Frayed Ends: Refugee Memory and Bricolage Practices of Repair in Dionne Brand's What We All Long for and Kim Thúy's Ru

Abstract

This essay explores the ways Canadian novelists Kim Thúy and Dionne Brand offer creative routes to narrate Vietnamese refugee life as an experimental practice of adaptation and repair. The article proposes bricolage as a representational vehicle for capturing the complex, material conditions of Vietnamese journeys of resettlement in Canada. Brand and Thúy imagine bricolage as both a quotidian practice, grounded in the repurposing of cast-off materials, and a compositional process that fractures multicultural metanarratives and reframes refugee experience in North America as inescapably ambivalent. Through a theoretical and formal analysis of bricolage, and the fragmentation out of which it emerges, this article reflects on the limits of aestheticizing refugee experience and finally considers the novels' frayed endings as resistant to redemptive closure in their call to political action.