"Eating Words": Alimentary Motifs in Shirley Geok-lin Lim's Poetry

In diasporic literature, alimentary motifs tend to play oppositional roles in relation to nostalgia: either they are evoked to reify longing for homeland, or to disavow it. Closely linked to these roles, and especially pertinent to immigrant women, is also food's function as critique of ideology. This essay explores food and food-related motifs in Shirley Geok-lin Lim's poems to elicit the paradox of nostalgia inherent in them, while also demonstrating their further complication of nostalgia as a concept. Let me begin with a brief outline of my interpretative strategy in order to clarify my position with regard to reading Shirley Lim's poems in this essay. One contention associated with reading poetry is the medium's profoundly personal nature, which potentially requires an undertaking of biographical criticism in order to establish meaning. In other words, the poet herself must be made a subject of inquiry if we were to interpret her work with a substantial degree of validity. Accordingly, intimate knowledge of the poet is fundamental to the task of interpretation; the greater our familiarity is with the poet's, say, history and philosophy, the more accurate our interpretation will be.2 In the case of Lim's poems, this circumstance is further compounded by her own confession in an interview that her creative works often incline strongly towards the "autobiographical" (Nor Faridah Abdul Manaf 305). Of course, this author- centred approach is not the only way to read poetry, but to disregard it altogether, especially when appreciating Lim's poems, is to risk compromising