In “An Anonymous Elsewhere”: An Exploration of Identities in the Postcolonial Spaces of Kim Thúy’s Mãn

Abstract

“If you want to survive, get rid of your identity”. From then on, Mãn and her Maman came to a resolution. In this violent state, they “learned above all was how to become flexible, imperceptible, invisible even”. The event when these words were spoken, would come to mark a significant turn not just in the history of Vietnam but the legacy of the postcolonial state. Be it, the state of origin to the land of settlement, the militant surge by the Communist army to the Québécois under the perceptual threat to its French identity, the cities of Saigon and Montreal surrounding the spaces of the text, remain imperceptible well within their legacy of imperial centres and their evolution into metropolitans through modernity principles. What else keeps disappearing in the narrative, along with the identities, are the places and their sign of times. It is because the places and the times feared “the unknown and, even more, the known” in their forms of state-based conflict. Along with examining a scholarly turn in the space discourse, prudently brought by movement and scepticism of the place-identity, the tangents of spatial identities are explored. A ‘symbolic’ space forms, invisible and unaccounted for, as one’s sense of self resigns from the markers of time and place entrenched in instability and postcolonial violence. Kim Thúy’s Mãn, breaking away from an inherent sense of place, exists in spaces created and intendedly disassociated from the temporal and historical complexities of either her home or the host nation. However, identity is an occurrence weaving itself from the frayed fabric of state and sociality. The current study examines the turfs of postcolonial spaces and formation of identity in Kim Thúy’s Mãn, lending the nature of space, a look through the lenses of spatial socialisation, place-identity and the transnation.

Keywords: Space, Mobility, Migrant Identity, Quebecois Nationalism