Of Return

"Of Return." Journal of Postcolonial Writing, 56(5), pp. 718–719

Author’s note

The poem is dedicated to the Malaysian literary giant K.S. Maniam, who passed away on February 19, 2020. His 1981 autobiographical novel The Return, a sensuous and poignant work about the search for identity in a postcolonial era, left a deep impression on me. Certain images in stanza one such as “tawny hair”, “blue eyes”, “daffodils”, and “fluffy” are drawn from the novel. “Ernie” is an English child character in one of the English-language readers that the hero of The Return encounters in his colonial education. In Ernie’s world “the sky [is] fluffy, not like ours that bleached itself to a transparent blue by midday” (Maniam 1993, 30). I cannot help but relate my own experiences to those depicted in Maniam’s novel. That feeling was especially strong when I first landed at London Heathrow Airport.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Ngoi Hui Chien

Ngoi Hui Chien is a Malaysian student pursuing an MA in English literature at the University of Leeds, UK. His research interests encompass, but are not limited to, postcolonialism, trauma literature (including war literature), psychoanalysis, and ecocriticism. Other than academic literary criticism, he is also committed to creative writing. The ideas in his works are often drawn from both anglophone and sinophone literatures.