Touching War Wounds: Vietnamese Refugee Trauma, Textured Forgiveness, and the Need for Sensory Epistemologies

The “frame” of the American War in Vietnam has rendered Vietnamese refugees, particularly women, legible only insofar as they are willing to offer their forgiveness of American male violence. Christian theology, in prioritizing the forgiveness of American war crimes over the need to witness Vietnamese refugee’s pain, has colluded with the dehumanizing structures that deny Vietnamese refugee women’s subjectivity. Yet the solution is not to offer a complete narrative of Vietnamese refugee trauma; both critical refugee studies and the material turn in trauma theory question whether narrative is sufficient to bear witness to war wounds. Building from critical refugee studies combined with Shelly Rambo’s work on trauma and theology, I argue for a Christian theological account that witnesses to trauma by utilizing a sensory epistemology to construct a more textured perspective on forgiveness