"Eating Words": Alimentary Motifs in Shirley Geok-lin Lim's Poetry.

In diasporic literature, alimentary motifs tend to play oppositional roles in relation to nostalgia: either they are evoked to reify longing for homeland, or to disavow it. Closely linked to these roles, and especially pertinent to immigrant women, is also food's function as critique of ideology. This essay explores food and food-related motifs in Shirley Geok-lin Lim's poems to elicit the paradox of nostalgia inherent in them, while also demonstrating their further complication of nostalgia as a concept. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]