Date of Award

5-2021

Degree Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Master of Fine Arts

Department

English

Program

Creative Writing (MFA)

Program

English

First Advisor/Chairperson

Patricia Killelea

Abstract

Taunggyi Dreamer: Exiles, Diasporas, and Pleasures, a collection of poetry and prose (creative non-fiction and fiction), reflecting themes of trauma, memory, psychic fragmentation and survival is told through hybrid narratives. The writing arises from my own multiple migrations from Taunggyi, Burma, to India and eventually to the United States of America. Taunggyi Dreamer is inspired by: my exile from my birth country, Burma, after the military coup of 1962; my resettlement as a stateless citizen in my ancestral home in India during my teen years; and my arrival to the United States of America in my thirties as a resident alien. The narratives are told through, in part, by ancestral female voices—grandmother and mother— but mostly through the daughter in woman-centered hybrid narratives. It is the community of women, in domestic and public spaces of the home and the world, in India/Burma and the diaspora, that helps define my creative style. I, too, like diasporic writers, use my hybrid sensibilities to create an aesthetic that, although not unique in terms of postcolonialism, is particularly mine; as a tricultural transplant, my writing vividly reflects the pluralistic ethos of an exile and a dislocated diasporic, but who, like George Lamming, also writes about the “pleasures of exile.”

Access Type

Open Access

Justification for Restricting Access

I do not want anyone to have access to my book draft because it is a work in progress and I wish to pursue outside publication of this manuscript.

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Available for download on Monday, March 23, 2026

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