Reflective nostalgia and collective memory in Fawaz Turki’s <i>Exile’s Return</i> and Andrew X. Pham’s <i>Catfish and Mandala</i>

This essay examines the performativity of nostalgia in reconstituting Pham’s and Turki’s collective memory. It challenges the pathological views of nostalgia, representing it as a productive sentiment, as an emotion that engages sweet and agonizing memories together to resolve the present estrangement of the returnee. Following Svetlana Boym’s “reflective nostalgia”, this essay mainly sets out to discuss Pham’s and Turki’s failure to reconnect with their roots after their return to Vietnam and Palestine respectively. The state of alienation that is born out of Turki’s and Pham’s inability to reattach with their roots provokes a recall of nostalgic and traumatic memories contemporaneously. This process of recollection generates new meanings of home and new visions of their future. This essay, additionally, discusses how “reflective nostalgia” helps Pham and Turki to write against the Israeli and American narrative of erasure. Following Evyn Lê Espiritu Gandhi’s and Sami Al-Arian’s visions on constituting global solidarity with the Palestinian liberation struggle, this essay further argues that the shared exilic features of reflective nostalgia, trouble belonging, and exilic memory suggest solidarity between Palestinian and Vietnamese exile authors, as in the case of Fawaz Turki and Andrew X. Pham.