Critiques

An Orphanage of Mind by Eddie Tay  A change of heart. An English phrase, a Western idea. I couldn’t understand its meaning.

      Shirley Geok-lin Lim’s foreword to Monsoon History seems to propose that the act of learning, thinking and writing in English involves abandoning one’s self for that of a western ideal. Yet the validity of this proposal is called into question when she confesses her inability to understand its meaning. As a Peranakan Malaysian in voluntary exile who finds a new home in America, she describes herself as experiencing “an orphanage of mind” as opposed to a “change of heart” for she “knew hearts did not change”, but rather, “grew older unfaithful / forgetful”.
     This “orphanage of mind”, the guilt of being unfaithful and forgetful of one’s cultural roots, is carried over to “Bukit China”, a poem that describes her return to the burial site of her father. The cultural guilt is conflated with the guilt of having disregarded her familial obligations. She admits to not having performed funeral rites, for she “did not put on straw, black, / Gunny-sack” to mourn for her father.
But how much of this cultural guilt is her fault? How voluntary is voluntary exile? Muhammad Haji Salleh asserts that for the Malaysian poet, writing poetry in Malay “is an ideological statement” as it explores the poetic range and possibilities of the language. However, privileging poetry written Malay marginalises and ignores the achievements of the non-Malay poet writing in Malaysia. What choice is there for a non-Malay poet but “voluntary” exile when national literature in Malaysia is only literature written in Malay?
Most people assume that exiles are people who are hopelessly estranged from their families, countries, or homeland. This need not be so. In the case of Shirley Lim, the exile exists in a liminal state, neither here nor there.     The conditions of exile allow her to forge a new identity by traversing between cultures. In “Lament”, she informs us that she has chosen the English language “(b)efore country.” However, as her poetry testifies, she did not fully relinquish familial, social and cultural ties to her homeland. On the other hand, neither is she entirely at ease in her new surroundings. In “Modern Secrets”, she negotiates between the languages of two disparate cultures, conveying in English what she “dreamt in Chinese.”
     In an increasingly cosmopolitan world, we are forced to admit that we are products of a variety of cultures. Shirley Lim’s poetry is perhaps one of the first of its kind that seeks to negotiate and mediate between different cultures, forging an identity that is unique, yet at the same time representative, of the inhabitants within this increasingly cosmopolitan world.