In an age of tightening borders and hardening identities, it is often literature that offers the clearest mirror to our fragmented world. At the Forum on European Culture 2025 in Amsterdam, Malaysian novelist Tash Aw and Dutch writer and poet Radna Fabias came together for a conversation that traced the intimate contours of migration, class, and colonial legacy.
At the centre of the conversation was Aw’s latest novel, The South, a sweeping, elegiac work that charts the rippling impact of the 1990s’ political upheaval in Southeast Asia through a single Malaysian family. The decade of so-called liberalisation, Aw reminds us, was also one of fracture – of widening class divides, eroded certainties, and the painful reshaping of post-colonial identities. With precision, Aw spoke of the dissonance between personal desire and cultural expectation, particularly for queer individuals navigating rigid frameworks.
Aw’s own biography is a migration narrative in itself: born in Taiwan, raised in Malaysia, educated in the UK, and now residing in Paris. This layered sense of belonging infuses his work and was a throughline in the discussion. For Aw, movement is never just physical. It is entangled with class mobility, linguistic alienation, and the burden of constantly having to translate oneself.
The emotional high point came when Aw turned the conversation inward. He spoke candidly about the shame and resentment he felt toward his parents: their Chinese accents, their exhaustion after long hours in low-paid jobs, the quiet indignity in watching them toil while he was dressed in a school uniform, sent off with the hope that he might one day grasp the opportunities they were deprived of. The migrant child’s shame, Aw suggested, is not just personal; it is systemic.
Fabias nodded in agreement, adding that for many post-colonial backgrounds, the question isn’t just Who am I?, but rather What parts of myself had to be hidden or sacrificed to become legible in the world? Belonging, they both agreed, is always conditional, never given.
Radna Fabias, whose debut poetry collection Habitus earned critical acclaim for its boundary-pushing form and content, brought her own lived experience to bear. The Curaçao-born, Netherlands-based poet performed a selection of her poems, their rhythms veering from clipped to soaring, intimate to defiant, giving texture to a story of displacement that echoed Aw’s.
Together, Aw and Fabias embodied the emotional toll and creative energy that comes with moving across borders. Their work reminds us that literature, at its best, doesn’t offer answers. It asks harder questions, about who gets to belong, at what cost, and who is left carrying the memory of that cost in their voice, their name, their art. Eva LAKEMAN 26th June 2025
