Doyle Avant

and

unreliable narrator

flâneur​

Assistant Professor

film writing and production

American University of Beirut

Department of English

Much of what I think about and write and perform relates either to war of some kind or being a long way from home – or both. I was born in 1964 and so the Vietnam War was ingrained into my consciousness long before I had the vaguest idea what it was all about. As a child I would hear Walter Conkrite on the evening news talking about the war in Indochina and for a long time I thought he was saying indoor China.

I imagined that somewhere far away there was this indoor version of China – but enormous, even bigger than the Astrodome – large enough to have impenetrable jungles and monsoons and for jets and helicopters to fly around in and for thousands of soldiers to fight in and die in and sometimes vanish into forever.

At some point I figured out that the war was actually being waged indoors and outdoors, but I was still too young to really understand it. Forty years have passed, and I still don't feel quite old enough to really understand it.

I vividly remember the day that Saigon fell – or was liberated, depending on which end of the telescope you were looking through – and being haunted by the footage of the chaos in the streets, the thousands of people desperately fighting to get into the American Embassy and onto one of the helicopters plucking the fortunate few off the rooftop and carrying them away to anywhere but here.

I’m still haunted by it.
And I’m not really sure why.

After graduating from university, I moved to El Salvador, which was then in the last few years of its long-running civil war. I rented a room in a crumbling hotel where I met a young American journalist named Thomas Long.

"So did you come to Salvador to figure out for yourself what's happening here?"

he asked me in that first hour of a 28 year (and counting) friendship.

And I realized that I didn't really know exactly what I was doing there.

But then it came to me. 

“No," I said.  "I’ve come here to get really confused. If the people who've lived here their whole lives can’t comprehend what’s happening here, I doubt that I’ll be

about to figure it out in six months.”

And I didn’t.

 

performance fictionista