Asiatic: IIUM Journal of English Language and Literature
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The Hong Kong Poetic Community: Ten Poets’ Experiences
Full text linkBecause publishing is by definition a public act of creativity, the development of a poetic or literary community is inextricably tied to the development of individual writers within the community. This article attempts to delineate the Hong Kong poetic community through an analysis of the experiences of ten poets who are participants in the Hong Kong community. They were interviewed by the author from 2009 to 2010 as part of a larger study on Asian poetry in English (Lam, 2014). Using extracts from a book on that study, this article addresses how the community has supported the poet's development, how they in turn have contributed to the growth of the community and their resultant sense of poetic community. Four of them came from English-speaking countries and one from the China mainland while the other five were born in Hong Kong. While not all the poets had their initial publications in Hong Kong, they have all benefitted from support from Hong Kong. And regardless of their provenance, they have all contributed to the growth of the community in various ways. In terms of their identification, a whole range of communities, from the local to the international or virtual, were reported. This is consistent with Hong Kong's position as an international city with a Chinese centre
1819: Isa Kamari on the Foundation of Singapore
Full text link1819 is the year of the British “founding of Singapore.†Early in that year Sir Stamford Raffles signed a preliminary treaty with the Temenggung of Johor permitting the British to set up a trading post on the island (Turnbull 1). By 1824, the request for a trading post had grown into a treaty through which the British claimed control over the whole of Singapore. 1819 is also the title of the English translation of the novel by the major Singapore Malay writer Isa Kamari on that same series of events (Malay: Duka Tuan Bertakhta, Sadly You Rule, 2011). In that book, Raffles, the Temenggung and the newly-installed Sultan Hussein of Singapore all play leading roles, but their actions are also balanced by those of the saint Habib Nuh, the silat master Wak Cantuk and the writer Munsyi Abdullah, who provide their own perspectives on the impact of the British colonisation of Singapore. In this paper I am interested in the way Isa tells the story not of the founding of Singapore in 1819 but of its loss, specifically to the Malay community, and the implications that he draws from that story for the contemporary Malay community of Singapore
Walking between Land and Water: Pedestrian Poetics in the Poetry of Shirley Geok-lin Lim
Full text link"Walking between Land and Water" weaves an exploration of the tropes of walking and liminality in the poetry of Shirley Geok-lin Lim into an essay-portrait of the poet at her home in Santa Barbara. It tracks the poet as she takes her daily walk on the beach, and sees how this mundane act furnishes a mobile poetic that articulates the contradictions and complexities of her diasporic history and condition. Focussing on her most recent collection of poems, Walking Backwards, the essay also picks out the major shifts in her work, especially the change to a more transnational key
Walking Backwards and Sideways: The Transmigrations of the Poet in Shirley Geok-lin Lim’s Work
Full text linkThis article and interview unveil ways in which Shirley Geok-lin Lim addresses her status as a transnational wanderer in recent poetry, specifically in Walking Backwards: New Poems (2010), noting relevance to earlier fictional works such as Joss and Gold (2001). For the brief interview, I asked Lim in July 2013 to elaborate on and to clarify some of her statements in her poems that might prove cryptic to a reader unfamiliar with Chinese customs
“Negative Difference†and Its Role in Writing: Shirley Geok-lin Lim’s Among the White Moon Faces
No full textThis essay addresses Shirley Geok-lin Lim’s Among the White Moon Faces: An Asian American Memoir of Homelands (1996) to argue the significance of the diasporic vision in the American literary imagination. I show that through a politics of return and re-engagement with the Malaysian context of the mid-twentieth century via her memoir, Lim presents history from the perspective of the oppressed and colonised. She also performs the important function of preserving and transmitting memory in diaspora. In addition to the benefits for the Malaysian American, this helps individualise the immigrant as an entity with historical dimensions for more mainstream audiences. The essay introduces the notion of "negative difference" as well, showing how Lim periodically felt herself marked as the devilish or unassimilable other in both Malaysia and the United States. Yet she uses the memoir as a reflective tool to evaluate the impact of such marking and often mobilises her writing as weapon or counter-act against such othering. In this regard, the essay argues for the beneficial effects of adversity on writing as conveyed in this particular work by Lim
Delphine Munos, After Melancholia: A Reappraisal of Second-Generation Diasporic Subjectivity in the Work of Jhumpa Lahiri
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