Deborah Emmanuel is a poet who is Singaporean. She is Singaporean her grandparents are from India but she doesn’t associate being Indian. As the CMI Chinese, Malay, Indian choices for Singapore even though she is Indian she feels like she is other because she never felt like she was Indian. She always felt like an outsider. She also went to jail for a while. She talked about how her life shaped her.
She had a few poems that she read for us, from those poems I can really see that all her different experiences from the past have really influenced her to become the person she is now. When somebody asked her if you could go back to your younger self what would you tell yourself and she replied saying I would change nothing. I was truly really surprised because she had gone to prison before and I would assume that it would be better for her not to go, but she said that everything that has happened in her life is there because of all the experiences that she has gone through including all the bad childhood she said she had with her parents or going to prison, and all of that made her the person she is today, the poet she is today and all these experiences help her write more poems.
