ABSTRACT

The Merriam-Webster Dictionary defines “displacement” as the act of being removed from the usual or original place or being forced to flee from homeland. The fall of Saigon to communists in 1975 resulted in the displacement of more than 1.6 million Vietnamese from their home country of Vietnam. Out of this group, more than 300,000 went to France. Linda Lê, one of the established voices of the contemporary French literary scene, came to France at the age of fourteen in 1977 with this wave of immigrants (1977–1987). Writers of Vietnamese origins such as Lê are bid by the French literary institution to write about their Vietnamese experience. This chapter argues that Linda Lê’s literary goal is to counter the will of the literary establishment to dictate the content for the writers. In her collection of essays Tu écriras sur le bonheur (1999), she advocates for a “displaced literature.” This signifies a literature that is not a romanticized reading of the experience of immigrants, but one that disorients and surprises the reader. This chapter examines Lê’s interpretation of displaced literature in her novels Calomnies (1993), Les Trois Parques (1997), and Héroïnes (2017).