Dr Nuraliah Norasid (in conversation with Dr Leslie Wong) – A Severed Head on the Nation’s Shield: Medusa in the Lion City

In this moderated conversation, Dr Nuraliah Norasid will speak about how a medusa became the protagonist of her 2017 novel The Gatekeeper. The Gatekeeper is set in a fictionalised version of Singapore and does not shy away from depicting inconvenient truths that belie the country’s performance of multiracial harmony. Yet the conduit via which it exposes these truths is Medusa, who appears to have little connection to the lived experiences of Singapore’s minority Malay community. Far from reaffirming Western classics’ self-proclaimed universality, however, the ludic nature of Nuraliah’s initial encounter with the Gorgon and her vital infusion of Malay language and culture into the novel reveal a reception journey at once deeply personal and
increasingly prevalent. Previous scholarship on receptions of Medusa has not fully explored her afterlives in postcolonial women’s writing, but this session offers an opportunity to understand why authors like Nuraliah choose to meet the petrifying gaze of Graeco-Roman mythology’s archetypal victim-monster.