The third and fourth countries - Page 2
From Griffith REVIEW Edition 6: Our Global Face
© Copyright Griffith University & the author.
Written by Catherine Cole
I FIRST WENT TO VIETNAM IN 1994. A FRIEND, WORKING WITH THE ABC in Beijing, had just been to Hanoi and told me I had to go. It was just like Paris, she had said. And it was to some extent – the French had done what colonisers do, building large imposing structures to awe the locals: administrative buildings, an opera house that deferred to Garniers in Paris. They built a concession in which the colonisers lived in fine houses in the style of France's north – or the villas of the south. They created an infrastructure to justify being there – colonisers who didn't want Vietnam as a settler colony like Algeria – but as a source of minerals and primary produce.
The American academic Michael Van writes extensively about the myths that surround a colony like Indochina. You still hear them at dinner parties: the French were much kinder, more sympathetic colonisers than the British; the French, being French, were much more tolerant of local customs; the French lived with the Vietnamese and respected their culture; the French intermarried and developed relationships with the local women – well, being French, they would, wouldn't they?
In Van's articles about the concession, the rat plague, in his explorations of the characters who appear in the literature of the day – the exoticised, sexualised, the villainous, perfidious locals, Van has proven these myths to be exaggerations at best.
VIETNAM'S RELATIONSHIP TODAY WITH HER FORMER COLONISER IS CORDIAL – as it is with her former enemies, America and her allies. While in Hanoi recently, interviewing French and Vietnamese people about Dien Bien Phu, I met the French novelist and psychoanalyst Francois Lelord, who believes that a new movement is taking shape in France, post postmodernism, Nostalgie. He argues that the French believe they are seeking something of themselves in their colonial past but their quest is really about life in France in the 1950s. In the '50s France still had her colonies, grateful children all of them. It was a kind of Jaques Tati place – uncomplicated but quirky – pre Algeria, Indochina, pre 1968 and the corruption of the '80s, certainly pre those pesky Muslim migrants who insist on wearing the veil.
I had previously had some startling conversations in Paris about this – the notion of "clean" migrants like the Vietnamese who honoured family, education, state, who despite Vietnam's independence, chose mother France as their new home. Contemporary Vietnam, I suspect, also seduces the French because it appeals to their aesthetic. Much of the debate that rages about the Muslim veil is about the secular state – what the French are reluctant to admit is that they are on a kind of search for the aesthetic; that strident Islam offends what they think should be French and how they think being French should sound and look. It was the same in the post-Dreyfus years when the immigrant Jews, particularly the left-wing Jews from Eastern Europe who congregated in the Marais, offended the French, making them easy targets for the fascists during World War II. And us? the migrant's child invariably asks. Arriving in our migrant ships from war-scarred Europe, how did we offend those who were already here and the Aboriginal people from whom they'd taken the place?
If you look at Hanoi from a certain angle it still looks French – or Frenchly Vietnamese. And the Vietnamese seem happy to play along with the illusion.
The grand old colonial hotel, the Metropole, is leased by the French Accor chain. The female staff wear silk ai daos, as they do in most of Hanoi's upmarket hotels and tourist shops, but I hadn't noticed colonial attire creeping into Hanoi before this visit. The Metropole has dressed the waiters in the outdoor pool area in pith helmets and colonial shirts and long shorts. French tourists who buy pith helmets at Hanoi's tourist shops, eschewing the formerly popular green helmets of the Vietnamese nationalists, see the attire of the colonial administration reflected by their Vietnamese servants. My Hanoian friends look on with a kind of evil smirk. They have a particularly acute sense of the ironic.
As a Western woman in Hanoi, I can't claim nation as I have in Australia, can't blend as I could on my rambles through Paris. I am burdened by my identity, my affluence, my culture, my ability to recolonise through tourism and my writing. The "hallo, hallo, bong jour" of the passing cyclo driver haunts every step I take around the city. My only desire is to understand a country that has been invaded by the Chinese, Portugese, French, Japanese, Americans. And Australians. And I am privileged by being a writer in a country that prides itself on its passion for literature, and for having one of the oldest universities in the world – a temple dedicated to literature.
It's a strangely circuitous connection – Yorkshire, Sydney, Paris, Hanoi, all of it requiring a credentialling of identity, a new I am each time I'm asked my country of origin. By giving play to notions of family, of place, of self and identity in my writing, a fourth country has to be imagined. The French philosopher Renan posed the question more than a century ago: What is a nation? Colonised? Independent? Imagined?
I don't know. ♦