After the fall (dirges among ruins) and bahau quilt : confessing and unweaving the self

This two-part dissertation seeks to explore various strategies in writing poetry on wartime trauma in English-speaking South-East Asia. It fits in with recent studies that examine poetry within the context of war. The study will draw largely on relevant ideas and strategies of Walter Benjamin, the proto-trauma critic, on epic writing, and other more contemporary critics on the poetry of witness. It argues that poetic genres that embrace hybridity with storytelling and empathetic appropriation can mediate experiences of traumatic conflicts, especially World War II. These genres, namely the long poem and the verse novel, also perform the act of witnessing against the objectification of the other. This study expands the scope of literary scholarship in the region to include trauma studies. It also shifts the focus of the latter away from an Anglo-European centre to include wartime Malaya. The creative writing section recreates the repetition of linguistic structures and imagery in trauma accounts in Bahau Quilt through the anima methodi poetic form in the protagonist Francisco “Chico” Pereira’s discourse. In his dying days, Chico recollects memories of his wife Lourdes, the suave but treacherous Formosan Lieutenant Lee Guo Zhi and the birth of one whom Chico considers as his own daughter, Christine. It is only after retelling their intertwining stories that he achieves healing and redemption. Christine, in turn, completes this task by including her mother Lourdes’s diary entries and Lieutenant Lee’s poems and letter in what constitutes a Bahau quilt. The creative writing section concludes with a recreation of trauma poems by Chico and Christine in After the Fall (dirges among ruins).Doctor of Philosoph