'The Art of Being Home': Home and Travel in Shirley Geok-lin Lim’s Poetry

"'The Art of Being Home': Home and Travel in Shirley Geok-lin Lim's Poetry" is an exploration of Shirley Geok-lin Lim’s poetics of travel and home anchored in a narrative tracking a day spent with the poet. It is a sequel to “Walking between Land and Water,” an essay published in Asiatic, in which I combine a personal encounter with the poet with an examination of the tropes of walking and liminality in her work. Here the focus is more on the motif and theme of home in the poet’s work, as the essay excavates the complexities and ambiguities of the meaning of home, from her first collection to recently published poems. This essay identifies the shifts in the poet’s idea of where and what home is, and examines how it forms a counterpoint to the poetics of travel and transnational mobility that informs her work. So far, critical attention has been more on her relationship with Malacca, her place of origin, than on her self-mappings in her adopted hometown of Santa Barbara. The essay gives a portrait of the poet at home, and highlights the increasing importance of Santa Barbara in her poetry.

The Year of the Horse

Short stor

2013 WSES guidelines for management of intra-abdominal infections

Peer reviewe

The Dublin-Moscow Line: Russia and the Poetics of Home in Contemporary Irish Poetry

Este artigo apresenta uma visão geral acerca das possibilidades engendradas pela influência da literatura russa sobre a poesia irlandesa. Em seguida, o foco se volta para a obra de Paul Durcan e a maneira pela qual a Rússia é apresentada como um “outro lugar” que permitiu a Durcan ir além da insularidade irlandesa e ampliar sua perspectiva. Desse modo, este estudo revela que o fato de Durcan voltar-se para a Rússia é uma tentativa de romper com a noção hegemônica de identidade, segundo a qual a relação entre lugar e sujeito é indissolúvel. Destarte, a Rússia é concebida como uma nação imaginária que permite ao sujeito se libertar da tradição anglo-irlandesa, permitindo a destruição de mitos que existem em torno da ideia de lar.This article opens with an overview of the possibilities offered by the influence of Russian literature on Irish poetry. Subsequently, the focus shifts to Durcan’s oeuvre and the way in which Russia presents itself as an “elsewhere” which has allowed him to go beyond Ireland’s insularity and broaden his perspective. Hence, this study reveals that Durcan’s turning to Russia is an attempt to disrupt the hegemonic notion of identity according to which the links between place and self are indissoluble. Instead, it is here proposed that Russia is envisaged as an imaginary homeland where the self can be freed from Anglo-Irish tradition allowing for the shattering of myths regarding the idea of home

Realm of paradise (full version)

The carcass sits astride the motorbike, fastened to the saddle by ropes, its pale pink bulk having ridden pillion in the fine drizzle to its final place of immolation. A faint hint of a smile hovers over its peaceful face, its shut, long-lashed eyes, its creased forehead and endearing snout, and even its flappy ears giving it somewhat a content, eerily human look. Perhaps not incongruously, Ted Hughes’s “View of a Pig” comes to mind. As I try to recall the magnificent ending, the helmeted driver loosens the lashings around the pig, and under the supervision of the women he and three other men grab the trotters and heave the weight on their shoulders, and march it funereally up the wet marble steps to the trestle table draped with a Coca Cola plastic sheet, and ceremoniously lay the cargo down. The Vietnamese matrons take care of the details, and direct their men in adjusting the pig till it looks presentable, dignified, a fitting sacrificial feast for the hungry spirits of the dead soldiers.Published versio

“We are all exiles” : exile and place in the poetry of Ee Tiang Hong, Wong Phui Nam and Shirley Geok-lin Lim

Exile is a dominant theme and trope in the poetry of the pioneer generation of Anglophone Malaysian poets Ee Tiang Hong, Wong Phui Nam and Shirley Geok-lin Lim. This essay traces the roots of exile in these three poets, exploring how the sense of displacement from cultural and political Malay hegemony has shaped their exilic poetics. It tracks the trajectory of their career and work to examine how exile governs their readings of place and belonging, of heritage and home. The essay follows Ee’s and Lim’s emigrant routes and examines how physical separation from their homeland opens up liminal spaces that their poetry negotiates, and foregrounds issues of ethnicity, nationality and diaspora that their post-migration work engages with. For Wong, a stayer, exile becomes a poetic strategy for dealing with the adversities facing the Anglophone writer in Malaysia. It also enables him to deal with problematic issues of identity and belonging, and view them from the distant perspective of remote classical Chinese poets. For Ee, Wong and Lim, exile as theme and metaphor, and as a poetic strategy, becomes the inescapable lens through which they see Malaysia and their history and identity as Straits-born Chinese or Peranakans, descendants of inter-marriages between Chinese immigrants and Malay inhabitants.Published versio

Realm of paradise

The carcass sits astride the motorbike, fastened to the saddle by ropes, its pale pink bulk having ridden pillion in the fine drizzle to its final place of immolation. A faint hint of a smile hovers over its peaceful face, its shut, long-lashed eyes, its creased forehead and endearing snout, and even its flappy ears giving it somewhat a content, eerily human look. Perhaps not incongruously, Ted Hughes’s “View of a Pig” comes to mind. As I try to recall the magnificent ending, the helmeted driver loosens the lashings around the pig, and under the supervision of the women he and three other men grab the trotters and heave the weight on their shoulders, and march it funereally up the wet marble steps to the trestle table draped with a Coca Cola plastic sheet, and ceremoniously lay the cargo down. The Vietnamese matrons take care of the details, and direct their men in adjusting the pig till it looks presentable, dignified, a fitting sacrificial feast for the hungry spirits of the dead soldiers.Published versio

'I am here, and there, and back again': the poetics of return in Ee Tiang Hong and Shirley Lim Geok-lin

In his essay "Dream of a Glorious Return," Salman Rushdie explores the central place that India occupies in his work. In all his novels, he confesses that the imaginary return to his homeland is the underlying theme, because the home country determines "the shape of the way you think and feel and dream." This leads Rushdie to conclude, "Exile is the dream of a glorious retum" Rushdie's longing for a return is an experience shared by migrant writers like Chinese Australian poet Ee Tiang Hong and Chinese American poet Shirley Lim Geok-lin, who have carried a considerable archive of personal, cultural, and national narratives from their place of birth to their adopted countries. Unlike those of second or third generations, their memories of the ancestral homeland are lived and strong, creating binaries of old homeland I host country, past I present, self I other that they must constantly negotiate. In Ee's and Lim's cases, the strong need for return also stems from the fact that they are voluntary exiles who left Malaysia in protest against its repressive politics in the 1960s and 1970s

'The Art of Being Home': Home and Travel in Shirley Geok-lin Lim’s Poetry

"'The Art of Being Home': Home and Travel in Shirley Geok-lin Lim's Poetry" is an exploration of Shirley Geok-lin Lim’s poetics of travel and home anchored in a narrative tracking a day spent with the poet. It is a sequel to “Walking between Land and Water,” an essay published in Asiatic, in which I combine a personal encounter with the poet with an examination of the tropes of walking and liminality in her work. Here the focus is more on the motif and theme of home in the poet’s work, as the essay excavates the complexities and ambiguities of the meaning of home, from her first collection to recently published poems. This essay identifies the shifts in the poet’s idea of where and what home is, and examines how it forms a counterpoint to the poetics of travel and transnational mobility that informs her work. So far, critical attention has been more on her relationship with Malacca, her place of origin, than on her self-mappings in her adopted hometown of Santa Barbara. The essay gives a portrait of the poet at home, and highlights the increasing importance of Santa Barbara in her poetry.