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It’s been 35 years since I left my home on the margin. As a child, I longed to escape from this place, to plunge into the centre. And for more than three decades, I have indeed lived and worked in the centre, but have made every effort to keep my mind in the borderlands. As Edward Shils says in Center and Periphery, in modern society, the words ‘centre’ and ‘margin’ do not refer to space or geography, but to “values and beliefs, institutions, and elites”. I’ve always preferred to position myself at a distance from power.
bell hooks states in ‘Marginality as a Site of Resistance’ that when living on the edge, one develops a particular way of seeing reality—looking both from the outside in, and from the inside out, one’s attention focussed on both the centre and the margins, finally coming to understand both. This mode of seeing reminds us of the existence of a whole universe, a body made up of both margin and centre. Thus the margin is an essential part of the whole.
Now I understand that the margin is the site of thought, and also of resistance. No longer does it only have to be a place of deprivation, exile and exclusion.
OTHER BOOKS IN THE CULTURAL MEDALLION SERIES
Other Cities, Other Lives by Chew Kok Chang
The Tower by Isa Kamari
Flowers at Dawn by Singai Ma Elangkannan
Penghulu by Suratman Markasan
Under the Bed, Confusion by Wong Meng Voon
The Earnest Mask by Xi Ni Er
Teaching Cats to Jump Hoops by You Jin
Durians Are Not the Only Fruit Page 17