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Title |
Healings through Reconstructions of Traumatic Experiences in Poetry: The Representation of Comfort Women in “Papaya,” a Poem of Chiang Wen-yu, Taiwanese Female Poet |
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Author |
Lee, Kuei-Yun |
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Professor, Institute of Taiwan Literature, National Tsing Hua University |
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Abstract |
Chiang Wen-yu’s “Papaya” is a rare modern poem which expresses comfort women’s affections in Taiwan. This paper explicates that the representation of comfort women’s trauma through poetry is able to transform the significance of trauma into signifiers and then make these women’s stories be recognized by the society as well as decrease the harassment of horrific reality. Hence, the connection between the suffering subject and the world is reconstructed. In fact, literature is a public discourse of historic traumas. The diverse stories of comfort women can query that if the mainstream history deprives the historical position of these women because of nations, powers, or genders. Moreover, Chiang Wen-yu wrote their life history from the standpoint of colonized females. In other words, Chiang inspected the important historical event from the viewpoint of plebeians, females, as well as the colonized, and thus the effect of her work is “constructing the female historical viewpoint.” |
