Revisiting Vietnam, locating home in Kim Lefevre's Retour à la saison des pluies

The present study focuses on Kim Lefevre's sequel to Métisse Blanche (1989), Retour à la saison des pluies (1990). The text is centred around a diasporic migrant's 'travel project' to return to Vietnam. The sense of place as dwelling becomes an overpowering element in a narrative that renews the theme of continual geographical dislocations characterizing Kim Lefevre's childhood and adolescence in Vietnam. This paper explores the migrant writer's predicament of displacement/emplacement in terms of the complexities that weave together issues relating to gender, language, place and history. Retour à la saison des pluies, a self-consciously gendered narrative of return, demystifies the conventions that define 'home'. As a 'world author' writing in French, Kim Lefevre creates alternative paradigms that represent her geographical, linguistic and cultural displacements through creative and self-reflexive literary techniques.