“Die While I Can Still Remember Who I Am”: Postcolonial Nostalgia and Trauma in Tan Twan Eng’s The Garden of Evening Mists

Saxena, Vandana

doi:10.5744/jcps.2019.1004

Cited by 3 publications

(3 citation statements)

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“…Several studies have explored how Tan Twan Eng uses these elements to create a vivid sense of place and atmosphere in his novels, and how his writing reflects his deep connection to the landscapes and cultures of Malaysia. In terms of trauma, they only concentrate on the signs and symptoms of trauma brought on by war (Saxena, 2020).…”

Section: Literature Reviewmentioning

confidence: 99%

Yin-Yang Concept of Healing in Tan Twan Eng’s Trauma Fictions

Hou¹,

Omar²,

Kaur³

et al. 2023

WJEL

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Contemporary Malaysian literature not only provides a platform of lives, but also functions as an avenue for trauma expressions where writers utilize different narrative strategies to create characters with multiple identities. One of the prominent Chinese-Malaysian contemporary writers Tan Twan Eng deals with the traumatic impact brought by Japanese oppression to Malaya during the 1940s and he offers a traditional Chinese vision of understanding on healing of trauma. His writing offers a unique and compelling perspective on the complexities of identity, memory, and trauma, and has earned him a place as one of the most important contemporary writers from Malaysia. In his works, the Yin-Yang concept can also be applied to the healing of trauma, as it emphasizes the importance of finding balance and harmony between opposing forces in order to achieve wholeness and well-being. Deploying the Yin-Yang concept, he examines how the protagonists in The Gift of Rain (2007) and The Garden of Evening Mists (2012) deal with traumas of war and violence. This paper utilizes Lacapra’s “work through”, instead of merely attempting to ignore or repress the painful events, confronting them in a way that enables people to process and integrate them, Cathy Caruth’s trauma theory about timelessness, relatedness, repetition and intrusiveness and Chinese traditional concept of Yin-Yang to analyze the ways of healing traumas. The transition from traumatic memory to narrative memory, in fact is the balance of forgetfulness and remembrance, and balance of mental pain and peace. His application of the Yin-Yang principles provides a potent metaphor for the process of achieving harmony and balance in the face of traumas. His Yin-Yang concept of trauma healing places a strong emphasis on the significance of confronting the past in a way that allows for the integration and transformation of traumatic events while also acknowledging the wider social and cultural settings of trauma. The research may provide a new and harmonious perception to understand traumas.

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Section: Literature Reviewmentioning

confidence: 99%

Yin-Yang Concept of Healing in Tan Twan Eng’s Trauma Fictions

Hou¹,

Omar²,

Kaur³

et al. 2023

WJEL

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“…While Saxena (2019) emphasises nostalgia which will forever be linked to loss, indicating the difficulty of healing, this essay expands on the idea that while reconciliation may be seen as far-fetched, the employment of Japanese aesthetics by Tan as agents of healing in the novel provides the option of reconciliation. Furthermore, the exploration of Tan's novel in the light of trauma studies serves as an alternative illustration of Caruth's framework of trauma as the belated experience of the traumatic event itself and the inadequacy of language to convey the experience, thus relegating the "speaking" and healing to the Japanese aesthetics employed in the novel.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 97%

“…The Japanese Occupation, according to Tan, is a "largely ignored and unknown period of Malaysia's past" (Lim, 2017, p. 15). Saxena (2019) describes the overlap of trauma and nostalgia in Tan's novel, in which the intertwining acts of forgetting and remembering are equally important. She rightly points out that Tan's novel "opens a discursive space for multidirectional memory that avoids the markers of nationality" (p. 175), promoting awareness that the trauma experienced is not confined to boundaries as most of the characters' lives have been profoundly affected by different wars: Magnus lost his eye in the Boer war in South Africa, Aritomo was exiled from Japan and Tatsuji had been a kamikaze pilot.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Art and Real Life: Trauma and Reconciliation in The Garden of Evening Mists by Tan Twan Eng

Chow¹,

Abdullah²,

Lee³

2022

JSSH

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This essay discusses the employment of selected art forms and their effectiveness in portraying trauma and reconciliation in Tan Twan Eng’s novel, The Garden of Evening Mists ,(2012), employing the concepts of trauma by Caruth (1996), focusing on the inadequacy of language to articulate trauma. The trauma model features most prominently by Caruth argues that traumatic events are never known directly. Any knowledge of these past events is only a form of reproduction of the original. Therefore, trauma is a ‘paradoxical experience;’ what is most traumatic is that which does not appear in conscious memory— this inability to know challenges the reliability of language to represent the full extent of trauma. However, Tan’s novel shows that the problem of representing trauma can be countered in forms of art that function as a medium to convey and release silenced trauma. While trauma escapes language, personal memories become collective memories when commemorated in art forms. Letting go of the past is achieved by bringing it to the present in art forms. Tan’s work significantly adds to the analysis of trauma in literary works. By employing the dominant tropes of Japanese art forms in the novel, Tan employs strategies that demonstrate that literature and art can narrate silenced experiences and traumatic historical events and escapes articulation.

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Malaysia and Singapore

Talib

2020

The Journal of Commonwealth Literature

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“Die While I Can Still Remember Who I Am”: Postcolonial Nostalgia and Trauma in Tan Twan Eng’s The Garden of Evening Mists

Cited by 3 publications

References 0 publications

Yin-Yang Concept of Healing in Tan Twan Eng’s Trauma Fictions

Yin-Yang Concept of Healing in Tan Twan Eng’s Trauma Fictions

Art and Real Life: Trauma and Reconciliation in The Garden of Evening Mists by Tan Twan Eng

Malaysia and Singapore

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