Biography

    LIM, SHIRLEY GEOK-LIN (1943- ) Malaysian poet, short-story writer. Born in Malacca, Malaysia, she was educated at the University of Malaya, Kuala Lumpur (BA, 1967), and at Brandeis University, USA, where she received a Ph.D. in English and American literature (1973).  Professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara, USA, Lim has published three books of poetry (Crossing the Peninsula, 198-, No Man’s Grove, 1985, and the selection Modern Secrets, 1989) and a collection of short stories (Another Country and Other Stories, 1982).  She was awarded the Commonwealth Poetry Prize in 1980.
    Lim’s work reflects her Chinese-Malaysian peranakan heritage.  Many of her poems and stories are written from the perspective of one returning (either literally or in memory) to the land of childhood.  They are often marked by a nostalgia formally inscribed in the realism of the stories, which re-create photographically, as it were, the sights and sounds of the ‘other’ life, the Asian life of her childhood.  It is significant that narrative realism has been the predominant mode of Southeast Asian prose writers in English and expatriate writers alike during the 1970s and 1980s; this suggests that to some extent their efforts were shaped by a common need to identify and authenticate an Asian heritage.
      Lim’s poetry develops the theme of the writer’s relationship with the world of her childhood, foregrounding the poet’s identity as an expatriate.  Nostalgia is unpacked into its component parts: exile, guilt, the joy of recognition, and a fascination with the exotic.  The poet is always aware of the complex nature of her relationship with the people and the land of her past; her poems about her parents, for example, express a poignant sense of grief, guilt, and, sometimes, resentment.  They are also marked by a sense of alienation (from her parents and their culture); in ‘The Windscreen’s Speckled View’ (in No Man’s Grove) she speaks of ‘a woman/who was once our mother’.  ‘Bukit China’ (also in No Man’s Grove), which describes the poet’s visit to her father’s grave, is characterized by negatives: ‘I did not put on straw… have not fastened/Grief on shoulder, walked mourning/Behind, pouring grief… I pour/No brandy…’ Even the joyful affirmation of homecoming in ‘Crossing the Peninsula’ is the affirmation of the visitor, the explorer/traveler from another world, and repeats in one sense the colonial encounter.
 This ambiguity is also evident in the poems that focus on the poet’s life in the USA.  They highlight Chinese difference and critique the monoculturalism of contemporary USA.  The poems ‘Modern Secrets’, ‘Dedicated to Confucius Plaza’, and ‘Chinese in Academia’ depict a cross-cultural interface and reveal linguistic, ethnic, and gender differences that are incompatible with the dominant patriarchal culture.  The awareness of difference is respectively ironic, whimsical, and bitter in each of these poems, which highlight the marginalization of an ethnic minority.  In ‘Lament’ the alienation of the non-Anglo-Saxon English speaker is figured in the imagery of a powerless woman; thus, the poet draws a strategic parallel between ethnicity and gender.
 Gender issues and feminism are a major concern in Lim’s poetry.  She writes about women across cultures, looking at their specific conflicts and disadvantages.  ‘Pantoun for Chinese Women’ laments female infanticide in China; ‘The Business of Machines’ critiques the abuse of women’s bodies by western medicine.  ‘I Look for Women’ (Modern Secrets) celebrates women – ‘the small/Sufficient swans, showers of stars’.
 Lim has also published critical work; she edited Approaches to Teacher Kingston’s ‘The Woman Warrior’ (1991).
ANNE BREWSTER
 Further reading: Anne Brewster, ‘Singaporean and Malaysian women poets, local and expatriate’, in B. Bennett, Ee Tiang Hong, and R. Shepherd (eds) The Writer’s Sense of the Contemporary (1982); Anne Brewster, ‘The mirror as metaphor in the poetry of Shirley Lim’, in John Kwan-Terry (ed.) Purpose and Direction (1991).
 
 

The Poetics of Diaspora: Shirley Lim
    by :Chitra Sankaran, PhD, Department of English Language and Literature, National University of Singapore

    Migrant writing, which has become an increasingly common phenomenon in post-colonial literature, takes many different forms, since border-crossing authors may be voluntary exiles, such as Ee Tiang Hong. Migration, forced or otherwise, may plunged them into an identity crisis; or their sense of identity may have been eroded by dislocation or by systematic cultural denigration of their indigenous culture by imperial ideology. Whatever the reason, migration has made the diasporic condition one quintessential feature of the post-colonial condition. The word diaspora, which referred originally to the dispersion of the Jews among the Gentiles after the Babylonian exile, retains a sense of displacement and an alienation of vision.
    One such diasporic woman-writer from the region, Shirley Geok-lin Lim, was born in Malaysia of Peranakan descent, migrated to the United States in 1970, and has lived there since. She married Charles Bazerman an American Jew, in 1972, and has a son. One might compare the diasporic women poet Sujata Bhatt with Shirley Lim. Both women, on the surface at least, seem to have several circumstances in common in that they are both settled in the West, married outside their races, and yet retain predominantly Eastern cultural affiliations.