We are deeply saddened by the news of the passing of French writer Linda Lê on May 9, at the age of 58 years old. She was the author of over 25 books, three of which have been published in English: Slander (translated by Esther Allen); The Three Fates (translated by Mark Polizzotti); and A Tale of Love (translated by Sian Robyns).
In 2016, Diasporic Vietnamese Artists Network co-founder Isabelle Thuy Pelaud met with Lê. Of the experience, Pelaud remembers:
“She said she wrote at night and slept during the day (and barely made time to meet with people—including TV interviews). She met me because she loved DVAN and was a fan of Monique Truong, Nam Le and Viet Thanh Nguyen. She read diaCRITICS and encouraged me to continue our effort. I invited her to our writing retreat in Corsica, but she laughed and said: ‘I am not comfortable with water, sun and people.’”
In honor of her memory, we are sharing an excerpt of an essay titled “The American War in Viet Nam and Its Diaspora” by Isabelle Thuy Pelaud and Anh Thang Doa-Shah in The Cambridge History of Asian American Literature (Rajini Srikanth and Min Hyong Song; Eds, 2016.) Linda Lê’s more recent book is titled Je ne repondrai plus jamais de rien.
– Eric Nguyen, Editor in Chief
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Linda Lê is perhaps one of the most internationally recognized authors of the Vietnamese diaspora. A productive writer, she published eighteen novels and non-fiction essay collections by 2012. Lê has received five national prizes in France and her works have been translated into multiple languages.[1] So far, only two novels, Calomnies and Les Trois Parques, have been translated into English under the titles Slander and The Three Fates. However, Lê’s experimental forms and use of multiple viewpoints as wells as a sense of darkness in her writing have caught the attention of literature critics in many countries, paving the way for more translations and popular attention.
Like other minority and female authors, Lê’s novels are often read in light of her autobiography. Critics have drawn a parallel between the recurring figure of the abandoned father in many of her works with the author’s separation from her own father. Others point out that her novel Lettres Mortes was inspired by Lê’s experiences in an asylum after the death of her father. However, in her interviews, the author refuses to categorize her books as autobiographical. Instead, she claims that what she wants to emphasize is the universal feeling of loss of those who are rootless
Lê’s writing, like that of Monique Truong, exceeds the refugee narrative, which focuses primarily on the passage from Viet Nam and the struggles in the new country, and ends with the refugee’s settlement in the new homeland. Instead, in Slander, the author weaves together the history of French colonization, the American War in Viet Nam as well as the exchange of power at the end of the war that led to a mass refugee exodus by sea in leaking river-boats.[2] At the same time, Slander also explores the racial politics of France towards its former colonized people, which affect the lives of the two narrators as much as the lingering memories of war and a lost country. Written in fragmented form, which refuses chronology and spatial logic, Slander moves back and forth between the narrative of the niece and her struggles as a writer in France, on the one hand, and the uncle’s experience under war-torn Viet Nam and the sanatorium outside Paris, on the other. Evoking the trauma of colonialism, war and racism, Slander challenges the linear character of history writing, pointing instead at the way that life in the diaspora is simultaneously shaped by the aftermath of different historical processes.
One recurrent theme that highlights the complexity of the diasporic experience is the complicated relationship between the author and the notion of homeland, which is best illustrated through her use of an anonymous “Country.” Though Lê often uses this abstraction as an example of her refusal to write autobiographical works, she addresses the way the lost homeland continues to haunt the uprooted person in Tu écriras sur le Bonheur. “I carry my country like this young peasant carries his twin’s fetus,” Lê writes. “It is a monstrous link. A link in which the native country, the twin, is protected and suffocated, recognized and denied, and finally carried just as one carries a dead child.” [3] Using a monstrous metaphor of the vestigial twin, the author speaks to the parasitic relationship between the one being uprooted and the homeland she has left behind, yet which continues to plague her life through unfulfilled desires and traumatic memories, not only of the war, but also other historical moments that shaped the experiences of those living in the diaspora.
Like Slander, The Three Fates lacks any division into chapters and boasts long paragraphs, which move through times and space as the narrator wanders between memories of the Fall of Saigon and present day. The fragmented form allows for multiple points of view and an impossibility of distinguishing between different times and spaces, reflecting the ways that trauma of war can return as recurrent flashbacks at unexpected moments. In The Three Fates, Lê turns on her uprooted characters, the two sisters and a cousin who managed to get away from a falling Saigon with their grandmother, while leaving behind the sisters’ father. In streams of consciousness, which translate Shakespeare’s King Lear and Vietnamese legends into the diasporic context, Lê exposes how the war and the displacement that follows its end haunt those who left not only with unfulfilled desires but also endless resentment and survivors’ guilt. As the sisters plot to bring their father to France, the reader also realizes the extent to which the diaspora and its uprooted inhabitants have the ability to impact the lives of those who they have left behind. Full of sarcasm and irony, The Three Fates explores the trauma of war through the incessant whispers of the dead grandmother, who until her dying day curses the enemy and the father for stealing her home, her land, and her faith, while the sisters try to make up for their survival through the relentless effort to reunite with their lost father. Unable to avoid the constant resurfacing of the past, the sisters escape into their obsessive-compulsive materialist drive to escape the guilt of having gotten away. Yet, the figure of the cousin, the principal narrator of the book who is missing a hand, also suggests that those who are uprooted are able to develop an alternative understanding of the past, present and future through a consciousness formed through the pain and trauma of war and displacement.
Notes
[1] The novels for which Lê received national prizes are: novels Les Évangiles de Crime (1992), Les Trois Parques (The Three Fates) (1997), Cronos (2010), and À L’Enfant que Je N’Aurai pas (2011). While she has gained international fame primarily through her fictional works, Lê has also established herself as an acute literature critic with a trilogy of non-fiction works: a collection of prefaces titled Tu écriras sur le Bonheur (1999), which she had written while working as an editor for Hachette Publications, and two essay collections published in 2004 and 2009.
[2] The American War in Vietnam is described in Slander as a war between the occupation army and “skinny, ugly men in black.” Linda Lê, Slander, trans. Esther Allen (Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 1993), 45.
[3] Linda Le, Tu Écriras sur le Bonheur (Paris: Presses Universitaires, 1999), 330
Contributor Bio
Isabelle Thuy Pelaud is Professor in Asian American Studies at San Francisco State University and co-Director of the Diasporic Vietnamese Artists Network (DVAN). She is the author of This Is All I Choose To Tell: History and Hybridity in Vietnamese American Literature (2011) and the co-editor of the award winning Troubling Borders: An Anthology of Art and Literature by Southeast Asian Women in the Diaspora (2014).
