Abstract
Nostalgia has long been maligned as the uncritical longing for the past, but scholars, writers and heritage practitioners have recently rehabilitated nostalgia as a way of coming to terms with the impossibility of a return to the past. This chapter explores selected poems by Shirley Geok-lin Lim that foreground the ambivalence of this desire for “home” and the writer’s own critical relationship with nostalgia. It argues that to consider intangible natural phenomena as fundamental to individual and communal histories is to challenge the very core of our anthropocentric understanding of heritage and to introduce notions of heritage that highlight human-environment relationship and interdependence.
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Notes
- 1.
The term peranakan means “local-born,” and in the context of Malaccan history refers to the distinct culture and community that was created out of the union between Chinese immigrants and local Malays. Lim’s ancestors are also known as the Straits born or the Straits Chinese due to their being domiciled in the Straits Settlements, a former British crown colony on the Straits of Malacca which was established in 1867. In the peranakan community, the male is referred to as Baba and the female as Nyonya.
- 2.
The “Great Acceleration” refers to the exponential rise in energy use and the world’s population since 1945 which led to dramatic changes in the planet’s biogeochemical and socio-economic systems.
- 3.
The boiled frog syndrome is a metaphor used to illustrate how people are unaware of environmental dangers until it is too late. Scientists point to how a frog sits in a pot of water which is gradually heating up but doesn’t move until the temperature reaches boiling point and the frog dies. It has not evolved to detect high temperatures and therefore is oblivious to the threat. Likewise, human beings may end up in a similar situation.
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Yeow, A.S.K. (2020). “The Unmovable Self Situated in the Quicksand of Memory”: Nostalgia and Intangible Natural Heritage in the Weather Poems of Shirley Geok-lin Lim. In: Gabriel, S. (eds) Making Heritage in Malaysia. Palgrave Macmillan, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-1494-4_8
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