidgin English with Americans. This choice shows that Stone’s American audience was/is not ready for the required linguistic realism (have the Vietnamese speak their language with English subtitles). Yet, it also complicates the memoirs: they’re not translated, like Menchú’s, into English but thought directly in Hayslip’s migrant American English, polished by Wurts. Is this pidgin?
So, in my own pidgin, Third-World English, as, like Hayslip, I’m not a native English-speaker, let me say that I’m very glad her ‘testimonial’ has reached me through the First World bridge of American English, whether co-authored or not, oral or written, literary or not. It is the perfect companion for Kovic’s ‘First World’ ‘literary’ ‘autobiography.’