Writing 'skin' as 'limit' - how I wrote The Monsoon Bride

I wrote my novel The Monsoon Bride (Text, 2011) as part of a Creative Writing Ph.D. at the University of Adelaide. Set in 1930, the narrative examines the experience of living in Burma during colonial rule. British colonialism is a frequently explored historical moment in the Englishlanguage literary tradition. While many postcolonial novels are set in India, few are located in Burma even though it was annexed by the British and ultimately governed as an Indian province. Of these texts, fewer still have at their centre a mixedrace consciousness, in particular AngloBurmese or AngloIndian [2]. Instead, the vast majority of novels that represent colonialism do so either from the point of view of the European coloniser or the oppressed colonised subject. This binary is pervasive in contemporary literature as well as postcolonial scholarship. Colonialism may seem well explored within literary and academic writing, but this exploration rarely takes place from a mixedrace consciousness-a view that connects both the colonised and the coloniser.