War, Gender, and Diaspora in Clément Baloup’s Memoires de Viet Kieu

As Nguyen (2016) and Margalit (2002) explained, forgetting and remembering imply making ethical choices about who, what, and how we remember a traumatic event as a local and global community. While recollecting a traumatic event, we must always ask ourselves who is creating the main narrative and for what purpose, what stories are sidelined in the process, the medium through which the stories are recollected, and the power imbalances of different groups that are remembering an event in the promotion of their own version of history. Hence, an ethical form of remembering should recognize the existence of multiple perspectives and sites of oppression in order to acknowledge the humanity and inhumanity of each faction. Even though this urge and ethical concern is shared by many Vietnamese artists, Baloup seems to push the argument further by including experiences outside the thick relations dictated by blood. Clément Baloup focuses on the portrayal of a collective experience more than on the (re)construction of the event from a personal perspective. In particular, this paper wishes to explore how Baloup recollects the experiences of Vietnamese women, often framing them through references to the Tale of Kieu.