Abstract
In recent Franco-Vietnamese literature written by descendants of immigrants, the liminality of exile is portrayed in all its complexity through migrant bodies – that of parents’ bodies – and through political and social bodies – linked to History and the Việt Kiều’s positionality in French society. The experience of external movement becomes an internal one, creating porosity between the outside and the body, self and others, places and times. This article argues that, in Minh Tran Huy’s Voyageur malgré lui and Doan Bui’s Le Silence de mon père, by representing their family’s migration, both authors present the silenced histories of the Vietnamese community in France. In order to do so, Tran Huy and Bui first focus on uncovering and writing the stories of their silent fathers: through their embodiment of exilic history, the fathers transmit the wound of their immigrant condition to their daughters. Consequently, daughters come to manifest similar bodily expressions of traumas they have not experienced and know little about. The fathers’ histories are eventually voiced and re-invested by the second generation. This shows how the unearthing of their fathers’ life stories is also about reappropriating a dual identity as well as making Asian diasporic perspectives and histories visible, notably to create new avenues of representation for French individuals of Asian descent.
Highlights
In the epilogue of her collection of essays on various exiled writers entitled Tu écriras sur le bonheur, Linda Lê explores what she refers to as displaced literature by exposing the manifold ramifications of exile on literary production and its reception
In order to discuss how silence endures and how passages from the personal to the collective operate, I will focus on two recent texts by Franco-Vietnamese writers: in Voyageur malgré lui, Tran Huy (2014) tells the story of Line who tries to connect the stories of other wanderers with her father’s migration from Việt Nam
Minh Tran Huy and Doan Bui focus on various processes of exposure, starting with the personal and concluding with a collective approach
Summary
In the epilogue of her collection of essays on various exiled writers entitled Tu écriras sur le bonheur, Linda Lê explores what she refers to as displaced literature by exposing the manifold ramifications of exile on literary production and its reception. Keywords Doan Bui, embodiment, exile, Franco-Vietnamese, Minh Tran Huy, silence, transmission, Việt Kiều
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