‘Chez moi pas chez moi’: Home(lessness) in Kim Thúy’s Narratives

Abstract

Abstract In La Nostalgie: Quand donc est-on chez soi? Barbara Cassin posits the home as an ambivalent space where one can feel ‘chez [s]oi’ but also ‘pas chez [s]oi’. Discussing the feeling of being welcomed by those who inhabit the space she calls ‘home’, she underlines homelessness as the lack of hospitality. In a similar vein, Sara Ahmed, examining the notion of feeling ‘at home’, emphasizes the affective and bodily experience that homelessness confers when people are uprooted and need to adapt to a new country and environment. It is from this interrogation of what it means to be at home and homeless, to be homeless and yet at home, that I examine Kim Thúy’s Ru and Mãn, considering the extent to which Thúy’s texts interrogate the notion of forced migration, refugee integration and the ability to rebuild a home in the aftermath of war and displacement.