Author: Nicole Ong, College of Interdisciplinary and Experiential Learning, Singapore University of Social Sciences - ResearchGate

Abstracts:
- »Nicole Ong also reads the wartime assault of women in Vyvyane Loh’s Breaking the Tongue (2004) using a survivor‑centric approach. By demonstrating the limitations of a Western‑centric reading of the novel that is set in multilingual and multicultural Singapore, Ong situates the female victim’s trauma in its cultural and narrative world/context and argues that reading the protagonist’s dual‑language testimony on its own narrative and cultural terms instead of solely in its English translation can empower the doubly marginalised voice who has been silenced by the colonisers and the Japanese soldiers who assaulted her.« (Source: Lim, Yiru, and Kit Ying Lye. »Introduction. Reading Trauma and Violence: Expanding Horizons.« Reading Violence and Trauma in Asia and the World. Edited by Yiru Lim et al. New York 2025: 6-7)

- »Literary trauma studies have attempted to counteract the erasures of colonialism by giving voice to the traumas experienced by colonised subjects. However, the tendency to use “Western-centric” frameworks of trauma to read postcolonial texts “[ignores] or [marginalizes] non-Western traumatic events and histories and non-Western theoretical work” (Craps and Buelens 2). This chapter compares two approaches of reading the dual-language testimony of a female victim of wartime rape in Vyvyane Loh’s Breaking the Tongue, a novel set during the 1942 Fall of Singapore. It analyses a Western-centric trauma reading of the novel and demonstrates the limitations of doing so. It then argues that a survivor-centric approach involves close reading trauma in the context of its narrative world: the culture it represents, the community’s worldview of language, the local methods of healing, etc. For this novel, this includes translating the victim’s testimony to acknowledge the value of a dual-language testimony in post-war, postcolonial Singapore. It is only when readers regard the victim’s testimony on its own terms that the novel can succeed in empowering a doubly marginalised voice: one whose story has been silenced by the Japanese soldiers who raped and killed her and by the colonisers who abandoned her.« (Source: Taylor & Francis Online)

Contents:

	Reading Trauma Narratives Through the Classic Model (p. 180)
	Reading Trauma Narratives in Context (p. 182)
	The Reader’s Choice: Towards A Survivor‑Centric Reading (p. 186)
	Notes (p. 188)
	Works Cited (p. 188)

Reviews: -

Wikipedia: History of Asia: History of Japan / Shōwa era | History of Asia: History of Singapore | Literature: Singaporean literature / Vyvyane Loh | Sex and the law: Wartime sexual violence / Wartime sexual violence in World War II | War: Pacific War / Japanese war crimes