Eurasian artist René Laubiès (a draft note)

In many ways a product of South-South trade, its culture exchanges, African-Asian capital flows including peripheral hybridizaiton (Verges 2003) at a time when steam ships ruled the sea.

"I'm Colonial French," Laubies explained. "I'm not French."

Yet Rene Laubies also was not exactly white, but a quite French-leaning Creole-Afro-Eurasiatic: the product of an overseas "Creole" French jurist and a Catholic Mandarin maman. He only "became" French, officially speaking, sometime in his teens on the eve of emigrating out of Asia, when a passport and other mandated documents had to be procured, his "master key to the Suez Canal," as Ezra Pound would later narrate. 

Coming of age he was leaving to study in France, which Morocco at the time then stood for. Another hot country. Someone may have been forced to even fib about his birth date. How else to account for repeated incongruity appearing in his later professional bio blurbs where date of birth is serially given as 1922 and 1924. For the record's sake, Rene's date of birth as entered into his final passport is February 27, 1922. We captured that image. 

Laubies was born in French Cochin China, a dethroned set of kingdoms bundled back together by diverse groups of neighbouring monarchic realms, Cambodia, Laos, Tonkin, Annam, plus a scrape of land that was leased from China. That is what comprised French Indochina, L'Indochine française, a monumental exercise in 'geographical handiwork' (cf. Fletcher 2003: 4:3). 

Cochin China was at once the economic while administrative centre of this noosed together peripheral sphere of "greater" (Oriental) France. Today that former entity has virtually dissolved in a modern constructed state called Vietnam. 

Even in his old age Laubies travelled with a picture of his mother. He showed it to me once while visiting his rooftop room at Bay View Hotel in Puri (1983).

"She was beautiful," he said. He handed me the photo. I looked at the small, rather aged exposure. 

"She looks very nice," I concurred before inquiring: "Was she Vietnamese?" He paused. 

"In part," he said, taking time to reflect. He gave the impression that he'd never really thought in those terms. 

Some days later he returned to this. "We didn't use the word Vietnamese back then, but Annamite, Indochinese or Cochin-chinoise. There were Malabar people there too," he explained. "The same as these people." We were living near each other at Varkala at the time. It must have been December 1986.

The usages, Vietnam and Vietnamese, were not widespread at the end of the century-long French colonial period. It was roughly from around 1948 that Annam and Annamese were officially supplanted by the modern expression Vietnamese, an historically constructed ethnonym for the majority Viet inhabitants of for the land and the name of their language, which gained immediate ascendancy (Proschan 2002: 614, n. 12).

References

Fletcher, Simpson. 2003. Review of, Vichy in the Tropics: Pétain's National Revolution in Madagascar, Guadeloupe, and Indochina, 1940-44, by Eric T. Jennings. Stanford University Press, 2001, in Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History, 4:3.

Proschan, Frank. 2002. "Syphilis, Opiomania, and Pederasty": Colonial Constructions of Vietnamese (and French) Social Diseases. Smithsonian Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage. (Oct.): 610-636.

Verges, Francoise. 2003. "Writing on Water: Peripheries, Flows, Capital, and Struggles in the Indian Ocean," in Positions: East Asia Cultures Critique - Volume 11, Number 1, (Spring): 241-257.