Red earth : a collection of poetry & a critical exegesis

• Main Author: Vincent, Esther Xueming
• Other Authors: Boey Kim Cheng
• Format: Thesis-Master by Research
• Language: English
• Published: Nanyang Technological University 2021
• Subjects: Humanities::Literature::Singapore
• Online Access: https://hdl.handle.net/10356/147454
• Institution: Nanyang Technological University

Red Earth is a collection of poetry that contemplates the meaning of human dwelling and being at home on earth. The poems demonstrate an ecofeminist poetics of home, and is founded upon a politics of relations and interbeing with human and non-human kin, and places. Drawn from memory and re-membered with imagination, the poems in Red Earth engage with memory, time, place, gender, nature/the environment, history, myth, culture and ethics to locate the female self within the world she inhabits. Red Earth is a collection of verse that invokes the spirit of place by reinstating a woman’s voice amidst the boom of machinery and economy in the context of capitalism, urbanisation and the ensuing alienation from nature. It seeks to establish the personal female voice within dominant patriarchal ideologies and narratives, and searches for home and belonging to the world as a daughter of the earth rather than as citizen of a nation. Tracing its poetic lineage to ecofeminist forebearers like Mary Oliver, Eavan Boland, Grace Nichols, Joy Harjo and Kathy Jetnil-Kijiner, Red Earth is an ecofeminist act of solidarity with marginalised others (human and non-human person-beings) and an artifact of social and environmental activism. Located in Singapore and moving across geographies, Red Earth embodies a new planetary politics of relations that ‘makes kin’ with fellow person-beings (the elements, animals, plants, places, environments) to offer hope and healing in a time of state-sanctioned violence against the land and by proxy, its people, and increasing urban alienation. The critical exegesis traces the theory and influence of my poems, with the first chapter discussing place and the making of home, and the second chapter focussing on ecofeminism.