Jean Arasanayagam's Poems About Identity
In the past Asian countries have been colonies for the European Countries, a large scale of immigration, often motivated by religious, political or economic reasons. The colonizers started to follow the culture of the native peoples and also had a powerful influence on the imperial country. Jean Arasanayagam, in her poems explores her dual identities – the Jean Solomons and the Jean Arasanayagam she became. Her childhood takes her to the Colonial past and beyond her lifetime lies that of her ancestors – the conquerors who became the history. It’s a history she cannot slough off because she is bound to it by birth and family. She recounts her identity in her collection of poems The Legacy. Culture is revealed to be hybrid, and this hybridity …show more content…
She admits the facts unearthed by current theorists of hybridity and miscegenation engendered by colonialism and imperialism emphasizing the darker aspects of hybridity. She says in the Introduction to Genesis I The Legacy, I felt no disparity in my ways of thinking with that load of connotations concerning identity. I would have been regarded as innocuous, without racial bias or prejudice and that is the way in which I feel even to this day in spite of all the traumas of naming myself as I now do – left behinder, hybrid, minoritarian and numerous other names as a result of being allied to ‘the other’ by my marriage.(12-13)
Jean Arasanayagam thinks of “The Legacy” which cannot be refused, for it has been part of her inheritance. She recalls the situation how the colonizers were and their interest in colonizing. Since childhood she has heard of narratives of their original culture and the dual culture they have inherited through the passage of time. The Sri Lankan Tamil culture has become part and parcel of her life that she feels her own culture as ‘alien heritage’(20). Some live a nomadic life and started to migrate to different places leaving over the ‘tid-bits of a hybrid race!’ (30-31). Forgetting the homeland is not so easy, yet time cures the wounds of
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