Drawing Histories, Documenting Experiences: Clément Baloup’s Vietnamese Memories

Abstract

ABSTRACT:This article discusses how Franco-Vietnamese artist Clement Baloup’s Vietnamese Memories Book 1: Leaving Saigon and Vietnamese Memories Book 2: Little Saigon offer a nuanced recollection of and reflection on the colonial history of Vietnam and its long-lasting impact on the Vietnamese diaspora in France and the United States. Different from well-known graphic memoirs of the Vietnamese diaspora, Baloup’s books present multiple and varied accounts rather than focusing on one single narrator and their family. Starting with the story of the artist’s father, the Vietnamese Memories books relate structurally and stylistically different episodes. This article examines how Baloup’s graphic narratives draw a collective memory of trauma and injustice without erasing each individual narrator’s unique experience; how they prompt the reader to contemplate the common threads connecting the multiple narrators whose stories are situated across different time periods; how the textual-visual narratives represent the intersection of personal memories of the Vietnamese diaspora and the sociopolitical history of Vietnam, France, and the United States; and how the added layer of a documenting and creative process—collecting and drawing immigrant survivors’ tales—further complicates the Vietnamese diasporic experience.