otherly

From At Home in Unhomeliness: An Anthology of Philippine Postcolonial Poetry in English (2007) ed. J. Neil C. Garcia: 

Let us pursue the domiciliary analogy in its conventional form: postcolonial poets writing in the language of colonization may be seen as guests residing in the house of English, which obviously isn't their original home. Their situation is therefore—as we have already noted—one of unhomeliness. And yet, it's clear that, by the tragic irony of colonial history, they now have to live in this new house, which admittedly exercises its own powerful claims on their imaginations, on their affections, even as it continues to remind them of their loss of original innocence, their "existential" displacement. They write in English, and yet do so not as residents but as "guests," behaving as Others in the house of the English Self. They deform, fragment or sabotage the traditions of English poetry, infuse it with alien rhythms, twist its structures, disrupt its sense and sensibility, adulterate its music, refract its optics, register, in each and every utterance, the fact of their double alienation from both their old and new identities. In other words, by writing in English, they may be said to insist on the fact that they exist pendulously in the chasm between the antipodes of the "purity" of a precolonial past and the "contaminations" of a colonial present. Readers of this kind of poetry will most likely never mistake it for anything other than creolized, mestizo, ethnic, minority, and yes—in the conventionally political sense that many Western or Western-trained critics understand it—most unmistakably "postcolonial."