The unsullied tongue of Saint Anthony and other miracles : a collection of magical realist short stories

• Main Author: Fong, Arin Alycia
• Other Authors: Barrie Wayne Sherwood
• Format: Thesis-Master by Research
• Language: English
• Published: Nanyang Technological University 2020
• Subjects: Humanities::Literature
• Online Access: https://hdl.handle.net/10356/140254
• Institution: Nanyang Technological University

"The Unsullied Tongue of Saint Anthony and Other Miracles" is a collection of magical realist short stories—a liminal, speculative space where the Othered Eurasian body can exist and come alive. The collection is an exercise in creating a kind of magical realism tinged with Eurasian sensibility and the miracles that pervade and haunt the Eurasian-born-Catholic consciousness. In this story world, Eurasian characters grapple with various contemporary issues—the reclamation of Kristang as mother tongue; female sexuality and queerness; sexism in healthcare; taboos surrounding women’s unruly bodies; religious suppression of women and sexual freedom; and the remnants of a violent colonial history largely forgotten by Singapore and many Eurasian communities. This collection of stories situates itself within a tradition of postcolonial magical realism and contemporary southeast Asian speculative fiction, expanding the subgenre to incorporate and suggest a Eurasian hybrid sensibility. The stories interrogate religious narratives through a fabulist lens, resisting homogeneity and reality as constructed by the state and Church, and teasing the magical from the real to reveal the thriving existence of alternative identities and ways of being. The Unsullied Tongue of Saint Anthony and Other Miracles is ultimately a celebration of the liminal, the tender, the surreal, the miraculous hidden in the shadows of the everyday.