i also feel - increasingly - that it's my southeast asian identity that wants to get out and shout at people.

it must be the camoens, because although it's one of the most liberating things i've read in a long while - liberating because the greeks and romans held us in thrall for centuries with their sea poetry and sold us their vision of the great voyages and what is it but paddling about the mediterranean it makes you laugh for joy and even poor tasso who was born after columbus took 15 whole stanzas to get from the levant to gibraltar when it is we who are the sea people the oceans are on the outside and we are on the outside and camoens lifted the spell and never ever will i feel sorry for odysseus again.

and you start in portugal and it is the european history you know and the world constructed by that very literature which you've always known is truly your world - and when you get to the other end it is your world again - a different one and once more truly your own - the one you live in and breathe in, and for all that when i read camoens my heart contracts, and don't anyone ever forget that i'm historically and geographically and socially and culturally southeast asian first before i'm anything else. that i feel real rage - they brought their cannons and fired them into our ports and took our towns and changed our names and bloodied our soils and are proud of it, they came in an armada made of up ships named for angels and flying redcrosse banners and behind those canvas wings the crusading winds are no less barbarous, and the dutch and the english follow behind seeking spices, and even milton compared satan's flight out of hell to the sailors rounding the cape on the trading flood, intoxicated by the spiced winds.