2 October 2000
Cherise Fong

She arrived in France at the age of fourteen, from Vietnam, on a boat, after the fall of Saigon. She crossed the border as a political refugee, seeking asylum with her mother and sisters in the colonial fatherland. Ten novels and twenty-three years later, she lives and writes alone as a literary refugee, seeking mental asylum in the cultural motherland of her adopted language. She was the "métèque écrivant en français" of her fifth novel'Calomnies', the "uppity little miss" of 'Slander' for whom "French has become her only language, her tool, her weapon. The weapon she uses against her family, against the Country," and who, in the impatience of youth and her quest for public identity scribbled three novels by the age of twenty-three, only to dismiss them six years later from her By The Same Author page ever since her sixth novel 'Les dits d'un idiot'.

Not surprisingly, 'Calomnies' is the only one of her works to be published internationally, in the United States, the Netherlands and Portugal. It is the one novel where she specifically exposes the irreversible distance between herself and the conspicuously unnamed Country, her own origin as an illegitimate child of the War, and the boot-licking envy of Madamère for the dominant European culture. Yet all her novels are precisely like the letters the young narrator writes to her mad uncle, full of "all the subtleties of the beautiful French language she [manipulates] like an apprentice murderer brandishing a kitchen knife." Ironically, her first foreign language translation, 'Slander', was published by the academic University of Nebraska Press in the "European Women Writers" series, as if this particular minority were most appropriate in introducing the author to America's notoriously militant identity politics.

In France and in Europe, she is no less a writer  part entière, and her recently completed trilogy - 'Voix', 'Lettre morte', 'Les aubes' - can be found on bookshop shelves under Littérature française. She is an author who has found a unique voice, a voice who seeks refuge in between the lines of language, a voice who sulks and screams, a voice who writes in French but speaks for itself.

In a collection of insights on world classics entitled with tongue-in-cheek'Tu écriras sur le bonheur' in 1999, Linda Lê ends her literary meanderings with a personal text more reflectively entitled "Littérature déplacée." She cultivates this displaced literature, not as the 'words of exile' to which they are so often patronisingly reduced, but as a literature which is literally misplaced, and finally awkwardly out of place, being neither here nor there, upsetting both. The words of the exiled author betray their origin and defy their host. The true voice of exile is nomadic, in perpetual search of a new language of expression, orphan to both cultural heritage and social authority.

...Which brings us back to the mad uncle locked up in Corrèze: "We are, she and I, wandering souls." Without roots and free to roam the world, the tumour of displacement lurks beneath the permanent mask of ethnic identity. I am not a banana. I am not second generation. "We are from Nowhere, she and I."

Linda Lê is published by Christian Bourgois