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Reconstructing a homeland: gender, gallicity and sense of place in colonial Vietnam
Anne-Marie Medcalf
Medcalf, Anne-Marie 2000, 'Reconstructing a homeland: gender, gallicity and sense of place in colonial Vietnam', in: Carolyn Brewer & Anne-Marie Medcalf eds, Researching the Fragments, Histories of Women in the Asian Context, New Day, Quezon City: 48-65.
Taking French colonial women in Vietnam from about 1865 to 1940 as a case study, this paper explores the ambiguous way colonial women have lived and constructed their experience of displacement and the various itineraries they have taken, either individually or as a cross-generational group, towards the physical and mental appropriation of the colonial environment and the construction of a hybrid, syncretized homeland. 1 Keeping in mind differences of class, generation, and location, the paper will concentrate both on first generation colonial women and on their daughters and granddaughters, born and bred in the colony.
A number of recent works have tackled the issue of the place and life of white women in the European colonies. In these texts, the structural ambiguity of colonial women's position, as dependent second-class citizens and as conquerors, has often been pointed out. 2 The idea that the arrival
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of women on the colonial scene heralded the "end of the Empire" because their assumed racism and jealousy towards indigenous women effectively put an end to racial integration" has also been counterargued at length. 3 At the same time, postcolonial writers have focused on displaced communities—in other words, on migration—diaspora, and exile, and, as a result, on cultural hybridity and sexual transgressions. 4 Finally, the alienation felt by European women in the colonial setting and their ambivalent and nostalgic perception of the colonized landscape have been analyzed in literary studies. As far as Indochina is concerned, the works of Louis Malleret in the 1930s and more recently of Patrick Laude 5 are representative of this direction. To date, the issue of colonial women as a specific category of migrants seems to have been bypassed. In addition, the study of what Young calls "the process of acculturation whereby groups are modified through intercultural exchanges and socialization with other groups," 6 needs addressing as far as colonial women are concerned.
Here I want to take the position that beyond the obvious fact of their migration to a land which is other, colonial women, form a specific type of diaspora for two reasons. Taking into account Vijay Mishra s extended definition of the term diaspora, these women are a "displaced community brought (to the colony) to serve the Empire," and they are "a group of migrants that sees itself on the periphery of power, or excluded from sharing power." What makes them a specific case and hence gives their voices both a hegemonic and a subversive tone, is that they are at the same time subalterns vis-a-vis male colonizers, and conquerors vis-a-vis the colonized nation. In the case of French women, their subaltern, second citizen status is exemplified, amongst other features, by the fact that they did not achieve suffrage until 1945. In the colonial context, therefore, they are, like the colonized, excluded from any decision-making in the public domain. In that sense and parallel to what Memmi explains about the colonized, these women are excluded from the political, sphere and confined by default to the domestic domain, however public their
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activities or profession. 8 Their country, nevertheless, is the conquering country and their male counterparts are the holders of public, political power. It was to this association that colonial women owed their own conquerors’ status, a status which assured that they derived substantial privileges and a modicum of power from being brought or attracted to the colony to serve the Empire, either directly or indirectly, through their husbands.
Through the exploration of this contradiction, both at the level of colonial women’s daily lives and in their relation to the Vietnamese environment, this paper offers a contribution to the analysis of the way women both partook of and undermined the colonial enterprise.
One of the questions I would like to address here is the nature of the cultural overlap that took place in the colonial space and which led this diasporic group to he seen as the guardians of an entrenched gallicity while eventually they felt foreign and even rejected in France, their home country. In other words, this is an exploration of what Robert Young calls “the mechanics of the intricate processes of cultural contact, intrusion, fusion and disjunction,” 9 and which could be said to constitute the daily road towards acculturation, a process which, I would argue, goes hand in hand with the acquisition of a sense of place.
The sources for this discussion are of three types. Firstly I draw on archival material from the French Colonial Archives housed in Aix en Provence. The series concerning requests for information on family members or would-be husbands for free passage to or from the colony or for financial assistance or positions, provided a wealth of information on the early period, both as far as women in need and administration policies were concerned. 10 I also draw on literary sources: autobiographies, novels, and poems. Jeanne Leuba, one of the best colonial writers from Indochina who was writing in the early part of the century, represents the first generation. Marguerite Duras and her well-known Indochinese novels mainly represents the second generation. 11 Finally and for the later
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period, I call on the memories of the ex-colonial women I interviewed in France or with whom I have corresponded since 1992.
In the first of the three parts comprising this paper, I look at the place afforded French women hy the colonial government before the 1920s and argue that it was similar to that reserved for unwanted migrants. In the second part, I discuss the experience and ambivalent perceptions that first-generation colonial women had of the Vietnamese environment, roughly within the same period. In the third and final part, I analyze the factors which made quasi-inevitable the construction of a syncretized homeland in the colonial space and the consequences this had for further generations of colonial women.
Not Their Place?
To acquire a sense of place and form any relationship with the colonial environment, one had first to get there and he allowed to find a niche.
Compared to other European colonies in Southeast Asia, the evidence concerning colonial women in Vietnam, if not for the rest of Indochina (that is, Laos and Cambodia) seems at first favorable, at least in terms of government rhetoric and early numbers. As early as 1865, for instance, Admiral de la Grandiere, head of the new colony, brou gkt his wife and children to Saigon. There is no doubt that he did this for personal reasons; however, he also did this to hold her up as the focus of social events which were felt to he much needed. Perhaps more importantly, Madame de la Grandiere was to be the symbol of the commitment of the admiral to the future of the colony, a future which had been quite uncertain until then. Both Jean Bouchot, the early historian of Saigon, and Paulin Vial, head of the colony’s Department for Internal Affairs at that time, insisted on the political aspect of her presence in Saigon. "The Admiral de la Grandiere,” wrote Bouchot, "had weighed the importance of the presence of such a superior woman as Mme de la Grandiere on the development
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of the colony" According to Vial: “Her presence was another testimony to the boundless dedication which M. de la Grandiere brought to his task." 12 In the same vein, Paul Bert, the first civil governor-general of Indochina, declared in 1897: "I would like all civil servants who come to Indochina to arrive with their families. I would invite those who come as bachelor to marry, I would like to he a witness at their wedding, and I will endeavor to he their children's grandfather." 13
And indeed, women had started arriving in Indochina quite early in the piece. Those who went to Indochina were the wives of civil servants and traders, but there were also nuns, seamstresses, chambermaids, primary school teachers, shopkeepers in their own right, adventurers and prostitutes. The first marriage celebrated in Cochinchina took place in 1863, five years after the fall of Saigon and by 1865, although families were still few, it was possible to form square dances at the governor's functions. 14 There were 80 European women in Cochinchina, the only colonized part of Indochina at the time. As such, they constituted a little more than 7 percent of the total European population of 577 people in Cochinchina. By 1886, women formed about 15 percent of Cochinchina's very small French population (under 3,000 people), soldiers not included. By 1937 they represented about 40 percent of the 32,000-strong French population of Cochinchina, Annam, and Tonkin. 15
The figures, however, do not compare favorably with those of other colonies in Southeast Asia, such as the East Indies or British Malaya. 16 To apply Ann Stoler's argument to the French case, there was, in fact, quite a discrepancy between government rhetoric and the realities of a situation in which, French colonial women in Vietnam were first “pitted . . . against policy makers in the metropole (before being pitted) against the colonized." 17 In other words, the welcome afforded women in the colonial context was, to a large extent, dependent on government policies and on the dominant ideology and interests of the periods considered.
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Men s position, of course, depended also on these factors, but their place in the colonies went without saying. 18
In fact, for numerous French women, in the early period, the colony was an alien place to which they were only grudgingly given access and which seemed to be swallowing their husbands and their sons. The administration's answers to requests concerning financial help, professional positions, or free passages to or from the colony, make the restrictive policies concerning women very clear. Interestingly, these policies were strikingly akin to the immigration policies of contemporary Western countries. Indeed, they prioritized family reunion to a limited extent, wealth, connections, high rank, and specific types of skills. In addition, they also protected the interests of the women already in the colonies, especially widows and daughters of civil servants and military officers. 19
For instance, women's job applications originating from France were at first rarely accepted and those that were accepted were in very few professional areas. In 1897 a draft letter from the governor-general's cabinet stated that besides primary school teachers and overseers at the opium factory, positions reserved for widows and daughters of the colony's civil servants, there were no positions for women in Indochina and no provisions for their immigration. It is interesting to note that any mention of the opium factory disappeared in the final draft.
That women already in the colony did fare better was especially true of widows and daughters of civil servants and military officers for whom there was the feeling that they were owed a place. As a result, besides the positions already mentioned, tobacco shop concessions and post office positions were largely their domain. But even this, as archival correspondence indicates, was perceived hy the colonial powers as a burden, notwithstanding the lower salary and lower positions which women characteristically suffered in the workforce. Indeed, on the whole, the government far preferred repatriating the families of deceased civil servants than tackling their problems. 21
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The Vietnamese Environment and the First Generation
Government policies on the whole were not conducive to the development of the feeling of belonging which is so necessary to a successful settlement in a new country. Once there, experiences of the Vietnamese environment afforded to first generation women were both diverse and restricted. They varied according to the women's place of residence, their occupation, their socioeconomic level, and the times of their arrival. Wealth or life in gallicized cities made it easier to shelter women from the realities of the environment, but poverty or isolation in the bush exacerbated the difficulties. This was especially so in the early period when very few European landmarks were built, little Western comfort was available, and women were geographically more restricted to the cities than men. In 1886, for instance, of the 70 adult women residing in the Tonkin region, compared with 530 men, only nine resided outside Hanoi and Haiphong. 22
Socially, women s space was confined to the domestic domain and the caring places where they worked voluntarily or for a salary in city homes, plantation homesteads, European compounds on mining sites, French hospitals or schools, and related places such as tennis courts, clubs, and brothels. Even though some women worked outside the home, second generation informants often gave the impression that "mother stayed at home." In this case, some comment close to an apology would be made, such as the fact that Mother had to work because of dire circumstances or that it was really a hobby. 23 Because of the colonial constraints which segregated many women from the country and its inhabitants, confinement to the domestic domain was greater than in Europe during the same period. As Stoler points out, this was partly to the obsession with protecting European women from sexual encounters with the colonized and partly because their main role was to assure the physical well-being of the male colonizers. 24 In addition, the strong compartmentalization of French society in the colony did not make for
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exchanges of experiences between French women from different social classes or even different occupational backgrounds.
Finally, within the domestic domain itself, women were also considerably restricted as far as their demeanor, domestic arrangements, code of dress, and behavior were concerned, as this was seen as part and parcel of the French mission civilisatrice. Even for Claudine Chivas-Barron, a French militant feminist of the 1930s and long-time colonial: "More than any other, the colonial woman must maintain dignity in her behavior. The way she conducts her life is being watched. Those who watch her are on the path of education or the civilized from a very old civilization . . . the French woman is the representative of the newly-imposed civilization." 25 In that sense, indeed, the private domain was a very public one, a point on which I will elaborate further.
In spite of their different circumstances, colonial women experienced feelings of discomfort, danger, and alienation that were often similar and only partially offset by their marvelling at the beauty of the environment or their sense of colonial superiority. This was perhaps best summarized in 1913 by Jeanne Leuba who, because she often followed her husband the archaeologist Henri Parmentier, had a less restricted experience than most:
I would like [she wrote] people to even dimly perceive a little of this existence which is ours, a little of this country where we experience—where we suffer—the voluntary exile in which we spend our young, our strong years, struggling against the spleen, the heat, physical illnesses, nervous states, misunderstandings and hostility from nature and people alike. 26
The discomforts and dangers they experienced are well-documented and indeed shared by most early colonial women, whatever the colony. They pertain to the climate, the floods, the mud, the insects, the rats, the fear of wild animals, the modes of transportations, the isolation, the
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diseases. This dis-ease also pertained to the Vietnamese mode of adaptation to the environment which was so different from these women s taste or criteria for comfort, health or safety. As a result they transferred their fears of the Vietnamese way of life onto the Vietnamese people themselves, especially servants—and this before any sense of political danger that the Vietnamese might represent. Vietnamese women had the added problem of being seen by some colonial women as potential rivals as far as colonial men were concerned.
Indeed these were very real and often painful experiences. On a day-to-day basis, women had to contend not only with the heat and humidity but also the everpresent insects, scorpions, and rats invading food, clothes or books, not counting the vegetation which invaded their houses, hiding snakes in its wake. “For the first weeks,” wrote Gabrielle Vassal, the wife of an Institut Pasteur doctor in 1913, “the troubles caused by cockroaches, ants, mosquitoes, and other nasty insects were such a discomfort that we preoccupied ourselves with nothing else.” 27
On a more painful note, women also had to defend their plantations against the elements. For instance, in 1927, the wife of a planter in Tongking wrote to Albert Sarrault, then governor of Indochina, “The profession of planter has its hazards and they particularly befell us last year when we were victims of a dramatic epidemic of bovine plague and of floods which were as serious as those of 1913 when I had the honor of meeting you.” 28 Sometimes, in colonizer fashion, they also attempted to play god with an environment that they didn't understand. The very real example of the wall that Marguerite Duras' widowed mother tried to build against the sea which flooded her land year after year is well-documented. 29 Diseases were rife. The tombstone of a nun who died in 1887 testifies that in 25 years of service in Cochinchina she went through 15 cholera, 22 typhoid, and 9 smallpox epidemics. 30 This was not to mention infant deaths which left women with terrible feelings of guilt. “The hospital was too far and the road too hard,” one informant said, but her mother always
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thought she might have set out earlier and saved her child from a raging dysentery. 31 The isolation women and their families often experienced finally compounded problems with which they sometimes had to cope on their own.
The general feeling was of an environment which, like government policies, was not made for them and which rejected them. As a result, perceptions and descriptions of the environment are overwhelmingly linked to issues of safety and physical, mental, and spiritual health. In Jeanne Leuba's writings, the climate is seen as a vampire robbing people of their energy and souls and women of their beauty, while landscapes, beautiful as they are, are seen as potential killers. In 1909, for instance, she wrote about, “the deadly sun which cannot touch my face without numbing it with fever . . . the water heavy and unhealthy, carrying mortal germs within [it] . . . the air which, if I step out, will . . . crush me with its dampness . . . suffocate me, my veins swollen and my lungs out of breath.” 32
These perceptions were not widely different to those of men. This is, I believe, not only because their daily experiences of the landscape were in some ways similar, albeit seen from a different, more domestic angle, but also because they partook of the same Eurocentric, orientalist, and progressivist perspective from which what was French and technologically advanced came first in their mental hierarchy of space. 33 On a more spiritual level the Vietnamese landscape had no meaning for the French women and men as they did not partake of the myths and history which gave meaning to it for the Vietnamese. Their myths were not only different, they were related to other landscapes. This had several consequences. First, it led to descriptions constructed around binary oppositions where the Vietnamese landscape was seen as brutal, excessive and weakening both body and soul. This perception was easily transferred to the Vietnamese themselves, who were seen as inferior, childlike, or even animal-like. The French landscape, on the contrary, was remembered seen as
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soft, harmonious, and replenishing. 34 In this perspective, what was similar to home was best and so they identified with the cooler weather and the drizzle which fell on North Vietnam three months of the year. When French landmarks of political, cultural, and military control began hybridizing the landscape with stone buildings, iron bridges, and French gardens, this also led to a denial of the Vietnamese part of this landscape. In that context, what really existed was what looked like a “French village.” An informant, to give one example, could only remember the jail, the church, and the resident s house when describing the town closest to her father’s plantation. 33
Secondly and in the same vein, in literature the Indochinese landscape and its inhabitants were not seen as situated in the here and now. Because it seemed impenetrable and incomprehensible, the landscape was seen either as a primeval world which Jeanne Leuba describes in one of her poems as being placed at the time of “the mornings of the world, when the virgin skies and the flowing clay/awaited . . . the human kingdom,” 36 or as a magical, unworldly place. 37 Seeing the landscape as a primeval world rejected the colonial space into an unknown past; it also erased any trace of its inhabitants, making it in effect, conqueror fashion, a terra nullius. In the second case, seeing the landscape as magical and unworldly mentally transformed it into a spiritual and powerful space, but this spirituality was perceived as a dangerous one to get in touch with. It was seen as destructive and sinful in very sexual terms. As Jeanne Leuba writes:
We are wounded by our love for this country . . .
Like a man enslaved by a perverted woman . . .
No we are not seduced, we are intoxicated. 38
In this context, France was seen as worthy of a pure and strong love while any passion for Indochina was seen as morbid, rather sinful and the result of excitable nerves."
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Constructing a Hybrid Homeland
Colonial women were denied a full place by colonial authorities. As a consequence they felt alienated, in very Eurocentric terms, from the Vietnamese landscape and from the Vietnamese themselves. In this they were like other migrants. Unlike migrants, however, they did not have to he assimilated or even integrated into a dominant culture. On the contrary, they were the colonizers; they were part of the dominant culture and therefore their task was to bring the colonized, who had become internal exiles, to adjust to French ways. As far as the women were concerned, their role was to establish a comfortable, safe and, above all, French home.
This home, as a reality or a symbol, defined and exemplified the colonial space in the eye of the colonized and established the boundaries of this space for both colonized and colonizers, thus also defining what constituted transgression, through social and behavioral codes (sexual transgressions, of course, were high on the list). In this sense, home was not only a public space as mentioned earlier, but a very political one, guarding the “interior frontier” which Ann Stoler, following Fichte, talks about. 46
Thus women set out to recreate the trappings of the French homeland, where French was best, through housing which at first sight looked like European cottages with rose gardens, imported French food, wine, and modern comforts. For safety, houses were built far away from swamps or Vietnamese houses; the wealthier the people, the more distance they put between themselves and the perceived dangers. Stringent cleaning rules kept the house free from insects and potential diseases. Servants were taught French hygiene and French cuisine, and neighborhood bachelors were brought to what was called the daily or the Sunday popote, to the family table. This gave them a taste of home but also kept them culturally - if not sexually - free from contamination through, as one informant suggested, “osmosis with the Vietnamese people.” This informant made it clear that the people in question were in fact Vietnamese women. 41
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Although women kept as much as possible what Stoler calls the inappropriate dress, food and other markers of European culture, 43 the constraints of the environment meant that in the process of creating a safe and comfortable environment, they had to forsake Frenchness, at least to some extent. In this regard papaya was used for mock chestnut puree on Christmas Eve rather than go without. 43 The bitterly criticized ditches established by the gardener which made the garden look like a rice paddy, were kept because they retained the water in the dry season and stopped the soil from running in the wet. 44 The requirements for a clean house made for a bare home devoid of clutter tapestries or carpets, very unlike a European home, especially with the addition of verandahs, glassless windows or Vietnamese or Chinese furniture creeping in in spite of stringent recommendations made in local magazines. 43 Thus while the colonial architecture and public works gallicized the Vietnamese landscape, the Vietnamese environment also modified the homebase of colonialism. Syncretization effectively started with the appropriation of space.
This practical form of syncretization was accompanied, more often than not, by an emotional shift which made both women and men write of the colony as their second homeland while feeling homesick wherever they were. After a long stay, indeed, their sense of belonging had been altered and their place was somewhere in the "imaginary homeland” that Rushdie writes about. 46 This is well described in Marguerite Duras’ work and while her sense of the landscape "creeping under her skin” are described with guilt in Jeanne Leuba’s early writings, she seems to give in quite freely to an acquired sense of place in her later works. 47
Whatever their feelings, as a norm, first-generation women kept on the French side of the French/non-French dichotomy. With the second generation, the picture started going awry. For this generation, the Vietnamese landscape was that of their first and ordinary perceptions, only partially mediated by the idea of France. Indeed, French children were brought up in the approximate translation of French homeland created
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by their parents 48 and educated in French schools. They officially ate at their parents table, wore French clothes and listened to European fairy tales. Even poor white families had Vietnamese servants and, in the wealthiest families, private Vietnamese tutors, generally women, were not rare. 48 These, especially nannies (Thi-Hai), actively communicated to their charges the tastes, codes of behavior, and beliefs which, on the whole, conflicted with those of their parents. This cultural system the children nevertheless absorbed often fit better with the perception they had of their surroundings. They heard, for instance, of myths full of good and had spirits who resided in a landscape they could recognize. 80 Summarizing it all, an informant recalled, "My Thi-Hai used to drag me under the banyan tree, where the monk gave his Buddhist teachings. From a very early age, I bathed in this tradition. When my mother took me to church, my thi-hai would take me under the banyan tree so the monk could clean me from all that rubbish." 51
Whether living in remote areas or small towns far from other French children, or in the cities when they lived emotionally close to the servants, children tended to play with Vietnamese children. In extreme cases children would have had contact only with these and with their own siblings until they were sent to school in the city. As a result, some informants said they spoke better Vietnamese than French until they were forced to speak it exclusively at high school which, they report, was an enormous trauma, the first of many to come.
For many second-generation women, the consequences of this mixed upbringing, was a relationship with nature and the Vietnamese adaptation to the landscape which, nourished as it was with local myths and childhood experiences, was one of trust devoid of the sense of danger and constraint their mothers had experienced. They ate Vietnamese food before coming to their parents' table, went barefoot and in underwear, had snakes and monkeys for pets, and often reported walking alone in the forest. Marguerite Diuras recounts that just for fun or more usefully in times of
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hardship, brothers and sisters alike, like Vietnamese children, would catch, sell or bring home lizards and fish to supplement the daily food. 52 More than that, though, there was a sense of daredevil attitude to danger. This is best exemplified by one woman’s habit of experiencing typhoons on the beach with her brother to the panic of their thi-hai but to their intense feeling of exhilaration. Another example is that of a young woman creeping into a Japanese occupied house diuing the war to steal an axe for chopping wood. It seems to me that this attitude, neither particularly French nor Vietnamese reflects not only childhood or teenage attitude to danger, hut also the violent atmosphere which pervaded the colony from the 1930s onwards and the development of survival skills based on an integrated knowledge of both cultures. 53
Whatever their present political stance in relation to the colonial enterprise, second-generation women tell of a feeling of strangeness at the idea of France. Others, and I quote one of them, “certainly did not feel French, if not Vietnamese.” 34 In many ways they had transgressed the boundaries established by the colonizer. The last transgression was a physical crossover, of which sexual transgression was only one manifestation. Young women bom in Vietnam or brought there at an early age felt “physiologically” 33 part of the country; some were ashamed of their white skin and prided themselves that they did not smell like Europeans because they ate Vietnamese food.
Interviews and autobiographical novels echo Marguerite Duras' The Lover, where she writes that her heroine’s sexual relationship with her Chinese lover, along with “the climate, the food, the rain water she washes with, the loose cotton and silk clothes she wears have fashioned her figure, her hair and her skin to the point that for him, she has become a young woman of this country, Indochina.” 36 In other words, there seems to be a shift in these women's perception of their own bodies. I would argue that this shift, shows not only the desire to emulate the other but also a deep identification with the country itself. This is seen in a reversal of the
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process of mimicry described by Homi Bhabha and thus to become both object and subject of what Young calls “colonial desire” and Said calls “exotic sexual promise.”
The colonial establishment saw and warned against the danger of such transgression. Indeed, a 1934 legal paper asserted that mixed marriages “put in question the very colonial policy of the civilizing state.” Writings deploring the uncouth behavior and loose demeanor of colonial young women were rife and novels telling of marriages with Vietnamese or Chinese men always ended badly, 57 Duras’ story included. The colonial administration, moreover, penalized incomplete Frenchness by prescribing the exclusive use of French in high schools, or in some cases by making it difficult for those who did not speak good enough French to attend vocational training in France.
In conclusion, as far as their experience, perceptions and effect upon the colonial environment were concerned, women in fact partook of three tightly interrelated sets of relationships, their situation is a complex one. As migrants, they had been displaced from a safe homeland/nation space/center of the Empire to the unsafe and foreign space of the Empire’s edge. They found themselves in an environment which was incompatible “with the space of their first perceptions” 58 and their ordinary experience; these had no place in their symbolic geography. As a result they were alienated and placeless. The path towards a new sense of place and a mental appropriation of space depends upon the internalization of the colonial environment and its inhabitants into their own symbolic landscape. In other words, it necessitates the construction of new place of identification, of a hybrid site which Homi Bhabha calls “the third space." For Bhabha, it is important to note that “this third space displaces the histories that constitute it and sets up new structures of authority, [and] new political initiatives.”60
As subalterns and colonizers, however, women were meant to serve the Empire in a very specific way, pertaining both to the domestic and the
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public domain. As a result, their effect on the environment was a double—and sometimes politically contradictory—process of appropriation. On one hand, indeed, it is this personal, mental and psychological process “by which,” as Jenny de Reuck points out, “that which is external is transformed into that which is internal.”61 On the other hand, their unspoken brief was not to adjust to a new land and thus create a hybrid space, but to recreate the domestic center of the Empire. In this sense they were involved in the expansion of the colonial frontier where the external had no place.Their relation to the environment thus became a political one, open to the public eye, whatever that of the colonized or the colonizer. For their children, the story is different as their sense of the colonial environment is a primary one, albeit grounded on the practices and ideas of exile.
To a large extent, colonial women did share the same dominant discourse on the environment as men. The specific contradictions experienced by first-generation colonial women, as well as the syncreticism which to various degrees characterized their daughters’ relation to the environment, marginalized them but also empowered them within, a third, no longer French, space. This space threatened the boundaries erected by the colonial establishment between colonized and colonizers.
Notes
1 Although I still use the term hybridity, in Homi Bhabha's sense of the term (that is, in so far as it represents an alternative place of identification), I also take on board Robert Young's remark to the effect that “[t]oday, therefore in reinvoking this concept, we are reutilizing the vocabulary of the extreme right as much as the notion of an organic process of the grafting of diversity into singularity.” Therefore I prefer to use the term syncretic rather than hybrid for two reasons. Firstly, syncretization situates this paper within the body of historical literature which revolves around the idea of the syncretic character of Southeast Asian cultures. Secondly, I believe that in the case I present, we do not witness the grafting of diversity into singularity but into a different plurality. See Homi Bhabha, “The Third Space, Interview with Homi Bhabha,” in Identity: Community Culture, Difference (London: Laurence and Wiseheart, 1990), 211; Robert Young, Colonial Desire, Hybridity in Theory, Culture and Race (London and New York: Routledge, 1995), 10; and Chris Berry, A Bit of the Side: East-West Topography of Desire (Sydney: Empress Pub., 1992), 55.
2 See Yvonne Knibielher and Régine Goutalier, La Femme au Temps des Colonies (Paris: Stock, 1985); Ann Stoler, "Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power; Gender, Race and Morality in Colonial Asia,” in Gender at the Crossroads of Knowledge, Feminist Anthropology in the Postmodern Era, ed., di Leonardo (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991), 55; and Sara Mills, Discourses of Difference: An Analysis of Women Travel Writing and Colonialism (London: Routledge, 1991).
3 On this, see Claudia Kapman, White Women in Fiji: The End of the Empire? (Sydney, Allen and Unwin, 1986); Helen Callaway, Gender, Culture, Empire: European Women in Colonial Nigeria (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1991); Margaret Strobel, European Women and the Second British Empire (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991), chapter 1; Ann Stolen “Rethinking Colonial Categories: European Communities and the Boundaries of Rule,” in Colonialism and Culture, ed. Dirks (Michigan: University, 1992), 331-334.
4 To cite but a few, see Bhabha, “The Third Space”; Salman Rushdie, Imaginary Homelands (London: Penguin Books, 1991), 1-21; Smadar Lavie, "Blow up in the Borderzones, Third World Israeli Authors Gropings for Home,” in Hybridity, special issue of New Formations, 18 (1992): 107-21; Vijay Mishra, “ Introduction,” Diaspora, special issue of SPAN, ed. Mishra (1992-1993): 1; and Young, Colonial Desire, especially chapter 1.
5 Louis Malleret, L’exotisme Indochinois dans la littérature Française depuis 1960 (Paris: Larose Editeurs, 1934), chapter 5; Patrick Laude, Exotisme Indochinois et Poésie (Paris: Editions Sudestasie, 1990).
6 Young, Colonial Desire, 4.
7 Mishra, “Introduction,” 1.
8 Albert Memmi, The Colonized and the Colonizer (New York: The Orion Press, 1965), 92 ff.
9 Young, Colonial Desire, 5.
10 Archives d'Outre-Mer; Aix en Provence, Fonds Indochinois des séries géographiques, Ancien et Nouveau Fonds.
11 Marguerite Duras, Barrage contre le Pacifique (Paris: Gallimard, 1950); L'Amant (Paris: les Editions de Minuit, 1984); L'Amant de la Chine du Nord (Paris: Gallimard, 1991).
12 Jean Bouchot, La Naissance et Les Premières Années de Saigon, ville Française (B.S.E.I., 1927), 123.
13 Clotilde Chivas-Barron, La Femme Française aux Colonies (Paris: Editions Larose, 1929), 102.
14 Ibid., 88-89.
15 See Bouchot, La Naissance, 122-123; Charles Robequain, The Economic Development of French Indochina (London, New York: Oxford University Press, 1940), 21 ff. We must keep in mind, however, the fact that the category French is a legal rather than ethnic category and was defined, in the colonial context, according to shifting criteria.
16 Stoler “Rethinking Colonial Categories,” 344. Note 21 mentions that “the number of European women in the Dutch East Indies rose from 18.7 to 40.6 percent of the total European population between 1905 and 1915. For British Malaya, John Butcher, The British in Malaya, 1880-1941 (Kuala Lumpur: Oxford University Press, 1979), 209, gives the figures: 37 percent of British women in 1891, 40 percent in 1911 and 56 percent in 1931.”
17 Stoler, “Rethinking Colonial Categories,” 321.
18 For the women I interviewed in 1992, the fact is perhaps best illustrated by the treatment they got—or rather did not get—from the French authorities at the time of the Japanese coup in September 1945. Informants testify to an experience of total abandonment, their repatriation practically not organized, while those in the bush were told at best, to “put the key under the door and leave." (Interview notes, Aix en Provence, 15.7.1992) Their most bitter complaint, though, is that their trials, comparable to those of Brit ish or Dutch women in Burma or Indonesia, have not been acknowledged to this day as if they had not even been there. Ibid: Interview Tape, Paris, 26.7.1992.
19 See especially, Archives d'Outre Mer, Series Géographiques, Ancien Fonds series G 70; I 40; I 60; J; Y; and Fonds du Gouvernement Général, 7663.
20 Archives d Outre-Mer, Fonds du Gouvernement Général, 7663.
21 Series Géographique as per note 19. For a discussion of this topic and a comprehensive bibliography, see Stoler, "Carnal Knowledge," 70-71.
22 Archives d’Outre Mer, Series Géographiques, G 01 (6).
23 Interview Tapes, Paris, 27.7.1992, 26.1.1993, 6.7.1995 (2).
24 Stoler, "Rethinking Colonial Categories," 322.
25 Chivas-Barron, La Femme Française aux Colonies, 121.
26 Jeanne Leuba, La Tristesse du Soleil, Paris, 36; Also quoted in Malleret, L'Exotisme Indochinois, 130.
27 Gabrielle Vassal, Mes Trois ans d’Annam (Paris: Librairie Hachette et Cie, 1912), 33.
28 Series Géographiques, Nouveau Fonds, carton 15, dossier 142, (29).
29 This is indeed one of the main themes of Barrage contre le Pacifique, L'Amant, and L'Amant de la Chine du Nord. On this see also Anne-Marie Cattan Medcalf, “Blurring the Boundaries, the Sense of Time and Space in Marguerite Duras' L'Amant," SPAN (October, 1992): 223-224.
30 Chivas-Barron, La Femme Frangaise aux Colonies, 92.
31 Interview notes, Aix en Provence, 15.6.1992, Paris, 26.7.1992.
32 Jeanne Leuba, La Revue Indochinoise, 1909, 494.
33 About the concept of hierarchy of space, see Michel Foucault, "Of Other Spaces/ Diacritics (Spring, 1986): 22-27.
34 See Patrick Laude, Exotisme Indochinois et poésie; étude sur I’oeuvre politique d'Alfred Droin, Jeanne Leuba et Albert de Pourvouville (Paris: Sudestasie, 1990), 147.
35 Interviews, Paris, 26.1.1993; 28.7.1992.
36 From La Tristesse du soleil, 158, quoted in Laude, Exotisme Indochinois et poésie, 162.
37 See for instance, Leuba, La Revue Indochinoise, 494.
38 Jeanne Leuba in Malleret, L'Exotisme Indochinois, 138.
39 Ibid.
40 Ann Laura Stoler, "Sexual Affronts and Racial Frontiers: European identities and the Cultural Politics of Exclusion in Colonial Southeast Asia," in Frederick Cooper and Ann Laura Stoler, eds, Tensions of Empire: Colonial Cultures in a Bourgeois World. In her chapter, Ann Stoler illustrates Fichte's concept of interior frontier in the colonial context of the West Indies and Indochina. For Fichte, she explains, an interior frontier entails two dilemmas: the purity of the community is prone to penetration on its interior and exterior borders, and the essence of the community is an intangible "moral attitude,' "a multiplicity of invisible ties" (Stoler, "Sexual Affronts and Racial Frontiers," 199).
41 Interview Tape, Paris, 27.7.1992, (1).
42 Stoler, "Rethinking Colonial Boundaries," 334.
43 Chivas-Barron, La Femme Française aux Colonies, 118.
44 Vassal, Mes Trois ans dAnnam, chapter 4.
40 Cliivas-Barron, La Femme Française aux Colonies, citing Groslier; 123.
46 Rushdie, Imaginary Homelands.
47 See for instance Duras, L'Amant, 26; this is also well shown through the character of the mother. As far as Jeanne Leuba is concerned this evolution is well shown in the examples quoted in Malleret, L'Exotisme Indochinois.
48 On the idea of approximate translation of European society in the colonies, see Stoler, "Rethinking Colonial Categories," 321.
49 Interview Tape, Paris, 26.1.1993.
50 Interview Notes, Paris, 26.7.1992, 12.7.1995.
51 Interview Tape, Paris, 27.7.1992, (2).
52 Duras, L'Amant, 13. (des petits caimans).
53 Information for this section relies mainly on interviews, especially Tapes, Paris, 27.7.1992 (2), 28.7.1992 (1), 26.1.1993,12.7.1995; notes, 26.7.1992.
54 Interview Tape, Paris, 27.7.1992, (2).
55 Ibid.
56 Medcalf, "Blurring the Boundaries,” 227; Duras, L'Amant, 120; see also Suzanne Prou, La Petite Tonkinoise (Paris: Cahnann-Levy, 1987), 171; Interviews, especially Tape, Paris, 27.7.1992 (2) and 12.7.1995.
57 See Malleret, L'Exotisme Indochinois, 175-179 for a list of such novels. On the topic of interracial marriages and métis children in Indochina, see Stoler, ”Sexual Affronts and Racial Frontiers,” 198-237.
58 Foucault, "Of Other Spaces,” 25.
59 Bhabha, "The Third Space."
60 Bhahha, "The Third Space,” 211.
61 Jenny de Reuck, “Women on the Frontiers: Self Representations of the Conqueror", unpublished paper, Murdoch University, 1993, 8.
62 Ibid.
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