Yesterday’s guest speaker for Writer’s Fortnight was Deborah Emmanuel, a Singaporean poet and performer. Throughout the course of the speech, Emmanuel read 3 of her poems that she felt most deeply to. I thought that all the poems she read to us were greatly expressing her thoughts and feelings that she had once experienced and felt, and I felt a connection to her and her life through the power and emotion of her poetry. What I found quite striking was that close to the beginning of her speech, she recited a poem about heritage and culture, and how she never felt like she belonged to a culture. This arose thoughts about how culture doesn’t really identify us and we can never really know if we are completely apart of one – almost like the cultural norms mentioned in Robyne Hayes speech. Emmanuel went on to talk about the CMI system and how it is so unnecessary to categorise individuals into three broad groups. This system also creates a weight for one to follow the norms and lifestyle of the culture. She was categorised into ‘I’ (Indian) – however, she never felt like she was one as the culture was not passed onto her.
Emmanuel later talked about her struggles as a 19 year-old through the violence of her family and the loneliness that was created. However what I took back from this was that the idea of not feeling like she belonged to a culture or society is what caused the trauma she faced. She never felt accepted anywhere and that left with long-lasting emotions. Deborah Emmanuel turned to meditation and spiritual practices to overcome her trauma and the constant fear of never thinking that she will find love – or the right love, after experiencing the difficulty that her parents had.