| Abstract | The life narratives of cô Nht, a former communist guerilla fighter and political prisoner during the American War in Vietnam, illuminate a dynamic politics of iteration and innovation at play within each act of remembering. Cô Nht lives in Ho Chi Minh City and is part of a women veteran's civic association called the Former Women Political Prisoner Performance Group. She is also a national and international advocate against the use of chemical warfare and a supporter of people living with Agent Orange-related disabilities in Vietnam. Historical and contemporary political contexts in Vietnam – such as decades of colonial rule, brutal wars and communist revolution and governance – dramatically affect the shape of official history and collective memory, including cô Nht's narratives. The socialist realist stylization of her life stories may at first appear reified and overwhelmingly ideological. However, as cô Nh t demonstrates , it is possible to perform collective, state-sanctioned public memory in ways that simultaneously practice fidelity to her longstanding revolutionary beliefs while also conditioning possibilities for more open, socially equitable futures. Listening to cô Nht's narratives of surviving torture in prison, and to her reflexive views on her lifelong commitment to social engagement, prompts me to forward the idea of ‘prospective memory’. Prospective memory is a form of collective remembering that propels and compels the past into the present and future. Existing in and through performance, it is a culturally contextual, embodied, social endeavor of memory- and history-making. Critically for cô Nht, prospective remembering carries an ethical mandate: by her example, she insists that retelling the past be oriented towards imagining and enacting social relations that are notably more equitable and sustaining than those ‘captured’ by fixed memorialization.
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