AustLit

'This article draws on my own and some of my family’s search for home and belonging, exploring links between these experiences and the development of characters in my novels and short stories, mostly as migrants seeking meaning and identity at the intersection of cultures. I draw on my own cultural background of migration from Singapore to Australia with my Anglo-Australian mother and with my Eurasian father, whose lineage includes family from Malacca and Singapore descended from 16th century Portuguese seafarers’ partnerships with Malay women. I will occasionally refer to aspects of the “Kristang” culture, the name for Eurasians descended from those partner-ships; and to my father and his siblings’ and parents’ lives in Singapore during British colonial occupation and since.' (Publication summary)

'The Eurasian writer, Simone Lazaroo, has lived most of her life in Australia. Her fiction seeks to reconnect with a cultural heritage to re-establish a sense of home and belonging, a move that is both a return – in that Lazaroo situates her narratives in the Asian contexts of her birth in Singapore and her paternal connection with Malaysia – and an origin because it “begins” by “coming back” (Derrida 1994: 10). In Spectres of Marx, Derrida writes that just “as Marx had his ghosts, we [too] have ours, but memories no longer recognise such borders; by definition, they pass through walls, these revenants, day and night, they trick consciousness and skip generations” (1994: 36). I explore this site of penetrable boundaries, between the “ghost” that haunts in the West – accountable in philosophical and psychoanalytical terms – and the seemingly unaccountable “hantu” in the Singaporean context. Instead, I work with Derrida’s idea of the “absent presence” or the “visible invisible” to raise questions about the female body, both spectral and Eurasian. I also explore spectrality in the motif of the photograph.' (Publication summary)