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Mānoa

Here was Once the Sea: An Anthology of Southeast Asian Writing

Volume 35 Number 2 (2023)

Guest Editors Rina Garcia Chua, Esther Vincent Xueming, and Ann Ang discussion their vision with this unique collection of writing:

This anthology represents a chorus of offerings, first and foremost to the land and the sea, and second to you, our readers, as an invitation to attend to the urgencies and travails of our homes. On the one hand, while the anthology is comprised mostly of anglophone texts, which reflect the aspirations of regional writers to speak across borders and to the globe at large, the English of these pages is inhabited by meanings and associations that make the language our own. This can be seen in the use of indigenous names of plants and places in the works of Annisa Hidayat, Diana Rahim, and Mohamed Shaker, or through rhymes and sounds in the poems of Natalie Foo Mei-Yi and Teresa Mei Chuc. At other times, the native language emerges like weeds, surprising and demanding to be noticed, as in Enbah Nilah’s use of Tamil, which persists as linguistic, cultural, and historical memory in a legacy of erasure.

Find this editorial note, poems, statements, art, and more at Project MUSE.