This article examines Michel Ragon's Ma sœur aux yeux d’Asie (1982) to retrace the identity of his métisse , Franco-Cambodian half-sister, Odette Ragon, who occupies a central yet precarious place in the narrative. Drawing on interviews, notably with the author's wife Françoise Ragon, this study shows how Ragon's autofiction constructs largely fabricated versions of his father, his father's experiences in colonial Indochina, and his half-sister, whose voice is ventriloquized by the author-narrator. While the novel appears to grant Odette narrative visibility, it ultimately fails to render her as a decolonial subject, reinscribing the Orientalist and patriarchal dynamics it ostensibly critiques. To address this limitation, this article assembles a photographic counter-archive by reproducing previously unpublished images of Odette. These photographs both intersect with and exceed the novel's narrativized representations, restoring a material continuity to her life while exposing the limits of its fictional framework. By juxtaposing Odette's visual trace with her mediated narrative, this article invites readers to reimagine her as a historical subject beyond the representational confines of autofiction.
Benjamin Hiramatsu Ireland (Tue,) studied this question.