Disenchanting the Return Home in Diasporic Writing

Anna Moï’s diary L’Année du Cochon de Feu ( The Year of the Fire Pig (2008)) opens with the diarist’s concerns of being evicted from her home in Ho Chi Minh City and tracks her search for a new one. This reading of Moï’s hitherto overlooked text focusses on the tensions between the diarist’s idealised home, which nourishes her literary writing, and her material struggles, resulting from the complex land laws in Vietnam. The ending seems to proclaim a turn to poetic imaginings as a means to escape the difficulties experienced throughout the diary. However, by drawing on infrastructuralist approaches, this chapter explores the ways in which The Year extends beyond the confines of its initial characterisation: rather than reinforcing the diarist’s desire to recede into the poetic space that feeds her sense of self, the text places such desires in contact with the material conditions under which a home is created. By engaging with the infrastructures that shape Ho Chi Minh City, and indeed with the possibilities of the autobiographical form of the diary itself, the text interrogates the limits of the diarist’s stance, suggesting a re-evaluation of relationships with home, as well as the forms through which it can be written.