I am pleased to announce the publication of my debut creative collection, Exiles and Pleasures: Taunggyi Dreaming, which will be released through Finishing Line Press later this year!
Exiles and Pleasures: Taunggyi Dreaming is a collection of poetry and prose (creative non-fiction and fiction), reflecting themes of trauma, memory, psychic fragmentation and survival told through hybrid narratives. The writing arises from my own multiple migrations from Taunggyi, Burma, to India and eventually to the United States of America. This collectionis inspired by: my exile from my birth country, Burma, after the military coup of 1962; my resettlement as a stateless citizen in my ancestral home in India during my teen years; and my arrival to the United States of America in my thirties as a resident alien. The narratives are told through, in part, by ancestral female voices—grandmother and mother— but mostly through the daughter in woman-centered hybrid narratives.
It is the community of women, in domestic and public spaces of the home and the world, in India/Burma and the diaspora, that helps define my creative style. I, too, like diasporic writers, use my hybrid sensibilities to create an aesthetic that, although not unique in terms of postcolonialism, is particularly mine; as a tricultural transplant, my writing vividly reflects the pluralistic ethos of an exile and a dislocated diasporic, but who, like George Lamming, also writes about the “pleasures of exile.”