Cultural Memory and Poetic White Space in Amy Ching-Yan Lam’s Baby Book : Emplacing Gaps and Absences

This article examines how various aspects of cultural memory, including pieces, fragments and dreams or imagined memories coexist in poetry, surrounded and enhanced by white space that allows both the poet and the reader to inhabit the emptiness and to see/feel/understand its potential. Poetry is what Pierre Nora has called a lieu de memoire, or site of memory, where cultural memory can be performed in a way that recognizes the impact of both inherited stories and inherited absences on second-generation immigrants. The author examines the ways in which Chinese Canadian writer Amy Ching-Yan Lam uses white space in her poetry collection Baby Book to explore the pieces, fragments, dreams, and imagined memories that form the diasporic cultural memory of a second-generation immigrant.