- Title
- 'I am here, and there, and back again': the poetics of return in Ee Tiang Hong and Shirley Lim Geok-lin
- Creator
- Boey, Kim Cheng
- Relation
- Amerasia Journal Vol. 36, Issue 2, p. 91-105
- Relation
- http://www.aasc.ucla.edu/aascpress/ajcollection.asp
- Publisher
- University of California
- Resource Type
- journal article
- Date
- 2010
- Description
- 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.
- Subject
- Ee Tiang Hong; Shirley Lim Geok-lin; poetry; homeland
- Identifier
- http://hdl.handle.net/1959.13/926685
- Identifier
- uon:9910
- Identifier
- ISSN:0044-7471
- Language
- eng
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