SARE: Southeast Asian Review of English

Of Clerics and Queens: Nghi Vo on Genre, Identity and Crafting Stories

Rheanna Mathews — 2025-12-29

Best known for her elegant storytelling, lush detail, and evocative prose, Nghi Vo is the acclaimed author of The Empress of Salt and Fortune, the first in an ongoing series of novellas called The Singing Hills Cycle. Her body of work also includes the novels Siren Queen, The Chosen and the Beautiful, and The City in Glass. She has won the Hugo Award, the Crawford Award, and the Ignyte Award, and her books have been repeatedly featured in NPR’s Best of the Year lists, securing her place as a significant and distinctive voice in speculative fiction. This interview was conducted via email between May and June 2024. It touches upon the nature of the genre and forms of fantasy fiction, the significance of being a POC (person of colour) writer of speculative fiction, queerness, and worldbuilding. Vo speaks of the importance of creating counternarratives, the collaborative creation of storyworlds by author and reader, about disruption, the importance of authoring yourself, and choosing the stories we tell about ourselves.

(Re)awakening of Naga Oral History and Culture: An Interview with Avinuo Kire

Bhagyashree Saikia — 2025-12-29

Naga literary works have their roots in oral traditions which serve as the repository of the Naga people’s Indigenous knowledge, cultural identity, beliefs, customs and festivals despite historical and modern upheavals. Among modern writers of Nagaland, Avinuo Kire is notable for her vivid portrayal of the oral tradition of storytelling that deftly combines Naga mythology, history, and folklore, thus making her works significant for comprehending the tenacity and depth of Naga’s cultural legacy and heritage. In this conversation, Kire talks about her deliberate contribution in positioning the Naga worldview through her writing, subverting prevailing grand narratives that frequently ignore Indigenous history and culture. The interview further emphasizes the significance of indigenous educational systems, such as the Morung, which were formerly essential for passing down traditional knowledge, values, and worldviews. Kire argues for the Morung system, which functions as a place of memory that can support cultural (re)awakening of Naga oral history, even though its traditional significance has been fading due to the arrival of Christianity and the spread of the Western education system in Nagaland.

Mediated Transmissions and the Construction of the Disenfranchised Malaysian Tamil Child in the Film Jagat

Janagi Komravaloo — 2025-12-29

This article explores the filmic mediated transmissions of Malaysian Tamil working class childhood in the Malaysian Tamil feature film, Jagat (2015) as a significant platform for accessing and understanding the experience of Malaysian Indian children largely underrepresented in general scholarship of the community. We do this mainly through focusing on the perspective of the film’s main child protagonist. Film scenes and images are interpreted through a methodology incorporating the four-pillared Indian ideological concept of mātā, pitā, guru and daivam. We argue that the film highlights how the harsh realities confronting Malaysian Indian working-class families can greatly hinder the influence of parents, elders, role models, and religion in guiding children's development during their formative years. Through its various filmic constructions of a working-class Tamil childhood, Jagat serves to highlight the vicious cycle of social marginalization that takes seed early on. Such comprehensive understanding of the journey of disenfranchised Malaysian Tamil children is crucial for raising awareness and fostering empathy. This broader perspective may help shift the narrative from blame and accusations, which often focus solely on Indian gangsterism as an adult problem.

“Most Lankans are Silent Seethers”: Haunting as Resistance, Spectral Temporality, and “the Dark Heart of Lanka” in The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida

Shreyaa Gajraj — 2025-12-29

This paper foregrounds Shehan Karunatilaka’s Booker Prize-winning novel The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida’s function as a reflection on the concept of haunting as resistance against forgetting, focusing on the notion of spectral temporality within the context of Sri Lanka itself as a spectral space informed by cultural amnesia. Leveraging Avery Gordon’s framework of ‘haunting’ through her work Ghostly Mattersas a component of social life, and Jacques Derrida’s specterintroduced in his work Specters of Marx, the paper follows traces of absent presences by interrogating the ways in which Sri Lanka’s ghosts demand reclamation of silenced events and delayed justice. This paper argues that The Seven Moons deploys haunting as a mode of political resistance through certain interconnected mechanisms rooted in Sri Lanka’s post-war context: enforced disappearance as state practice, photography as counter archive against institutional erasure, and the figure of Mahakali as expression of collective rage – all grounded in specific “sites of death”. It looks at enforced disappearance as a tool of state terror strategically employed by the Sri Lankan state, alongside laying bare distinctive triggers that actively participate in resisting institutionalized erasure. Finally, it evokes the haunting quality of certain sites of death suggesting their temporal discontinuity.

Narrativizing Memory’s End: A Critical Overview of Contemporary Indian English Dementia Narratives

Mousana Nightingale Chowdhury — 2025-12-29

This paper provides an overview of contemporary Indian English narratives of dementia, exploring the complex interplay between narrative strategies and the representation of dementia subjectivity, reflecting wider socio-cultural attitudes toward the illness. The study examines Indian fiction and non-fiction published in English since the 21st century in the wake of a firm disability consciousness globally. By analysing six concurrent caregiver memoirs and fictional texts produced in the Indian literary scene, namely, In the Line of Alzheimer’s: The Mission Continues (2009) by S. P. Bhattacharjya, Krishna: Living with Alzheimer’s (2015) by Ranabir Samaddar, A World Within (2014) by Minakshi Chaudhry, Our Nana was a Nutcase (2015) by Ranjit Lal, Girl in White Cotton (2020) by Avni Doshi, and Mrs. C Remembers (2017) by Himanjali Sankar, the research underscores the challenges in representing the lived experiences of dementia vis-à-vis issues of identity, memory, and aging. The paper explores the ethical dilemmas in narrating dementia – balancing agency, limitations of empathy, and politics of representation, alongside the convergence of biomedical and socio-cultural discourses that influence how dementia is portrayed, understood and treated. The study concludes with insights into contemporary dementia narratives and suggests future interdisciplinary research directions within the Indian context.

Between Mothers and Daughters: Acts of Care and the Reclamation of Self in Geetanjali Shree’s Fiction

DEBASHRITA DEY — 2025-12-29

This study will explore the multifaceted nature of caregiving, with a particular focus on the intergenerational exchange between mothers and daughters in Indian families. Caregiving is often understood as unpaid labour; however, it is actually a much more nuanced relational endeavour influenced by diverse factors in which it is situated, which may be emotional, cultural, and economic (Breier 2021). In these families, daughters are often seen as primary caregivers, a role that is reinforced by social norms and beliefs about intergenerational filial duty. Caregiving varies greatly among families, influenced by factors such as financial independence and dependency norms, often creating an unequal burden for women. This paper grapples with these issues by exploring Geetanjali Shree’s Mai (2017) and Tomb of Sand(2018), honouring the lived experiences of adult daughters who engage in the multifaceted and complex realities of caregiving. The narratives also reveal the complexity of caring for their mothers, particularly in relation to the mother’s struggle to reclaim her identity, which has been largely obscured by the normative role of caregiving.

The Lover's Villanelle

Ayman Hareez Muhammad Adib — 2025-12-29

Diary Poem, Hong Kong

Srinjay Chakravarti — 2025-12-29

Arundhati Roy, Mother Mary Comes to Me

Shilpa Nataraj — 2025-12-29

Arundhati Roy’s Mother Mary Comes to Me (2025) is a deeply layered memoir of her mother, Mary Roy, a renowned educator, activist, and uncompromising feminist voice. Written in the aftermath of Mary Roy’s death in 2022, the text resists the conventional portrayal of the mother as purely nurturing and compassionate, instead presenting a figure marked by paradox and defiance. The memoir unfolds through a series of juxtapositions: love and estrangement, success and failure, insider and outsider, revealing the tensions that shaped their bond. At once personal and political, the book testifies to Roy’s own trajectory as writer-activist while foregrounding the enduring relevance of her mother’s grit as her strength in life. This review critically engages with Roy’s reframing of motherhood, her articulation of the personal as political, and the text’s broader resonances for gender studies and creative writing.

Notes on Contributors

Sharifah Aishah Osman — 2025-12-29

Notes on Contributors

NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

This section introduces the contributors to SARE Vol. 62, Issue 2 Dec (2025)

EDITORIAL

Sharifah Aishah Osman — 2025-12-29