“One that Returns”: Home, hantu, and spectre in Simone Lazaroo’s The Australian Fiancé (2000)
Abstract
The Eurasian writer, Simone Lazaroo, has lived most of her life in Australia. Her fiction seeks to reconnect with a cultural heritage to re-establish a sense of home and belonging, a move that is both a return – in that Lazaroo situates her narratives in the Asian contexts of her birth in Singapore and her paternal connection with Malaysia – and an origin because it “begins” by “coming back” (Derrida 1994: 10). In Spectres of Marx, Derrida writes that just “as Marx had his ghosts, we [too] have ours, but memories no longer recognise such borders; by definition, they pass through walls, these revenants, day and night, they trick consciousness and skip generations” (1994: 36). I explore this site of penetrable boundaries, between the “ghost” that haunts in the West – accountable in philosophical and psychoanalytical terms – and the seemingly unaccountable “hantu” in the Singaporean context. Instead, I work with Derrida’s idea of the “absent presence” or the “visible invisible” to raise questions about the female body, both spectral and Eurasian. I also explore spectrality in the motif of the photograph.
Keywords
Simone Lazaroo, cultural heritage, Asian contexts, motif of the photograph
Document Type
Journal Article
Date of Publication
2020
Volume
36
Issue
1
Publication Title
Journal of Literary Studies
Publisher
Taylor & Francis
School
School of Arts and Humanities
RAS ID
45272
Copyright
subscription content
Comments
Ash, S. (2020). “One that Returns”: Home, hantu, and spectre in Simone Lazaroo’s The Australian Fiancé (2000). Journal of Literary Studies, 36(1), 112-124. https://doi.org/10.1080/02564718.2020.1738719