In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

4 / Traitors and Translators: Reframing Trinh T. Minh-ha’s Surname Viet Given Name Nam and A Tale of Love As a Vietnamese woman declares in Trinh T. Minh-ha’s Surname Viet Given Name Nam, “heroism is monstrous.” In the film, she was speaking as part of a generation of Vietnamese women who live in postsocialist Việt Nam and for whom conditions have not changed much in the wake of national revolutions. If the opposite of heroism is treason, as Trinh’s film shows, then being a traitor is also monstrous. The dialectic of heroism and treason that traditionally characterizes Vietnamese womanhood underlies Trinh’s films on Vietnamese women. In these films, Vietnamese women in the homeland and diaspora commit acts of linguistic and cultural treason against community and nation, especially in their function as linguistic or cultural translators. Being both a female traitor and translator is a dynamic that plays out in Trinh’s work as well, whereby the woman translator (Trinh herself) performs as a traitor to the content and form of her own film and to the national family. In framing her texts along these nodes of analysis, I conflate the terms of traitor, translator, and collaborator in order to ask: Who is the traitor, and whom or what is she betraying? Parallel with Trinh’s critique of heteropatriarchal discourses in the homeland and the diaspora, in this chapter I give female collaborators—or those deemed by the powerful as traitors to the family and nation—a positive valence in order to cast the work of Vietnamese and Vietnamese diasporic cultural producers in a different light. Trinh has made two important films about Vietnamese women as they figure in the folds of the national family: Surname Viet Given Name Nam (1989) and A Tale of Love (2003). Expounding on the idea of traitors and translators / 123 feminine betrayal through acts of collaboration, Surname Viet exposes how translation and treason are tied to the female body, especially when placed against nationalist contexts. The first part of the film features women actors reenacting the personae of Vietnamese women. Later on, these same women speak of themselves in the first person, narrating their experiences as diasporic women situated in the United States. From the film’s beginning, Trinh betrays the notion of feminine authenticity by rendering incomprehensible the women’s heavily accented speeches; even though there are subtitles, they elucidate little about what the women are actually saying. Subtitles are a translational operation that typically tries to effect a “cultural affinity” between West and East, Self and Other. Trinh, however, problematizes the idea that translations and subtitles serve as “visualized speech,” rejecting how translation guarantees access to the female Other.1 While other critics look at Trinh’s Surname Viet as a theoretical exercise for the auteur, I reorient a critical gaze back onto the speech and bodies of the women in the film and contextualize how these women engage in not only acts of translation but also the performance of memory within and outside the film.2 For collaborative acts constitute the film’s spine. The text comes from a book of interviews called Vietnam: un peuple, des voix, collected in Vietnamese and translated into French by Mai Thu Vân. Some of the interviews were then translated into English by Trinh and reinterpreted by the Vietnamese American women actors in the film. These translations-upon-translations reference a colonial and imperial legacy in which some of the interviewees deliberately situate themselves. Through manifold acts of translation, the film posits that the “original text” does not bear originary meaning, nor does an originary bearer of meaning—the third world woman—affix it. In relation to film as translation, Rey Chow argues in a different context that Trinh’s film shows “a process of ‘literalness’ that displays the way the original itself was put together, that is, in its violence.”3 In the second half of the film especially, Trinh demonstrates the fragmented ways Vietnamese woman has been composed in nationalist discourse.4 The stories the immigrant women narrate point to the possibility of a feminist understanding of difference and the creation of alliances between women in Việt Nam and the diaspora. As film scholar Glen Mimura puts it, Surname Viet “illuminates the cultural circuits along which these stories have traveled and the marks that these displacements have inscribed on the original texts.”5 This chapter investigates further the displacement of meaning located in the “original” and...

Share