Agential Orange:Immortal Performatives and Writing with Ashes

Walter Faro (bio)
Pennsylvania State University

Abstract

This essay is a case study of the author’s late father and his processes of coming to know himself through a relationship with Agent Orange, a deadly and untraceable chemical. In performatively demonstrating the agential forces of nonhuman others at work, the essay troubles idiomatic written forms in order to navigate the personal and professional sites of Agent Orange’s emergences in this man’s life, which were confined neither to the hospital nor the home, the social nor the material, health nor sickness, and which blurred the lines between any such binaries. In the end, a way forward, even in death, is conceptualized through the paradigm of a social-material world.

The horrors of the Vietnam War are well documented, as are the ripples of trauma and chemical infection that continue to radiate from it. Agent Orange was the primary chemical deployed by the US in acts of chemical warfare against the Vietnamese people between 1961 and 1971. According to McHugh, it “contain[s] a type of dioxin labeled TCDD (2, 3, 7, 8-tetrachloro-dibenzo-para-dioxin), which is the most toxic human-made substance” (194). Not only was this deadly DNA-reconfiguring chemical blanketed over the land for over a decade, but vast amounts of it were abandoned in storehouses and military bases, allowing it to continue to leak into the ecosystem (Dwernychuk 117). The Vietnamese people remain devastated by the existence of Agent Orange and its severe effects, as the President’s Cancer Panel clearly indicates in its 2008/2009 report, which notes that “approximately 4.8 million Vietnamese people were exposed to Agent Orange, resulting in 400,000 deaths and disabilities and a half million children born with birth defects” (78). Far more consideration and care are needed for those whose death resulted from ingesting the chemical, including children who died and children who were born with birth defects, and the lasting impact of Agent Orange use on following generations. American soldiers like my father were also doused with these chemicals, and were similarly assured that they were harmless to humans.

When the US sought to destroy Vietnamese crops and defoliate their jungles in a strategic act of chemical warfare, they crucially ignored the fact that the environment is a dynamic field of human and nonhuman material. This became most clear to my father and to his unit (First Cavalry Division: Company A, Second Battalion, Seventh Cavalry) when they would get together after the war and discuss the fact that their shins tended to boil up mysteriously with scabs in the summertime. Their shins: the area most directly exposed to the crops and grasslands.

On the north-side beaches of Lake Michigan, in the oddly hot Chicago sun, I watched my dad pick at scabs on his tan, hairy forearms. Mistaking his pocked skin for the effects of sunburn I ran across the sand to our towels and coated my body with a thick second coat of sunscreen. The poorly blended white paste didn’t contrast much with the fair Scandinavian skin I had inherited from my mother, but my father couldn’t help but notice my spontaneous and frantic basting. Guiltily, I explained that I didn’t want to end up with skin like his. This prompted him to tell me about his postwar shins and how those leg scabs had slowly, over the years, started to surface everywhere on his body. Contact with his old unit substantiated the suspicion that his case was not anomalous.

The scabs serve as an inscription of my father’s relation to the Vietnamese environment, but they also can be seen to foreshadow Agent Orange’s more radical action. This process began when my father was the victim of dental malpractice: an oral surgeon forgot to remove the plastic wrappings on a set of dental implants inserted into my father’s mouth. The dentist then recommended my father to a postoperative inspector whom he had bribed to sign off on the procedure. This led to a horrific infection that spread rapidly throughout his body. I was two years old when this process began, and over the next nine years, my father would experience the removal of his gallbladder and the majority of his pancreas, a handful of strokes, more than one cardiac arrest, and a litany of kidney and liver issues. In just one particularly complicated year he suffered forty-two emergency room visits.

Sickness is that which prevents us from doing what we want to do, but it in no way stops us from doing, from existing as a force in the world. As rivers flow, dance, evaporate, and congeal, so does all else exist in constant movement: the ungrounded ground that constitutes existence in space/time. Now, this does not mean that threads of some abyssal sinew afflict our every atom, rendering us meaningless, unintelligible, and endlessly restrained. On the contrary, the process of knowing that we can only ever intra-act in the past (in the sense that we can never say now in the Now), or imagine as future possibility, assures us of the vast wealth of meaning in the present. As all actors become (humans, nonhumans, more-than-humans) we can only reflect and make cuts, as Karen Barad calls them, in the oceans of experience flowing through us (816). Those cuts are both a part of our acting and of our decisions, and also a part of affect. Some component of the world makes itself intelligible to be cut in the first place. This is performativity in the most colloquial sense of the word: it is a dance. Just as dancing is constituted by conscious choices and forces of unintelligible agency (gravity, momentum, energy), so are our processes of becoming and knowing. We take a step, we move, we swing within an excess of forces.

I seek to analyze Agent Orange’s agential role in my father’s ongoing process of becoming. In the process, it should be clear that Agent Orange is a moving actor of his biology. More precisely, Agent Orange’s material-discursive practices were enmeshed in every strand of my father’s identificatory practices. This is not merely because of its biological entanglement with his cells, or because it potentially altered his very DNA, but because Agent Orange consistently eluded doctors’, friends’, and family’s efforts to isolate it as merely biological. Reports on Agent Orange before and after the Vietnam War frequently denied that the chemical had had any conclusive negative effects on the human body. Because of these reports, medical treatment has had no choice but to exclude its effects as a possibility (“Health Effects”). Despite the fact that far more recent analyses have significantly contested those initial reports, we are not, especially in the current US political climate, likely to see the US government significantly undertake further reconciliatory processes for the atrocities committed against the Vietnamese people and environment that are still struggling to recover.¹ This is evidenced by the reaction of Congress in 2010 to the President’s Cancer Panel Report, which substantiated proof of Vietnamese suffering from Agent Orange. Well over ten billion dollars were given to US Veterans Affairs while a fraction of a percentage of that was given to the Vietnamese.²

My ambition is not to expound upon scientific research to prove the harmful effects of Agent Orange, but instead, to take up my father’s life as a case study of its material-discursive agency. Because the aforementioned studies contemporary to Agent Orange’s initial deployment claimed to be inconclusive, the duration of my father’s existence was marked by a relationship with a phantom: a DNA-altering agent within his body, the potential of which still remains largely unknown. In order to conduct this analysis, I tell the story of my father using Stacy Alaimo’s term “trans-corporeality.” With a chemical as mysteriously devastating as Agent Orange, there is no better way to parse its acting than to understand my father’s “human corporeality as trans-corporeality” (238). As Alaimo describes, trans-corporeality refers to the human as “always intermeshed with the more-than-human world [where] the corporeal substance of the human is ultimately inseparable from ‘the environment'” (238). Furthermore, the structure (or lack of structure) of Agent Orange’s emergences in my father’s life is trans-corporeal: it was confined neither to the hospital nor to the home, the social nor the material, health nor sickness, and, in fact, it blurred the lines between any such binaries. As Alaimo states, “movement across human corporeality and nonhuman nature necessitates rich, complex modes of analysis that travel through the entangled territories of material and discursive, natural and cultural, biological and textual” (238). Therefore, the structure of my writing will be as entangled in the personal and professional, the narrative and theoretical, as is the object of my study.

The multiplicity of systems of any being coordinate with one another in constant movement, and in a biological body like the human, the circulatory system coordinates with the respiratory, which coordinates with the reproductive, and so on. A being such as my own takes place in consequence of the coordination of my father’s systems (and my mother’s), which are all constituted in DNA altered by Agent Orange. Thus, Walter Sr. coordinates Walter Jr. Luckily for me, I was spared from the horrific birth defects that have plagued Vietnam since the onslaught of Agent Orange took root in nature. That chemical lurched, docile in my father’s body until just after my second birthday, when it emerged at the prompting of a gum infection and opened the floodgates for all other agents to hollow my father out. It was enmeshed in his acting sicknesses while remaining both invisible (as under-researched) and intelligible (as having effects in his body and in Vietnam simultaneously). The doctors were forced to ignore Agent Orange even while my father’s material-discursive voice screamed: “that chemical ‘in Vietnam’ destroying uncountable beings is also inside me!” How am I to do a trans-corporeal reading of Agent Orange without looking at my father’s body, and furthermore, without assuming that I am soaking in this chemical that could have affected me the way it has so many others? How else can we read a chemical that is certainly material, but whose effects are completely interminable?

In Vibrant Matter, Jane Bennett provides a reading of Adorno’s concept of nonidentity, which she describes as matter that is always elusive, that defies humans’ ability to conceptualize it, and that acts upon us nonetheless (14). It is through her reading of the initial impulses of Adorno’s concept that she proposes the importance of the cultivation of a “capacity of naiveté,” which is a repudiation of the human capacity to conceptualize matter, to think ourselves separate from it without first thinking ourselves a part of it: “both to receive and to participate in the shape given to that which is received” (17). For Bennett, this process enlivens the world, making it livelier and more poetically stimulating: endlessly fascinating. As my father’s case shows, an endless “fascination” and inability to conceptualize is often the only option. It is this fascination, which I would argue is more of a frustration in this case, that allows me to provide a reading of Agent Orange at all. Indeed, it ought not always be the case that we remain fascinated with matter, but that we examine the ways in which the matter has become fascinated with us. Remaining in suspension, or as Bennett says, remaining “naïve,” is the purgatory imposed upon all those who have come in contact with Agent Orange.

As my dad wrestled with the elusive toxin in his body that was both doing nothing at all and that was also inhibiting doctors, restricting his hormones, affecting his mood, as well as destroying the Vietnamese ecosystem—killing children, animals, plants, and insects—the rest of the people in his life attempted to get to know him. As his son, I had to learn what it meant to be one hundred percent disabled from PTSD: to announce my presence before every interaction with my father, never to sneak up on my father, never to wake my father, never to threaten my father, never to overwhelm my father. On more than one occasion the intelligibility of my body disappeared when my small hand surprised my dad: he would spring into action and, with his hand around my throat, have me dangling in the air. The milliseconds of those experiences taught me that I was not constant; that the world as it was intelligible to me was not as it was for him.

I remember my dad’s eyes as they changed from vacant to seeking and how he would bring me into his arms and ask me to forgive him, reminding me to be more careful for my own sake. It was simple as a child to understand that the person I knew to be my dad was a small part of the forces materializing as him and bringing forth his performance.

My father considered himself many things: an international mercenary, a martial artist, an assassin, a loving father, a husband. Manifest in all of those mystical titles was the founding force of his identification as a Vietnam veteran. When he first voluntarily enlisted in the US Army in 1968 he was physically too short, at five feet four inches, to enter the forces, but his height was altered on the physical examination paperwork (which required soldiers to be five feet six or above) because the Army needed more men to navigate the tight Vietnamese tunnel systems. Then, despite having been trained in heavy artillery during boot camp, he was sent into the dark holes of the Vietnamese jungle to deal with close combat and booby traps. My father was only nineteen years old at the time, but the Vietnamese who guarded the tunnels were often far younger. Because of that, my father killed an untold number of children in over 270 firefights as a solider in the Vietnam War. These atrocities were always described to me as part of a chain of command, as an order that took the form of an explicit threat: “kill or be killed.” The commands that interpolated him as a soldier were, in his mind, still actively speaking in all of his practices.

When I was growing up I often imagined that Agent Orange was some evil spy: a literal agent. I wondered as a child what Agent Orange might sound like if it spoke. I wondered if my dad was always sick because it was giving him commands and reminding him that he was a soldier. It turns out that this is exactly what was happening. Agent Orange was always speaking: in his body, with his singing, through his movements, and in his sleep.

Some people sleep with their eyes open. Usually, this is thought to be a characteristic of hardened veterans or people who have somehow trained themselves to sleep this way, and although I cannot speak to that process, my father certainly did sleep occasionally with his eyes wide open. What was more anomalous, though, was that my father could not speak Vietnamese while he was awake, but there were times while he slept when Vietnamese language came out of his mouth. This language further alluded to the dynamism of agencies within which he was enmeshed: the voices that scream in Vietnam, that screamed before and that are yet to scream, that cannot be contained. They erupted from my father, and he did not control that emergence. They are phenomena. My father is connected to Vietnam in that he took actions there that continue to act, to have effects there; Agent Orange is acting in a field of matter, and it does not discriminate. Within that field, I, my father, other western soldiers, Vietnamese people, and all beings it has intra-acted with (other humans, nonhumans, and more-than-humans) are entangled. That entanglement is quantum, so my father is just as likely to be screaming out the voices from a moment somewhere within his memories as he is to be screaming in synchrony with those in Vietnam across, but not separated by, space-time. Barad explains such an entanglement this way: “Entanglements are not the interconnectedness of things or events separated in space and time. Entanglements are enfoldings of spacetimematterings” (139). In this way, Agent Orange is intralingual: it translates only unto itself and it adapts.³ Agent Orange does not need a human natural language to act, but it is nonetheless material-discursively co-constitutive through my father’s processes of becoming. It is speaking in my father’s body, and in whatever ways my father speaks, so does it (although certainly not alone).

The first time I watched my father speaking Vietnamese in his sleep, I was perhaps the most scared I have ever been. I worried for him. I worried what wars were being waged inside (in/with) his body as he slept. Something in him, I knew, was not sleeping. I had woken up in the middle of the night. A dream had just been coming over me: I was standing on the branch of a tree peeing into the setting sun. Realizing with a flash of lucidity that this might mean I had wet the bed again, I frantically sprung from sleep and scraped my hands over the sheets in the dark, trying to feel for wetness. Thankfully nothing. Suddenly though, a voice became audible to me.

The long hallway outside my room was lit by a single nightlight, and looking down it I saw the familiar shifting lights that meant Dad was either still awake watching TV or had fallen asleep doing so. After some tiptoeing in the dark I found myself standing over him.

His eyes are wide, shifting all around, and sometimes he’s mumbling, sometimes barking the language into the empty room. Light rises and falls, illuminating him at random, the screen reflecting off of his wet gaze.

Is he looking at me? Not at me exactly, but through me, like a stranger. He’s speaking the whole time. His face is tense, and his raspy voice growls the way it does after he’s been trying to cough up tar. I’m not supposed to wake him up. He said never to wake him up. The television lights reflecting off his eyes seem to be flashing faster. His speech is getting more urgent, and now he’s repeating the same phrase over and over again, louder. Looking at me more. The unrecognizing stare disappears in shadow, then reappears with the whites of his eyes full, his stare aflame.

"Dad…"
Approaching the couch, I touch his foot lightly and say again, "Dad?"
No change in him. Incoherent. I take a step closer.
"Hey, Dad."
I grab his shoulder. "Dad!"

His eyes snap to me. His hands are on me. Screaming, staring into my eyes, he pins me down. His eyes are black. I couldn’t understand a word.

In this moment, I had no concept of what Vietnamese sounded like when spoken. For at least the next few days I believed that one particular question I had asked myself had been answered: what might Agent Orange sound like if it spoke? Quite literally it seemed that inside my father was a social world he could not understand and could never hope to be conscious of. In order to expand my notion of Agent Orange’s intralinguality, I take up Vicki Kirby’s call to “interpret ‘there is no outside of language’ as ‘there is no outside of Nature'” (229). Agent Orange proves that even an artificial, human-made chemical operates outside of human abilities to capture, measure, limit, and understand it. It is performative; it has effects of its own. This artificial chemical has become in/with all things it has encountered. It communes amidst all other cells in the plants, earth, insects, animals, and humans it has encountered. The internal processes taking place in such a case bring me to one of Kirby’s most difficult questions: “why is it so difficult to concede that nature already makes logical alignments that enable it to refer productively to itself, to organize itself so that it can be understood … by itself?” (232). If we take language in the performative sense as not primarily referential but as having effects, then when we observe intra-action on any level, or agency in any capacity, we can conclude that what is taking place is something social. This is what I take Kirby’s interpretative leap to offer. The process through which the material negotiates the introduction of Agent Orange to its biology is a social one, where effects take place and changes continue to happen. Agent Orange does not become unified with the beings it communes with: it does not translate itself to become one with another cell, and yet it remains within the social structure of cells and changes take place. Kirby makes this point: “When we posit a natural object, a plant, for example, we don’t assume that it is unified and undifferentiated: on the contrary, this one thing is internally divided from itself, a communicating network of cellular mediations and chemical parsings” (232).

Alaimo’s work helps us to think about Agent Orange in relation to other illnesses that are also elusive, trans-corporeal, and implicated in a world of political and ethical concerns. What makes the mystery of this artificial chemical similar to chronic illnesses, such as the autoimmune diseases that Alaimo mentions, is that they both continue to resist the possibility of a “crystalline understanding,” regardless of any dynamic research conducted, precisely because “there are (how many?) forces continually intra-acting?” (250). Furthermore, Alaimo’s conception of “toxic bodies,” which points to the present reality where seemingly nothing on Earth is not already contaminated in some way, extends our lack of any totalizing knowledge limitlessly. Not only are the boundaries of beings blurred in the constant motion of materialization in space-time, but in those lines of flight other strands of being are threaded-in. It is not then that these beings (chemicals, toxins, or literally anything in the world) are being written into identity as if they can be thoroughly traced and read, but instead they are speaking all the time. Intra-acting reveals the toxic body as material-discursively loud with the social world of becoming. This does refer to a oneness, but to that of a tremendous crowd. Together, Kirby and Alaimo’s work reveals that currently, only the performative concept of language is able to factor into the material-discursivity of identification, where certain voices are heard over others and notions of identity become intelligible amidst the loudness of our being in/with the world.

At the electricity of affect the effects of an always-already flowing epistemological waterfall are pouring, and when your eye flits or your finger connects, the entirety of reception is swept up. There is no still water. To think that any intra-action will yield “the One, the flourish of stars which perhaps comprise the unattackable body of Truth,” as Édouard Glissant so elegantly puts it, is to resign oneself to narcissism (7). You lay down in a field of grass and stare up at the stars and marvel, but you receive nothing of your own volition. Certainly less when you try to ascribe language, either in thought or in action, to what you receive. There is no force that will stop the waterfall’s cascade from beneath, where you are, but that which you cannot do is less important here than what is possible; you may try the most difficult of tasks: to stop all forces from cluttering the electricity bringing forth you in/with the world. You may, as Maurice Blanchot says, attempt to be where “only being speaks—which means that language doesn’t speak any more, but is. It devotes itself to the pure passivity of being” (27).

Truly, my father was rendered passive in the inability to recognize an enemy to fight in order to progress. He quite literally died by allowing the chemicals to decide, once and for all, whether he would continue to exist. He rendered himself passive to the agencies upon which he could never impose silence. A bullet would not find the agent, but maybe another agent might.

One day my father overdosed with a gun in his hand. Peaceful at last, I wasn’t sure if dying this way meant he was fighting to live or fighting to die: a soldier to the end. Here, expression and intention revealed their co-execution. They coordinated one another’s function and decapitated one another in the process. I will never know if my father was selfish. Whether he wanted to tell his wife and son: “If you find me dead, know I was trying to fight it,” or whether it was: “know that I would have taken myself out one way or another.” In expressing intent or intending to express, both falter amidst the possibility of otherwise. But my father was, in fact, not going to be dead as long as Agent Orange was enmeshed within his ongoing being. Agent Orange survives six feet underground. It would continue to vehiculate its contamination through its ongoing decomposition of my father’s body. Maybe it would make it into your plants and into your bodies. Maybe my father would go with it and be with you as well: immortalized as a vast cellular network raining down on all the world. Maybe my father contemplated this first, because as my mother and I read his will for the final time it instructed his cremation. As if all the drugs, surgeries, radiation, and guns in the world had proved that Agent Orange could not be killed, now he wanted to turn it all to ash. Today my father’s body is perched in an urn on my desk, but could there be a malevolent orange genie trapped inside? Of course not. It haunts his legacy; it haunts my name. It still kills, steals, and destroys. It is still a devil unseen and unbelievable. But it is not only that. I hate that this part of my father survives, and yet that is why I write about him: to ensure it is not the only part and to show that nothing is singular.

Even the overdose is entangled in years of attempts to kill the pain of sicknesses and surgeries. Not only was every treatment my father received ultimately unsuccessful due to some mysterious force at work, but he also developed quick immunities and allergies to pain killers. Hydrocodone, Vicodin, OxyContin—you name it, he could not take it. Codeine specifically caused my father to have a heart attack almost immediately upon its first prescription. The only pain medication that his body seemed to cooperate with was morphine, which is not intended to be used for years on end due to its highly addictive properties. Once more, doctors searched for an alternative method of relief that could float my father through his own dissection, and once more they were baffled by their inability to do so. Eventually, there were no doctors who would continue my father’s morphine prescription, and he was left to cope with pain unmedicated. Marinating in the biological warfare for which his body became the stage was too much for him to handle without any weapons to fight back. This led him to use illegal narcotics instead and, well, you know the rest. Self-prescription lasted five weeks.

The language that refused to recognize the Vietnamese people by calling them “the enemy” refused to recognize the dynamic field of matter called “the environment,” and refused to acknowledge the actions of their own soldiers (“them” being the organizing militant forces of the US government) by calling those soldiers “the forces, the troops, the ARMY.” This follows the constitutive gaze of the West. However, once the soldiers returned home, neoliberal discourse instituted once more a recognition of individuality: the responsibility to fend for yourself. This ironic paradox claimed my father first as an included part of one body (a static field of bodies: the military) and next as a severed limb. Furthermore, my father’s attempts to map a private, individual singularity as severed from the acting body of the military became increasingly more difficult amidst the ongoing war beneath (and on the surface of) his skin. As Alaimo explains, “if one cannot presume to master one’s own body, which has ‘its’ own forces, many of which can never fully be comprehended, even with the help of medical knowledge and technologies, one cannot presume to master the rest of the world, which is forever intra-acting in inconceivably complex ways” (250).

What Agent Orange ultimately did—through his isolation from the body that ushered forth his violence in Vietnam—was orient him amidst a cultural network: a shared community of suffering in/with Vietnam. He could not negotiate his inclusion within this space while also knowing that he was enlisted by the oppressive forces that had created it in the first place, while also knowing that he had chopped through crops with a machete and cut through humans with knifes and bullets. He could not forgive himself, grant himself entry into that space, but his quantum-entanglement with it evacuated such a choice nonetheless. Treatment for PTSD and treatment for bodily sickness became inseparable. As Kirby puts it, “the logic of causal separation and the presumption that there are different moments in time, different places in space, and a very real difference between thought and material reality” simply does not hold (220). Further, she argues, “to suggest that one affects the other in a way that renders them inseparable doesn’t confound the nature of their difference (respective identities) so much as it emphasizes that these differences are joined, or connected in some way” (222).

I know that while my father was alive there was no way he would ever have been able to step foot on Vietnamese soil again, despite his connection to it. I wish that he had, though. I wish that he had pursued the community that he could never avoid. Whether he was castigated and exiled or embraced and forgiven, allowing the possibility of that process to take place in an intelligible way for once may have unmoored him from negotiating it endlessly with “himself.” A nature-culture like that established by Agent Orange, which forcefully inaugurates a community around the entanglements of humans and nonhumans, provides the possibility of a space for toxic bodies to advocate rejuvenation in/with an ever-materializing world. My father’s identity is not unlike all others: “it” is scattered amongst, and entangled in/with spacetimemattering. However, trying to make “connection and commitments,” as Barad calls them, within those nature-culture entanglements would likely have been generative for him (150).

It is not about “him” in the end. It took Agent Orange assassinating my father, over the course of decades, invisibly and for all the world to see, for me to think through the entanglements of humans and nonhumans. We can be sure that the Vietnamese people will never forget such material-discursive agencies for similar reasons. Surely, as Alaimo concludes, “(toxic bodies) encourage us to imagine ourselves in constant interchange with the ‘environment,’ and, paradoxically perhaps, to imagine an epistemological space that allows for both the unpredictable becomings of other creatures and the limits of human knowledge” (262). Yet we might also observe that be-ing and coming-to-know are in the constant intra-play of self-forgetting. In Meeting the Universe Halfway, Barad calls this an “ethico-onto-epistem-ology,” which she describes as “an appreciation of the intertwining of ethics, knowing, and being—since each intra-action matters—(where) the possibilities for what the world may become call out in the pause that precedes each breath before a moment comes into being and the world is remade again” (185). I have attempted to discuss this earlier through metaphor, but Barad’s description is more efficient. Such a complicated proposal is not just an option, but perhaps is merely the case, as Barad’s work exemplifies.

As humans, we may come to know ourselves performatively through our effects, and through the always-already reciprocal effects of the intra-active world. This overwhelmingly causes us to critically engage with every step we take within the performative dance of spacetimemattering, but also frees us of this overwhelming pressure by registering the ways in which the nonhuman world engages with us. What does the nonhuman world tell us about ourselves? About our actions? How are we oppressing so many (humans, nonhumans, more-than-humans) by forcing them to have this awareness? How do we come to obfuscate our awareness of our intra-active materialization in/with all beings? Largely, I would argue, by believing we can stop time, space, or matter.

My father, to be both mystical and honest, still lives in spacetimematter. Even ash does not simply cease to exist but moves, fluctuates with temperature and gravity. I can see it; it is in front of me, intra-acting with me now. It is with ash that I write. The conception of performativity I have articulated here, where the agential intra-activity of all beings both frustrates and fascinates, enlivens and destroys, refuses the notion that death is the end, and instead affirms the liveliness of the world. I cannot put an end to the agential orange I hate, which haunts me and so many others, but if I did this text would not exist; I would not exist. I also cannot put an end to my father. If dioxin was never invented in the first place and never proliferated, then, of course, that would be wonderful. But time-traveling impulses are only ever wrestled with in a quantum entanglement that situates us in the future’s execution of the past: the present that never is. In this way, I may have never known my father, and he may have never come to know himself, but I sure do love getting to know him.

Footnotes

1. For recent scientific work conducted, see Ngo, et al. and Committee to Review the Health Effects in Vietnam Veterans of Exposure to Herbicides, et al., Veterans and Agent Orange: Update 2004 (and subsequent updates). For a more thorough understanding of Vietnam’s ongoing struggle with Agent Orange, see McHugh’s work on the Aluoi Valley in “More than Skin Deep: Situated Communities and Agent Orange in the Aluoi Valley, Vietnam.”

2. See Nguyen and Hughes, “The Forgotten Victims of Agent Orange.”

3. Intralingual is the process by which a language is translated, sometimes radically, within the confines of itself in order to adapt to different circumstances. This is not the same as interlingual, which refers to multilingual ability. Agent Orange does not speak natural languages like Vietnamese or English—that would be absurd—but it is nonetheless enmeshed in the material-discursive practices of speaking. On the differences between intra and interlingual, see Zethsen.

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