Race, State, and Identity in Life Writing from Malaysia A

UNIVERSITY OF HAWAI'I LIBRARY

THE FICTIONS OF A NATION:

RACE, STATE, AND IDENTITY IN LIFE WRITING FROM MALAYSIA

A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED TO THE GRADUATE DIVISION OF THE UNIVERSITY OF HAWAI'I IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF

DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY

IN

ENGLISH

AUGUST 2008

By Claire Dawn Morais

Dissertation Committee:

Craig Howes, Chairperson Cristina Bacchilega JohnZuem David Hanlon Barbara Watson Andaya ------

We certify that we have read this dissertation and that, in our opinion, it is satisfactory in scope and quality as a dissertation for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in English.

DISSERT ATlON COMMITTEE

Chairperson

(/3~~ ~ (Z)~)# ... tZ. ..

11 © 2008, Oaire, Dawn Morais

iii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Running through this dissertation are traces of family, teachers and friends.

The journey that took my parents John Victor Morais and Gladys Morais nee Vaz from

Kerala to Kuala Lumpur gave my life its early trajectory and encouraged me to continue journeying, both in search of what the future might hold and towards a fuller understanding of the past. My brothers Herbert, Benedict and Justin and my sister Elaine have kept me part of the family circle through our continuing conversations even as the benediction of my mother's prayers have kept us connected and safe. And I would not have engaged in this adventure if I had not had the unstinting support of my best friend and husband, John Frederick Webster, and my children Zubin and Sheela Jane Menon, cheerleaders who sustained me with their technical support and editorial assistance.

I would also like to thank Sun Hee Kim, graphic designer and member of my work family at Loomis-ISC who helped me locate and extract the images I used to support some chapters.

Our first friends in Hawai'i, Michael and Marie Jose Fassiotto have been steadfast in their faith in my enterprise. Marie Jose prompted me to begin talking about my father's place in Malaysian history by inviting me to speak about his life and work at the

Biography Center of the University of Hawai'i.

I have had the great good fortune of exceptional teachers. Craig Howes, the

Director of the Biography Center, proved pivotal to my studies, introducing me first to life writing and then serving as the Chair Person of my Ph.D committee. He was exacting and generous in all the ways most valuable to a student: as a reader, editor, and challenger of my most cherished opinions. A seminar in ethnography with David Hanlon

IV introduced me to a discipline that provided tools critical to my writing. And a seminar with Miriam Fuchs led me to question "authority"- my own, the nation's and that of the authors I discuss. Cynthia Ward opened the door on the field of visual culture and I gained a fi!ller understanding of how popular culture speaks to and for us through a seminar with John Rieder. Cynthia Franklin and Cristina Bacchilega introduced me to issues of ethnicity, diaspora studies and folklore in ways that I found myself returning to often. And my chapter on SaJleh ben Joned would have been the poorer without Reinhard

Friedrich's seminar on the trickster figure in literature and society. I revisited Malaysian history with fresh eyes through a course with Leonard Andaya and had the benefit of

Barbara Watson Andaya's scholarship on Malaysia in my area studies and in reviewing this dissertation. John's Zuem's perspective as a member of my dissertation committee with experience akin to mine in the world of business and tourism helped me sharpen my arguments. Being engaged in this inter-disciplinary conversation here in Hawai'i where the rights and responsibilities of those who came and those who were already here are still being discussed stimulated my thinking about the rights and responsibilities of those who came and those who were already in the Malay States before it became Malaysia.

To the many other teachers, members of family and friends who have helped emich my understanding of what it means to be Malaysian and what it takes to belong, I owe my grateful thanks. I am glad to have completed this particular journey at this particular time at the University ofHawai'i at Manoa. It was for me a most hospitable place of learning and growth. As we say in Malaysia, ribuan terima kasih or as we say here in Hawai'i, mahalo nui loa.

v ABSTRACT

This is a study of nation, race, and identity in Malaysia through a number of life writing texts. The texts examined are written works as well as independent films and visual culture expressed through the mass media and the internet. These works explore the framing of identity in the Malay States from colonial times to the present and offer fresh perspectives on what it means to be Malaysian in ways that challenge state prescriptions and suggest that the nation is still very much a work in progress. They also call into question Euro-centric ideas about what constitutes a national identity and how nations emerge.

In discussing how identity has been articulated and continues to evolve in

Malaysia, this study sheds light on how race has informed nation. It examines where articulations of ethnicity have led as the country has joined the ranks of newly industrialized economies. It points to issues of class and gender in the stories of how

Malaysians see themselves. This small corpus oflife writing, expressed in several different genres, suggests that the contest for hegemony once waged by waves of colonizers and centered on the key ports of Melaka, Penang, and Singapore is today a contest waged largely within national borders for the right to frame identity as citizens.

The maritime traffic that brought Chinese and Indians in large numbers to serve the needs of a colonial economy created a diaspora space in which new immigrants encountered those already there and raised questions about who belonged and who did not. That need led to a conversation started by the departing British colonial government and the middle class elites to whom it relinquished power in 1957. It is a conversation that continues to this day, but its tone has changed, becoming more ethnocentric and more subject to

vi intrusive attempts by the state to control public discourse. Racial polarization and a more authoritarian state have not helped provide answers to questions of identity and belonging that are satisfactory to descendants of immigrants for whom Malaysia has been, for several generations, the only place they consider home.

vii TABLE OF CONTENTS

Acknowledgements ...... iv

Abstract ...... vi

List of Figures ...... ix

Introduction: Authority and the Nation ...... 1

Chapter I: Colonial Times ...... 50

Henri Fauconnier: The Soul of Malaya

Chapter II: Chapter II: From British Colony to Independent Nation ...... 91

John Victor Morais.Witness to History: Memoirs of an Editor

Chapter III: Going Native ...... 133

Salleh ben Joned. As I Please: Nothing is Sacred: Sajak-Sajak

Saleh: Poems Sacred and Profane

Chapter IV: Transculturation ...... 169

Shirley Geok-Lin Lim. Among the White Moonfaces:

Memoirs of a Nyonya Feminist; Two Dreams; Joss and Gold.

Chapter V: Crossings and Collisions ...... 206

K.S. Maniam. Arriving ... and other stories; In a Far Country;

The Return: Between Lives

Epilogue: The Multi-Media Tum in Malaysian Life Writing ...... 235

Works Consulted ...... 262

V1ll LIST OF FIGURES

Figure

I. Print advertisements from the "Malaysia Truly Asia" tourism

marketing campaign ...... " ...... , ...... 4

2. Cover Illustration by Leng Tsu Soo for the 2003 edition of...... 79

The Soul of Malaya.

3. Witness to History cover photo of John Victor Morais ...... 107

4. Back cover of Witness to Historv shows Morais interviewing

Malaysia's first Prime Minister, Tunku Abdul Ralunan ...... 107

5. HINDRAF street rally ...... '" ...... 238

6. BERSIH street rallies ...... 240

IX INTRODUCTION: AUTHORITY & NATION

The idea of Malaysia as a nation is one that contains within itself several overlapping fictions. It is an idea that has found expression in fictionalized autobiography and in various other forms of life writing. This study explores some of the fictions of nation, race, and identity through a number of life writing texts-written works, but independent films and visual culture amplified through the mass media as well-that track the framing of identity in the Malay States from colonial times to the present.

Separately and as a whole, they offer an understanding of what it means and has meant to be a Malaysian in ways that challenge state prescriptions and suggest that the nation is still very much a work in progress on different tracks. My study of how identity has been articulated and continues to evolve in Malaysia centers on how race has informed nation.

It examines where articulations of ethnicity have led as the country has joined the ranks of newly industrialized economies. In so doing, it also points to issues of class in the stories of how Malaysians see themselves that lend credence to the view expressed by economists like K.S. Jomo, that class contention underpins the historical process in colonial and post-colonial Malaya.

The history of modem Malaysia is the history of repeated contestations over both territory and identity. Early contestations, prior to the Portuguese conquest of Melaka in

1511, consisted of an on-going jockeying for power among the sultans and chiefs of the

Malay states, and the competing attempts of successive overlords to command strategically placed ports and extract tributes from vassal states. I These power struggles preceded waves of colonization by the Portuguese, the Dutch, and the British in the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries. The contest for hegemony centered on

I ------

key ports along the Melaka Straits-Melaka, Penang and Singapore-- because these ports provided the protection from the monsoons that trading vessels that sailed between

India and China needed. Today the contest is largely waged within national borders for hegemony over identity, rather than over territory. The maritime traffic that brought

Chinese and Indians in large numbers to serve the needs of a colonial economy prompted long term residence and settlement that over generations turned into adoption of the new land as home.2 Over time, and as the Malay States moved towards independence, this growing immigrant population increasingly vested in the colonial economy created a need to define who belonged and who did not, and the terms of their staying or leaving.

That need led to a conversation started by the departing colonial government and the middle class elites to whom it relinquished power in 1957. It is a conversation that continues to this day but its tone has changed over time, becoming more ethnocentric and more subject to intrusive attempts by the state to control public discourse. Racial polarization and a more authoritarian state have not helped provide answers to questions of identity and belonging that are satisfactory to third and fourth generation descendants of immigrants who call Malaysia-and only Malaysia-home.

Fifty years after gaining its independence, Malaysia would be hard pressed to find anyone amongst its 27 million citizens today who could define what it means to be

Malaysian to the satisfaction of all the different etlmic communities that together make up the nation's population. But just as surely, fifty years after independence, it would be very hard, if not impossible to find any citizen of Malaysia who calls India or China home. And yet, the conversation about nationhood and patriotism and identity returns over and over again to the differing entitlements and expectations of the "immigrant" and

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the "native," and mutual suspicions about loyalty and welcome. Malay or non-Malay, from abroad or from the relative anonymity of on-line chat rooms and blogs, Malaysians increasingly express the fear that, fifty years after gaining independence, "their basic freedom is being threatened, not by some external enemy, rather by their very own government" (Bakri).

Answering the question of who is an "immigrant," and who "belongs" has become further complicated by more recent waves of legal and illegal immigration from other Asian countries such as Indonesia, Bangladesh, India, Sri Lanka, Nepal and

Myanmar, as employers in a fast-growth economy look beyond national borders for people willing to work for less money than Malaysians expect, or willing to accept the jobs that Malaysians no longer want. And yet, the official government stance towards illegal immigrants today is the same as the one taken towards the communists in the sixties: hunt them down and root them out. Today the government uses the same volunteer force to hunt down illegal immigrants that was first set up to fight the communists.• 3

The government's response to the influx of tourists is, however, an unqualified welcome that offers, as Malaysia'S main attraction, the very racial diversity so closely monitored and policed internally. Starting in mid-1999, Malaysia began advertising itself with the tagline "Truly Asia." This campaign presented a bevy of uniformly light-skinned women with almost inter-changeable faces in elaborate traditional attire to represent the nation's diversity (See Fig.J). The lavishly colorful and resolutely exotic television, print, and outdoor advertising campaign won several awards and helped increase tourist arrivals from below 13 million in 2001 to 18 million in 2007.4 According to the Tourism

3 0IIt ...... ~ .. ,...... an. ""-0...... OoII.miDwt,I....,.. .. ,...... ,.."., ..u ..... a-..~ ...... , ...... AM._,r.c...... ~ ...... _ ...... 4AW .. _ ... '!l!.t ...... --...... _ ...... c; ...... Nt.n. ... cI ..... - ...... ,. .. 10 __ •• '--".,..._ ...... ~ ... .,.....hk...... - ...... '-_ ...... ,...... ,...._

Fig. 1. Print advertisements from the "Malaysia Truly Asia" tourism marketing campaign

4 Malaysia website, the campaign was designed to break away from the "single cultural destination positioning commonly used by many other Asian countries," Instead, it sought to portray Malaysia as the only true "multi-cultural one-stop destination"

(Tourism Malaysia: Trade and Marketing Resources). But this visual presentation of cosmopolitan Malaysia erases bloodlines. Rather than "project one set of histories across another in such a way as to make diverse cultural experiences concurrent and relatable within a logic of co-implication," the government's impulse is to write over ethnicity at the same moment as it claims ethnic diversity as the basis for Malaysia's cultural richness

(Shohat and Starn 56). Decked out, sanitized, and stylized, the female models fail to convey any sense of the colorful disorder, the communal separations as well as the seepage of cultures, which are taken for granted in daily living in Malaysia.

This tourism marketing campaign certainly did not invite the tourist to discover the richness of Asia in the diversity of Malaysia's illegal immigrants. Estimated to number about three million, they officially constitute more than ten percent of the total population and currently outnumber Malaysian Indians, the third largest ethnic group at the time of Independence, who represent less than eight percent. 5 Today more than ever, while instituting programs and creating laws that reinscribe race in ways that work against a sense of national belonging, Malaysian politicians wage an on-going, inherently self-defeating argument about what "Bangsa Malaysia" (Malaysian race) means, and what it demands-and they do so without irony, from the ramparts ofrace.

The response from Malaysians on the street to governmental restrictions on public discourse and the policing of the relations between races is to retreat into greater communalism, finding solidarity in race. If the coinciding increase in intermarriage and

5 the softening of attitudes towards such unions are any indicators, this retreat is not provoked so much by ethnic antipathies as by the fear of punitive measures taken by the state that target those who venture too far beyond the safe confines of their own community to speak of issues of race and religion in ways that cut across ethnic lines, or frame comparisons that challenge the status quo. Legal instruments left over from colonial times, such as the Sedition Act, are today used to silence some kinds of dialogue that could foster a sense of national identity: whether the subject is poverty or educational opportunities, the government declares these issues too inflammatory if spoken of in terms of how the different races fare.6 The Sedition Act criminalizes speech deemed to have a "seditious tendency," including speech which tends to "bring into hatred or contempt or to excite disaffection against" the government, foster "feelings of ill-will and hostility between different races," or question preferential access to business, education, and employment opportunities reserved for Malays and natives of Sabah and Sarawak who qualifY as Bumiputera (princes of the soil), or natives. The indigenous Orang Asli , a term which translates as "original people" largely do not enter into this discussion, because of their status as wards of the state rather than as fully recognized citizens with the means and avenues to engage in the political life of the nation.

Malays. Chinese. Indians: Staging the Races

To speak of Malaysians today is to speak of any of the three constitutionally identified "races"- Malay, Chinese and Indian-that make up the bulk of the nation's citizenry.7 Although "race" is enshrined in the Malaysian constitution, and in various pieces of legislation designed to manage communal tensions and protect native rights, the

6 use of the term in governance had its genesis in colonial times. The colonial administrators in British Malaya used race as markers for pressing the local native and immigrant populations into their service. The short stories of Hugh Clifford, a prominent administrator in British Malaya for several decades, who eventually became Governor of the Straits Settlements, offer ample evidence of British presumption and pragmatic certainty when assessing each of the races. The Malays, Clifford tells us in Malayan

Monochromes, "true children of the drowsy land in which they live-are as lazy about their religion as they are concerning everything else in the world" (121). He commends the Chinese for their "indifference to discomfort and their extraordinary toughoess" (43), but notes that like other "financial operators," they have "regarded the sacrifice of a human life as a matter of slight moment if weighed in the balance with the success of a

'deal'" (46). The Indians, "have a peculiar talent for ... intrigue" (104). Ruling over these childlike races was the British Government which Clifford describes as "a huge, flint-hearted organism," yet one with the capacity to act as a "foster-mother, to whom they might run fearlessly for comfort and protection" (148). These attitudes inevitably translated into policies for governing and apportioning power that further compartmentalized communities, accentuating their distinctness instead of fostering the softening of racial boundaries between neighbors actually taking place at the level of daily living.

The departure of the British did not bring an end to the politics of race. Instead, it further entrenched racial divides as ethoicity became the basis for how and where power was vested and where rights were assigned in the peaceful transition to independence.

Beneath this transition simmered resentments and expectations that sprang from a sense

7 of native entitlement, or immigrant contribution. The Malayan Union, the first step in the direction ofIndependence following the end of the Second World War and the Japanese

Occupation, rested on the premise of equal citizenship for all, whatever a person's race or religion, and offered no special recognition of the "native" status of the Malays. The

Sultans were in essence coerced by the British into agreeing to the terms of the Malayan

Union. That agreement essentiaJly meant they had to abandon any notion of sovereign rights enshrined in earlier treaties. 8 However, strong opposition from the Malays to the loss of native status, the Sultans' objections to being bullied into submission, and the lobbying of Downing Street by influential retired colonial administrators in London sympathetic to the Malays, resulted in the Malayan Union being replaced by the

Federation of Malaya in 1948. The new constitution restored Malay native entitlements, and placed restrictions on immigrant rights to citizenship.

In post-colonial Malaysia, entitlements and expectations based on race have framed debates over the unequal distribution of wealth and control of the economy among indigenous and immigrant groups. Those same entitlements and expectations have also shaped such political initiatives as the New Economic Policy of 1970, designed to bring about a fairer distribution of wealth and opportunity after the race riots of May

13,1969.9 Those initiatives, and the ensuing resentment of the immigrant Chinese in particular at seeing their dominance eroded, have led to the racial stereotyping of native

Malays as undeserving of the urban prosperity and improved standard of living that flowed their way from the large scale economic development largely produced by immigrant labor.

8 Used to signifY the status of Malays as natives, the tenn Bumiputera emphasizes the heritage of Sultans and chieftains (putera) who ruled the Malay states at the time of colonization. From the time a British trader named Francis Light established a base on the island of Penang in 1786 on behalf of the British East India Company, British control in one fonn or another was sustained through a variety of treaties negotiated, or imposed with some measure of force, through one or more of the Sultans who ruled over the

Malay states. British administrators convinced the Malay rulers that the thousands of immigrants being encouraged to come from India and China to meet the needs of the colonial economy would do the work that the rural Malays, whose needs were largely met through subsistence farming, would not want to do. In The Malay Dilemma, published in 1970, a year after the race riots in Kuala Lumpur, Dr. Mahathir Mohamad offered much the same argument. This book caused a rift in Malay leadership and ushered in a new, abrasive tone in Malaysian politics. 'The Malays are spiritually­ inclined, tolerant and easy-going," asserted Dr. Mahathir, while "the non-Malays and especially the Chinese are materialistic, aggressive and have an appetite for work" (97).

In recent years, however, independent fihns are offering a counter-argument to how

Mahathir and others have mapped the country by providing vignettes of village and small town life. These films capture a sense of being Malaysian in the city and the country that is defmed as much by class and gender as by race.

The Chinese, who came initially to mine tin, did become the backbone of business and the most conspicuous accumulators of wealth in the urban centers. Thousands of

Indians were brought in to work on the rubber plantations started by the British while middle-class Indians also emigrated to Malaya to staff the schools and the Civil Service.

9 With each generation, intermarriage became more commonplace, so that a Malaysian might also be a Eurasian or that increasingly sought after ethnic mixture referred to approvingly today as a "pan-Asian"-the offspring of Sino-Indian, Sino-Malay or other mixed Asian unions. As the American Anthropological Association's statement on race points out, there is greater variation (94%) within so-called racial groups than there is between them (about 6%) and that "throughout history, wherever different groups have come into contact, they have interbred" (RACE: Are We So Different?). And yet, "race," a term fraught with social and political import and the subject of much scholarly debate, is a term used routinely and structurally to differentiate the communities in Malaysia by what they can or cannot do as well what they can or cannot say. Malaysian politics has failed to adequately consider how the races did in fact come together over time to build both nation and society as the everyday inter-ethnic engagement and tolerance of others made possible a peaceful transition to independence and the country's steady growth.lO

Contemporary Malaysian politics is founded on demarcation and the enforcement of differences. 11 Religion-and in particular whether one is Muslim or not-is ultimately the most powerful marker of where citizens belong and what their rights are. Thus questions about allegiance, community, and quite simply who "we" are as a nation dominate public discourse and permeate everyday life routinely, even as second and third generation Malaysians find themselves having to dispel suspicions about the depth of their patriotism simply because they are not Malay or Muslim-or sometimes because they are not Malay or Muslim enough. Again, Mahathir, whose provocative speeches have fuelled the racial debate, famously argued that "there never was true harmony" between the races prior to Independence. "There was a lack of inter-racial strife. There

10 was tolerance. There was accommodation. There was a certain amount of give and take.

But there was no harmony" (Dilemma 4-5). He saw a landscape in which the Malays, largely concentrated in the rural areas, were increasingly excluded from urban life and the opportunities it presented for education, trade, and the accumulation of wealth.

Mahathir's outlook during his reign as Prime Minister over twenty two years shaped public policy, gave the national conversation a far more combative tone, and altered relations between the races structurally and socially. In the process he also tore at the tolerance and accommodation he himself acknowledged had been part of the fabric of

Malaysian identity.

Despite, or perhaps because of, their authority, or emboldened by the change in the national conversation that took place during the Mahathir era, politicians have generally been unable or unwilling to strive for genuinely satisfactory answers to the question of who Malaysians are as a nation. In November 2006, newspapers carried reports of different political parties sparring over a resolution proposed by the Gerakan party to adopt the idea of Bangsa Malaysia ("Malaysian race"). The leader of one faction of the ruling Malay party, UMNO, Datuk Abdul Ghani Othman was reported as saying

"After 49 years of independence, we should be more mature and not try to produce nebulous concepts whose origins are not clear.... Even if the term Bangsa Malaysia is to be used, it must only be applied in the context of all the peoples of Malaysia with the

Malays as the pivotal race." 12

Authorizing the Nation

In the absence of a nuanced discussion in the forums offered by public policy and government, I believe we need to look to writers, and to life writers in particular, for sites 11 that address the multiple dimensions and state of flux of Malaysian identity. Such writers offer us the opportunity to examine identity engaging with the environment on several fronts and through multiple personae, freed somewhat from the restrictions placed on public speech and more widely read, and therefore more closely policed, pronouncements. Unlike politicians playing to different galleries while serving those whose patronage ensures their power, writers, and more recently film-makers and producers of visual culture, appear to work with greater independence, selecting their materials and finding their professional partners with less of a sense of being bounded by race, class, gender, or geography. These writers and producers oflife writing have often demonstrated greater subtlety and attentiveness in teasing out the patterns of interconnectedness that go into the making of a nation like Malaysia.

This study locates answers to the question of "What is a Malaysian?" by looking at the life writing of authors and producers of visual culture. Like all Malaysians, their perspectives are shaped by their subject positions relative to power structures, ethnicity, native entitlements, and immigrant contributions to the creation of this new nation.13 But these writers and film makers also record shifts in position over time that reflect their response to the emergence of the new nation, generational changes in political leadership, and the rise of religious fundamentalism. By life writing I mean biographical and autobiographical written texts and a growing body of visual culture. Representations of the capital city, Kuala Lumpur, independent films and public events transmitted via global television are all writing the lives of the people of Malaysia in ways that are simultaneously stage-managed and unintended. These visual representations are largely unfiltered, or less mediated by the domestic constraints of self or state censorship. That

12 such unauthorized expressions of identity can take place at all is a consequence of official and public indifference to the intellectual conversations on the fringes at a time of national absorption with economic advancement, personal prosperity, and ever more conspicuous consumption. Such indifference to the uncomfortable questioning of intellectuals makes available a small public space where cultural production that might otherwise be stifled is beginning to flourish quietly. Only after they attract attention outside the country, or are given a wider audience via the media, do these authors' and producers' contributions to the conversation about Malaysian identity attract state and regulatory attention, and with it censorship, public condemnation, official blustering, or the denial of permits for the enactment of some of these expressions ofidentity14 And more recently, peaceful street rallies by largely Malay and later largely Indian crowds in

Kuala Lumpur were televised via CNN and AI-Jazeera, which recorded in the process the state's use of undue force, tear gas, and water cannons to contain the march and turn back the crowds.

Whether endorsed by or antagonistic to the state, embedded in all of these expressions of identity are questions of authority-authority in the sense of power

(intrinsic, assumed, or conferred) as well as in the sense of articulating, and thereby

"authoring," an idea. By what authority did successive colonial powers claim ownership not only of the territory, but of the psyche of the people they found in or brought to this particular place, so far removed from their homes? By what authority did the Malays assert their primacy as the indigenous--or to use Mahathir's term, "definitive people"

(126)-when the Orang Asli, by virtue of the meaning of the term used to refer to them

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by others, including the government, would seem to have a prior claim?15 And by what authority did the immigrant Chinese and Indians become a part of the new nation?

By examining the process of ongoing authorship of a nation through the work of selected writers, film-makers, and other media-amplified images, I recognize that my very act of selection reinforces their authority to frame the conversations about race embedded in the idea of Malayal Malaysia. By juxtaposing the work of these writers and film-makers to those images of official Malaysia writ large on television screens and global news media, I realize that I am reading these cultural productions as reflections of the struggle of different ethnic cornmunities to accommodate each other as they collectively inch towards nation. I therefore would seem to reenact the perhaps tired imagining of nation along the same fault lines of race. 16 But as I do so, I will also question the reliability of the writers I have selected because in their unreliability, and in the gap between what they profess to do and what they in fact accomplish, also lies emotion and truth about the emerging nation. At this stage in Malaysia's history, I see this journey along critical paths marked by race as a necessary stage, since this is indeed the road we have traveled, guided by old ties to tradition, and by new attachments to a place that does not yet feel completely like home. Recognizing that Malaysians have, in sometimes unwitting collusion with the state, spent the first fifty years of nationhood identifying themselves by race first, and nation second, may provide a means for a richer reimagining of nation. Working in an environment in which race and nationality have been rigidly defined by the measuring instruments of state, these writers, film and image­ makers are beginning to open up new ways of imagining nation, ways that question the very idea of nation as previously defined.

14 The ways life in Malaysia is being written for internal and external readership, also suggest that articulations of identity will be further complicated by the pace of globalization. Many life writing "texts" already provide evidence that foreign investment, education, travel, and access to other societies through virtual avenues such as global media and the Web, and the new international solidarities being fostered by religious fundamentalism, will lead to even more critical self-examination of how issues of class, gender, religion and freedom are informing who Malaysians think they are. For clearly, the different ways Malaysians are today thinking of themselves increasingly contradict the state's efforts to keep the lid on both religion and race by requiring citizens to define themselves through a limiting set of criteria that fail to account for the overlap and seepage of identities. 17 The writers and filmmakers I will discuss address the over­ simplification of race, and raise fresh questions about the rigid separation of races. They also wrestle with identity, offering no neat answers. Separately and as a group, they represent a modest but growing corpus of cultural production that struggles to articulate the complications of race and nation, and though not readily acknowledged by the state, their work may be more informative than anything the state offers about how the nation is in fact being imagined as it continues to evolve.

Life Writing. Nationalism and the Shared English Canvas

In seeking answers to the many questions surrounding the authority of the writings I examine, as well as my own authority in selecting those writings, I rely on the guidance of theorists of both life writing and nationalism. I draw on Paul John Eakin and

Roland Barthes to explore how those who write and read determine what the emerging

15 life writing of Malaysia says about the nation. Eakin's reminder of the "dynamic, changing, plural" (98) nature of the self is as pertinent to the state of a nation like

Malaysia as is Barthes' observation that "a text is not a line of words releasing a single

'theological' meaning (the message of the Author-God) but a multi-dimensional space in which a variety of meanings, none of them original, blend and clash" (146). Whether the nation is seen to be invented (Gellner 169) or imagined (Anderson), as I trace the emerging outlines of nationhood through a variety of life writing texts, I remember

Barthes' remark that "a text is made up of multiple writings, drawn from many cultures and entering into mutual relations of dialogue, parody, contestation" (148). This study necessarily represents the focusing of that multiplicity in me as a reader, and although it can, and will be focused differently in other readers, we might discover in the overlap the emotional and intellectual topography of a young nation.

Some of that overlap results from the use of English: the language of the British educational system and initially the main language for communication between the middle class elites of newly independent Malaya, then Malaysia. Despite the diverse origins of the middle class, those who belonged to it shared the language of the colonizer.

English was an enabling language in Malaysia, articulating a sense of shared aspirations among those who viewed the British colonial administration as both exploitative-and useful. Print capitalism, as Anderson argues, helped to fonn this fraternity, "a group in hot pursuit of refrigerators, holidays, power" (144). For while working class communities still clung to vernacular education and newspapers out of a nostalgic attachment to the homeland to which they still hoped to return, the emerging middle class employed

16 English to foster the growth of the kind of nationalism that Ernest Gellner speaks of, the kind that "invents nations where they do not exist" (Thought and Change 169).

As new immigrants and ambitious upper middle class or aristocratic Malays looked to improve their economic standing, English clearly was the ticket they needed.

Fluency could pull working class families into middle class prosperity. Writers like

Wong Phui Nam and K.S. Maniam, for instance, devoted much of their writing to examining their sense of estrangement from ancestral traditions. Wong, who writes very much in that modernist tradition hugely indebted to Eliot and the broader English canon, is a leading Malaysian literary voice. He converted to Islam, married a Malay woman and raises his children as Muslims. He makes his living as a merchant banker, and he always publishes under his Chinese name. He thus appears to have achieved that blending of traditions and experience, that ability to preserve individual identity while sharing other communal identities, that is probably the most eloquent statement of what it means to be

Malaysian. But his writings suggest a state of siege and a threatened loss of identity that may be traced to the increasingly heavy intrusion of government into spheres of personal privacy. K.S. Maniam describes what Wong does as "inhabitation"; the ability, even while dealing with themes of cultural estrangement, to "leave behind the self shaped by his own cultural milieu and enter the self of a personality formed by another culture or cultures" ("Introduction" Ways of Exile xiii). While a note of regret at the loss of ancestral tradition is never far away in the works of the writers discussed in this study, there is along with it, and most conspicuously in the case of Maniam, an impatience with traditions that are oppressive--that constrain individuals as they try to establish homes in the new land. Maniam does not therefore display the same sense of "cultural catastrophe"

17 that Albert Memmi describes as resulting from an estrangement from a mother tongue that is not properly valued in the machinery of state (107).

A learned ease and comfort with communicating in English, either because it was adopted as the first language in some middle class homes, or because it was the medium of instruction in the main school system, provided common access to cultural traditions that served Malays, Chinese, and Indians equally. Increasingly distanced from their own cultural and literary traditions, they imbibed English nursery rhymes, European fairy tales, children's books by writers such as Enid Blyton, the poetry of the Romantics, and the drama of Shakespeare. Malaysian children learned how important it was to know and demonstrate familiarity with the Western, and in particular the British, canon. Similarly, the more a British-style education appeared to be linked directly to material advancement and economic opportunity, the more ballet and piano lessons, scouting and tennis became preferred to Malay, Chinese or Indian dance or music, traditional Malay martial arts

(silat) or traditional Malay sports such as sepak takraw (kick volleyball). Audiences and practitioners of traditional forms of community theatre as the wayang kulit (shadow play) or mak yong (Kelantanese dance drama) shrank into the country. In the urban centers,

Malaysians pursued success through Western educations and western-style business growth.

The struggle to preserve identity through the writing of lives in a variety of visual and oral traditions has not been confined to just the Chinese and Indians. Among the

Malays, those who cherish oral and theatre traditions like the mak yong have had to struggle to keep these art forms alive. For the past fifteen years, the fundamentalist

Islamic state of Kelantan has tried to purge local Malay culture of all elements

18 supposedly predating or running counter to their version of Islam: "Intermingling among bukan muhrim (those not of familial ties) was barred in performances, and practices and rituals seen as khurafat (deviations from PAS's interpretation ofIslam) were rebuked"

(Fadzil "Mak Yong,,).18 Attempts by the state to impose its "performance" on the artist is not confmed to just the pressure from Islamic fundamentalists. Plays such as Huzir

Suleiman's Election Day have faced numerous permitting problems in Kuala Lumpur because of their political content. This play deals with the government use of undercover agents to monitor and indirectly manage the private lives of activists known to be working for Opposition parties. Huzir also suggests how individuals can be seduced by the power the machinations of the state can provide to someone pursuing their private agendas-in this case, the pursuit of a beautiful woman. Here the playwright was Malay, the characters were drawn from the different ethnic communities and the pennitting authorities were part of the Federal government. As a result, even while trying to distance its own moderate stance on Islam from the more fundamentalist position espoused by

PAS in Kelantan, the state action in the case of the mak yong performance in the rural

East Coast state of Kelantan, and the staging of Election Day in the Federal capital of

Kuala Lumpur, was similar. What both experiences reflect is the pressure on Malay articulations of identity from the state that often goes unremarked or is overlooked by the

Chinese and Indians. When they do look up from contemplating the pressures on their own identity as Malaysians, the Chinese and Indians often tend to homogenize the Malay experience and discount the challenges to identity that they too face directly and indirectly from the state's efforts to manage nationhood.

19 But it was not always this way. In the decades leading up to and following independence, the shared education in English, and the tradition of education in mission schools, created a common cultural canvas on which all three races initially felt comfortable tracing out the contours of nation. The life writing that this study examines fills in those contours in ways that suggest that the early transcending of racial boundaries through a shared colonial past gave way, through changes in political leadership, to a more chauvinistic nationalism. This new nationalism emphasized racial differences, supposedly to stir the Malays into an awareness of how far they lagged behind the other communities and what they needed to do to catch up and get ahead. The most famous exposition of the reasons for Malay backwardness was Dr. Mahathir Mohamad's The

Malay Dilemma. The book was banned at first by the founding Prime Minister, the

Cambridge-educated gentleman prince Tunku Abdul Rahman, who enjoyed wide support among Malaysians of all races, and who had fostered a climate of easy inter-racial discourse and interaction. He had also expelled Mahathir from the ruling party, the

United Malays National Organization (UMNO) the year before in response to public attacks on his leadership. Mahathir had accused Tunku Abdul Rahman of failing to protect Malay interests, which in turn had led to the riots of May 13,1969, when strong electoral wins by the predominantly Chinese Opposition party provoked violence that racked the capital. Subsequently welcomed back to UMNO, Mahathir became Malaysia's longest serving Prime Minister, and the chief architect of its heightened, often controversial profile externally, its rapid economic growth, and its polarizing politics.

How a genteel middle class conversation at the time of Independence turned into the brief riots that claimed lives in ways that have scarred the nation is a question that all

20 of the life writing texts and the other visual expressions of identity covered in this study help to answer. May 13, its consequences for public policy, and its direct and indirect impact on private lives feature prominently in the short stories, plays, poetry and films that constitute the modest corpus of life writing in English and in the vernacular that addresses nation building in Malaysia. These life writing texts map out the shift in the national project, and in the changing nature of the conversation at the national level about who Malaysians are, and who they should aspire to be. They tell us how ordinary

Malaysians embraced or distanced themselves from this national project, as power passed from one generation to the next, and as leadership styles and priorities changed.

The people who today call themselves Malaysians first began to see themselves as part of a common body politic under British rule. Britain was the colonial power that left the most lasting impression on the country through an elaborate civil service, a network of mining, plantation, and trading companies with headquarters in London and operations in Malaya, and a system of mission schools, churches, and hospitals that ran the length and breadth of the country. British officials produced a wealth of commentary on Malaya and Malayan society, the most cited text probably being Frank Swettenharn's essay on

"The Real Malay," largely because it is the most infuriating in its presumption.19 Richard

Winstedt's, Start from Alif. Count from One: An Autobiographical Memoire also invites examination, given Winstedt's impact during his long and distinguished career in shaping the education system including the creation of the Sultan Idris Training College, and his stature as a scholar of Malay culture. According to Farish Noor, Winstedt's goal was the

Orientalist one of "reproducing the Western stereotypes of the pleasant, nimble Malay agriculturalist or the rustic Malay schoolteacher who was meant to return to the villages

21 to teach skills that were more in keeping with their 'traditional rural' lifestyle" (The

Other Malaysia 84). However, I believe that to understand Malaysian identity today, we must look at how identity was articulated during colonial times, how the discussion modulated with independence and how the pitch and content has changed with each generation of leaders. For this reason, the first five chapters of this study examine the life writing texts of Henri Fauconnier, John Victor Morais, Salleh ben Joned, Shirley Geok­

Lin Lim, and K.S. Maniam. The Epilogue then suggests where the conversation is headed next as new forms and forums (independent films, online commentary, global news channels) enter the fray and Malaysians engage in new ways of articulating who they are.

A rationale and overview of these chapters follows.

Chapter One: Colonial Authority

The Soul of Malaya by Henri Fauconnier is a particularly rich example of a colonial memoir that goes beyond the classification of the natives offered by British administrators like Winstedt, Clifford, and Swettenham, suggesting a more intimate, complicated engagement with the country and its people. Though almost necessarily displaying an Orientalist bias, Fauconnier is less easily dismissed because of the careful attention he pays to the complexity of the relationship between the colonial administrator or planter with the local people--indigenous and inunigrant. Fauconnier makes it clear that he is drawing on personal experience. In this memoir masquerading as a novel, he also creates a fictional world complete with "heroes" through whom he conveys his life experience, insights and attitudes.

22 The Soul of Malaya engages at the level of daily living with the different races being drawn into oblique relations with each other through their shared engagement with their colonial masters. We get glimpses of how an imperial superstructure affects the dynamics between the indigenous and immigrant groups in ways that define not just race and nation, but class and gender. We also get a sense of the "solidarity of the whites"

(Anderson 153) thanks to Fauconnier's promise to "give an insight into the soul of

Malaya ... through the medium of rather exceptional individuals." Somewhat apologetically, he explains that he has chosen for his "heroes in fiction" two "somewhat sophisticated Frenchmen," but hastens to add that "their hearty, bluff [and presumably less insightful] English comrades were my friends in life" (Author's Note). Fauconnier equates authority in Malaya with those who belong to the colonial culture-French or

British. As Anderson, speaking of nationalisms in South East Asia, suggests, this feeling of European solidarity is reminiscent of "the class solidarity of Europe's nineteenth century aristocracies" (153). Fellow feeling arises from a shared colonial racism towards the local population, indigenous and immigrant.

There is no question that Fauconnier formed a lifelong attachment to Malaya and its people, but this attachment is inseparable from the asymmetrical power relations that

Edward Said has called "the structure of attitude and reference',20 provided by European imperialism. But Fauconnier's ability to write with both authority and intimacy did not spring just from his competence in the Malay language and his interest in Malay poetry.

After all, British administrators like Winstedt and Clifford shared a similar interest in

Malay culture. But Fauconnier displayed, in addition, the sensibility of a writer forced to embark on an adventure in the tropics to shore up his family's sagging fortunes in

23 Europe. He was not a bureaucrat intent on an imperial mission. His goals were personal, as was the experience he recorded and the Prix Goncourt, awarded in 1930, added a further seal of aesthetic authority to his memoir.

The Orientalist dimensions ofFauconnier's text are still formidable more than 70 years later. The cover design of the most recent reprint of The Soul of Malaya presents this work as essentially a literary "colonial postcard" in the sense in which Malek Alloula discusses that medium.21 A small native figure is dwarfed by both the landscape and the planter-an iconic representation of the "daily imposition of power in the dynamics of everyday life" (Culture 132). Fauconnier's memoir is one that the illustrator can fit easily into the colonial enterprise of "keeping the subordinate subordinate, the inferior, inferior"

(Culture 95) (see jig 2). Yet I have chosen to examine his work because I believe that having recognized its biases, one can still discover insights into the dynamics of a plural society in formation. As the Biographical Notes that accompany the memoir tell us,

Fauconnier's early childhood in France was spent writing "intimate journals, illustrated stories, little novels, plays" (180). These were performed, often with music he composed, to a family audience and the experience perhaps equipped him to capture the nuances of life and society in Malaya more skillfully than those British administrators who, in attempting to do the same, produced rather more heavy-handed pronouncements.

Fauconnier seems more tuned in to and more able to pinpoint the tensions between the different communities and between the colonizer and the colonized than the autobiographical writings of such august British administrators and educators as Hugh

Clifford and Richard Winstedt can.22 My choice ofFauconnier is also influenced by the chord his life writing has struck with the well-known Malay writer, Salleh ben Joned.

24 Salleh acknowledges Fauconnier's Orientalist perspective but hails him as a 'brother" and an "honorary Malay" on the strength of what Salleh considers a remarkable understanding of, and insight into, the Malay sensibility (As I Please 166).

Chapter Two: Bifocality

This section moves from Fauconnier to my father, John Victor Morais, whose life as a Malaysian began as a fifteen-year-old student in a school run by British educators in Ipoh, the capital of the state ofPerak, important at the time for its rich tin deposits. He learned English in adolescence--an acquisition pursued with a passion that led to his becoming the editor of the national English-language daily, the Malaya

Tribune, at the age of27. He spent a good deal of his later adult life writing biographies of the "Great Men" of the emerging nation. Many were political leaders. Faithfully rendering the politics of race that by law frame the Malaysian nation, he wrote about people who were representative of their communities.

These biographies were welcomed, sometimes commissioned, and always viewed with respect by the middle-class circles in which he lived. That respect, I believe, derived less from these biographies' inherent value as literary works than from how they positioned their subjects-and their biographer-as larger than life on the canvas of

Malaysian history and public life. Though Malay was, and still is, the official national language, English was the language learned in school and used in business and government. In the different ethnic communities, the languages heard and used at home tended to be Malay or one its regional dialects, Cantonese, Hokkien, Teochew and other

25 Chinese dialects, Tamil, Malayalam, Punjabi and Sindhi. Given the separation of languages and lives, Morais' act of publishing these biographies in English- typically an enterprise immediately associated with the world of colonial government and middle-class success---drew attention to his role not only as a public figure but as the articulator of the aspirations and the contributions of those most closely engaged in the constructing of a new nation.

Homi Bhabha talks in the Location of Culture about how minorities survive by learning "how newness enters the world" (303 - 337). Modernity is therefore all about constantly reinventing and reconstructing the self. There is mimicry - the use of an

English education to advance professionally, for example - but there is also rejection of mimicry in the distancing and differentiation from the colonial mentors one seeks to displace. The texts my father produced, and his insistence on being an author, reflect some of that split in and reinvention of identity that so many theorists have identified as integral to modernity.

Chapter Three: Native Authority

Because the "original people," the Orang Asli, do indeed live closer to the land and the forests than the Malays do, it would seem reasonable to look to them for an understanding of the "native" perspective on what it means to be Malaysian. The Orang

Asli do not, however, enjoy the same social and political stature or access to resources as the more urbanized Malays. The attitude of the state towards the Orang Asli today is strikingly missionary in a colonial sense: the state's desire to bring them into the general economy, to proselytize - but for Islam now, not Christianity - and to take charge of

26 them as if they are wards of the state. Andaya and Andaya observe that the Orang Asli were long overlooked in considerations of rural poverty. State attempts at resettlement were driven by the pressure oflarge "dams, logging, road building and land clearance projects" which intruded into the Orang Asli 's nomadic, forest-based way of life. While supposedly bringing them within easier reach of government medical and educational services, the disruption of their traditional sources of livelihood put them at the mercy of the state whose "development" priorities they are ill-equipped to serve, and from which they feel estranged. The result has been the "transformation of the Orang Asli into a rural proletariat, with the accompanying poverty, poor nutrition and consequent ill-health"

(306). Mahathir's position on the Orang Asli was simply that they have no claim to being the "definitive" people, because the Malays set up the first government, because a Malay government dealt with foreign powers and because the legal successors of those who set up the first government significantly outnumber the original tribes, further legitimizing the Malays as the true owners of the nation. Such reasoning gives us some sense of the authority and power that lay behind the attitudes and programs instituted during his long tenure as Prime Minister. The Orang Asli-and the non-Malays--continue to be seen and placed in this way by the state within the project of nation-building.

At this time there do not exist life-writing texts that present an Orang Asli view of the nation in the same way that the texts chosen for this study dO.23 I have chosen to examine the work of Salleh ben Joned to provide a "native" perspective on the nation,z4

This writer is both a productive and provocative choice. His identity as a Malay-as a

Bumiputera, (prince of the soil) in contemporary political parlance--invests him with not only the authority of native descent, but of a connection through race to the princely

27 (putera) lineage of the sultans?5 Created by politicians and challenged often by Salleh, the label immediately connects Malays to both the land, "bumi, " and to the traditional

Malay aristocracy, whose authority in turn is tied to religion?6 Being Bumiputera allows

Salleh to be critical in his views in ways that other non-Malay Malaysians cannot, largely because of legislation that inhibits any commentary deemed to touch on "sensitive issues" or race or religion,

Salleh's authority as a Malay is, however, both undercut and enhanced by the position he enjoys as a literary figure. Conservative Malays regard him as an apostate for his liberal, informed views on Islam. Some claim he has lost his "Malayness" as a result of many years spent abroad in Australia and others refuse to take him seriously because of his noisy, sometimes outrageous public persona.27 Among non-Malay Malaysians and non-Malaysians, his authority is enhanced because of the very things that cost him his stature with the Malays, especially his willingness to risk violating boundaries, both spoken and unspoken. Few Malays have been willing to be as independent and vocal as

Salleh in articulating ideas about race and nation, for fear of affecting their social standing or professional advancement.

Despite his mixed reputation and the public censure he draws from other Malays, no one writes more frankly about Malaysian culture or so often breaks taboos by attempting to "Break the Ethnic Code.,,28 Salleh is as comfortable in the Anglo-American world of letters as he is in the world of Malay language and literature. His authority springs from his talent for removing the masks worn by those in power to strengthen their political base. He challenges those who put on the mantle of Defenders of Islam, or brandish National Culture as if it were a weapon, and finds Malaysia instead in the

28 alchemy of dance and poetry that defies the limits of the politically authorized. Though not from the minoritarian perspective that Homi Bhabha identifies as its source, Salleh exhibits a "vernacular cosmopolitanism" (xvi). Though he belongs to a majority with power, his dissenting writing challenges authorized renderings of the nation, making him a minoritarian voice within the Malay majority.

His writings articulate what non-Malays think but cannot say with ease or impunity. For Malaysian society, he is a re-vitalizing trickster figure in the sense that

Salleh slips through apertures and finds new openings.29 In this role, he brings great authority to the articulation of national identity through his essays, social commentary, poems, and plays-more authority, in my opinion, than the officially anointed Malay poets and writers, some of whom grapple with the tension of Malay essentialism versus being Malaysian in ways that exclude the reality of contemporary Malaysia. Salleh is one of a very few Malay voices whose framing of the nation assumes that the unpoliced meeting and mixing of the indigenous and immigrant is essential to the idea of being

Malaysian.

Chapters Four and Five: Collisions, Crossings and Authoritv after May 13

The chapters dealing with the life writing of Shirley Geok-lin Lin and K.S.

Maniam provide insight into the Chinese and Indian working-class experience. Both writers map ajoumey from personal hardship to a growing optimism, from personal advancement through an English education to increasing disillusionment with the national project and an eventual estrangement from tradition.

29 Shirley Geok-Lin Lim's life writing records the fashioning of an identity in post­ independence Malaya by a child born in the Straits with a felt claim to being "native" that is tested by the events of May 13 and the policies that followed. Lim also writes with the authority that springs from having been immersed in a colonial and postcolonial environment that brought her education, recognition, and professional success outside

Malaysia. But for almost all her writing, she draws on the diminished authority and dashed hopes of her community, and her personal disappointment with the direction the country chose to take in response to the race riots.

Today, Lim is a Malaysian who lets herself be represented as an Asian-American.

Lauded for her honesty in portraying a difficult childhood, Lim's success in narrativizing what Sidonie Smith has called the "transculturation of an immigrant mother,,30 has allowed her to assume the mantle of authority as a feminist, an Asian-American, and by her own lights, a disenfranchised Malaysian. By repositioning herself in the American academy, and by fully exploiting the colonial legacies of language and education that were her ticket to America, Lim brokered a new "authority" for herself. The exoticism of being Malaysian in the United States at a time when new voices from little known places were especially welcome, granted her added authority. Lim thus enjoys the authority of multiple affiliations. She is a new immigrant to America, an alienated but still dutiful daughter, an Asian American and a feminist, and a mother filled with hopes for her son's identity as an American. Her life writing in all its hybrid forms is important because it places in clear view the stance of many Chinese towards the project of nation-building, their estimation of the contribution they made and their disenchantment at being side­ lined as the country prospered. She articulates what is often thought without being spoken

30 aloud in the Chinese connnunity. But Lim does not really interrogate the vexing issues of the innnigrant-indigenous encounter in Malaysia with a sense that others were variously disenfranchised at different stages in the path towards nationhood. Her focus is just herself and this undermines her authority as one who speaks for the nation. Shirley Lim cannot be ignored but I believe she must be challenged, in the same way that Rey Chow has challenged Chinese intellectuals occupying positions of power within the American

Academy who profit from their safely distant examinations of the cultural politics they left behind.

Chapter Five dea1s with K.S. Maniam. For Indian Malaysians, the question of what had been left behind, in terms of tradition and familial ties, continued to occupy them long after they had settled down and made Malaysia home. In my discussion of

Maniam's life writing, I examine issues of modernity, what he believes it has done to tradition, and how one might negotiate one's way through both. Beginning his education in Tamil and but switching to English, Maniam's authority, not unlike my father's, was derived from his success with a learned language but he uses that proficiency for different ends. Maniam writes fiction and short stories based loosely on his own life and on what he knows first hand of working class Indians. He examines where he came from culturally, and how his mother tongue, Tamil, and the culture and traditions he was raised in, were watered down and adapted to the environment in first British, and later independent Ma1aya. From this dua1ity emerges the hybridity that Bhabha sees as the essential condition of diasporic, minority connnunities. In the postcolonial passage to modernity, the present is unmoored from a fixed past, so that it does not necessarily move towards an inexorable future. Invoking Wa1ter Benjamin's connnent that Brecht's theatre

31 involves "damming the stream of life, bringing the flow to a standstill in a reflux of astonishment" (364), Bhabha declares that this is exactly what the reimaging the past and present entails. K.S.Maniam is not Brecht, but his enterprise is similar. He too dams the stream of life that brought working class Indians to Malaya in search of jobs on the plantations. Maniam explores what happened to those who stayed to pursue a vision of success that involved achieving what was enjoyed by those who exploited them. Through his post-colonial fiction and plays then, he does what Brecht says actors do in epic theater: he "shows his subject by showing himself and he shows himself by showing his subject" (qtd in Benjamin 153).

Epilogue: The Authority of Visual Culture

Despite the strenuous efforts of the state to control the ways Malaysian identity is articulated and represented, the notes of dissent heard previously only by a small community of readers are getting amplified. This is happening largely due to the intervention of the international media and the larger audiences enjoyed by film and other popular forms of cultural production that are today addressing the issue of what it means to be Malaysian. The epilogue discusses in some detail what is happening in independent films and also looks at public events that have been translated into visual statements about Malaysia through television news broadcasts and onsite reporting by foreign journalists who refuse to be constrained by local censorship laws. Though the government has taken measures in the past to shut down or withdraw publishing permits for media organizations guilty of stepping over the bounds of what the state considers acceptable, the country's interest in remaining attractive to foreign investors as a stable,

32 well-managed nation greatly complicates its efforts to control how Malaysia is represented. The government has largely ignored the commentary on the country's politics that appears in local newspaper columns, short stories, poetry, drama, cartoons or comedy theatre. The relatively small audience for these small voices of dissent have made them seem not worth the trouble to suppress. But that is changing. Independent film-makers like Yasmin Ahmad, James Wong, Tan Chui Mui, and Deepak Kumaran are finding larger domestic and international audiences and getting the kind of recognition outside Malaysia that the state both wants and abhors. These films, as well as numerous online sites spreading commentary on political events almost as soon as they take place, are extending the conversation about the nation beyond middle class literary circles, across ethnic borders and into a global sphere where voices from the Malaysian diaspora worldwide are increasingly being heard. These films and other expressions of visual culture therefore suggest once again that being Malaysian is a project that cannot be contained by the state and is currently escaping such artificial confines.

The Authority of My Selection

The writers and filmmakers I examine bring their culture, their ethnicity and their aspirations to nationality to the creation of their biographies and autobiographies, and their autobiographical poetry, fiction, and film. In a still young parliamentary democracy that uses legal and cultural instruments of authority to shape and control how the country represents itself, these artists discuss race and nation in ways that escape politically prescribed limits. But in choosing these writers, I too exercise an "authority" that is inevitably hybrid, reflecting the migratory nature of experience in the sense in which Said

33 and others have discussed it. 31 My authority springs from my Malaysian-Anglo-American education, my status through my mother's family as a third generation Malaysian, and my attentiveness to the stories my parents told of their passage from India to Malaya, and their participation in the journey to independence.l2 It is an authority that derives also from my awareness of the price paid in languages forsaken, chosen, learned, and lived, and my increased questioning, as I live in Hawaii with my Malaysian children and

American husband, of who we are and where we belong.

I believe that the writers I have chosen, and my act of writing about them as scribes of the nation, will expose in the Malaysian context "the supreme fiction of memory as fact ... the unfolding of relational identity in many registers" (Eakin 98). Set against each other and viewed as various outcomes of empire, their texts reflect the inexorable complication of cultures in a cosmopolitan environment: "none is single and pure, all are hybrid, heterogeneous, extraordinarily differentiated and unmonolithic"

(Culture, xxix). One of the challenges of a country like Malaysia is that institutions of power reflexively resist this drive towards complexity as much as ordinary people instinctively accept it in the rhythm of everyday life. In the words of Malaysian historian

Khoo Kay Kim, "when you're a true Malaysian, you're a very lonely person ... we're all divided by cliques. And when you're not with one, you're left out" (qtd. in Hamid).33 As the nation embraces globalization and competes regionally with its neighbors, the fear at the state level is often that Malays will not do well enough as a community, or do as well as another community. The result has been a countervailing impulse towards asserting a racial essentialism over nationalism that must be resisted. 34

34 Nationalism and life writing often tend to assert a singularity in the face of a self­ evident plurality. Paul John Eakin asks, "Why do we so easily forget that the first person of autobiography is truly plural in its origins and its subsequent formations?" (43) A similar question may be asked of nationalism. Taken as a whole, the writers in this study tell us that writing the life of the Malaysian nation is a truly plural act in its origins and in its subsequent formations. It is plural because it invokes many voices, some louder and more powerful than others, each modulating over time, discovering not just the "new registers of selfhood" that Eakin talks about, but also new registers of nationhood.

In undertaking this study, I join these writers in contesting the authority of the nation as it is politically prescribed and sanctioned. However uncertain and problematic its formulations of truth, the act of life writing in an emerging nation like Malaysia, is an act of retrieval of some measure of authority-first from the colonizing power, then from the apparatus of the newly independent state. The new nation that emerged with independence was one still heavily weighted with the instruments of colonial authority, soon pressed into the service of a government led by a middle class intelligentsia anxious to preserve its privileges. With each generation, this middle class has become more polarized, losing some of the ease in daily interactions that, at least in the urban centers, has characterized middle class working and social life at the time of independence.

Government programs to re-distribute national wealth more equitably relative to

Malaysia's racial composition have degenerated into opportunities for the rich to get richer through the often unembarrassed manipulation of the rules underlying the New

Economic Policy. Instead of providing working class Malays with the means of gaining a share of the national pie consistent with their "native" status and numbers, the Policy has

35 enormously enriched an elite class, conspicuous by their consumption, whose members enjoy preferential access to education, jobs and business opportunities. Meanwhile, out of sight on the plantations, or in squatter settlements in the cities, the poor, and especially the Indian poor, continue to languish, their so-called political representatives largely reduced today to sycophantic defenders of the establishment. They are a far cry from the fully engaged Indian political and community leaders who participated in the steps leading up to independence, and entered energetically into the project of building the new nation. As for the economically better-off professional Indian middle class, today it is largely preoccupied with staying relevant, surviving and prospering in the game of urban politics and business, while finding ways to accumulate the means, if possible, to send their children abroad for the higher education almost certainly closed to them in

Malaysia. Approximately four percent of all university students in Malaysia are Indian even though they constitute eight percent of the population.35

In joining these writers in their acts of contestation, I reaffirm my connection to the only nation I call home, claiming the authority and the license of the "vernacular cosmopolitanism" that Bhabha has called the condition of postcoloniality (xvi). This study invites other Malaysians, and those interested in the imagining of this nation, as they consider these writers and others, to "hold together in a single field all the traces by which the written text is constituted" (Barthes 148), including the proximity of one text to the next, and to lay to rest "the fiction ... that everyone has one and only one - extremely clear place. No fractions" (Anderson 166). In so doing, we might arrive at a richer understanding of Malaysia's palimpsestic past and present than has been authorized to date. Key to this understanding will be to realize that changeability is as much the

36 condition of nation-building as it is the condition of constructing lives - in words, on film, on the internet, and in the world.

37 I For detailed discussions of the relationship between trade and polity in Southeast Asia from earliest times to the end of the nineteenth century, paying particular attention to the

Malay Peninsula and the Straits of Melaka, see the twelve scholarly articles in The

Southeast Asian Port and Polity: Rise and Demise edited by Malaysian historian J.

Kathirithamby-Wells and John Villiers.

2 Malaysian economist Jomo Kwame Sundaram (or K.S. Jomo as he is more widely known) provides a detailed analysis of how the waves of immigration, temporary residence, and long term settlement created a pattern of uneven development and contention between classes that has continued with the country's ever-increasing participation in the world economy and its pursuit of capital. lomo makes the point that

"in so far as the state mediates class relations, the understanding of class formation cannot be abstracted from consideration of the state within the wider context of the world economy" (viii).

3 The head of RELA, a volunteer self-defense corps originally formed in the 1960s to destroy communist groups, today calls illegal immigrants the nation's second deadly threat: "We have no more communists at the moment, but we are now facing illegal immigrants," he said. "As you know, in Malaysia illegal immigrants are enemy No.2."

Enemy No. I, he said, is drugs." See http://www.iht.com/articles/2007!l2/09/news/malay.php for a recent report in the International Herald Tribune that highlights the Malaysian government's targeting of illegal immigrants.

38 4 Tourism is the second largest foreign exchange earning sector for Malaysia. See

Tourism Malaysia Promotional Plan 2005-2007. http://www.tourism.gov.my/cOlp/trade/download/promoplan 05-07.pdf http://w.Ww.tourism.gov.my/statistic/default.asp

The climate of heightened threat from terrorism after September II and media coverage of bombings in popular tourist spots such as Bali in 2002 and again in 2005 by Jemaah

Islamiyah (JI), the South-east Asian terrorist group with links to al-Qaeda may also have helped direct some of the tourist traffic away from Indonesia and towards neighboring

Malaysia.

5 This is according to the 2000 census. See http://w\vw.statistics.gov.my/engiishiframeset census.php?file=pressdemo. Recent estimates place Indians at somewhere between seven to nine percent of the population.

6 A violation of the Sedition Act is punishable by up to three years in prison, a 5,000 ringgit fine (about U.S. $1,515), or both. These penalties may be applied regardless of the speaker's intent in making the statements, or their context and have silenced a broad range of critics of government policy and activists working for causes, such as migrants' rights.

7 The American Anthropological Association issued a statement on "Race" on May 17,

1998 that addresses public misconceptions on the supposed relationships between race and intelligence and traces the evolution of the politics of race. It explains how race theory was developed and used to serve colonial interests, to rationalize slavery, and "to

39 assign some peoples to perpetual low status, while others were permitted access to privilege, power and wealth." v.'Ww.understandingrace.org/aboutistatement

Understanding this history of how race theory was employed to shore up power and justify exploitation is very helpful when trying to understand how race and identity are framed in Malaysia.

8 See Andaya and Andaya for an account of the pressure to which the Sultans were subjected by the British to get them to acquiesce to the terms of the Malayan Union (264-

267).

9 See www.umisd.orgiumisdiwebsite/document.nsf/OIA20E9 AD6E5BA919780256B6D00578

96B?OpenDocument

10 The 2008 General Elections seem to suggest that ordinary Malaysian citizens are willing to do with their votes what politicians have failed to do with their power: unite around the issues rather than around their ethnicity. Voters gave the Opposition close to fifty percent of the seats in Parliament, reflecting widespread frustration with government policies and a willingness among voters to place the common good above ethnic interests.

In addition to giving the Opposition control of five key state governments, the votes of a largely Chinese electorate in one district at least helped ensure the election victory of an

Indian lawyer who had been prevented from campaigning because he had been detained without trial under the Internal Security Act for championing the rights of working class Indians. See

40 http://business.theage.com.aulmalaysian-voters-open-the-door-for-anwar-ibrahim/20080311- lyrf.html

11 This attitude manifests itself in the increasing high-handedness with which municipal, state, and religious officials, citing the absence of appropriate permits, have razed temples and churches in the name of development or. See http://www.ccmalaysia.org/pressl20071030templedemolishedwithoutwarning.htm for an account of one of these incidents. These temples and churches are often those serving small communities some distance away from the bigger urban centers. Most recently, state enforcement officials of the Publications and AI-Quran Texts Control

Department under the Internal Security Ministry confiscated English language Christian children's books said to contain offensive caricatures of prophets from several bookshops in the states of Johor, Negeri Sembilan and Perak. A strongly worded press statement on

17 January 2008 from the Council of Churches in Malaysia deplored the action and called on the Prime Minister to intervene (Email to the author from Benedict Morais 18 January,

2008).

12 The Gerakan claimed its resolution was "merely supporting the policy of the government." In a message to mark the end of the Muslim fasting month of Ramadan,

People's Progressive Party President, Datuk M. Kayveas had called on all Malaysians "to work towards a Bangsa Malaysia that is based on feelings of mutual respect and understanding. Let us not see any race left behind because of racial discrimination and religion." New Straits Times 6 Nov. 2006: 10

41 13 Homi Bhabha is one of many theorists who remind us that "The move away from the singularities of 'class' or 'gender' as primary conceptual and organizational categories, has resulted in an awareness of the subject positions - of race, gender, generation, institutional location, geopolitical locale, sexual orientation - that inhabit any claim to identity in the modern world" (2).

14 In 2007, three weeks prior to a long-planned interfaith meeting at which the

Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams was due to speak in Kuala Lumpur to mixed gatherings of Muslim and Christian scholars from around the world, Malaysian officials sent word that the meeting would not be given a permit to proceed. See http://www.ccmalaysia.org/press/20070510cancellationofbuildingbridges.htm

15 Mahathir bases his argument that Malays are the "rightful owners of Malaya" on two premises. The first is: " The definitive people are those who set up the first governments and these governments were the ones with which other countries did official business and had diplomatic relations." The second is: "the people who form the first effective government and their legal successors must at all times outnumber the original tribes found in a given country" (126). He finds validation for the first premise by reference to

Australia, Taiwan and Japan and for the second by reference to the changes that were brought about in South Africa, Kenya and Rhodesia because they did not meet the second condition.

16 Gillian Whitlock reminds us of the need for caution when looking for truth in life writing texts. In a review of Rosamund Dalziell's Shameful Autobiographies: Shame in

42 Contemporary Australian Autobiographies and Culture. Whitlock is critical of the fact that "the capacity of the autobiographical text to be a reliable vehicle for the expression of emotion and truth by a narrating subject is not in question." http://Vv'"''''.lib.latro be. edu.aul AHRIarchivellssue- December-l 999/whitlock. html

17 Referencing Charles Hirschman's study of census classifications in Malaysia, Benedict

Anderson, points out that "as the colonial period wore on, the census categories became more visibly and exclusively racial" (164). The writings I examine often challenge the usefulness of these over-simplified categories.

18 Kelantan, one of the more Islamic of all the Malay states, has been a stronghold of the

Pan Islamic Party of Malaysia (PAS) since it took control of the State in 1990 from the ruling Barisan Nasional which controls the Federal government and is dominant in the rest of the country. See http://www.kakiseni.com/artic\es/featuresIMDgzNO.htmi#top

Actor and writer Fahmi Fadzii provides a detailed account of the struggle to keep mak yong alive in the face of state interference and policing of an art form believed to predate the advent ofIslam in the Malay states.

19 www.sabrizain.demon.co.uk/malayalmalays2.htrn. The text is often cited because

Swettenham is seen as a principal architect of British Malaya, and because of its mix of imperial arrogance and a genuine, if patronizing, interest in the native specimen. Andaya and Andaya provide a comprehensive review of the broad range of writing available on

Malaysia.

43 20 Said's Culture and Imperialism provides an extended discussion of how this structure may be discovered in a variety of canonical works from Mansfield Park to Aida that form part of the education of both colonizer and the colonized, though imbibed in the first instance, from a position of power, and in the second, from a position of subordination to that power. (151)

21 In The Colonial Harem, Malek Alloula discusses the "brilliant colors of exoticism," the

"full-blown yet uncertain sensuality," the "variegated elements of the sweet dream in which the West has been wallowing for four centuries" and which "sets the stage for the deployment of phantasms." Fauconnier's work can be read as a perfect example of this pursuit of an Orient that is both "glittering imaginary but also its mirage" (519).

22 Winstedt's Start from Alif. Count from One is full of observations about the Malays, the Chinese and the Indians. Most are never identified by name: he provides detailed portraits of the rulers and chiefs with whom he worked, but houseboys and schoolteachers, farmers and dressers, are generally identified simply by their ethnicity.

He therefore speaks of the "black face and black hands .... of a white-clad Tamil dresser" who took care of him when he lay wracked by malaria (63) or of "Ionghaired odoriferous Sikhs" who drew his carriage (62). He also readily draws from individual actions such generalizations on race relations as the following:

"Under a layer of some weird and many polite conventions, the Chinese is human like ourselves" (51); and "fond as he is of his distant cousins the Chinese, the Malay despises them. Mildly he envies their business capacity and their wealth, but as a Muslim he contemns a pagan"(57). These observations provide some insight into how the different 44 ------

communities were beginning to view each other, but they do not offer the dynamics of inter-communal engagement at a personal level that we see captured in Fauconnier's work. Hugh Clifford's Malayan Stories suffers from the same weaknesses. While he displays a studious command of and fascination with the Malay language, literature and customs, the perspective is very much that of the colonizer intent on managing and ruling his child-like charges, bringing civilization to the Asiatic races who lack virtue, or the capacity to think and feel as white men do.

23 Musician Kit Lee, now known as Antares, has married an Orang Asli woman, has been embraced by the community and has written a book about life among the Temuan, an

Orang Asli tribe. His work and that of Zawawi Ibrahim who has written on Orang Asli in the East Malaysian states of Sabah and Sarawak on the island of Borneo, provide some insight into the challenges facing the Orang Asli as they are impacted by national development strategies. Antares and Zawawi do not however produce the kind of life writing that this project addresses: literary efforts that offer both deliberately and inadvertently, pictures of nation-making and race relations.

24 The middle class intelligentsia negotiated Malaya's independence from the British. I have therefore looked at works by writers who were a product of the colonial education at the time, and who wrote in English to communicate with each other and with a broader local middle-class reading public reaching beyond their own communities, and with a readership of influence outside the country. These writers knew they would not reach these wider regional or international readerships if they confined themselves to their mother tongues. 45 25 Bumiputera is usually translated as "sons of the soil" but it is worth noting that the choice of "putera" comes weighted with connotations of class and privilege that suggest a link to the hereditary rulers of the Malay States in ways that a more neutral term such as

"anak negeri" (literally "child of the country" or "native") would not. A term like "anak negeri" would also suggest the automatic inclusion of the Orang Asli.

26 Salleh's interrogation of the ostensibly privileged term "bumiputera" will be discussed more fully in the chapter devoted to his work. The term is problematic both for Malays and non-Malays. It cannot be ignored, but neither, Salleh argues, can it be taken at face value.

27 Always impatient with public pieties and cultural grandstanding, Salleh's reputation achieved minor mythic status in Kuala Lumpur in 1974, when he decided as a "little gesture of friendly protest" to urinate in sight of about fifty people at what he considered the "pretentious, the false and the fashionable" posturing of an exhibition entitled

'Towards a Mystical Reality." The exhibition consisted of the staging offound objects by a notable local artist, presided over by local officialdom. Salleh explains his actions in

As I Please in an essay entitled "The Art of Pissing: An Open Letter to Redza Piyadasa"

(19-29).

28 See the essay of this title in his collected anthology Nothing is Sacred.

29 Lewis Hyde's very instructive view of the revitalizing role of the trickster figure in society in is borne out by the emerging cultural landscape in Malaysia. Dissenting voices are multiplying especially via the reassuring anonymity or apparent distance from state 46 authority of the Internet, and more openly in theatre, film and specialty bookshops in

Malaysia.

30 In a back cover blurb for Among the White Moonfaces: Memoirs of a Nyonya

Feminist. Smith identifies in Lim almost all the subject positions of "race, gender, generation, institutional location, geopolitical locale, sexual orientation" that Bhabha points out "inhabit any claim to identity in the modem world." See footnote (1)

31 See, for example, Power, Politics and Culture. Interviews with Edward W.Said. Ed.

Gauri Viswanathan.

31 My mother was born in Batu Gajah, Malaysia but was sent back to Kerala where she went to a boarding school run by Italian nuns for her education. She returned to Malaya after my father, already professionally established in British Malaya, returned to Kerala where his search for a suitable bride ended when he found my mother. She was eighteen.

Their families were distantly related and the match was regarded as highly suitable. Thus though my mother was born in Malaya and my father in India, their lives entailed repeated journeys back and forth between India and Malaya before the latter firmly became home.

33 Khoo Kay Kim, Professor Emeritus, Universiti Malaya, is a Malaysian Chinese from the small northern town of Teluk Intan. Married to an Indian, one of his three sons,

Mavin Khoo, is an internationally recognized, now London-based, exponent of Bharata

Natyam, or Indian classical dance. His dance instructors in the early stages of his training included Ramli Ibrahim, a Malay master of the Indian art form. Khoo Kay Kim's eldest 47 son, Eddin Koo, is a poet, writer, and translator who has started a nonprofit called Pusaka

(Centre for the Study and Documentation of Traditional Performance in Malaysia) http://www.pusaka.com.my and is himself an apprentice to a master shadow puppeteer

Dalang Abdullah Ibrahim, better known as Dollah 8aju Merah. The interests ofKhoo's family thus cross several ethnic boundaries, suggesting some of the possibilities for rich, unpoliced cultural exchange that ordinary Malaysians like to think of as being fundamental to who they are as citizens of this nation. The state's clumsy efforts to set up barriers between the communities, ostensibly to preserve racial harmony, make this kind of exchange more and more difficult.

34 At the 2006 Annual General Meeting of the United Malay Nationalist Organization, the lead party in Malaysia's ruling coalition known as the Barisan Nasional (National Front), the middle-aged head of the UMNO Youth wing drew a ceremonial keris-a Malay sword with a wavy blade, usually part of the regalia of the traditional rulers, the Sultans and warriors-while delivering his speech at the podium, and vowed to defend Islam and the Malay race. http://omong.wordpress.com/2006/11/23/politicians-we-can-do-withoutl

The gesture has generated considerable controversy and bitterness. A leading Opposition politician, Lim Kit Siang, has pointed out that had a Chinese or Indian exhibited such behavior, they would have been quickly jailed under the Internal Security Act for inciting unrest.

35 See Andaya and Andaya (305 - 306) for an overview of how Indians, and in particular the Tamil poor on plantations, have become more and more disadvantaged, as strict

48 application of employment laws in the immediate aftermath of the 1969 riots put around

60,000 plantation workers out of work, and as the inexorable building of factories, homes and golf courses on what were once rubber estates displaced more workers. Dismally funded plantation Tamil schools have failed to equip young Indians in ways that would let them break the cycle of poverty.

49 ------

CHAPTER I. COLONIAL TIMES

Henri Fauconnier: The Soul of Malaya

Since the story of what it means to be Malaysian today begins in colonial times, in the entanglement of indigenous and immigrant peoples under colonial control, examining a colonial text can tell us something about that entanglement: who is recognized as

"Malayan," and who is privileged or erased in the colonial rendering of identity. Though the British controlled the Malay states from the late eighteenth century, and though a number of British administrators left behind a variety oflife writing texts, I have chosen

The Soul of Malaya by the French writer and planter, Hemi Fauconnier, as the colonial lens for this study for several reasons. Despite bearing many of the hallmarks of

Orientalist thinking, this work gets beyond some of the central assumptions and moral fixity inherent in such a perspective to achieve some understanding of Malay identity­ an understanding empathetic enough to have moved at least one informed native reader,

Salleh ben Joned, to recognize a kindred spirit. Himself the child of several cultures,

Salleh hails Fauconnier, with a humor and pointedness calculated to provoke fellow

Malays, as "Brother Hemi, Honorary Malay" (As r Please 166).1 This chapter points to the multiple frames of time, place, and power through which the reader must move to arrive at an understanding ofFauconnier's promised "soul of Malaya." r will situate the book within the socio-economic realties at the time of its first publication, and examine how politics, economics, and shifts in power locally and globally have changed the way

Fauconnier's representation of Malayan identity before the Malay States became one nation is read today.

50 Fauconnier describes Malaya during the early decades of the twentieth century as a place well on its way to becoming a plural society, thanks largely to the trade ambitions and labor demands of the British East India Company, which paved the way for control by the Crown. The Soul of Malaya captures what life was like during a period of great fluidity in population movements. The reader must constantly work in translation: from the colonizer to the colonized; from one culture to another; from one language to another, and back again. This chapter examines the ways in which The Soul of Malaya delivers what it promises, and evaluates the degree to which it was even possible for it to do so, given the conventions of time, place, and politics that framed the writing.

Romantic Tradition. Orientalist Reality

At the time of its publication in 1930, the book was recognized and celebrated as a work firmly anchored in the Romantic tradition. Fauconnier tells the story of a world­ weary Frenchman, Lescale, making his way to Malaya after the First World War. He is taken under the wing of a fellow countryman, Rolain, with whom he had once shared a foxhole in a "chance encounter on a day of slaughter" (10). As Rolain guides his friend to an understanding of the soul of Malaya, Lescale soon discovers that Rolain has not lost his ability to probe his "flayed soul" and provide "a grasp of the encompassing world that lies beyond expression" (11). The renewal of their acquaintance, their many conversations, and the "unuttered implications of [their] silences" lead the reader on a journey that provides an understanding of Malaya founded on an understanding of the

Malay temperament (10). That temperament is seen primarily through Rolain's servant,

Smail, whose philosophizing about the Tuan (master) allows the book to explain how the

51 native views the white man as well as how the white man views the native. The loose plot climaxes with Smail running amok, and Rolain and Lescale responding to that personal crisis with an empathy rarely found in colonial writings on Malaya.

Critic after critic heaped praise on the way Fauconnier captured the "tropic scene,"

"the strange spell of Malaya," the "rich, mystical folklore, flavorsome rituals, frank and cruel manifestations of Nature." These reviews still influence how the book is packaged and delivered to readers today. The book's publishing history and the author's history are condensed in Appendices in the 2003 edition, along with translations of the Malay pantun

(epigrammatic poems) that Fauconnier draws on frequently throughout the text. When the book first appeared, The New York Herald Tribune critic, Angel Flores, sensed "an adumbration of Gide," and Conrad's heart of darkness beating in Fauconnier's jungle scenes:

Thus Malasie depicts a metamorphosis and a conversion. Fauconnier

travels the old Rousseau path now darkened on the one hand by post-war

disillusion and Splengerian somberness; radiant, on the other, with

primitivism. Malasie tells of the return of the modem sophisticate to the

noble savage. In this sense it can be classified among the best works of our

rampantly fashionable new-romanticism. ("Appendices" 205)

After remarking that "nothing is more objective than a landscape," a French critic, Pierre

Descaves, still argued that The Soul of Malaya "is foremost a state ofthe author's soul"

("Appendices" 203). Other critics praised it as "the most imaginative interpretation of the tropic scene ... a classic of exotic life" (204); and as a "profound revelation of the writer's reactions to the mystery, the strange loveliness ... in this land of haunted,

52 sometimes menacing enchantment" (206). The Times Literary Supplement observed that it "would not be fair to say that the Malayan scene dominates the book," but then quickly points out that "the reader is always conscious of it. Its majestic beauty, vivid color contrasts and endless charm are to be glimpsed on every page" (207). These responses suggest that what this example of highly subjective life writing seemed to offer the reader above all were ostensibly objective landscapes of exotic physical and psychic terrain. As if in support of this claim, the early editions of the book more often than not had cover illustrations that focused on the lush vegetation, exotic foliage and tropical enchantment of Malaya. The Europeans who were the book's first readers, quickly fell under the spell of the jungle, as this enchantment was sustained through the interplay of highly descriptive prose and the black and green woodcuts of Henri Camus in the early editions or the 1947 engravings by Charles Fauconnier now included in the 2003 edition. The

Appendices in this edition also include photographs of the covers and illustrations of prior editions. There is also no doubt that the highly stylized illustrations were meant to enhance the mood of enchantment and magic created by Fauconnier's tale. Nearly thirty years later, when he returned to Malaya, Fauconnier himself would speak of entering the jungle still under that spell, "as if into a sanctuary" ("Appendices" 199).

Clearly then, The Soul of Malaya, bears many of the hallmarks of Orientalist thinking in the way it was written, published and read. Drawing from Edward Said,

Timothy Mitchell, argues that

three features define this Orientalist reality: it is understood as the product

of unchanging racial or cultural essences; these essential characteristics

are in each case the polar opposite of the West (passive rather than active,

53 static rather than mobile, emotional rather than rational, chaotic rather than

ordered); and the Oriental opposite or Other is, therefore, marked by a

series of fundamental absences (of movement, reason, order, meaning and

so on). (495)

But we see a great deal more of this Orientalist perspective in the life writing left by

British administrators. In Malayan Monochromes, Hugh Clifford repeatedly contrasts what he perceives as universal native ignorance or superstition with the superior intelligence and virtue of white men. As standard-bearer for an empire that sustained its culture and civilization with the wealth generated by slave labor on sugar plantations in far-flung colonies, Clifford wrote with a stunning lack of self-consciousness about the abomination of debt slavery among the Malays. Decrying their lack of civilization, he demonstrated in story after story how the arrival of the British and their enlightened administration brought salvation to a land which had spent aeons in ignorant isolation.

("Two Little Slave Girls" 119-148). The stereotype of Malay indolence is another theme running through Hugh Clifford's Malayan Monochromes and R.O.Winstedt's autobiography as well, confirming a shared colonial view of Malays. In subsequent chapters we shall see how this later became the lens through which those immigrant groups brought in to provide the hard labor needed to work the tin mines and rubber plantations viewed the native popUlation.

Fauconnier's work differs from Clifford's or Winstedt's because he senses there are limitations to what he could know of Malaya and the Malays, and to the depths to which he could plumb their spiritUality or psyche. I therefore share Salleh's refusal "to dismiss the book as hopelessly contaminated by 'OrientaIism:'"

54 Fauconnier is clearly a child of European romanticism, and that inevitably

colors his perception of his Malayan characters and their values. But that

doesn't necessarily mean he distorts everything he sees---in the form of

romantic idealisation or unconscious condescension.... While he can be

memorably articulate about the Malays, he stresses that he 'know[s] very

few of the secrets of the Orientals.' (As I Please 167)

Fauconnier often acknowledges the limitations of what he can know, and reflects on his sense of being forever outside. In fact, the story of his education and initiation into the mysteries of Malaya is largely the story of his Malay servant, Smail. This consciousness of where Fauconnier stands in relation to the land and its people paradoxically grants him some access. He therefore can take the reader much further into the territory of being

Malay and Malayan than any other colonial writer of the time.

Part memoir, part fiction, part folklore and part travelogue, The Soul of Malaya is framed several times over by time, place, and the inter-textuality of the photographs, woodcuts and illustrations, Malay pantun and the family commentary, letters and reviews that accompanied its initial and subsequent publication. Further complicating matters is his dual colonial framing of the soul of Malaya by having it discerned by a Frenchman in what was then British Malaya. In his Author's Note, Fauconnier says his choice of two

Frenchmen for the "beau-role" was "inevitable, as they are the main characters in the narrative as well as my spokesmen." But he further argues that "an insight into the soul of

Malaya ... could only be attained through the medium of rather exceptional individuals," and therefore he had to reject as characters those "ordinary, typical colonists," the

"hearty, bluff English" who were his friends in life, but clearly did not meet his standards

55 for sophistication (7). Despite his frequently professed awareness that to understand a place one must look at it through the medium of those who are of the place, Fauconnier does not entertain the possibility of a Malay character being cast in the "beau role" in this place called Malaya. Despite the title's promise, then, we are left with the distinct impression that Malaya may simply be the exotic location for the exploration of the soul of a Frenchman in the light of the new romanticism of the time.

Landscape, Exhibits, Postcards

Many of the first reviews of The Soul of Malaya seized on its delineation of

"landscape" as one of Fauconnier' s major achievements. He himself spoke of the work as springing from his love of "a country so beautiful that it seems everything in it is beautiful, even its crimes" ("Appendices" 202). The Times Literarv Supplement describing Fauconnier's Proust-like creative process, praised the picture he drew from memory and from a distance-Tunisia, where he had retired--of a Malaya of

"phosphorescent seas, the palmy shores, the fertile plains; the mystery of the jungle on the mountain-side where the tigers bark at night. And what a confusion of races--dark, graceful Tamils, vivacious Malays, Chinese overseers and English planters"

("Appendices" 202-3). This critic appears to have taken away from the book a sense of

Malaya as "truly Asia" in ways that foreshadow the country's current tourism advertising.2 But this response also suggests that the component races and the

"confusion" under colonial role were rendered by Fauconnier in a manner that was more faithful to the social reality than the buffed and staged parade of races seen in the country's contemporary tourism advertisements.

56 This is not to say that Fauconnier's writing is free of the staging of races. In fact, his representations of Malaya, its people, and the place betray an indebtedness to the late nineteenth century tradition of World Exhibitions. In "Orientalism and the Exhibitionary

Order," Timothy Mitchell argues that "the world as exhibition means not an exhibition of the world but the world organized and grasped as though it were an exhibition" (500).

There is a sense also in Fauconnier of imposed order, and of people situated in designated positions that minimized recognition of a Malaya in flux in every possible sense: in who ruled and who was ruled, in how power was apportioned or simply taken, in how the colonial powers colluded, and in how the different races in this emerging plural society responded to their common colonial masters. Fauconnier's portrait also contrasts sharply with the reality of a physical enviromnent that was changing overnight. The padis, small­ holdings of the native Malays that provided rice for sustenance, were being systematically over-shadowed by the large scale commercial planting of alien rubber trees by the British, and later oil palm by the French, among others. Acres of rain forest were cleared for the new plantations, and the river valleys and hills were being mined for tin and gold. Profits from these new enterprises flowed to large private companies, and over time these exotic products became commodities traded on the London Stock

Exchange. This larger systemic hacking into the terrain of the country from which

Fauconnier himself personally profited is romanticized. He depicts it from a relatively safe distance even as he examines with sensitivity the individual tragedy of a Malay youth's descent into a personal hell.

Fauconnier himself expressed the hope at the time of publication that The Soul of

Malaya would be "read with simplicity, and that one will find in it throughout, the main

57 point, that drop of spirit in the matter" (202). Through the central characters of Rolain and Lescale, and their relationships with the Malays, he provides evidence on almost every page of a determined effort to understand the psyche of the Malay-to get beyond being just tourists. Rolain learns the Malay language, masters the poetry and folklore, and becomes acquainted with the inner demons of the Malays he is most intimately in contact with: his domestic, Smail, and Smail's brother, Ngah. And yet, despite their strenuous efforts, these translators of culture cannot accomplish what George Steiner claimed was achievable in translation: an "exchange without loss" (After Babel 302). Tejaswini

Niranjana rejects the possibility of such an exchange in the colonial context because of the fundamental inequality in the relationship ofthe colonizer and the colonized. While many conversations between Rolain and Lescale and their Malay domestic staff seem at first to support George Steiner's view that the "arrows of meaning, of cultural, psychological benefaction move both ways" (302), on a platform of well-balanced dialogue Niranjana makes a persuasive case that imperial rule makes a balanced exchange unlikely, if not impossible because "the asymmetry between languages is perpetuated by imperial rule" (59). As the events of the book unfold, we see that asymmetrical relationship express itself in many ways, including Rolain's interventions to protect, then to avert, the further humiliation of Smail after he runs amok in a fit of hurt pride. Seeing that he was not going to succeed in intercepting and saving Smail from being captured, Rolain kills his servant with the same bloodied kris that Smail had used earlier on his rampage. He does this apparently to keep Smail from being subjected to an alien system of justice that had little room to understand what he had done or why, but in so doing, Rolain also makes a fugitive of himself. Rolain's action is consistent with

58 Fauconnier's attempt in The Soul Of Malaya to seek inclusion so as to be part of the

Malay story, to be part of the place. By turning Rolain into a fugitive from a colonial system of justice because of his decision to protect the dignity of a native, he achieves some degree of distancing from a colonial infrastructure which otherwise positions those who take the photographs and make the postcards, literary or otherwise, outside the picture.

Reading The Soul of Malaya as a colonial postcard also places it in the context of tourism and all of the tools employed to encourage that lucrative traffic. At times, the work functions also like a documentary to promote tourism rather than a fictionalized memoir because of the vistas it opens up and the guided tour it offers. Looked at in those terms, the book confirms Dennis O'Rourke's argument, from the perspective of a documentary film-maker, that the notion of a "dialogue between cultures" in tourism is a myth, because there are such glaring economic disparities between the tourist and the host country and because the "actual tourist encounters with the people who are the culture" are so short that their encounters are inevitably distorted (40). In the

"documentary" provided by Fauconnier's recollection of his fifteen years as a planter in

Malaya, we must rely on Rolain and Lescale as our tour guides. Fauconnier describes the two characters as "my spokesmen" (7). Through their long conversations and arguments with each other and with their Malay servants we encounter Fauconnier's insights into

Malay culture and Malayan identity. The authority of these insights rests on the willingness of these two non-natives to draw what they know of the land from the Malays in their service. But inevitably, the perspective of these tour guides is weighted with power through the economic disparity that favors the visitor over the native in the way

59 O'Rourke describes. Added to that asymmetry is the power of a colonial infrastructure of business and government.

The Malays with traditional power, such as the ruler Rajah Long, are treated with a mix of formal politeness and disdain by the British District Officers like La Roque, who are shrewd in their manipulations, but lack the philosophical subtleties of the two

Frenchmen. Rajah Long, "a corpulent and sulky-looking personage" responds to La

Roque's conversation at the festival at Kampong Nyor "with a forced smile" (lIS). La

Roque himself exhibits some of the superficial deference of a colonial administration to native "influence" when he speaks of needing to "take care not to rub him up the wrong way. One has to talk to him in the old pompous Court Malay which is very difficult but he likes it." But this level of accommodation is designed to make possible "civilization on the march" in the form of western-style infrastructure: what La Roque calls "my new road," and the rest-house that he points to as being "nearly finished ... behind my fat

Rajah's house" (117).

The appropriation and commodification of the Other that is a part of the colonial enterprise is evident intermittently throughout the text. For the most part though,

Fauconnier assigns the more stridently colonial world-view to minor British officials like the District Officer, La Roque, or British planters like Potter and others. Several bluff, coarsely shallow, text-book colonial pronouncements about the natives and what one needs to do to manage them are sprinkled throughout the accounts of the Club meeting, of La Roque's invasion of Rolain and Lescale's idyllic retreat to a secluded Edenic bay, and of the pivotal dance festival at Kampong Nyor which triggers Smail's descent into his amok state.

60 ------

Lescale's education through long conversations with his mentor, Rolain, largely consist of his struggle to understand how far along that road to identification with the soul of Malaya Rolain actually is, and to try and catch up. Despite being on relatively far less familiar terms with the soul of Malaya, Lescale soon understands the Malay to have

"three soul-coatings: animism, Hinduism and Islam. They are obstinate Mussulmen, but quite unorthodox. Their invocations, that start and finish with the name of Allah, are really addressed to countless demons discredited by the Prophet" (60). Rolain, Lescale tells us, is much more at ease in this world of Malay mythology, describing the

denizens of this mythology as though he had seen them himself. The black

Prince of the Genii, Sang Gala Rajah, who had preserved, almost

unaltered, one of the appellations of Siva.... Tupapaus from the depths of

the Pacific, Pisasies from Dravidian India, Jins from Arabia, not to

mention all the malignant dragons hawked along the coast by Chinese

juoks. (61)

Lescale himself is not quite sure what to make of the responses Smail provides to his questions. His persistent efforts to make sense of Smail's notion of the soul, and whether it exists in animals, vegetables or even in minerals, provokes the following exasperated response: "White men," said Smail, "ask the sort of questions little children ask." He then adds, "We eat the rice, but we do not eat the rice's soul." Lescale is perplexed but intrigued:

Though my logic is at a loss, I dare not assume that Smail is a fool.

What he says may contain a truth, and must in any case possess a

61 meaning. My instinctive logic tells me so. Thus when I was a child I

reverenced the absurd ....Was the answer really incoherent? I was not

sure. How should I find out? I did not talk Malay well enough to press the

point. In this country I was a child of three years old. (59)

By having his colonial characters ascribe intelligence and meaning to what the natives say, Fauconnier differs markedly from other colonial writers of his time. Hugh Clifford's unremitting view of the superstitious ignorance of the natives, and his equally strong conviction of the superior intelligence and virtue of white men contrast strikingly with

Fauconnier's fluctuations between the certainties of what he asserts, and the uncertainties of what he suspects he does not know.

In a discussion of the untranslatability of all poetry, and the peculiar allusiveness of Malay pantun, Lescale demonstrates an awareness of multiple textures and layers in

Malay culture and a desire to respect that complexity:

One must have lived a long while among them to catch the various

connotations of each word besides its literal sense. It is a game of leap­

frog between the concrete and the abstract. ...The first pantuns had

amused me like those puzzle drawings that have to be looked at from

every side to find some hidden profiles in the contours of the obvious

objects. (64-65)

The effort by these French planters, Rolain and Lescale to plumb the depths of the Malay language, and through that, the depths of the culture, mitigates somewhat the undeniably strong strain of European paternalism and the reflexive sense of superiority permeating the philosophical discussions that give the book its thread of continuity. Rolain, for

62 example, chastises Lescale for his simple-minded view of not just the Malays, but also the Indians and Chinese. He is impatient, for instance, with Lescale's infatuation with the Tamil rubber tapper, Palaniai. Her efforts to conceal her visits with him offend

Lescale, who believes that "Native women who are secretly admitted into the Master's house, usually dissemble the fact with enough ostentation to make all the rest aware of their glory" (41-42). Rolain's explanation ofPalaniai's behavior, and her husband

Karuppan's indifference to the relationship, supports every cliche of Orientalist thinking:

"For them you do not count. You are beyond caste. Palaniai brings you

merely a propitiatory offering, and Karuppan troubles himself no more

than men of ancient days who gladly gave their wives to a god with a taste

for mortal women." (42)

Despite its Orientalist cast, a passage like this can still reflect an on-going curiosity about the local order of things, and realms of being not necessarily fully understood, but that must be acknowledged, with all their apparent contradictions.

A Storied Place

Both Lescale and Rolain identify with Malaya as a place infused with living beings, a "storied place" much in the way that Cristina Bacchilega discusses Hawaii

(240-251 ).3 In his first excursion into mountain jungle, Lescale reports: "That jungle lives and breathes and murmurs, soaked in a happiness so deep that it wears the guise of indifference." As he ventures further in, that sense of being surrounded by living beings is reinforced:

63 Beyond the narrow circle of trees that barred my vision began the vast

domain of mystery, and even around me in the play of shadow and the

shafts of sunlight, among the shivering palm fronds and the rustle of

foliage that no wind can reach, in the dim agitation that encompassed me

as subtle as the circulation of the blood beneath the skin, I discovered

stranger mirages than those of the desert and felt the faint pressure of

unknown forces ... .I saw no living being, and yet I felt I was at the very

heart of an intense life: so startling an anomaly, that I could now better

understand why the old legends peopled the forests with invisible beings,

or plant-like entities veined with sap instead of blood. And as the light

began to fail I guessed that those mysterious presences would beset us yet

more closely with the darkness." (18 -19)

Smail recognizes in Rolain an even greater affinity for the world of spirits that inhabit the land. He admires Rolain, but also fears for him and for himself. When explaining

Rolain's excursions deep into the jungle to Lescale, Smail says:

He does nothing. He just looks about him. When I am with him he

sometimes talks to me. But I think he mostly talks to the spirits. He is not

afraid of spirits ....There are many of them in the jungle.... more spirits

than mosquitoes. There are some in every tree. I would not live here with

any other Tuan [SirlMaster]. (59)

In Smail's concern for Rolain is the recognition of a shared sensibility.

Alongside this intimation of a Malay world of spirits that Rolain seems to identify with is a more prosaic, stereotyping. In one scene, during a Club meeting to discuss the

64 renovation of the premises, one man proposes with a wink that they "give the job to-­ er-a Malay contractor." Lest anyone not understand that this was a reference to the widely held view that the Malays were lazy, he then adds, "In that way we shall be left in peace for a long while" (81). Laughter erupts, signifYing general agreement. In another example, La Roque bursts upon Rolain and Lescale sunbathing on the beach and joins in their naked abandon-and their discussion. He makes the dryly facetious comment that he finds it hard to condemn the Malays because "They are never guilty. When they kill their father and their mother, it is due to their terrible ill-luck. .. And yet, they have many faults" (l05). Lescale is the first to respond, quoting a missionary, Father Lebouvier, from a nearby town: "We have all the mortal sins, except idleness. The Malays have none but idleness" (105). Rolain then takes this defense a stage further: "It is their virtue ....

If they were not lazy, they would not be so merry, vivacious, lewd, fantastic and arcadian.

It is not for us, who come of accursed races, to judge them" (105). This defense sets up a

Rousseau-like apposition of cursed European versus Noble Savage that could suggest that this work is yet another Orientalist depiction of the fabulous East for the consumption of

Europeans.

But far from being the too short holiday tour that O'Rourke criticizes as being inadequate to any understanding of another culture, the journey in Fauconnier is an extended one, conducted over much of a lifetime for all of his "guides." The results are mixed, reflecting their openness to learning and their inability to accommodate newness, their differing levels of cultural obduracy, and the perspective, for better or for worse, that time and distance provide. Fauconnier had started writing parts of the book as early as 1914 but he completed it only in 1931, several years after leaving Malaya to retire to

65 Tunisia with his family. His \Witing of his life in Malaya over that long a period of time, and from such a distance as well as his channeling of his experience through his two

"spokesmen" provide a less dogmatic, more fluid sense of the place. He focuses on the people who are the culture, and does so in ways that differ markedly from the life writing of British colonial officials who spent far more time and had far more power in Malaya.

In fact, Fauconnier's work accommodates contradiction and self-examination in ways that begin, at times and in some respects, to transcend the power inherent in the colonial enterprise within which he and his guides operate.

It is true that Lescale, the junior student of the Malay soul, lapses periodically into the kind of colonial pronouncement that reflects the white man's sense of superiority.

Referring to his conversation with his Malay servant, Ngah, he says, "I would not argue.

It was a waste of time. His babble soothed me. I had the sensation of talking to a friendly dog. One need not enquire whether the dog's ideas are very coherent" (131). Yet, despite that belittling, Lescale is actually attentive to instruction from Ngah, whom he elsewhere describes as his "professor of literature."

He makes me read a whole book of old stories: the Adventures of Flea of

the Forest, of Daddy Grasshopper. Then we go on to the proverbs and

pantuns. They are more difficult, but I make rapid progress. I begin to

follow the thread of what the Malays say when they talk to each other.

(91)

Lescale works hard at learning to pronounce Ngah's name so as not to embarrass him in front of others. He threatens to beat N gah to punish him for the sulks that the latter uses to register disapproval of his Master's behavior, but the threat is received with

66 indifference and challenge. N gah comes out of his sulks when he pleases, suggesting an unspoken awareness of power outside the economic system that makes him a servant to foreign masters in his own land.

Out of Eden

Rolain's immersion in the Malayan landscape is cast several times as a search for

Eden that invites comparison to the attraction that many feel for Hawai'i, another place also viewed almost routinely via the cliches of tourism as a Paradise. Haunani-Kay Trask describes people fleeing the sickness of mainland America and coming to Hawai'i, looking for relief from "the depths of Western sexual sickness that demands a dark, sin­ free Native for instant gratification between imperialist wars" (137). Trask's account of what Hawaii supposedly represents to those who come to visit or to stay might just as easily describe the relationship between the colonial settlers and the native Malays as

Fauconnier saw it. One episode in The Soul of Malaya exemplifies this notion of the flight from sin to salvation particularly strongly. About halfway through the narrative,

Rolain and Lescale enjoy a little interlude when they literally go native to take in the sun on a pristine beach. Their peace is rudely interrupted by the unexpected arrival of La

Roque, who quickly strips down to match their physical nakedness. But their metaphysical nakedness is less easily emulated and the bland flippancy of La Roque clearly provides a foil for Rolain's intense meditations on the state of Europe:

"The melancholy of Europe is not seen by those who have never left it,"

said Rolain; nor by any who have not come back there after a long time

away. It is a country in which I could no longer live; it is inhabited, not by

67 human beings, but by marionettes. Utterly devoid of charm. There is

nothing to admire but empty landscape." (10 I)

Later in the conversation, he draws an explicit parallel between Eden and the East.

To be in Europe, he explains, is to be cast out of Eden for having eaten of the "fabled fruit" of a flawed morality. In contrast to the still Edenic state of Malaya, Europe is a place where men struggle, knowing that they have been cast out of Paradise:

"The sin-punishment was leaving Eden. Every land in which a man cannot

live naked all the year round is condemned to work and war and morality .

. . . When you get back to Europe, you will see none but harassed people,

all mistrustful, always on their guard, thinking only of defending their

right to get the best place first. How can they possibly be happy? And with

it all, drilled like performing dogs." (105)

And yet, despite this insight, Rolain is silent on the paradox of the colonizer occupying the "best place first" in the land of the colonized. When we read Fauconnier's personal observations on his early years in Malaya, the period of his greatest enchantment with the land, this silence becomes understandable: "the planter spends the day among his coolies, at once king, judge, doctor, depending only on himself in the solitude of his soul, omnipotent, and alone ..." ("Appendices" 182). This is clearly the colonizer savoring the power that allows him to appropriate a place, press it into alien use, subjugate its people, and press them into service to an alien, if in this case, generally kindly, Tuan (Master).

Such enjoyment of the "best place fust" is not easily relinquished and can only be justified if the world of the colonizer and the colonized are seen as separate spheres of existence. In one sphere, the colonizers compete for the best place first while in the other,

68 the people who are of the place are judged by how well they subordinate themselves to the colonizing power. The native is not a contender for the "best place fITst." He is simply part of the landscape.

More than just one double standard is at work in The Soul of Malaya. Having left what he describes as a dehumanized Europe behind, Fauconnier praises the recovery of that innocence and simple goodness in the Edenic East. But the omnipotence necessary to enjoy such simplicity is only possible by riding on the backs of natives and the backbone of French and British military power. A further contradiction arises from the fact that Eden in Malaya is more peopled than Fauconnier's vision of redemption can accommodate. He does not see the non-Malays as people but as "fallen nations" whose response to European tyranny and condescension is "blind admiration" (43). He has no trouble dismissing the other races, brought or drawn to Malaya to meet the needs or to exploit the opportunities of a labor-intensive plantation and mining colonial economy.

They are little more than factors of production, pieces of a vast colonial machinery­ dolls and drudges, with none of the depth of soul he readily finds in the native Malay.

When celebrating his freedom from domestic chores because of his Tamil water carrier,

Lescale tells us he was "a tall, upstanding fellow, a magnificent type of pariah. He always looked as though he were accomplishing some solemn rite, even when he removed the night soil" (134). And speaking of his Tamil lover, Lescale describes Palaniai looking up at him "with great deep empty eyes" (39).

Even as Malaya moved increasingly towards becoming a plural society during the period of colonial rule because of the active encouragement of large-scale immigration from China and India, Chinese and Indians were viewed as people who, while they

69 worked the land and the mines, were not afthe place and therefore could not provide an understanding of its soul. This is why Rolain is impatient with Lescale' s efforts to understand his Tamil lover and approves ofLescale's hiring ofNgah to replace the

Chinese houseboy, Ha Hek. According to Rolain, "You can never know a country well except from the people it produces. In Malaya you must surround yourself with Malays"

(78). This willfully ignores, of course, the impact of the people "produced" in a country as a consequence of colonial intervention, and the complexity of their relationship to the place. And yet, more than twenty five years later, Fauconnier acknowledged another kind of exclusion when he suggests that one of the reasons for writing a sequel might be to expose "an unknown aspect of the country" that would "concern the mountainous regions where the Sakais live. That's all that's really missing" (218).4 While he never embarked on that effort, it is worth noting that Fauconnier pointed to the Orang Asli as a necessary piece in the identity of the country he loved, long before other Malay, Chinese, or Indian writers were ready to do the same. Still, Fauconnier's indifference to the presence of the

Chinese and Indians endures.

Equally conspicuous, though predictable, is the virtual absence of a female perspective among those doing the staging or being staged in this colonial postcard. The

Malays who provide insight into the soul of Malaya are almost always male. The Malay women we encounter are the painted and costumed dancers who have lost all hope of marriage, on stage at the celebration at Kampung Nyor, and the decorous young women, including the Rajah's daughter, object of Smail's attention and later despair, who sat in the audience and "as befitted them, kept silence, motionless under their veils" (124).

Again, it would be easy to read this representation of the Malay female (as well as the

70 earlier representations of Palaniai) as a typically Orientalist objectification. The counterpointing of female types at the Kampong Nyor festival is not unlike what Marshal

McLuhan observed in a 1947 advertisement for nylon stockings, in which a "serenely innocent" girl stands against a backdrop of a rearing horse: "stately, modest and

'classical,' she is the 'good girl' usually counter-pointed against the 'good-time girl,' who is wide awake and peppy" (133). Similarly, the decorous, veiled good girls of Rajah

Long's party contrast sharply with the less inhibited good-time girls on stage, who parry one suggestive pantun from the audience with another.

But this picture is not as clear-cut as it might seem. One of the "good girls" drops her veil and exchanges glances with Smail who becomes infatuated with her. Her simple act of agency and the subsequent snub Rajah Long delivers by removing her from the scene, set in motion the chain of actions that result in Smail ultimately running amok.

This largely unspoken, not fully articulated drama ends in Smail's death at Rolain's hands in what is presented as an act of compassion. Rolain understands the code of love and honor in the Malay world and the violence that springs from being humiliated within the framework of that code. By turning the kris on Smail, Rolain does not just stop

Smail's killing spree but saves him from the further humiliation of colliding with an alien code of justice imposed through the systemic violence of colonization. As Henry Glassie explains:

Oppressed people are made to do what others will them to do. They

become slaves in the ceramic factories of their masters. Acting

traditionally, by contrast, they use their own resources--their own

71 tradition, one might say-to create their own future, to do what they will

themselves to do. They make their own pots. (396)

Though his act of protection is itself paternalistic, by protecting Smail from British justice, Rolain preserves Smail's right to "make his own pots."

But the truth of the matter is that no one was really free to make their own pots.

Fauconnier's Malaya was a place where advancement was heavily choreographed, stringently channeled, and driven by the quest for profit of the colonial powers and the struggle for survival of the immigrant communities. The painful legacy of colonization still lies buried beneath the later veneer of order, apparent harmony and progress in

Malaya. Both the colonial quest and the immigrant struggle for survival fostered a somewhat fluid sense of identity. This identity was one that maintained connections to the place left behind but also took on whatever was necessary for survival in the place of adoption: the languages, customs, and conventions of a new land. With successive generations, this somewhat self-consciously assumed identity became the only identity the new Malayans could call their own.

Over time, this process caused the Malay community to question the allegiance of their new neighbors whose customs, practices, and behavior suggested a continuing link to ancestral homelands. Does someone who has left their native homeland to make a new life elsewhere remain indigenous to their homeland, or do they become defined solely by the new place they call home, especially after two or three generations? David Gegeo' s arguments for a persistent indigeneity based on the concept of portability of place shed some light on this question. Gegeo argues that Pacific Islanders, no matter where they go and for how long, remain connected to the place left behind. This is possible because they

72 take their sense of place with them, rooted as it is in genealogy, in a continuing attachment to land, in position that derives from both genealogy and marriage, in native fluency in language, in familiarity with their culture and history, in acknowledgement of their obligations to kin and in a shared perspective on how to view and transform social reality and be transformed by it (493-494). Almost all of these criteria for a continuing indigeneity relative to one's ancestral homeland apply to the immigrant races in Malaya.

But what Gegeo is silent on in his essay-and what the Malays were perhaps not attentive enough to in the remaking of their society at the end of colonial rule--are the accretions: new language, a different education, a different cosmos for work and play, and new customs that become part of the transformation of identity in the adoptive country. The life writing texts examined in the chapters that follow discuss these accretions, and what they meant for indigenous and immigrant identity in Malaya.

In Malaysia, the transformation over two or three generations has resulted in a near complete cultural rupture with the ancestral homelands. There is no looking back, no returning to India or China---or for that matter Sumatra, Java, Southern Borneo, or the

Celebes, the places from where many of the Malays who are identified as Bumiputera

(princes of the soil) or natives, originally came. Benedict Anderson has famously pointed out how the census, map, and museum "profoundly shaped the way in which the colonial state imagined its dominion-the nature of the human beings it ruled, the geography of its domain, and the legitimacy of its ancestry" (164). This kind of shaping also affected the making of the future nation state. A 1911 Federated Malay States (FMS) Census lists under 'Malay Population by Race' a number of groups of people who originated outside the colonial territory of the FMS. "But these extra-FMS origins receive no recognition,"

73 Anderson notes, "from the census-makers who, in constructing their' Malays,' kept their eyes modestly lowered to their own colonial borders" (165). Today, when all the ethnic communities perceive that being Malaysian brings with it a constantly modulating sense of place, the sense among Malays of being both indigenous and entitled is in some ways more acute and more fully articulated than it was by their predecessors when Malaya was still a British colony.

Adding to the current political debate of who is indigenous and who is immigrant, which makes Malaysia a still contested space, is the realization by the Malays that colonialism and immigration actually marginalized them economically even as it preserved their preeminence politically. This political power has been used to implement programs to redress some of the economic imbalances. But the process ofrighting old wrongs has also raised questions about what it means to be Malaysian, and what it has taken to create the place that the different races, living in a society that is both mixed and divided, each calls its own. Beneath its surface harmony, Malaysia is one of the formerly colonized countries of Asia where "forceful reminders of old racial wounds refuse to heal, and new battles are still being fought over raciaily contested national issues"

(Nicholson 5). As they trace the history of the country from early times, well before the rise of Melaka as a center for trade in the sixteenth century to Malaysia as it is today,

Barbara Watson Andaya and Leonard Andaya acknowledge that "it is not easy to escape a centrist perspective. This vantage point needs to be balanced by other views from the

'margins' if the full mosaic of Malaysia's rich past is to be surveyed and appreciated"

(344). They also note the Malaysian government's confidence that the different communities can be "integrated into a basically Malay society" (343). But both the

74 relegation to the margins, and the notion of "a basically Malay society," run counter to how the non-Malay communities see their increasingly blended histories in the only country that, as third or fourth or fifth generation Malaysians, they regard as home.

Malaysia in 2008 is a newly industrialized nation where manufacturing and foreign investment dominate, and has often been cited as a fast-growth "tiger economy."s

What was once little more than the "muddy river mouth" that the name "Kuala Lumpur" signifies, now is a capital city of gleaming skyscrapers, an impressive system of highways, and the congested traffic of city streets and new housing developments beneath a sky that is often not as blue as it once was. In its physical and metaphysical contours, the country is very different from that place where "the jungle lives and breathes and murmurs ... the vast domain of mystery ... in the play of shadow and the shafts of sunlight, among the shivering palm fronds and the rustle of foliage" that for

Henri Fauconnier at least, was the "soul" of Malaya in 1931 (18).

Despite the often noisily proclaimed difference in values between the two nations, the soul of Malaysia today is tied far more closely to the United States. Malaysian leaders like Dr. Mahathir Mohamad, who were quick to tout Malaysian values for the benefit of local constituents, were wooing American investors in foreign venues at the same time by promising a politically stable environment and a workforce that costs less, yet is educated and tuned enough to American values to respond to the expectations of American multinationals. Mahathir and Singapore's Lee Kuan Yew were the most vocal defenders of Asian values in the debate provoked by Samuel Huntington's infamous Clash of

Civilizations essay, first published in the summer 1993 issue of Foreign Affairs. In that essay, Huntington made the now familiar argument that "the great divisions among

75 humankind and the dominating source of conflict will be cultural" (22). His recommendation that the United States align itself with nations of similar culture to fend off the threat from "alien civilizations" stirred up a storm in which Mahathir, Lee Kuan

Yew, and their anointed spokespersons defended Asian values in every forum possible as the secret to the success of the tiger economies. Though the Western skills and technologies their countries had acquired and adapted had fostered national growth, they argued that Malaysia and Singapore maintained their stability through a continuing fidelity to Asian values and traditions.

Those values seemed seriously under siege, and Malaysia's image as a model of

Asian culture and hospitality was seriously damaged by Mahathir's draconian 1998 response to his deputy Anwar Ibrahim's efforts to bring about a leadership change through the use of Filipino-style people-power: public rallies calling for "reformasi." In a fine example ofthe amnesia that operates in the corridors of diplomacy and trade, and in the light of changed American foreign policy following the attacks of September 11,

Mahathir's autocratic behavior and anti-semitic diatribes were forgotten as the country was officially welcomed back as a friend of the United States. The U.S. went further, anointing Malaysia as "a moderate Muslim nation," a designation that continues to be the subject of contention within Malaysia as non-Malays wrestle with this new representation of who they are.6 During his 2002 visit to the United States, Mahathir was given a welcome befitting an ally whose identity as a "good" Muslim nation was crucial to

America's war against its enemies:

Treated virtually as a pariah by the administration of President Bill

Clinton for his attacks on Jews, his refusal to follow the advice of the

76 International Monetary Fund (IMF), and the suppression of domestic

opponents including his one-time heir apparent, Mahathir was greeted

warmly as a comrade-in-arms in the war against terrorism by President

George W Bush .... Mahathir went on to lecture a banquet hall of US

business executives on the evils of terrorism ... and was given a standing

ovation by his corporate audience while embassy officials distributed a

one-page statement signed by Bush on White House stationery which

declared Malaysia "a modem, moderate, and prosperous Muslim state

land] an important example to the region and the rest of the world. (Lobe)

Mahathir's rhetoric and his reception, despite all the anti-American and anti-West attitudes he was known for previously, point to the fact that Malaysia is as eager to welcome American investment as American companies are to invest in Malaysia.

The ambivalence that we saw reflected in Fauconnier's account of the relationship between the colonizer and the colonized is thus reenacted today in the ambivalence of

Malaysia's position in relation to the neo-colonialism of American military and trade interests in Malaysia and Southeast Asia. Less than one tenth the size of the United

States in population, and a predominantly, increasingly more conservative Muslim state in South East Asia, Malaysia is both geographically and culturally distant from predominantly Anglo-America. Yet it ranked as the United States' tenth largest trading partner between 2004-2006 and American pop and consumer culture is everywhere in the country's urban centers.7 In fact, the preoccupation with American culture is one of the ways in which Malaysians achieve a certain national solidarity of interest that transcends communal boundaries. In the 1960s and 1970s, Malaysians of all races who once aspired

77 to higher education in Britain began turning their faces to America, as the media and programs such as the Peace Corps made the United States a familiar, benign presence.

The long infatuation with Oxbridge and English culture left over from colonial rule was yielding to the allure of Hollywood and the popularity of American television shows,

Westerns, detective novels and other pulp fiction. This gradual, largely middle-class loosening of ties to Britain and an increased interest in the new freedoms and opportunities that America represented, helped foster the sense that Malaysia as a whole was the model of inter-racial harmony and goodwill that it projected publicly. And certainly, inter-racial goodwill has been the central message, broadcast domestically and internationally via self-congratulatory advertisements and ceremonial parades showcasing diversity on the anniversary of Merdeka (Independence) every year. The political leadership seemed not to notice the widening of fissures between races at the level of the working class. Having achieved independence through peaceful negotiation fifty years before, inter-racial harmony has been viewed as a given, as indeed it was in middle-class circles. The nation was therefore caught off-guard by the inter-racial violence that tore the country apart in the riots of May 1969. Triggered by post-election results in which the Chinese-dominated Opposition won big gains in Parliament, the resulting confrontation set in motion a chain of political initiatives that to this day try to re-engineer the economy to ensure a more equitable distribution of wealth, and get past the legacy of colonialism. Malaysia today therefore bears the scars not just of the colonial times captured in The Soul of Malaya, but of its post-independence history, and of uneven economic development in a plural society.

78 Fig. 2. Cover illustration by Leng Tsu Soo for the 2003 edition of The Soul of Malaya.

79 The cover illustration of the 2003 edition of The Soul of Malaya. and how it was conceived, testify to some of the scars and legacies of the immigrant/indigenous encounter over the past fifty years (see fig. 2). Designed by Leng Soo-Tsu, an award­ winning Malaysian Chinese illustrator based in Singapore, the cover focuses on the relationship of the colonial power to the rural Malay. In the foreground, a European planter in a safari suit stands in silhouette on a hillock with his back to the reader. He looks out over a country landscape illuminated by a fiery setting sun. Walking towards him on lower ground, head bowed and apparently unaware that he is being watched--or watched over-is a native Malay in the traditional sarong. He is insignificant and remote when compared to the towering figure of the planter, and the fullness of the landscape of sky, mountains, and palms, into which he blends easily-a small detail. There is no sign of Chinese or Indians anywhere. The message is one of power, erasure, and an unequal dynamic. Explaining his cover design, Leng says,

The story was about a plantation owner's experience in Malaya. I thought

the human element/relationships needs to be clear on the art - just foliage

would be too abstract. ... I had wanted him to be in a reflective mood, at

the end of day, observing his servant going about his business (going

home after his job's done at his master's house) .... Planter (that's a

planters hat he's wearing by the way) is looking down at his place and

probably taking stock of what he has built. The reader/viewer sees from

his point of view. (Email to the author, 17 January 2008)

The most telling comment is that "The reader/viewer sees from [the planter's] point of view." What this reader sees is a rural Malay servant subservient to a colonial master. It

80 is curious, but not altogether surprising, that the "Othering" of the Malay in British

Malaya is re-enacted in the present by a local illustrator, but the illustration testifies to an enduring colonial legacy , a continuing view of the Malayan landscape observed, to use

Lucy Lippard's words "from the outside" (qtd. in Bacchilega 241). In discussing the relationship of photography to history, Roland Bartbes argued that history "is constituted only if we consider it, only if we look at it-and in order to look at it, we must be excluded from it " (27). Fauconnier looked at Malaya as an outsider-one trying very hard to get inside the "soul" of Malaya, but still an outsider. And while he saw and represented Chinese and Indians in his novelistic memoir, despite their growing numbers, he presented them too as outsiders. Given how and why they came to Malaya, this was perhaps not entirely surprising even though the numbers were formidable. Writing in

1935, R.O. Winstedt provided an authoritative view of the growing numbers and perspective of the Chinese immigrant population in Malaya: "In 1931 there were

1,709,392 Chinese out of Malaya's total population of 4,385,346. For ages they have traded with the Peninsula, their only interest, commerce" (History 257).

The illustrator in 2003, however, is a member of an immigrant community whose relationship to Malaya is an allegiance, cultivated over three or more generations of adapting to the new country as home. Though the feeling that Malaya was home grew with increasing prosperity and permanent settlement, throughout the process the Chinese continued to view the Malays through a British lens. Having come to Malaya to escape poverty in China, the Chinese built new lives and many saw their families accumulate wealth through tin-mining and other business enterprises. By 1931, they represented nearly 40 percent of the population, and their success as miners and traders gave them a

81 growing economic dominance that translated over time into identification with colonial power, and the colonial view of the native Malay as someone rooted to the land in ways that were less enterprising and less profitable. With the exception of the state of Negri

Sembilan, the Chinese actually outnumbered the Malays on the West Coast of the

Peninsular where the key towns and growth centers were located. In 1981, fifty years after The Soul of Malaya was published, Hussein Onn, the third Prime Minister of

Malaysia, put the British characterization of Malays as "nature's gentlemen" in context:

"We planted padi and drove the master's car.... We were just full of

charm. But then the Chinese took over the economic life of the country by

virtue of their energy and commercial talent. At that point the greatest fear

of the Malays of being submerged in their own country was realized.

Malays are now adopting new values to help them compete with other

Malaysians. In the process nature's gentlemen will have to lose some of

their old charm but that's the inevitable price indigenous people must pay

for progress ...." (Morais, Hussein Onn 52)

The major economic restructuring after the pivotal post-election race riots of 1969 has not entirely eliminated the disdain for the supposed lack of drive on the part of the

Malays. 8 If anything, it has been exacerbated by the readiness of Chinese businesses in particular to exploit programs like the New Economic Policy, intended to grant the

Malays the resources and opportunities to accumulate more wealth.9

The 2003 cover illustration for Fauconnier's colonial work is itself an act of commerce that reinscribes stereotypes, painting over the many lives actually represented within the writing to foreground a power dynamic that erases the Malay sultans and all

82 the other races in favor of the colonial planter's view of the landscape. And yet, this is the same work that a Malay reader like Salleh ben Joned can celebrate for having truly come close to capturing his soul. By that he does not mean to suggest, as the illustration seems to, that the Malay is placed appropriately in his subordinate role as servant. Instead Salleh points to Fauconnier's ability to get beyond the stereotypes, reflecting "a mind that is deeply sympathetic," and to suggest the complexity of the Malay character: "They say these people are soft ....Yes, soft ... as dynamite" (168). In this difference between what the Malaysian Chinese illustrator and a Malay reader saw in The Soul of Malaya we can also read some of the dynamics of identity and otherness in contemporary Malaysia.

What one community saw as it looked across at the other did not always coincide with how that community saw itself. Some measure of mutual awareness of the discrepancy between self-image and the perceptions of others continues to haunt inter-racial discourse in Malaysia today.

The objectification and staging of the different races to serve a colonial economy found in Fauconnier's work is re-enacted today by Malaysians as they seek to participate in and profit from an even more aggressively globalized economy. The domination of local populations by latter day arrivals, and the impact this has on shaping identity stokes the race to compete for tourist and investment dollars. Multi-nationals exert a different kind of imperial control over the everyday life of the countries they invest in and the markets in which they sell their products. In today's global economy, Malaysians collude in the domination oflocal populations by the forces of capital. Where once colonial subjects were offered the prospect of personal advancement and improved living standards only through imitation of their colonial masters, Malaysian citizens of all races

83 today exercise their "freedom" to buy what the West owns but produces cheaply in places like Malaysia. Imitation of the more democratic consumption patterns of the West has taken the place of the elitist pursuit of the colonial power's education, religion and culture.

This chapter has noted the many ways in which The Soul of Malaya is fixed in and framed by time. More than half a century has passed since its publication. But re­ colonization through multinationals and the media has led to a new, in some ways more insidious enslavement to foreign power-more insidious, because in an age of apparent independence and new freedoms, we see the often unthinking, self-inflicted re-enactment of an old hegemony: wealth, gender, the West. In its trade and tourism advertising,

Malaysia gets presented by Malaysians as a place to invest in or explore. Cheap labor, female subservience, and a culture that can be domesticated to meet the needs of multinational employers, or diluted for easy Western consumption are all promised. 10 The story of identity constructed in Malaya during colonial times bears out Nicholson's observation that "race and nation were born and raised together. They are the Siamese twins of modernity" (7). Even today, the two show no signs of being separated in

Malaysia, with race being the place where the idea of nation is most contested. And yet, race is also the place where the idea of nation most conspicuously coalesces. If, The Soul of Malaya was a literary "colonial postcard" in the sense in which Malek Alloula speaks of other colonial postcards, that postcard has been turned over and re-inscribed (520).

The following chapters examine that reinscription of identity through the life writing of

Malaysians, both indigenous and immigrant. These texts will suggest how their authors pictured and positioned themselves within the project of nation-building and how

84 generational shifts in that project drew them in or marginalized them. They will also provide some understanding of the degree to which Malaysians have been willing to have that identity newly framed by the politics of economic growth and globalization in return for the spoils available to those positioned to claim them.

85 IA self-described "hopelessly 'Westemised'" Malay, Salleh is one of the most accomplished Malaysian poets writing in both English and Malay. (As I Please 75). In embracing Fauconnier Salleh challenges, as his commentary often does, the pieties of race dispensed by politicians who protect Malay rights--and their political power-by protecting the notion of what it means to be Malay from any challenge or discussion.

Salleh's admiration for Fauconnier's work is a call to recognize the value of holding a mirror up to the soul of the Malay, even when the person doing the holding is not a

Malay. This repeated theme in Salleh' s work will be discussed more fully in the chapter that deals with his writing.

2 Started in the 90s, the campaign, "Malaysia, Truly Asia" has kept evolving under that same tagline.

3 Bacchilega draws on Lippard's distinction between lived-in landscapes known from the inside rather than observed from the outside to discuss place in Hawai'i as an outdoor backdrop for the experience of viewing, and place as a lived-in landscape, a 'storied place" invigorated by gods and kupua (beings who can take many forms). I found this helpful to understanding the different ways in which Malaya is viewed by the colonial planter, the native Malay, and the adoptive Malayan in Fauconnier's work.

4 The Sakais were one of several Orang Asli tribes living in jungle and hill communities and the term was generally used casually within the country to mean the Orang Asli.

86 5 See

8411.2003.00 131.x?cookieSet=l> for a review of the scholarly literature on the countries commonly identified as the "tiger economies" because of their aggressive growth and their conversion from a largely agricultural base to newly industrialized economies attracting foreign capital and the establishment of multinational corporations. While there was very rapid growth, the increasingly inequitable distribution of wealth created instability, contributing to the Asian financial crisis of the late 1990s.

6 While Malaysians of Chinese and Indian descent and other non-Muslims think of themselves as living in a nation where the official religion is Islam, they generally reject the state's assertion that they are living in a Muslim state. That difference has led to an on-going debate, stoked by Mahathir's frequent declarations at home and abroad that

Malaysia is a Muslim state, that continues to this day. Under the administration of his successor, Abdullah Badawi, a supposedly progressive form ofislam-Islam Hadhari­ was announced, but the handling of several high profile public events has called any claim to moderation and progressive thinking into question.

In July 2007, the Christian Federation of Malaysia issued a statement to express its concern at the remarks of the Deputy Prime Minister Datuk Seri Najib Abdul Razak that

"Islam is the official religion and Malaysia is an Islamic State, an Islamic State that respects the rights of the non-Muslims and we protect them." The Christian Federation declared that "the use of the term "Islamic State" is unacceptable to Malaysians of other faiths, on three grounds. Firstly, the term "Islamic State" is not used in our Federal

87 disenchantment with U.S. foreign policy grows. See http://www.census.gov/foreign­ trade/statisticslhighlights/top/index.htrnl

8 In a 1996 speech inaugurating a new Chair in Malay Studies at the University of

Victoria in New Zealand, Dr Mahathir Mohamad defended the need for "handicaps" such as the affirmative action enshrined in the New Economic Policy to hasten the advancement of the Malays. He also alluded to the legacy of the colonial characterization of the Malays:

"Under British rule the Malays were preserved as ·Nature's Gentlemen'.

They were a contented people who accepted British rule as a matter of

course. And if the British decided that they should remain the hewers of

wood and the drawers of water, why, what was wrong with that? Had they

not always been the hewers of wood and drawers of water? And so the end

of World War II found them actually welcoming the return of British

colonial rule."

23e/8531aOa632aa24234825674a002132ed?OpenDocument>

9 It was well-known in the business world that Chinese entrepreneurs would enlist silent, passive "Ali Baba" partners who would lend their name as shareholders. In return, they would be given a share in Chinese businesses that would then qualifY as having met the

Malay equity ownership goals set by the New Economic Policy.

89 lOIn "Tourism and Cultural Development in Malaysia: Issues for a New Agenda," Kadir

H. Din states, correctly I believe, that "In terms of government allocations of funds for tourism, and of coverage by the promotional media, there seems to be a belief that staged culture contributes more to tourism than street culture which is always there for the asking." He argues that "from the point of view of people outside industry, tourism on balance destroys local culture and serves mainly the interests of foreigners at the expense of the local community" (111-114). His comments are borne out by tourism marketing campaigns that very clearly objectifY the country as a subservient female, and self­ consciously draw images from an earlier colonial era to feature them in contemporary marketing.

90 CHAPTER 2. FROM BRITISH COLONY TO INDEPENDENT NATION

John Victor Morais: Witness to History: Memoirs of an Editor

If Fauconnier provides an understanding of Malayan identity through a colonial lens, my father, John Victor Morais, can illustrate the civic sense and understanding of

"good citizenship" that motivated the middle class elites who took over the reins of government once the British left the Malay States. His self-assigned role as an early scribe of the nation prompted him to document the lives of the Great Men of early independent Malaya. His own memoirs came towards the end of a career in which he had produced biographies or edited collections of the speeches of four Malaysian Prime

Ministers, the first Finance Minister, the founder of the influential Islamic Youth

Movement (ABIM) who later became Deputy Prime Minister, the first elected Speaker of the Malaysian Parliament, the leading Malaysian labor leader and first Asian President of the International Confederation of Free Trade Unions (I.C.F.T.U.), the Lord President of the Federal Court of Malaysia, and the retired chief of the Armed Forces. He also started a biennial compendium of biographies. Modeled on similar projects in other countries, he called this publication initially Leaders of Malaya and Who's Who. and later simply

Who's Who in Malaysia and Singapore. His own biography was always one of the entries. As to his decision to write his own memoirs, it was prompted by a conviction that he belonged with that cluster of early middle class leaders who saw it as their mission to keep the nation chugging along on the tracks that had been laid out by the colonial government. The only important distinction was that now Malaysians, not British administrators, were in charge.

91 The reception those biographies enjoyed, even from those who probably never moved past the covers of each volume, enhanced the reputation my father had already earned. In addition to raising the profile of those whose lives he documented, sometimes at his own expense, these biographies and his wide-ranging community activities fostered my father's own reputation as a public figure.' That reputation linked his success as someone who had greatly improved his own circumstances through talent, hard work, and perseverance to the significant contributions that he, and many of his peers in that first generation of middle class Malayans, had made to support and build their communities.

His account of his election as the president of the Kinta Indian Organization in 1947 is followed by that of his nomination as the first Indian State Executive Councilor in the

Perak government, a state "cabinet" post that he recalls with transparent pleasure: "All the members of the State Council and the State Executive Council were entitled to be addressed as "the Honorable Mr.... I was then in my late thirties and this boosted my ego!" (59). But his sense of himself as a leader within the Indian community was balanced early on by a recognition of Malay rights. Writing about Malay opposition to

Britain's initial blueprint for independence that gave generous citizenship rights to non­

Malays in a new Malayan Union, Morais speaks of the courage of Dato Onn bin Jaafar, the founder of the United Malays National Organization (UMNO), describing him as

"having blazed the trail to freedom by awakening the Malays to their rightful place in

Malaya" (Witness 61). Neither Malay nor a historian, in his already instinctively recognized role as a witness to the new nation, as early as 1947 he wrote Hidup Melayu, a small book on the growth of Malay nationalism.

92 Cultural Ruptures. Accretions. Adaptation

My father's ability to adapt to his new country had its roots in the traditions of his native Kerala. Even before he landed in what was then the British-controlled Malay

States, my father knew what it was like to be at the confluence of several cultural streams. While there is no oral or written record of when the family became Catholic, the name "Morais" is Portuguese, as is my mother's family name, "Vaz." The assumption, therefore, has always been that the families acquired those names when they were baptized by missionaries at some point during Portugal's nearly 500 year control of neighboring Goa? (The Syrian Christians of Kerala, my father's birthplace, claim that their ancestors were converted even earlier by the apostle St. Thomas, before his martyrdom in Tamil Nadu in AD 72.) In her study of Christianity in this region, Cecilia

Busby notes that Kerala, despite being the smallest state in India,

is in fact one of the most cosmopolitan, with a large non-Hindu

population. As well as a Christian and Muslim community, there are the

remnants of a Jewish community, all of which have a long history in the

state. The ports of the Malabar coast have served as centers for

commercial exchange between China and Arabia and the West since well

before the first century AD. (78)

Busby also points to the Indian insistence on recasting Christian "notions of person, substance and power" in ways that are "recognizably Indian but which must also be accepted as fully a part oflocal understanding of Christianity" (78). Clearly, Keralites had a long tradition of adapting to newness.

93 Missionary activity and the conversion to Catholicism of local populations in both

Kerala and the Malay States as well as the widespread movement and educational goals of missionaries within the region, encouraged the residents to adopt European habits, orientating themselves towards "performing civilization" in the way John and Jean

Comaroff have described this process in other contexts. Part of this performance involved cultivating an ease in negotiating cultural crossings through education, language, cuisine, dress and deportment. My father's biographies of the early leaders of Malaya and

Singapore, and his account of his own life, record that process of negotiation. While the lack of economic opportunity drove people like my father-and his brothers before him-to look beyond the Kerala coastline to what the Malay States offered, they took with them to new lands a tradition of dealing with foreign cultures, and making them their own. A critical part of that tradition in Kerala was an emphasis on literacy and education that outstrips most ofIndia:

The roots of Kerala's literacy culture can be traced back at least to the

Hindu rulers of the 19th century. The Queen ofTrivandrum issued a royal

decree in 1817 that said, "The state should defray the entire cost of the

education of its people in order that there might be no backwardness in the

spread of enlightenment." She hoped education would make her people

"better subjects and public servants." The kings of Co chin also built public

schools and promoted elementary education. Christian missionaries gave a

further boost to education by setting up schools for the poor and

94 oppressed, bypassing traditions that had allowed only high-caste Indians

to attend school. (Raman)

It is worth noting, perhaps, that my parents were distantly related and the commitment to education ran strong in both families. My maternal grandfather's brother, Xavier Vaz, was a respected local educator, having started and run St. Xavier'S, an English Middle

School. My mother was sent to a convent boarding school in India to ensure that she got a better quality of education than was easily available at the time in Malaya. It is not surprising, then, that the account Morais provides of his early struggles after arriving in

Malaya focuses on his efforts to learn and complete his schooling in English. The story of his own progress is also the story of many immigrants who recognized that an English education would move them along socially and professionally. He also provides us with a glimpse of how the different communities were running up and competing against each other to get ahead. When his brother John Manuel Morais, a senior teacher at the school in Ipoh, asked the headmaster, Captain B. Preedy to admit the newly arrived adolescent from Kerala to a class for which he was not completely ready, my father notes the headmaster's generosity of spirit. Despite a prior quarrel with his brother, Captain

Preedy, "true to English tradition ... did not think of that incident and take revenge on me" (8). My father also remembers another teacher, Mr. Hall, who demonstrated the

"helpful attitude of an Englishman" in giving him the extra couple of grace marks he needed to qualify for advancement to a higher class (9). In the competitive environment of Anderson School, where he became a student after arriving in Malaya, he remembers

95 the paternalistic British headmaster and British teachers as being sometimes more helpful

than other Asian teachers in furthering his scholastic career.

In fact, my father's memoirs are peppered with expressions of regret that some of

his fellow Asians were not as sporting as the English were. Mindful of his debt to British

mentors, he openly admired the British public school spirit as he understood it, and the

British sense of fair playas he saw it displayed in his educational and career experience.

And yet, while he often expressed admiration for the oratory of Winston Churchill, or the

poetry of Tennyson, once the Malaysian flag was raised on August 31, 1957, he

unhesitatingly gave himself over to the service of the national project, confident that he

had a role to fulfill through his work as a journalist. Writing about fifty years after my

father began documenting the lives of public figures in the newly independent state,

another journalist in neighboring Singapore, whose national history is closely interwoven

with Malaysia's, begins the preface to his book, Singapore: The Air-Conditioned Nation

with this observation:

It's been said that newspapers record the fust drafts of history. If so, then

this book represents an attempt at a second draft of Singapore's very

recent political history, as observed by one newspaper journalist. ...

As a writer more accustomed to perishable newsprint, I cannot help

feeling apologetic at my own presumption in using a medium as

permanent and pricey as a book. (George 9)

The mission of these two journalists, more than a generation apart, was similar. My

father, however, did not feel in the least apologetic or presumptuous about moving his journalistic drafts of history from newsprint to books. If anything, he felt it was a

96 necessary part of helping to build the nation by lending its newly independent state a measure of gravitas comparable to other nations around the world and not least the newly departed colonial power. In his Introduction to the second edition of Leaders of Malaya and Who's Who, which began with a brief Foreword from the Prime Minister, Tengku

Abdul Rahman, Morais observes:

With Federation of Malaya now an independent country it is commanding

the thought of all nations. There is greater need now for a book containing

biographical information about men and women who have served and are

serving Malaya. "Leaders of Malaya and Who's Who," the first of its

kind, was published in 1956. Orders for it have come from various parts of

the world including the United Kingdom, the United States, Canada,

Germany, Australia, New Zealand and India.

Having declared the importance of both the book and the country in the eyes of the world, he then quotes a congratulatory message received from the Prime Minister after the first edition came out:

At a time when so much is happening all around us and when a new

chapter about the history of Malaya is to be written in letters of gold, your

pUblication is most welcome as it is very necessary at this time for

maximum publicity to be given to Malaya and those Malayans who are

playing their parts in their own spheres for the good of the country. (xxiii)

By securing the highest possible level of endorsement for his early efforts at celebrating the nation by publicizing its most notable citizens, my father established himself as one of its most notable citizens too. He repeated this practice with every book, so that by the

97 time he got around to writing his memoirs, what others had said about his earlier publishing endeavors, along with his considerable reputation as a man very engaged in the civic life of the community, confmned his claim to be a ''witness to history."

That witnessing largely took the form of writing the lives of key figures in the first generation of post-independence political leaders. Emulating the Victorians with none of Lytton Strachey's penchant for chipping away at the pedestals on which they had been placed, Morais' approach with every public figure was to sketch the outline of their lives in terms of key milestones, gather accolades from their peers, and cull heavily from their speeches.) Often he would include the best or most important of their speeches in their entirety. With the speed and instincts of a newspaper editor, rather than a painstaking researcher looking to drill down through the intellectual and emotional terrain of his subject, my father gathered photographs, quotations, and speeches together and put them between hard covers the way a newspaper editor might put together the news of the day. His expectations of the general reader were very similar to those of later journalists like Cherian George. He "maintained ajoumalistic style" (George 9), using quotations from a wide variety of authorities to lend added weight to his own commentary which always had an exhortatory quality. In one of his earliest books, A

Man of His Time, the biography of the Lord President of the Courts of Malaysia, he states its purpose as follows:

The story you are going to read is the story of Suffian, a humane judge,

Suffian, a dedicated educationist and Suffian, the man. If it provides

insight into the role of this outstanding Malaysian in contemporary history

it will have served its main purpose. Also, ifthis book will serve to inspire

98 Malaysians, especially the youth, to whom it is dedicated, then this

venture would not have been undertaken in vain. (xiv)

In Tun Tan: Portrait of a Statesman, the Prime Minister again provides a Foreword which attests to both the place of the first Finance Minister, and the place of his biographer, in

Malaysian history:

I heartily welcome this book on Tun Tan Siew Sin by the veteran

Malaysian journalist, J. Victor Morais, who has been a witness to our

struggle for independence since its inception and to our success as a

nation. This book contains not only the biography of a remarkable man but

also the story of the momentous years of Malaya and later of Malaysia. In

a way, the story of Tun Tan is also the story of the M.C.A. [Malaysian

Chinese Party1 and the role played by the Malaysian Chinese in the post­

war period. (iv)

That Morais saw each of the biographies as lessons in nation-building is reflected in the thrust of his questions, and his enshrining of the answers he expects and elicits. As in a newspaper account, the Epilogue to his biography of Tun Tan is headlined with a quote from his subject: "We Must Either Co-Exist or This Country Will Disintegrate." The interview that follows is focused almost entirely on "proposals that might facilitate the quick realization of our goal of a united Malaysia." Morais goes on to report Tan's remarks:

"Racial unity in Malaysia is basically a Sino-Malay problem.... The real

problem is religion.... The integration of the three main races of

Malaysia into a united nation will take a long time to achieve.... It has

99 appeared easy in the past, merely because of the quality ofleadership and the

good sense of the common man in this country. Taking a long view, I am

therefore hopeful that we can make it though I agree that unless we are

careful, there is a danger that there could be polarization along racial lines

among the people of this country." (236)

Morais' comments that "In passing I told Siew Sin that there are several problems facing the various races in the country which both the Govermnent and the leaders of the different political parties have to solve"(238). In a newspaper this would be viewed as editorializing. In this Epilogue, the conversational familiarity of addressing the Minister by his first name rather than by his formal title, Tun Tan, used throughout the book, establishes Morais' position as an equal and as one qualified to comment on what is essential to nation-building.

The biographies that followed TunTan confirm this impression as the reader makes his way past the front cover into the book. Hussein Onn: A Tryst with Destiny does not begin to tell the story of the Malaysia's third Prime Minister until we have heard first from the Lord President of the Federal Court, Tun Mohamed Suffian, whose bewigged presence accompanies a Foreword in which he welcomes "yet another book by

Mr. Victor Morais" because it is "a contribution to the meager literature that exists about our leaders written by a local author," as opposed to "distorted accounts in books by foreigners who make fleeting visits or simply write from libraries in distant countries"

(ix). An Introduction from Tun Tan Siew Sin follows the Foreword. He too welcomes the book "written by my friend Encik 1. Victor Morais" because it is "very timely" and because "it is not only the history of one man, it is really the story of one of the most

100 glorious chapters of Malaysian history" (xi). The Author's Note and Acknowledgements further attest to the prestige of the project-and its author-by listing more notables in

Malaysian society who had contributed insights or comments on the subject. Several, we are reminded, were also the subject of biographies or newspaper articles by Morais. This kind of careful staging and unveiling characterized all of his books, each adding to the stature of the next, and to the biographer's reputation.

The thread of nation-building and the challenge of race relations is present throughout these books. But this challenge is presented as one embraced by middle class leaders--Malay, Chinese, Indian- who share a common cause, and find solidarity with each other. There was no question as to the "Malaysianness" of the subjects or of their biographer. This solidarity was greatly strained by the race riots of May 13 and the policies put in place in its aftermath to manage race relations better and to prevent another outbreak of violence. It was perhaps his recognition of that fraying of unity, as well as his awareness of the suspicion increasingly voiced in the more polarized climate of Dr. Mahathir's administration about where the allegiance of immigrant Malaysians actually lay, that prompted Morais to begin his own memoirs with the unequivocal declaration: "I am a Malaysian of Indian origin, owing undivided loyalty to Malaysia"

(5).

Witness to History: Memoirs of an Editor was self-published. It is important less for its intrinsic merits as an analytical biography or literary work than for its value as an indicator of a "society's self-consciousness about its history -and 'historiography' may be defined as such self-consciousness" (Keren 332). Michael Keren has argued that biographies of political leaders play an important historiographical role, and that some

101 biographers believe that by recounting a particular life story their own lives are affected.

This was true of my father's lifelong commitment to writing about the political and community leaders of his time. He believed the work honored the contributions of the individuals, and gave him, as a biographer and editor, a place in the history of the nation.

His memoirs tell this self-conscious story of a man who often described himself as "self- made."

In addition to recording milestones in the life of an Indian immigrant in a British colony, he also relates how he maintained his livelihood as a newspaper editor under the scrutiny of Japanese Occupation forces during World War Two. By providing a personal account of a very public life, Morais also conflates several histories-the emergence of a new nation, the accommodations and confrontations of the indigenous and the immigrant, and the transition from a colonial to a post-colonial society still tethered in many ways to

Britain and its institutions. His biographies of Malaysia'S leaders and his own memoirs strongly suggest that the new nation's independence depended on how successfully it could sustain the manners as well as the social, educational, and administrative infrastructure created, but apparently no longer controlled, by the departing colonial power.

Even after the British relinquished their hold on the reins of government, they continued to enjoy enormous cultural sway through the middle class elite, who had become earnest anglophiles. Navigating his way through a school system run by British and local schoolmasters was the beginning of my father's sense of himself as a witness to the nation's history. While the majority ofIndians came to British Malaya to work on the rubber plantations,4 the emigration of the Morais family from Kerala to the Malay States

102 was part of a separate flow of middle class Indians. They came looking for positions in the growing British civil service, and in the schools, hospitals, and other institutions that formed the administrative infrastructure of the new urban centers of Malaya. How this rising generation of middle class professionals and administrative workers saw themselves in relation to the mixed communities in which they took up residence, gained an education, and built careers is critical to understanding identity formation in Malaysia, and how it differed depending on ethnicity, personal and communal goals, and the stance taken by the leaders of each community. Morais' career spent writing the lives of the new nation positions him as part of this relatively better off middle class that drew its membership from the different ethnic communities, and built its sense of a national ethos on a shared British education and acculturation.

My father makes special mention in his memoirs of the many future leaders in

Malayan politics who were his classmates, members of his Scout troop, or his cricket team. They included people of all ethnicities. He writes about Datuk Yeop Mahidin, who went on to lead Watania, a secret Malay resistance organization during the Japanese

Occupation. From among his fellow scouts came a Prime Minister, the Chief of the

Armed Forces, the head of the state Malaysian Chinese Association and the Secretary­

General of the Ministry of Welfare Services. His alma mater, Anderson School in Ipoh, is well-known as one that produced a distinguished crop of political leaders, scholars, and businessmen (Witness 9-11). My father wore his links to the school with pride, and throughout his life they continued to be the basis of personal friendships and professional ties. With a simplicity that seems truly antiquated today, he writes that his motto in life was always the same as his school's: "To strive, to seek, to find and not to yield" (10).

103 By shaping his aspirations to the school motto, my father began his professional life armed with the will to pull himself up by his bootstraps to succeed, to "be all that you can be." One might argue that the adopting of the motto was also a personal mimicking of the imperial mission that was not without irony. It is not clear whether my father adopted this motto for his life because he liked Tennyson, or because that last line from Tennyson's poem, "Ulysses," happened to be the motto of his beloved school. I am inclined to believe it was the latter. While Morais often expressed his distaste for British colonial attitudes, his love for the sentiment expressed in the motto reveal an identification with

Victorian values that, in their conservatism, and emphasis on self-improvement, were consistent with his own ancestral traditions.

Family Duty. Personal and National Identity

Morais' attachment to notions of duty were anchored in family relationships that carried over from his native Kerala. He was born in 1910 in Trivandrum, the capital of

Kerala, and died in 1991 in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. From the age of sixteen he lived, studied, and worked in Malaysia, with periodic visits to relatives in Kerala. After a tough childhood in which he depended on the kindness of relatives after the death of his mother while he was still a toddler, he directed his hopes for a more comfortable life towards

British Malaya. Viewed from India, it was very much the land of opportunity, much as the United States was to Europeans fleeing famine, poverty, or persecution. He dreamed offollowing in the footsteps of his eldest brother, a Normal Trained teacher, one of two from amongst his immediate relatives and friends in Kerala who had made a career in teaching in what was then the Federated Malay States. We get some sense of the esteem

104 in which teachers in general, and John Manuel Morais in particular, were held in my father's account of how, even after an absence of fifteen years, his brother "had no difficulty in finding a bride" when he returned to India in 1925 with the express purpose of getting married (7). Morais' sense of the importance of doing one's duty informs his account of how his brother got married. He speaks approvingly of the fact that Manuel

Morais went ahead with plans to marry the woman he had chosen, even though the bride suffered a nervous breakdown on the eve of the wedding. Too ill to attend the reception, or go on a honeymoon with her new husband, she remained in India, forcing him to return to Malaya alone. But his stoicism and devotion were rewarded when she joined him after her recovery, eighteen months later. Told often in my childhood, this story helps illustrate why, despite their modest financial circumstances, the Morais family enjoyed considerable standing, expressed in the idiom of Malayalam as being "of a large house,',5 meaning that they had a keen sense of responsibility towards the community and took care of many.

In addition to supporting financially the family left behind in India, Manuel

Morais brought one brother after another over to Malaya to improve their education and give them a chance at building a better life. But he lost two brothers in short order in their twenties--one to typhoid, the other to tuberculosis.6 So, by the time my father, the youngest brother, started clamoring to come to Malaysia, he had to deal with Manuel's reluctance to put another sibling at risk. But Morais' determination eventually wore his brother down, and at the age of sixteen, he arrived in Malaya in early 1927 on the

S.S.Rajula, a ship that regularly carried hundreds ofIndians over, seeking a new beginning. 7

105 My father's account of his life, and the great importance he placed on the generosity of his brother is emblematic of the immigrant experience. Many new immigrants looked back to the homeland, supported the family members left behind, and often gradually brought them over. Together, the family then struggled toward a better life through their labors in the new land. How one did one's duty-by marrying right, by making room in one's household for extended family, by sending money and small luxuries back to family in India-helped determine social standing in the country of adoption. It is clear from Witness to History that Manuel Morais had earned a special place in the Indian expatriate community and within middle class circles in general, not just because he was a fine teacher, but because he displayed a keen sense of duty to family. My father often publicly acknowledged his admiration for and debt to his brother.

A very large framed photograph of Manuel Morais also occupied a place of honor in our living room throughout my uncle's life. And my father's memoirs open with a full page picture of his brother facing the first page of the story, saying through that gesture what he often said in person: that without his brother, his success in Malaya would not have been possible.

My father's life sparmed much of the twentieth century. Timing alone would therefore have made him a participant in the events leading up to and following Malaya's independence. But he saw himself as someone with far more agency-a player, acting rather than merely acted upon. If life narration is "a performative act," as Smith and

Watson have suggested it is (47), Witness to History: Memoirs of an Editor begins performing as soon as you pick it up. At 246 pages, it has the heft of a work to be taken seriously. At first glance, it clearly befits a man whose public service, community

106 ,,\, J VICtor :'o\otal~ ,nler"e.. ing Tunku Abdul Rahman PUlra AI IVj. the- f"" Pfl~ "'mlll~' 0( Male.,. •••fler he I\od .teppec;l down as P.M. The p'ofol~ of Ihf. Tunku .. nut'1'\ b~ Mr Morab a~.red In Thto ASia .Io\agilline

Tvn 5" James Thomson, finot l.cM"d President of Federal Court: Moo. It " Victor ,,",oralS who has ..... 'iuen Ihls book co... ering Importent periods en the "'~OI'y of "'\eloyil He Mot prcwldHi us w,th the resulu of his obs4:l"o'alJQns 0, the' Kt'rtf.'S through ... hlCh he passe-d None .... ho fHI~ kno..... n ""OHIt' can ha\IC an) doubt 01 the value! of ... het he ha, <10M" both 101' his thinking contemporaries and for the h,$totian of 1M fulure, But apert hom Its \-.Iue lor Iht- futu~ h,storlafll Ihis book .s of profound interest 10 I~ of us ... ho helle lilled through the "'ear, ,I coyefS

Tun /'I\okamcd Suman. Lord Pruidenl of Fedefl~1 Court: I \Io~ome Ini, Inlelt'shng book by my frjend. ViC'\Of MOf.i, He I,rsl shfank hom .... "hng himself tnOl,lgn tw has .... nller'! enthusilHtl<:"lIy ImOI.Igh about otlvrs. I em tMrefor~ "'el) p1ctlW

Or _ Stephen Goh. Ph_D . (Cambridgt). 8 Uti (OdOl'd). Ll.M A.~ en edm,rer of your hie \/oork ! v.-ou!d urge )'OU 10 pub!bh your eulOb'OQ'ephlr "nee iI $hould If"eplfe mo$1 0"\,,1,,),,'111'15 Hj)Klell)' ItIP younger gt'llerel,Ofl .... 110 .... ,11 'cad ,I I .... "n, to C'Of'lglalulate )'OU fOf Iil'ldiF\c,) lhe lUTle 10 COI'f"\P!toIC\oO\Jf.1CWy

Fig. 3. Witness to History cover photo Fig. 4. Back cover of Witness to History of John Victor Morais shows Morais interviewing Malaysia' s first Prime Minister, Tunku Abdul Rahman

107 leadership, and professional achievements were widely known. Looking out from the front cover is not a rumpled, working journalist, but a man suited for success, whose serious appraising gaze is directed upwards and faraway, his sleek widow's peak and strong features adding to the impression of confidence. It is the gaze of monuments, and monuments clearly celebrate the heroic (see fig. 3). The back of the book jacket shows its subject at work. Bearing out the promise in the book's title, Victor Morais is seated next to and listening to Tunku Abdul Rahman, someone indisputably recognized across communal lines as pivotal to the nation's history (see fig. 4). The affable, well-loved prince and first Prime Minister of Malaysia was also the later architect of the peaceful enlargement of territory in 1963 to include the tiny island state of Singapore and Sabah and Sawarak on the western coast of neighboring Borneo. Malaysians of all races know

Tunku Abdul Rahman as "Bapa Malaysia" or the Father of Malaysia.8 Victor Morais is taking notes: this is history straight out of the mouths of those who loomed large in it, and in whose company my father walked, a witness to his adoptive nation's history. Readers, whether or not they get beyond the covers of the book, cannot miss this visual staging.

This is life writing as performance.

Performance, as Smith and Watson have pointed out, is the attempt to frame a life rather than simply deliver information. In response to reader expectations that autobiographical narrators tell "unified stories of their lives" or create and discover

"coherent selves," Smith and Watson suggest that

the unified story and the coherent self are myths of identity. For there is no

coherent "self' that predates stories about identity, about "who" one is.

Nor is there a unified, stable immutable self that remembers everything

108 that has happened in the past. We are always fragmented in time, taking a

particular or provisional perspective on the moving target of our pasts,

addressing multiple and disparate audiences. Perhaps then it is more

helpful to approach autobiographical telling as a performative act. (47)

My father stages himself in the company of the nation's early leaders much in the way

"the idea of American presidents as well as his contact with actual former presidents, drives [Edward William] Bok's narrative of self-formation as an ambitious, assimilated

American" (Smith and Watson 65). The biographies Morais wrote show how identity was being framed in newly independent Malaya, and the cultural, psychological, historical and political contexts that drive their performance of ethnic and national identity. My father's "performance" therefore not only tells us who he thought he was, but how he and other immigrants saw themselves, and how they constructed their identities in relation to each other in a new nation. His sense of himself as "relational, routed through others" closely parallels how the nation, as represented by the middle class elite, saw itself in the first flush of independence (Smith and Watson 64).

As the British colony evolved, through the experiences of World War I and II and the Japanese Occupation, and into independent Malaya, immigrant families came to see the Malay States less as a place of temporary exile, and more as their new home of choice. One consequence of this changing outlook was a near complete rupture with ancestral homelands over two or three generations amongst the Chinese and the Indians.

The Communist regime made going back to China much less of an option for the families who had fled to Southeast Asia. But for the Indians, who had come to Malaya, the homeland remained a place they still thought of possibly retiring to. After working for

109 much of their adult lives in Malaya, earning far more than they could have in India, whether in the professions, the civil service, or the trades, retiring to India would give them a significantly higher standard of living than they had enjoyed before emigrating.

Some nostalgia for a homeland, relatives, and a seemingly more homogeneous community especially when viewed from the Malay Peninsula, with its increasingly plural society and inevitable erosion of tradition, made India often appear more attractive than perhaps it was. But over time, fewer and fewer professional Indians spoke of returning, and even when they did, they left their children and grandchildren firmly established in Malaya as their home. And some retirees even reconsidered their decision, and returned to Malaya.9

Morais' account of his life helps us trace this refocusing of identity amongst middle class professional Indians in their new country of adoption. As the early biographer of those who played key roles in constructing the new nation, Morais supplies examples of this shift in orientation and allegiance through his journalistic rendering of the lives of prominent people, including himself. His account of his own life in the emerging nation at several points details how he turned back to the country he left behind: to find a wife, to seek better medical attention than he could get in Malaya, and to secure employment after a year spent in India convalescing following his surgery. But he also describes how he stopped thinking of India as home, and increasingly saw himself as a Malaysian.

110 Seeing Oneself and Being Seen

My father begins his memoirs with an "Author's Note" which announces that

"Writing has been my calling for the past forty years"(xiv). He approached public life with the same sense of a "calling," infused with a high moral purpose. Like so many other immigrants, he came to British Malaya in search of a better life, and he quickly saw self-improvement as going hand-in-hand with the betterment of the community as a whole. By combining a very old-fashioned civic-mindedness with strong personal ambition and drive, he was very much as he described himself: a self-made man. Seeing himself as a writer, he also assumed the responsibility of chronicling the birth and evolution of a nation through his accounts of the leaders who steered its course. Like other autobiographical narrators, who are "at the center of the historical pictures they assemble and are interested in the meaning of larger forces or conditions," my father provides useful insights into how identity was being framed in Malaya as it transitioned from British rule to independence. Seeing himself as a "witness to history" he anchored his snippets of reporting in the "temporal, geographical and cultural milieux" of his time

(Smith and Watson 11, 9).

A resourceful, ambitious immigrant, his approach to becoming a reporter also demonstrated how my father's career mirrored the times. Recognizing Victor's aptitude and interest, his older brother steered him towards journalism and away from teaching.

Manuel recommended that Victor "take up shorthand and prepare for newspaper work.

Try to become a reporter" (13). While waiting for his high school results, therefore,

Victor took a correspondence course in Journalism and Short Story Writing from the

III Regent Institute of London. He wrote letters to the press on controversial issues and took great pleasure in seeing them published. And indeed through his newspaper work and later publications, my father became an ardent, if imperfect, witness to Malaysian history.

Through his biographies and memoirs we encounter not just the chronology of events or the personalities who loomed large, but also the social processes and individual initiatives which determined identity.

In the first instance, identity was shaped by how both indigenous and immigrant communities were placed on the chessboard of empire. Dictated by the needs of a colonial economy, the British created an education system and bureaucratic infrastructure that determined the relations of power within the state and the opportunities accessible to people depending on class, location, ethnicity or gender. Whether they advanced within this British-designed economic system depended on colonial priorities, and often what class or racial assumptions informed the thinking of colonial administrators. If sufficiently well-born and educated, the Malays, for example, were seen as potential administrators or civil servants. The great majority, however, were subsistence farmers in villages. Farish A. Noor describes out how the British created a two-tier system of education for the Malays:

While the Malay College of Kuala Kangsar (established 1905) was formed

with the intention of creating a generation of English-educated Malay

students of royal, aristocratic or noble background to man the middle and

lower echelons of the Malayan Civil Service (MCS), the SITC [Sultan

Idris Training College] had its own unique role to play within the logic of

the Colonial-capitalist state. The SITC, which was created as a result of

112 the ethnocentric policy proposals of the Assistant Director of Colonial

Education, R.O. Winstedt, was primarily directed towards the goal of

reproducing the Western stereotypes of the pleasant, nimble Malay

agriculturalist or the rustic Malay schoolteacher who was meant to return

to the villages to teach skills that were more in keeping with their

'traditional rural' lifestyle. (The Other Malaysia 84)

Largely unconnected to this rural hinterland, however, was the teeming new life in the urban centers, tin mines and plantations to which Chinese and Indian immigrants flocked, encouraged by the British, who felt they were better suited to the demands of industry and the commercial goals of the empire. Morais wrote biographies of the middle class leaders amongst the Malays, Chinese, and Indians who kept the wheels of government turning in the administrative and business centers, and the schools and hospitals in and around the Federal capital of Kuala Lumpur. He is almost completely silent about the people in the small towns and rural hinterland.

Creating a Personal History through Publishing

My father's reputation as the country's leading biographer was based on widespread respect for his various publishing initiatives which began early in his career.

His first act of independent publishing was a small book called Badminton in Malaya, written under the pen name "Racquet." The fact that he was new to both the country and the sport did not deter him. Understanding that British patronage would be key to the book's success, he secured an endorsement and foreword from the President of the

Badminton Association, John 1. Woods. A senior partner in a British law firm in Ipoh

113 who had done a great deal to promote badminton, Wood had not thought to bear witness to the game in the way my father now had. The nearly $1000 in profit made from this

1934 effort was only one part of this success. My father stressed that how it positioned him in the eyes of others was equally important: "This book proved my passport to success as a journalist and as an editor and publisher. Most of the seniors in the office were surprised. A junior reporter had the guts to publish a book! I was then only 23 years old" (15).

The importance of this book in positioning him for professional advancement is supported by his account of his later interview with the General Manager of the Malaya

Tribune, E.M.Glover who was visiting Ipoh to appoint a local representative for the

Singapore-based paper. One of the fust things Glover said was "So, you are Morais. You wrote that book, Badminton in MalayaT(16). This conversation led to my father's appointment. That he was just twenty seven, yet deemed qualified to succeed the departing Scotsman, W. B. Patterson, as the paper's editor, contributed to his growing influence in the community.

My father's relations with the Britishers whose patronage advanced his career became over time increasingly ambivalent. The Japanese success in sinking the two

British warships, the Prince o/Wales and the Repulse, assigned to defend Singapore and

Malaya from Japanese attack did much to change local attitudes. The demeaning treatment British prisoners were accorded under the Japanese also undermined their position of assumed superiority and pomp which had often characterized their dealings with both the indigenous and immigrant communities in Malaya. When the British returned to Malaya after the Japanese had surrendered, they encountered a changed

114 population that had learned a few new lessons about old masters. Take, for example, this exchange between my father and E. M. Glover, the man who enabled his success as a newspaper editor. Glover had fled to India when the Japanese invaded Malaya and he returned to resume work as the paper's General Manager:

The Japanese Occupation, despite tyranny and terror, taught us many a

valuable lesson. One of the most important lessons I learned was to

maintain our respect as free people.

We also learned that Asians were second to none not only during war

but also during peace time. The change of attitude on my part was

observed by Glover when I answered his numerous questions during his

first visit to Ipoh after the war. He soon found out that I had increased the

salaries of all the staff, including my own. He was very surprised by this

and he once remarked, "Do you know Morais, Harper in my office, who

is senior to you, does not earn as much as you do?" I said, "That's his

misfortune. "

Glover replied, "You certainly have changed, Morais." To this my reply

was, "Mr Glover, the world has changed and we must change with the

changing times."

Glover leaned back in his chair and said, "Yes, the world has changed

and you really changed." (55)

This conversation signaled a fundamental shift in my father's relationship with the man to whom he continued to feel indebted. Though he was grateful for Glover's "act of great

ll5 faith in a young man," he no longer felt the kind of deference that existed before the

British were humiliated by the Japanese (Witness 57).

In combining deference, the shrewd use of authority, and pride in his ethnicity, my father was employing the survival strategy of many other members of the emerging

Malayan middle class. His desire to record the lives of Malayans, for example, was skewed heavily towards documenting the achievements of political or community leaders. "What is the history of a nation but the biographies of its famous people?" he asks (151). Though he does not credit Thomas Carlyle with the observation, his frequent invocation of prominent Victorian thinkers and writers grew out of an education that emphasized memorizing and using quotations to show one's command oflanguage and oratorical skills, much in the way that a facility with sound bites often distinguishes politicians and media personalities today. 10 The cumulative effect of his many biographies was to heighten his reputation as the country's premier biographer. And it did not really matter whether people read them. It was enough that he wrote and published because these actions signaled a command of one the most potent tools of the colonial officials. Though few in an emerging middleclass pursuing the acquisition ofthe comforts of modem living aspired to imitate him, his work was recognized as loaded with real value for social and professional advancement. Those, like my parents, who adopted

English as a fIrst language at home made possible a fluency for their children that fostered academic and career success. And middle class Indians were more likely than most to make this choice. Perhaps prompted by the experience of British India, Indians held a widely acknowledged linguistic edge over the Chinese and the Malays, most of whom still used a Chinese language or Malay at home, and relied on English acquired in

116 school to handle their academic and career challenges. These people made up the emerging middle class: educated, worldly, tuned to their ancestral traditions and homeland and to the excitement ofliving more prosperous lives in the new, emerging nation. This combination of tradition and future prospects drew them to those humanistic ideals embedded in the Victorian values of the colonial education the middle class received.

Prescription for Self-Improvement

Some of those Victorian values entwined with Indian traditions of duty and discipline inform my father's prescriptions for would-be reporters:

Qualities necessary for success are personality, cleanliness in dress,

courtesy, patience and politeness. A reporter should also be prepared to

suffer snubs occasionally.

Every reporter should acquire a reading habit-not sex novels and

detective stories. Good English books such as those by Dickens and

Arnold Bennett are guides for descriptive reporting.

Study of contemporary newspapers like the Times, the Observer, the

Manchester Guardian, the Daily Express and the leading Malaysian dailies

will help a journalist learn quickly to develop a nose for news.

A reporter should be a critical but accurate recorder of current history

without taking sides. He should note down important points or words used

in articles in a scrap book which can be used profitably later on. (Witness

234)

117 While directed at aspiring reporters, these pointers reflect the tone he took and the discipline he demanded from the many he tried to set on a path to success, no matter what career they chose.

In Imagined Communities, Benedict Anderson speaks of "official nationalism" as

"an anticipatory strategy adopted by dominant groups which are threatened with marginalization or exclusion from an emerging nationally-imagined community" (101).

He also described the key early spokesmen for colonial nationalism as "lonely, bilingual intelligentsias unattached to sturdy local bourgeoisies" (140). But these statements do not really describe to how nationalism evolved (and is still evolving) in what was once

British Malaya and Singapore, and how someone like my father observed and participated in it.

My father's strategies for professional advancement were not unlike those adopted by other middle class professionals who pursued an English education-as did the Malay aristocracy and upper classes. Yet the resistance of the native Malay intelligentsia to the Malayan Union, an early effort by the British to frame the emerging independent nation and the negotiations with leaders of the immigrant Chinese and Indian communities in the period leading up to independence, reflected the absence of a nationally-imagined community united by a common vernacular.ll Contrary to

Anderson's remarks about nationalism in Southeast Asia, the early nationalism of Malaya did reflect the existence of separate, emerging middle class communities amongst the

Malays, Chinese and Indians. They were welded-to use Anderson's word-far more strongly to the idea of a new nation connected to Britain through the education provided by the colonial administration, and the wealth and business opportunities made possible

118 by the colonial economy, than to other immigrant groups, or even to the native Malays.

As Edward Said has pointed out, there was often a strong, highly valued "legacy of connections" to the Mother Country (Culture and Imperialism 341). The new intelligentsia in Malaysia and Singapore were Cambridge-educated lawyers and doctors,

Brinsford-trained teachers, Inns-of-Court barristers and other professionals--accountants, journalists, lawyers, trade unionists--whose families were either upper crust Malays, tin miners turned towkays (business magnates), or hardworking small business entrepreneurs, professionals, administrators, and civil servants. They dedicated themselves and what wealth they could accumulate to giving their children the best education in English in Malaya, and later, if personal means or scholarships permitted, in

Britain itself. While the situation of working class Indians on the plantations was dire, leaders were emerging from the cadre of civil servants and professionals that formed the other group ofIndian immigrants in Malaya and in Singapore. Despite their relatively small numbers, the early roster of political leaders in Malaya included several Indians: the fiery Seenivasagam brothers were lawyers and P.P.Narayanan was a lifelong trade unionist, while in Singapore, labor leader Devan Nair, went on to become President of the island state, and Opposition leader J.B.Jeyaratnam, has waged a lonely and costly battle against the one-party dominance of Lee Kuan Yew's People's Action Party.

Witness to History and my father's other biographies therefore constitute something akin to Pope's "gallery of worthies," attesting to the Malaysian nation's success in its transition from colony to independent nation.

119 Staging the Story The reader of Witness to History is primed from the outset to set great store by this account of the fashioning of life in colonial and postcolonial Malaya. The legal, even religious resonance of the title is further enhanced by the way the narrative is framed: by the introductory remarks of two Lord Presidents of the Supreme Court, and a review by an academic with impeccable credentials.12 This staging of the narrative invests it with as much symbolic value as possible in ways that Greg Dening might recognize. In Mr

Bligh's Bad Language. Dening drew on some of the conventions of theatre to demonstrate the ambivalences of language and space, the incommensurability of class, and the consequences of blurring the public and private. Without Dening's scholarship, but with the instincts of someone who learned very early on the importance of being

"self-reliant" (9) and not letting himself be "intimidated by the workings of an unkind fate" (5), Morais repeatedly stages his life experiences, and his place in Malaysian history. He understands the impact of symbolism on life narratives, and the subtle ways that power, language, and ceremony shape people's attempts to bridge the divide between classes, even if with mixed success.

My father's biographies are gossipy, fragmented accounts of the times, peopled with a motley cast: the remnants of a colonial administration, Sultans and social workers, teachers and unionists, freedom fighters from India and tin miners from China. On the basis of the spotlight he threw on the achievements of the leaders of his time through his biographies, he felt justified in saying: "I have contributed my share to the writing of the history of Malaysia" (151).

120 As a family, we realized that he approached the chronicling of Malaysian history, armed more with energy than with scholarship. But his journalistic accounts resonated with local audiences, and filled a void in local commentary. He was a witness to local history because he lived it and because he wrote it down. When Britain declared war on

Germany, he brought out a midnight edition of the Malaya Tribune (Witness 57). When the Malaya Tribune closed, he mustered enough support to publish a new paper, the Daily

News. the next day. During the Japanese Occupation, he edited the Yamato News and the

Perak Shimbun, the human head on a spike outside his office, a grisly reminder from

Japanese Intelligence Officers that all the news that's fit to print meant different things to the Occupation forces. My father survived the Occupation and a number of interrogations by Japanese military officials and managed to keep publishing a newspaper while under their scrutiny without being seen as a collaborator by the Malayan People's

Anti-Japanese Army (M.P.A.J.A.), or by the British when they returned.

His accounts of his skirmishes with the Communists who had fought the

Japanese, or his encounters with British officials after the war who viewed with hostility some of the speeches he was asked to make during the Occupation, speak to the intrepid survival strategies of an immigrant in a new land. He also recalls being enthralled by the

Indian struggle for independence and the willingness of Indians in Malaya to volunteer or contribute what little they had to the struggle. He tells us that the visit ofIndian freedom fighter "Subhas Bose proved a unifying force for Indians in Southeast Asia. A new enthusiasm, as never seen before, swept the Indian community throughout Malaya." He also speaks of having "helped launch several publicity campaigns to raise funds for the

Indian National Army, popularly known as I.N.A."(52). Speaking of a close friend, I.A.

121 Thivy who was president of the Malayan Indian Congress and later India's Ambassador to Italy and the Vatican, he reports: "Once Thivy shocked me when he said he would go to the battlefield if asked by Subhas Bose. When I reminded him about his wife and children who were then in Ipoh, he replied: "Freedom of India is more sacred to me than my family .... God will look after them ..." (53).

Perhaps not always intending to, he captures in these vignettes, the overlap of resistance to colonialism and attachment to the homeland, and the desire to acknowledge solidarity with the Indian struggle while establishing ties to the country of adoption. As long as the British--or later the Japanese--were a common external threat, the dual loyalties could co-exist. But as the new nation of Malaya, and later Malaysia, got cobbled together, some of the other races understandably felt that Indians sometimes seemed more loyal to India than to the new nation where they were finding prosperity. Soon, these loyalties began to haunt the making of new rules and new ways of constituting oneself in relation to one's neighbors. They also affected the negotiations on a national scale to merge diverse economic interests. 13

Transgressions and Negotiations

In "Breaking Rules: The Consequences of Self-Narration" Paul John Eakin identifies three primary transgressions for which readers call self-narrators to account.

They are "( 1) misrepresentation of biographical and historical truth; (2) infringement of the right to privacy; and (3) failure to display normative models of personhood"

(Biography 113). To some degree Witness is guilty on the first two counts. A vigilant reader might discover factual errors or deliberate misrepresentations, such as the

122 announcement early on that "I was born on 18 December, 1916" (5). My father was born in 1910, but his desire to bring a kind of Dickensian specificity to his tale was apparently outweighed by his desire to appear younger than he was at the time of writing. With regard to the second transgression, my father wrote his memoirs in the face of unanimous family opposition.14 Part of the contract between the reader of a text and its author leads to the ethical issue embedded in a writer's determination to write a life narrative that necessarily represents the lives of others even when they object to having aspects of their lives documented. The family opposition to the enterprise represented by Witness to

History was prompted by a simple desire for privacy and some concern that the book might be seen as self-aggrandizement.

And yet, Victor Morais is still referred to and remembered by people who have likely never read his memoirs, suggesting that, in the case of the Malaysian public, an aspect of the reading contract is at work that is not addressed explicitly in any theory about modes of reading. IS I refer here to the impact of publication on a public that reveres someone who publishes. Increasingly aware through the mass media of publishing events, this public may know of authors without ever having read their work. A sense of the life narrative therefore emanates from the larger-than-life presence that having been published lends to the writer. In addition, the fact that Morais had also written the life narratives of several Great Men who had steered the nation through independence and labor struggles meant that the "contractual effect" on the reader played itself out across a publishing landscape rich with symbolism, originating in the power and prestige of those whose lives he chronicled, and in whose aura he shared to some modest degree. This effect has more than survived any shortcomings in the work that my father produced, and

123 has established him among Malaysians as a source of "biographical and historical truth" that remains popularly affirmed and not seriously contested.

Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson have observed that all life narratives "engage the past in order to reflect on identity in the present" (3). My father was conspicuous in the community by virtue of his position as a newspaper editor; as someone who sought and was sought to fill leadership positions in civic and community organizations; as someone whose command of the English language was generally superior to many of his peers; and as someone who was an admired public speaker.

His skill as a public speaker was cultivated through deliberate imitation of the writing and oratorical style of those he admired. Having essentially devised his own professional education, he invariably chose as his models, the larger-than-life examples of men like Gandhi, Nehru, or Winston Churchill. His prose often hewed to the heroic and his delivery always drew considerable admiration. In an emerging plural society, where the language spoken at home was still mainly Malay, Cantonese or Hokkien,

Tamil or Malayalam, the use of English at work and on public occasions was something the educated middle class handled with functional ease. But my father wanted more. He was determined to use English with a flourish, and his position as a newspaper editor created expectations that he was only too happy to rise to, making him a much sought after public speaker, and winning him over time the presidency of such symbols of middle class prestige and community leadership as the Rotary Club, the Press Club, the

Kinta, and later the Selangor Indian Association, the Perak Catholic Association, and other institutions of public service.

124 At a time when very little was being written or published by Malaysians about

Malaysia, my father's journalistic biographies of civic and political leaders provided a rare glimpse of the transition from colony to independent nation. His memoirs and biographies provide some insight into the ways middle class community leaders seized the opportunities for self-advancement made possible through their access to an English education and their skills at navigating the class and race-based education and employment practices institutionalized by a colonial administration. My father's life­ both the way he lived it and the way he recorded it-reveals how an immigrant shapes his identity within a specific community in ways that affirm ethnic roots and yet fulfill the desire to build a legitimate claim to be called Malaysian. Nearly twelve years after the success of his first book, Badminton in Malaya, my father embarked on Hidup Melayu, which tried to tell the story of Malay nationalism. The fact that he was neither Malay nor a historian did not deter him and neither did the fact that he, along with the rest of the growing Indian and Chinese communities and the plural society created by British economic interests, were very much a part of the challenge to Malay nationalism. My father identified with Malay nationalism as someone whose own sense of Indian patriotism had first been stirred by the bloody struggle of Indian nationalists against the

British, but who increasingly defined himself as a Malaysian, "owing undivided loyalty to Malaysia" (5). My father's discourse reflects what Vincent Perez, alluding to Richard

Rodriguez's book, Hunger of Memory. describes as "a middle-class assimilationist ethic"

(9). On the one hand, Morais does to some degree what Genaro Padilla describes in My

History. Not Yours: he measures his life "within a communitarian configuration and against the disruption of identity as identity is situated within an imagined cultural

125 community ofthe past" (232). But on the other, his account of his professional and social advancement shows a canny appreciation of the doors that a colonial administration opened for him and others, and a conviction that fair play and opportunity were sometimes more likely to be found with the colonial power that was in place than with other Asians who were o/the place. 16 And finally, Morais frequently alludes to people he knew as fellow Catholics or fellow Andersonians, religion and school ties cutting across racial lines to establish the common ground of this new middle class, whatever their etlmicity.

While often betraying a journalist's haste to go to press rather than the measured pace of a scholar or researcher, my father's biographies nevertheless stand as a chronicle of the times. They speak directly and indirectly to how identity was being fashioned in the immigrant encounters with indigenous people occurring within a collapsing colonial administration that was simultaneously, if unintentionally, providing the means by which

Malayans would secure their independence. Through this process, Malaysians would discover, not without resentment, their vulnerability to and inescapable dependence on each other.

126 1 My father started the first Cos Club, an organization for social and cultural activities, in

1933. A photograph of the founding group shows three Indians (my father, a medical doctor, and a man who later became the Senior Assistant Commissioner of Police), three

Chinese (two teachers and a medical practitioner) and one Malay (a senior Cooperative

Officer). Already the emerging plural society in a key urban center, Ipoh, was reflecting the growing dominance of immigrant races and the minority representation of the native

Malays. A later photograph shows my father with the Directors ofthe Ipoh Rotary

Club-he was President in 1949. He is flanked by a British Vice-President and a British

Honorary Secretary. The rest of the Board is made up of two Chinese, two Britishers, and one other Indian. There are no Malays in this photograph. Again, this photograph reflects how the different races were coming together-and not coming together-in middle class society under British rule.

2 After Francis Xavier established the college of St Paul for the training of Asian missionaries in Goa in 1542, for the next hundred years Goa was the channel through which missionaries had to pass to get to the Far East. Francis Xavier went on to preach and serve the poor on the Malabar coast of Kerala and later made his way to Melaka where he was first buried before his body was moved back to Goa. See Panikkar 280-

283.

3 Stratchey would have sneered at my father's attempts to "write a good life," and he did indisputably conform to the methods by which "eminent Victorians" were over­ celebrated. But their research methods were actually not too different. Like Strachey,

127 Morais tended to rely on only one or two sources and newspaper accounts. Unlike

Strachey, he supplemented these materials with personal interviews with his subject, and large selections from their speeches, something Strachey would have abhorred. Unlike

Strachey, who has been called a "gentleman burglar" for the way he routinely reworked to more felicitous effect, texts he did not acknowledge as source material, my father belonged in the company of honest "journeymen ofletters." He was more interested in recording good deeds for posterity than in drawing delicate psychological portraits. See

Sutherland for a commentary on both Stratchey's professed scorn for such "journeymen of letters" and his unembarrassed plagiarism.

4 See K. S. Jomo, A Question of Class: Capital. the State and Uneven Development in

Malaya for an account of flows of Indian labor into Malaya. He estimates that about four million Indians emigrated to Malaya between 1860 and 1957. Thanks to the repatriation of retired and aged labor to India, and the high fatality rate among plantation laborers, when Malaya achieved its independence in 1957, the Indian population numbered less than 900,000, of whom about sixty percent were locally born (192). Fauconnier's fictionalized memoir shed some light on Indian labor on the plantations. He described

Indian rubber-tappers, gardeners, hospital attendants, night soil carriers, book-keepers and others and briefly touched on their relationship to the Malays and Chinese as well as to colonial officials. Lescale tells us that he 'had to learn the names of a hundred and fifty

Tamil coolies, and of their headmen, the Kanganies; the character, capacity, and caste of every one of them, and then disentangle the ramifications of their relationships" (30). It is important to note the power the Tamil foreman or kangany exerted over the laborers

128 ------

through a system of debt bondage as well as the tensions that slowly built up as inunigrants brushed against other immigrants and the indigenous Malays under the umbrella of the colonial administration. British colonial policy fostered both the increasing plurality of Malayan society and the increasing separation of the conununities by ethnicity. Fauconnier notes, for example, that the Malays "lived on the river banks" and "on the edge of the estate. Malays and Tamils met only on the road, did not speak, and seemed hardly to see each other" (48).

5 My mother, Gladys Vaz Morais recollects that when she was introduced as a prospective bride for Victor Morais, "there was not a single person amongst all our relatives who objected." This unanimity on the suitability of the match arose from the high esteem that the families of both the prospective bride and groom enjoyed in the community. This respect was based not on the families' financial assets-which were very modest-but on how members of both families contributed to the well-being of their relatives and associates. Telephone conversation Aug 31,2007.

6 See Witness for a brief account of how the two brothers, Thomas and Franklin, succumbed to illness after being brought to Malaya to further their studies (6).

7 See http://oceanlinermuseum.co.uklRajula.htmlfor a brief overview of the importance of the SS Rajula in the flow of both inunigrants and British soldiers and colonial officials between India and the Malay States from 1926 until 1974, when the ship was finally retired.

129 8 Tunku Abdul Rahman was also instrumental in encouraging Singapore to secede in

1965, in the face of Lee Kuan Yew's increasing assertion of Chinese rights and expectations.

9 My maternal grandparents chose to retire to their fumily home in Kerala after decades of working in Malaysia, and despite the fact that all their children, with one exception, had married and settled down in Malaysia. They returned to a life of modest comfort and position, surrounded by family retainers whom they took care of, providing small shares of the family land for those who had been in service with them, to build their homes. A handful of other family friends of my parent's generation also chose to retire to India.

Some built homes in newly trendy Bangalore and places other than their place of birth or hometown, where they expected a more comfortable life than they could enjoy in

Malaysia. Their experience of returning was not an unalloyed success, resulting in at least some abandoning the experiment and returning to Malaysia several years later, disillusioned that life was not as they had remembered it.

10 My father often told his children to collect memorable quotations and new words in a personal notebook as part of a discipline to improve our command of English.

II See Andaya and Andaya's A History of Malaya (264-269) for a clear discussion of the shifts in British attitudes to the Malays, Chinese, and Indians after the Second World War and the tensions that simmered as the British tried to reward what they saw as Chinese and Indian loyalty through resistance to the Japanese Occupation. Britain's formerly pro­

Malay approach was shaken by the sultans' refusal to evacuate and alleged Malay

130 cooperation with Japanese organizations. For an independent journalistic view of the cooperation showcased by community leaders to demonstrate racial harmony and continuing goodwill towards the British in order to secure independence, see M.G.G.

Pillai's commentary. He also describes the deterioration of race relations and the spirit of mutual accommodation once independence was achieved and political power gradually became a tool for personal enrichment and cronyism rather than nation building for all.

12 Harvard and Cambridge-educated academic, Dr. Stephen Goh provided the very favorable pre-publication review (Witness xvi-xvii)

13 Contemporary events suggest that the idea of nation in Malaysia remains haunted by the early history of immigration. These events will be discussed in greater detail in the

Epilogue.

14 Eakin discusses the ethical dimensions of such violations at length in How Our Lives

Become Stories in a chapter entitled "Privacy, Inviolate Personality and the Ethics of Life

Writing" 142-186. The title alone points to critical ethical dimensions of the "contractual effect" on readers of life narratives.

15 Although Morais passed away in 1991, in a social situation in November 2006, I was asked by someone too young to have known him, and who had never read his memoirs, and who is Malay and unconnected through family ties, whether I was Victor Morais' daughter. When I asked how she knew of my father, her response was "Who does not know Victor Morais?"

131 16 See 9, 16, and 57 for occasions when he contrasts the behavior of Asians unfavorably with the actions ofthe British officials.

132 ------

CHAPTER 3. GOING NATIVE

Salleh ben Joned: As I Please; Nothing is Sacred; Sajak-Sajak Saleh: Poems Sacred and Profane

Henri Fauconnier's Soul of Malaya gave us a colonial view of identity which recognized the Malays as the race that defined a place whose population was already changing due to the large-scale immigration and settlement of Chinese and Indians. The biographies and memoirs written by John Victor Morais suggested how a class of aristocratic or well-born Malays and middle class professional Chinese and Indians found common ground in their English education in mission schools. His stories of their contributions to the new nation, and the genteel accommodations their communities made to each other reveal an optimistic imagining of nation largely confined to the educated middle class in the towns. The transfer of power from colonial administrators to local middle-class elites did not therefore disturb the foundations on which the new state rested: economic function was sti11largely identified by race, and the distribution of wealth still favored the middle class, thanks to its proximity to power.

Community leaders spear-headed the effort to forge a national culture based on the inherited colonial inscription of what Malayan society was, rather than on the needs and aspirations of the increasingly hybrid society already being created. That hybridity was the outcome of the tensions between tradition and modernity, and between the different languages used at home and in public spaces. The euphoria of middle class elites in the first flush of independence carne to be increasingly moderated by the insecurity of successive generations of indigenous and immigrant communities, as the rising tide of a flourishing economy lifted some boats spectacularly, but left the Indian

133 ------

plantation and Malay agricultural sectors largely untouched by national prosperity. A more strident native narrative of race and religion provoked by these complications created a climate of national pretensions and anxiety that no writer has addressed more clearly than Salleh ben Joned.

This chapter looks at Salleh's work, focusing particularly on his newspaper columns and his poems as life writing texts. I read these personal essays and poetic autobiography in the way that Smith and Watson have defined these two forms of life writing: "a self-trying out ... of one's own intellectual, emotional, and physiological responses" to prevailing ideas of nationhood and belonging. By offering, as Smith and

Watson suggest the essayist does, his "perspective on the thoughts of others," and in particular the thoughts of those with the power to enforce their ideas of nation and belonging, Salleh' s work serves as a form of resistance and self-affirmation that transcends and cuts across race while remaining grounded in it (200). His poems do much the same work. As "poetic autobiography," Salleh's poems explore "emotions, vision, and intellectual states" as they try to explain his view of what it means to be Malay, what it means to be Malaysian, and what he sees as a rich process of borrowing and adapting between the communities. Citing James Olney, Smith and Watson remind us that

"autobiography in poetry has centered on a sustained exploration of 'the consciousness of consciousness and the 'growth ofa poet's mind'" (200). It is possible to find in Salleh's poems, whether passionate, lyric or comic, a mind that is assertively Malay and

Malaysian, while disavowing the state's clumsy prescriptions for both.

Whatever the genre, Salleh's life writing lets us see how the supposed internal borders of Malaysian society overlap in terms ofrace, religion, class, gender, and

134 geography. In the decades following independence, this mutual imbrication between communities and the well-intentioned, hope-filled efforts of middle class elites to build a new nation produced a surface tranquility. That tranquility, to some extent, rested on the silence resulting from the prohibition of any discussion of race or religion. This prohibition, however, produced the contrary and socially divisive effect of driving

Malaysians to keep looking at national aspirations primarily through the lens of their particular ethnicity, and what it has, or has not, brought them. Trying to build their lives in the heady postcolonial phase of a newly industrializing economy, Malaysians increasingly relied on largely unexamined notions of identity that derived from the natural affiliations of ancestry, even as they also claimed affiliation through citizenship.

Madhava Prasad has argued that "to be part of an already existing constituency, whether it is race, nation, gender ... is to be not committed at all but affiliated," and that the formation of a new nation often entails a "historicizing break that the intellectual has to make with natural affiliations" (157). This chapter examines Salleh ben Joned's breaking, not only of affiliations, but of the taboos and restrictions on speech and language while insisting repeatedly on his Malayness, his Malaysian-ness, and his citizenship of the world. His accounts of his life and the lives of Malaysians in his newspaper columns and his poetry resist any containment by race or religion. He often pursues the question of what it means to be Malaysian by examining how both English and Malay have been misused to serve political agendas, and how they have worked against the process of building a Malaysian society. He is brutally direct in his responses to prevailing ideas, and to the efforts of those who would police how others think:

135 I'm a stinking big-mouth, I know. But I really can't stand the

provincialism of my fellow Malaysian, especially Malay (or Bumi)

writers. The contemporary Malay writer as a type (which means there are

exceptions) is an utterly predictable, cliche-clogged, slogan-sloshed,

pretentious, sentimental, deadly solemn and therefore humourless animal.

He takes himself so, so seriously - and for all his intellectual pretensions,

he knows fuck-all about the big world. The Malay word for writer is

sasterawan (Sanskrit in origin), and I must admit in my polemical usage

the word has acquired a pejorative connotation. (As I Please xvii)

Salleh understands exactly where his writings position him in relation to the state, the religion ofthe state, and race:

And thus the charge against me that I have blasphemed against the Holiest

of Holies, the inbred figure ofthe Malay sasterawan, that shrill articulator

of the Soul of the Race (race, not nation, mind you), that pious and

sentimental defender of the glory of the Great Malay Minda (from the

English 'mind'- you see, we don't even have a word for mind!) (xviii)

Moving easily between the world of Malay and English, between the secular and the religious, between race and nation, Salleh exposes the rich possibilities inherent in the entanglement of races and languages that is Malaysia. But his crossing of borders, both real and imagined, attracts reproach from those in power. He describes his periodic withdrawals from writing his column as "self-enforced, soul-searching, soul-saving khalwat," a word that he notes, is "of Arabic origin and it means' spiritual retreat.'" But in one of the many perversions he delights in unmasking, in Malaysia the word "has

136 come to mean 'retreat for immoral purposes' or sexual 'close proximity,' a crime-sin which is punishable by the shariah law (it only applies to Malay-Muslims-so much for the special rights and privileges of the Malay-Bumis)" (xviii). This one example is "a perfect figure for the general perversion of values, of the spirit, intellect, heart, life, and inevitably language" (xiv) in the name of religion and race that his essays and poems confront head on.

Salleh started writing his column "As I Please" when the leading English daily in

Malaysia launched its Literary Page in 1991. The New Straits Times is generally seen as a conservative paper, largely uncritical of the establishment, and frequently engaging in self-censorship to stay out of trouble with local laws governing speech. Yet, Salleh's often anti-establishment, disrespectful columns have regularly appeared without the paper running into too much trouble. The general speculation has been that Salleh' s race protects him from the official, punitive reaction that a non-Malay writing as he does would probably attract. There is also the sense that Salleh is sufficiently outrageous so that no matter what he writes, the public will not take him seriously. And ironically enough, his writings are also useful in Malaysia's presentation of itself externally, since they stand as evidence that this democratic nation allows freedom of expression. Salleh has tested his freedom in many ways. For two years, he produced weekly columns in which he applied the vigor of his humor and criticism to how language was being misused in the realm of public life and policy. In so doing, he constructed an identity for himself that allows us to view these colunms as life writing in ways that are more relevant to this study's focus on national identity than the poems and essays that deal with the personal events of his life such as the death of his little daughter, his marriages

137 or his struggle with depressionl We do not learn through the selection of writings discussed in this study a great deal about those details of Salleh's life. What we do learn is how he constructs a strong public persona and projects it consistently through his columns in a climate in which language is used by politicians to constrain identity.

Malaysian poet Wong Phui N am has said that Salleh' s writings spring from "a real concern, for lack of a better word, over the politics of language." The battle is against

"enemies of the word" and

Salleh wrote against all such people. They come in the shape of

nationalists with blinkered vision, cultural chauvinists, religious

ideologues and yes, even hypocrites, jumpers on of bandwagons and

humbugs .... The harm when it is done [by these enemies of the word]

will take the form of national divisiveness, or it will take the form of

cultural, intellectual, economic or even moral stultification of the nation.

("Introduction," Nothing is Sacred xiv)

Salleh's reaction to V.S. Naipaul's notorious remark about Malaysia's intellectual stultification confirms Wong's reading of what motivates his writing. In the Preface to his compilation of "As I Please" columns, Salleh explains that his writing had been driven, not by the courage often attributed to him, but by "Commonsense ... and a real concern for the intellectual state of the country":

I was furious when V.S.Naipaul, interviewed while in Malaysia

researching for his book Among the Believers, so casually said that mine

was "a country without a mind." But I knew what he meant, and if we

138 I -

confine that remark to the contemporary scene, I couldn't help but agree

with him. (xvii)

As my discussion of Salleh's writing will show, many Malays and non-Malays agree that

there is a great need for his mission of introducing into public conversation those subjects

that another Malaysianjoumalist, Adibah Amin, has observed are typically protected by

"totems and taboos" (As I Please 182).

The Bumi/non-Bumi Divide

The term "Bumi" is used as both totem and taboo by Malays and non-Malays. It is

totemic in its politically weighted signification of "native" ancestry. Used in this

abbreviated form by non-Malays, however, it is often pejorative, implying attitudes of

dependency that are taboo to the descendants of immigrants, who point to their self­

reliant, pioneering ancestors as people who had improved their circumstances through

sheer hard work. These over-simplified narratives of native and immigrant are

encapsulated in the Bumi/non-Bumi divide. The New Economic Policy, the program that

restructured the Malaysian economy to ensure greater Malay participation, granted

Malays greater access to education through quotas, preferential hiring, mandated equity

participation in business, and discounts on home purchase purely on the basis of race,

regardless of wealth. But, as Salleh has observed, the programs designed to "get Malays

out of the 'Malay Dilemma' ... put him in a new one--the Bumi Dilemma" (As I Please

47)? Because the programs did not necessarily deliver assistance where it was most

needed and merited, they cast a cloud over genuine achievements by Malays in the eyes

of the non-Malays, creating a wall of mutual suspicion between Bumi and non-Bumi.

139 Salleh points to that wall only to tear it down by dismantling the logic of policy-makers and literary chauvinists, and by offering the energy of his own accomplishment as "a

Malaysian writer of Malay origin" (As I Please 47).

Though Salleh's columns and books have been fostered and celebrated by Malay and non-Malay editors and critics working in English, the Malay literary establishment largely ignored him until, incensed by his increasingly public refusal to embrace their championing of notions of Malay essentialism and purity, they began attacking him. In her "Afterword" to As I Please. veteranjournalist and critic Adibah Amin, who describes herself as "a Malaysian who was steeped in Malay-Islamic culture before being exposed to 'Western' ideas," points to Salleh's impact across racial divides, enraging some and delighting others. Adibah makes the important point that Salleh' s supporters and detractors are not divided along racial lines:

It would not be accurate to say that "some" refers to Malay-Muslims and

"others" to Malaysians of other races and creeds. True, several Malay­

Muslim writers, academics and assorted individuals have lashed out at

Salleh through the media and other channels. Incensed by his blithe

disrespect for totems and taboos, they have pinned various labels on him,

the mildest being Mat Salleh-the Malay nickname for an Englishman.

But in private debate, many from the same community admit that they

enjoy the idol-toppling and that Salleh is salutary for Malaysian society.

(182)

Adibah also suggests that Salleh appeals to "Western" readers because he behaves like the child from Andersen's fairy tale who points out that the emperor was not wearing any

140 clothes-an allusion Malaysian middle class audiences raised on a diet of Western fairy tales in the mission schools would instantly recognize. But Salleh has his Malay folkloric equivalent in Si Luncai, the peasant boy who has the temerity to compare his father's bald head to the king' s. Malay folklore is also filled with characters like Pak Pandir, known for his stupidity, Pak Kaduk, for his self-deception, and Lebai Malang, for his greed and pseudo-piety. Salleh's attacks on stupidity, hypocrisy, and grandstanding religiosity in high places therefore have cultural antecedents that help his work resonate among the Malays both positively and negatively. Finally, Adibah argues that "As the other communities of this land have similar traditions, Salleh's irreverent wit is very much in tune with the spirit that keeps Malaysians sane." What unites Malaysians in their appreciation of Salleh's writing about the Malaysian spirit is a shared "fear that pompous self-righteousness will smother this lively spirit" and cause it to be "shackled and shaped into a humorless society" (182). Adibah and Wong's appreciation ofSalleh's life writing for its contribution to fostering a sense of being Malaysian that rises above political barriers erected along racial lines attests to the broad appeal, regardless of race, that his work enjoys. Despite the presence ofracialistic groups within each community, Salleh's popularity attests to the aspiration found in every community in Malaysia, regardless of their ethnicity, to be part of a nation that does not just rise above race, but welcomes the mutually enriching crossing of racial boundaries that has been going on for decades.

Though this yearning for an idea of nation not bounded by race can be found in much of the life writing in this study, one would be hard-pressed today to detect a broad­ based, culturally unifYing sense of nationalism that is helping to formulate what it means to be Malaysian. One of the most influential theorists of nationalism, Ernest Gellner,

141 argues that this unifying sense actually accounts for the nation: nations do not produce nationalism (Nations and Nationalism 58-62). Salleh points out that the first of the nine challenges laid out in Vision 2020, the Malaysian government's blueprint for development, is that of

creating by the second decade of the next century a united Malaysian

nation which is ethnically integrated and harmonious. This amounts to an

admission by the Government that, more than three decades after

independence, we are still not a nation in the full sense of the word. Those

of us who would agree with this belong to two main categories. There are

the non-Bumiputeras who believe that the officially sanctioned

'Burni/non-Bumi' dichotomy is the root of most of the obstacles to the

emergence of a true nation. And there are the Bumiputeras who claim we

are not a true nation because we don't have linguistic and cultural unity.

(As I Please 55)

Perhaps Salleh's most conspicuous effort, and the one that has endeared him to people of all ethnicities, is his willingness to address the issues arising from the

"Bumi/non-Bumi" divide. It begins with a challenge to the position of privilege he supposedly occupies as a Malay. In a country where race and religion determine how much of an insider or outsider one is, Salleh should be an insider. Yet to Malaysian officialdom, and in the closed circles where National Culture-thought of in capital letters-is formulated, Salleh is very much the outsider, or worse, the apostate. A leading voice in Malay literary circles and the National Laureate, Professor Muhammad Haji

Salleh, Chair of Malay Literature at Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia, called the

142 publication of Salleh's Sajak Sajak Saleh: Poems Sacred and Profane "the most traumatic of experiences" for the local literary scene. In responding to this critique and chastisement in Muhammad Haji Salleh's journal Tenggara (24:89) for not properly fulfilling the role of the poet "as leader and elder of society," Salleh pulled the discussion of identity out of the relatively small circle of journal readers, and opened it up to a broader general audience through a column in the New Straits Times (As I Please 37-

43). His response touches on two of the central issues that bedevil the discourse about being Malaysian: racial purity and patriotism. He begins by saying that a less literal and more informed reading of his poems might have been hoped for from someone with the

"educational background, formal qualifications, exposure to literatures other than Malay and Indonesian" that Muhammad Haji Salleh has. He views Muhammad Haji Salleh's

"need to assert his Melayuness"(Malayness) as unseemly: "he should not be part of the tribe of ethnocentric katak di bawah tempurung (frogs under a coconut shell)" (39). 3

Salleh believes that because their worldview is as limited as that of the proverbial frog, members of this tribe of "Melayus who are also self-conscious about being Moslem" read all kinds of "impurities" in his work because they are in search of "ethnic purity." Since they see Salleh as a writer whose "sensibility has been sullied by undesirable foreign matter" (37), he considers it his mission to subject these katak to the frequent "ketok

(knocks) of ironic mockery" (39).

While Malay purists look askance, a Malaysian Chinese reader who is also a convert to Islam, the poet Wong Phui Nam, sees Salleh as being "firmly rooted in his

Malay heritage" (Nothing is Sacred xiv). Adibah Amin, a Malay woman, is unperturbed

143 ------

by the sexual overtones of Salleh's poetry that so scandalized the Malay literary establishment, and has no doubts about how authentically Malay Salleh is:

Despite years of staying and studying in the West, Salleh is very much

part of the rural Malacca earth that gave him life. His roots have always

been with him; He never had to look for them. His Malay, in poetry as

well as everyday speech, is Malaccan in its earthy exuberance. (As I

Please 183)

The Dynamic. Changing. Plural Self

In celebrating what he sees as the necessary "sullying" of the races as they become Malaysian, Salleh claims no exceptionalism by virtue of being Malay. Rejecting those who are "self-consciously defensive about cultural identity," he aligns his view of patriotism with that of Lin Yutang, who asserted "What is patriotism but the love of the good things we ate in our childhood?" (43). In the spirit of the same metaphor, he advances in a separate essay the notion that "kebudayaan rojak" (a culture as mixed as a tangy, peanut sauce-covered fruit and vegetable salad popular with all Malaysians) is inevitable given the fact that in the nation's cultural mix, no one race truly dominates in terms of numbers. Speaking to the racial purists, he argues, as Paul John Eakin does, for the "dynamic, changing, plural" nature of the self (98):

Anyway, what's wrong with kebudayan rojak? Malaysians like rojak. It's

good for them, and it helps nation-building. Unity in diversity is certainly

better for our cultural life than the imposition of an artificially conceived

national culture through legislation. A living culture, as everyone knows,

144 grows naturally. It cannot be programmed or legislated according to an

abstract recipe. (As I Please 57)

But it can be tasted. Salleh's writing of Malaysian life in general, and his writing about the lives and ideas of Malaysian artists, writers, dancers, playwrights, and poets, including himself, give us a sampling of the flavors of this postcolonial nation.

Salleh crosses many boundaries as he takes the debate about identity from one forum to another, each time broadening participation in the effort to foster a sense of national connectedness and a sense of being Malaysian rather than Malay, Chinese, or

Indian. These boundary-crossings and the connections critics have made between Salleh and precocious Malay folkloric characters who point to truths otherwise resisted or hidden, place him squarely in the tradition of the "prophetic trickster" described by

Lewis Hyde in Trickster Makes This World. Hyde argues that the trickster figure is essential to preserving and vitality of any society. Salleh's spirit of playfulness establishes his connection to the mischief of Hermes and Krishna, to the trouble-makers

Eshu and Legba of Yoruba and Fon mythology, and to his own native Malay tradition of the sernar, or clown. Salleh does what Hyde says all trickster figures do: he helps us see

"the muddiness, the ambiguity, the noise" (300).

But Hyde makes a crucial distinction between the prophet who foretells the future, and a trickster prophet like Krishna or Eshu or Monkey, who "disrupts the mundane in order to reveal the eternal" (284). Throughout his poems and essays, Salleh repeatedly disrupts the mundane, announcing his intent through the titles of his books­

Poems Sacred and Profane and Nothing is Sacred and through their actual content. In his poetry and prose we find the repeated, passionate, sometimes manic celebration of the

145 senses, and the sure passage he believes they offer to the divine. In multi-racial, multi­ religious, and dogma-ridden Malaysia, he is both native son and pendatang (arrival),

"breaking the barriers between creeds,,4 as he speaks

of the One, of the Haq;

of the Crescent and the Rose,

of the Yin and the Yang,

of the Lingam and the Y oni.

(Poems Sacred and Profane 116)

Clearly, the creative mischief at work in Salleh's life writing is important to the naming and shaping of what it means to be Malaysian. He succeeds in slipping the traps of inherited and acquired identity. His writings suggest that there is enough vitality in the mix of cultures found in Malaysia to shed the "shame covers" made necessary in a

"shame culture," which Hyde describes as "one which preserves its structure by swamping those who step out ofline with deadly, smothering waves of shame" (155). By tearing off those shame covers, Salleh offers an intuition of worlds beyond state prescriptions. And by translating for his readers the sacred dance of the body and of speech, by arguing against everything that is "cincai (shoddy) and canggih (pseudo­ sophisticated)" (Nothing is Sacred, 45 - 50), Salleh demonstrates his competence as "a translator who knows that there is no final language, that once the tongue has been cut loose it will endlessly invent new speech, new articulations complex enough to fit the shifting scene" (Hyde 312).

146 Salleh notes with pleasure that Malaya means "freedom" in Tagalog, a linguistic cousin of Malay.5 He passionately resists state threats to his "Malaya," noting over and over again the irony of those encroachments on his identity. An essential aspect of the freedom that he considers his birthright by virtue of being of Malaya is the freedom to move between cultures, as he does linguistically and in terms ofliterary tradition. Salleh moves constantly between his English education in Malaysia and Australia, his Malay heritage, and his sense of being Malaysian. He celebrates the national practice and his personal inclination for easy borrowing in a light-hearted poem "Malchin Monologue," that demonstrates how Malays and Chinese impart local flavor to the English language:

not say I don't speak English well

but you speak of English that got no kick lab!

our tricks very Malaysian you know, frank and fast

english words we tekan as they should be tekan

with the blatancy of belachan6

we give them meanings all our own

for example: we stress the du in education

'cause we just like to do what we like

with words and their meanings

our native way of talking the lingo

is our opportunity to be ourselves also.

(Sajak-Sajak Saleh 152)

147

The Trickster as Translator ofIdentity

Humor is the key to Salleh's contributions in the shaping of national identity. He argues that the "deadly solemnity" of the saslerawan (men ofIetters) and seniman

(artistes) "invites parody" ("No Joking Please, It May be Anti-Islam" Nothing is Sacred

155). The leavening effect of his wit makes him very much a trickster in Hyde's sense of someone who helps revitalize society and shape cultural identity through his ability to cut through sham. According to Hyde such artistic practice is kin to the pattern of revelation one associates with prophetic tricksters:

There is an art-making that begins with pore-seeking (lifting the shame

covers, finding the loophole, refusing to guard the secret) that uncovers a

plenitude of material hidden from conventional eyes .... and that points

toward a kind of mind able to work with that revealed complexity, one

called, in these last cases, the hinge-mind, the translator mind. (311)

Everywhere one looks in Salleh's work, one finds this process of uncovering, oflaying bare, of translation from the sacred to the profane, from the divine to the human, from the hidden to plain view, because to his "hinge-mind," his "translator mind," it was not hidden at all. It was just that some would perversely not see. A striking example of this is his argument that the Malays are, in some sense, the community most discriminated against in a country where they supposedly enjoy special protections under the

Constitution, and opportunities for the redress of old wrongs through the New Economic

Policy. He points out that while the Malaysian Constitution guarantees freedom of religion for all, as a Malay, he is denied that freedom because a Malay is defined as one who is Muslim and follows Islamic customs and practices. 7 He is therefore compelled by

149 the Constitution to be a Muslim. But this runs contrary, by his reasoning, to a verse from the Qu'ran that seems "compellingly clear:"

"la ikrahaji'd'din" meaning 'there is no compulsion in religion' (al­

Baqarah, verse 256). For some time now I've been meaning to openly

shout from the top from the nearest minaret the unambiguity of that

seemingly simple line and confront all its possible implications and

complications. But I dared not. (As I Please 77)

But of course he does. Despite professing a somewhat limited knowledge ofIslamic theology, and a distaste for "getting entangled with the ulamas" (religious teachers), he takes them on in the pages of the New Straits Times. (77). In a piece entitled "Muslim

Writers and the Apostasy Law," he provocatively cites the Mexican poet Octavio Paz's idea of poetry to support his arguments, labeling Paz, as the ulamas would, as a 'infidel.'

Salleh endorses Paz's claim that poetry

touches the electric border of religious vision .... it has been alternately

revolutionary and reactionary .... all its loves have ended in divorce, and

all its conversions in apostasy. Poetry has continually been a stubborn

intractable heterodoxy; an incessant zig-zagging rebellion against

doctrines and churches ... other-worldly and this-worldly .... Heretical

and devout, innocent and perverted, limpid and murky. (79)

Salleh embraces Paz's view that "it is this very heterodoxy that explains poetry's ability, in Paz's words to place contrary or divergent realities in relationship .... to seek, and often find, hidden resemblances .... Each poem is (thus) a practical lesson in harmony

150 and concord" (79). Those practical lessons everywhere evident in Malaysia are what

Salleh focuses on in his life writing.

Lifting the Covers on Language

To get to those lessons, he lifts the covers that shroud language, both English and

Malay, in shame, arguing that a "dreadful, deadening smugness and complacent conformity,,8 pretentiousness, and ignorance have dampened down the sensuality of the

Malay language and Malay people. In addition to showing how words like khalwat have become prurient in the hands of Malay religious authorities, he also argues against the prudishness and banality of modem Malay by directing readers to the sensuality and eroticism of the Malay pantun of old. The pantun is an oral poetic form of the common people, rather than of the courts. His sample reading of one pantun has the effect of stripping the shame covers laid on it by the literary establishment:

Asam kandis asam gelugur

Ketiga dengan asam remunia

Nyawa menangis di pintu kubur

Hendak pulang di dalam dunia.

With all those asams (sourish, bitter-sweet fruits), what a dish we have

before us! (I could write a whole thesis on Malay hedonism as manifested

in the attitude to food and the vulgar pleasures of the gut.) The first

couplet is untranslatable: the taste is in the very sounds of the words. The

sound of the names ofthe various asams poetically ferments the fierce

yearnings of the soul about to leave the earth and all its pleasures (the 151 Malay rindu is better than 'yearning'; it really grips the liver). Asam

kandis with all the acidity of its symbolism, sweet-sourish, literally

brings the tangis (tears) to your eyes, as well as the juice of mortal life

itself to your mouth. The second couplet merely states what has been fore­

shadowed-no, given a foretaste of-in the first: "the soul weeps at the

edge of the grave" (literally on the edge and on edge) "yearning to return

to the earth." (As I Please 155)

Yet this same very earthy poem, Salleh notes, is placed perversely in the section on religious themes in the authoritative anthology, Kumpulan Pantun Melayu, published by

Dewan Bahasa dan Pustaka, the institution charged with promoting Malay language and literature.

The typical reaction to Salleh's behavior has been to dismiss him as kurang ajar

(ill-mannered, boorish) or heretical. He responds with the fine point that "apostasy from the religion of race ... can be a worse charge than the apostasy from the religion of the race" (49). The dexterity in both thought and language reflected in this statement is that of a trickster writing his life in two languages, both vitally important to him and to his society. This dexterity demonstrates what is needed in a society that attempts to close communities off from each other in the mistaken belief that doing so literally keeps the lid on things. A trickster like Salleh dedicates himself to blowing the lid off. The almost reflexive labeling directed at Salleh, primarily by the Malay literary establishment, in response to his dirt-work, is not unlike the general tendency of society to confuse tricksters with psychopaths that Hyde discusses. Hyde asks "whether the associative leap that links these two characters isn't really a defense against the anxiety that trickster's

152 ----~---.~-

methods can produce ... .Trickster is among other things the gate-keeper who opens the

door into the next world; those who mistake him for a psychopath don't even know such

a door exists" (159).

The failure of the Malay literary establishment to welcome, let alone celebrate,

the vitality of Salleh's writings can be traced to the quest for Malay purity. That quest,

says Salleh, has led to a selling out of "Malaya" as freedom, and has prompted some of

his sharpest critical writing on culture, nationhood, and the perils of national, cultural, or

literary chauvinism. Having discovered, via The Song of Malaya by Ugandan poet Okit

p'bitek, that Malaya also means "prostitute" in Swahili, Salleh characterizes the "atavistic

fantasy of 'Malaya' and 'Melayu' befogging the already blinkered minds of our

sasterewan (writers)" as an act of prostitution. Because they are using their talent to

prostitute a collective ideal, and because "it is done in the name of "bangsa" (race) and

"semangat kebangsaan" (spirit of ethnic nationalism)," he also accuses them of being

incapable of recognizing what they do as prostitution.

Salleh crosses many thresholds and in so doing establishes his kinship to other

boundary crossers like Hermes, whom Hyde calls "the god of the hinge" because of the

way he moves between worlds, the way he enchants and disenchants (211). Sallehjokes,

implores, rants, and raves to be taken seriously, to not be dismissed as a traitor to his

race, or a man unhinged. But in typical trickster fashion, he subverts his own efforts to be

taken seriously through his identification with the figure of the amok, consumed by "the

frenzy of the liver" (Sajak-Sajak Saleh, 134). "The Ballad of Mat Solo" captures the

melodrama of the "highnoon of a kampung butt I eclipsed by a bullet in his gut" (135). In

the figure ofthe naked amok, cheap cigarette in one hand, bloody kris in the other,

153 indifferent to the rifles and dogs and the noonday sun, is something of Salleh the artist.

The ways in which he opposes the monologic utterances of the state with the heteroglossia or multiplicity of voices and languages in his life writing and in the personae he assumes, stands as a form of resistance through language and rhetoric to state formulations of identity. He will not be pinned down, and he will not be silenced. His writing is one of the closest things Malaysia has to "carnival" in the Bakhtinian sense, pushing the limits of society not to over-throw it, but to revivifY it. Ella Shohat and

Robert Starn offer insights into carnival that can help us understand and place Salleh's role in Malaysian society:

As theorized by Bakhtin, carnival as an artistic practice transforms into art

the spirit of popular festivities, embracing an anti classical aesthetic that

rejects formal harmony and unity in favor of the asymmetrical, the

heterogeneous, the oxymoronic, the miscegenated. Carnival's 'grotesque

realism' turns conventional aesthetics on its head in order to locate a new

kind of popular, convulsive, rebellious beauty: one that dares to reveal the

grotesquery of the powerful and the latent beauty of the 'vulgar.' (45)

When opposing the "monologic true-or-false thinking" of the state and the literary establishment, Salleh "stages and performs hybridity, counterpointing cultural forces through surprising, even disconcerting juxtapositions." The state may insist that the cultures of the many communities in Malaysia are "incommensurable." Salleh's response is always to demonstrate that they are "thoroughly co-implicated" and in that co­ implication lies nation (45).

154 The Trickster as Freedom-Fighter

Salleh is not the revolutionary man of action that Frantz Fanon felt the native intellectual needed to become to throw off the intellectual and physical shackles of colonialism, and to discover who he is and what his nation could be. But he is a literary activist, who through his newspaper columns, his poems, and plays chooses to "speak about everything under the sun" (Fanon 225). As Fanon pointed out when explaining how a national culture emerges, this is the artist who "to illustrate the truths of the nation, turns paradoxically towards the past and away from actual events" (225). So while the immediate cause of Mat Solo running amok is not something Salleh would identify with, he suggests that "brooding in the bile of ancestral lust" was a more deep-seated "chaos":

"a long trail of blood / from the heart of a race that knew once / the rage of the tiger that dares the sun" (135). Over and over again, Salleh returns to the idea of a lost energy, a hearty sensuality, and a bringing together of the sacred and the profane that is at the center of Malay culture, but which has been increasingly plastered over and denied. His trickster wit and playfulness are repeatedly put to work to free his native Malay from the stifling overlay of political bombast, and the unimaginative plundering of English to ensure that the Malay language stays abreast of the vocabulary of economic growth. By using his life writing in English to attack the deadening of the Malay language, Salleh further enacts the co-implication of cultures that is Malaysia, opening the discussion of

Malay culture to the scrutiny and participation of non-Malays. In a separate essay he argues for hedonism as "part of the essential nature of the [Malay 1race" (As I Please

161). He returns to the figure of the amok as a metaphor for what happens to both the language and life of the people when their instincts are repressed:

155 The puritan is an example of a person whose hati (liver) has become

atrophied; for in order to become a true liver, meaning open to the

marvellous possibilities of life, your hati .. . has to be alive. Saki! hati

(literally sickness of the liver') is always associated with the amok and the

lover blighted in love .... And remember too that the amok is not always a

mad zombie who runs amok without any rhyme or reason .... Don't

repress or betray the cries of your instincts, your body, your spirit. If you

do that you might run amok, or, if there's nothing left in the liver to fuel an

amok, you'll just die and become a liver without a living liver." (J 60)

Salleh's fear is that in a climate of increasing repression and grandiose emphasis on form over substance, the Malays as a people and Malaysia as a country run the risk of maintaining the outward appearances of vitality while slowly dying inside.

The Trickster as Stirrer of the Pot

Part of Salleh's trickster-like role in Malaysian society, then, is to enliven a religion and culture that he believes have been deadened by their rules for purity. He does in his own way what Hyde argues other tricksters have done. Despite the havoc they wreaked, they invented fish traps, stole fire, and even turned their own destroyed intestines into food for the New People.9 Salleh's frequent target is the "Malay world of letters ... 'Malay' because I refuse to pretend that there is a national cultural life in this country, simply because there is no such thing, at least not yet, as a truly national culture"

(As I Please 21). His approach is not a simplistic promotion of past cultural glories, but a

156 headfirst dive into contemporary race-based politics, to see what he can find in that

"seething pot out of which the learning of the future will emerge" (Fanon 232).

Fundamental to that future is the urgent need for Malaysia to aspire towards a culture of connectedness rather than separation. He discovers in a performance of the

Bharata Natyam, the furiously energetic classical Indian dance form, by two young male dancers, "sons of Malaysia, both-Qne half-Chinese, half-Indian, the other Malay," the breaking of multiple barriers (Nothing is Sacred 213). Their dancing is "earth-bound, heaven-striving, a vibrantly passionate embodiment of the much-desired spirit of connectedness and concord" (211). Salleh perceives in the mutual imbrication of races and religions, in the dance and dancers, a celebration of "the concord between man and man, tribe and tribe, us and they, gods earthly and God transcendent" (212). The same performance that Salleh views with such enthusiasm was however looked at askance by some religious authorities who felt compelled to pull the Muslim dancer, Ramli Ibrahim, in for questioning on the charge that he was promoting the Hindu religion. iO But Salleh, the boundary-crossing trickster and opener of doors to other worlds, instead looks at the boundaries crossed by these dancers and asks: "Why can't the reality they affirm in the sacred dance of the body be similarly affirmed in the sacred dance of speech?" (213)

The question goes to the heart of what it means to be Malaysian, and how we might begin to articulate our identity. It strikes at the heart of how Malaysia is-and is not-constituted by its politicians; how it is imaged and articulated by its artists, and finally, how it is consumed and internalized by its people. Salleh moves easily between the world of Malay culture he is grounded in, the colonial traditions he talks back to, and the contemporary melding of cultures he feels a part of. While alert to signs of cultural

157 ------

vitality and the alchemy that exists in the mingling of traditions, he is skeptical of public stagings of Malaysian culture via the pronouncements of politicians or the pretentiousness of imitative literary events at home or abroad. He cites Minggu Sastera

Malaysia (Malaysian Literature Week), staged in London in September 1992, as one example of this, and recommends that Malaysians stop "pretending that there is such a thing as a Malaysian literature" (187).

In true trickster-fashion, Salleh fortifies the traditions he mocks. Though he questions the existence of Malaysian culture, this Malay Malaysian poet who writes in

English, and who uses a rowdy wit, scathing irony, and poetry firmly in the tradition of the balladeer, is one of a small number of writers who, drawing from different streams, are producing a trickle of writings that actually reflect the connectedness and boundary­ crossing essential to making them Malaysian. Salleh says of himself:

I am in some ways quite Westemised and I am not embarrassed by it. ...

But I also feel I am still, in some things, incorrigibly Malay ....The

streams that water my being, my life, my dreams, my writings are many

and various, though the central one is no doubt Malay .... Malaysia is my

country and so is the world. Actually my true country is not the world, but

world literature. (As I Please 49-50)

His success in representing himself as a citizen of the world while remaining

"incorrigibly Malay" has led others to appreciate his importance. In her Introduction to

As I Please, Margaret Drabble writes that Salleh helps readers "understand Malaysia today," and gain an "insight into the confrontations of East and West, ofisiam and the secular or Christian world" (xiii). But she also points to another dimension of his role as

158 the trickster: his humor, and inclination to treat with satire or irony those he wishes to expose to closer scrutiny.

Semar: Salleh as Wise Clown

While Salleh is often just plain impatient and angry, his work, just as often reflects a rambunctiousness and bubbling over of sentiment. Playful, reproachful, and challenging in tum, his writings are very much a part of traditions that can be traced back to the many streams that water his psyche. It is easy enough to draw a connection to the

Shakespearean clowns of Salleh's Anglo-Australian liberal arts education. But we can also detect a tradition that has probably come down to him through his Malay heritage: the semar of Javanese wayang kulit (shadow play). In many ways the most important figure in the cast of puppets, the semar

is in reality the son of the high god of the universe, half male and half

female, his black body represents the day and his white face represents the

night. Though he spends much of the evening in raucous and silly jokes,

when push comes to shove, the hero turns to him for advice and help.

(Keeler and Foley 28)

Sensual and erotic, the semar may serve the aristocracy but they are very much of the people and embody the spirit of the land. They therefore mediate between worlds, counselling and dispensing common sense. In poems like "Harum Scarum," Salleh's voice is the voice of the semar. Exasperated with the intolerance for humor in high places, Salleh asserts the need to employ "a satanic sense of humour" to deal with

"fanatic fundamentalists, puritans, chauvinist and other bumpkins like them.... with their

159 foul, solemnly self-righteous breath" (Nothing is Sacred 154). He enjoys exposing pious hypocrisy, delivering sharp rebukes to the new class of Malays whom he sees hacking their way up a slippery slope of success:

Drinking, gambling, lying, bribery,­

and all kinds of whoring too -

all of them perfectly okay.

And to hog it all's not taboo.

Our one dislike we have to keep

to preserve our identity;

so long as we hate pigs and pray,

we'll remain Moslem and Malay. (Sajak-Sajak Saleh, 34)

In lines like these, Salleh turns his talents to a scathing scrutiny of his own community, allowing non-Malays who might feel the same way but dare not express their feelings to let out a breath of relief and sense some hope for the future.

Like the semar of traditional Javanese theatre, Salleh is the voice of wisdom, the one who dares to speak the truth to those in power, to knock them down from the pedestals on which they place themselves. His role is to keep them from being consumed by their own pride, and to force before them what they refuse to see otherwise. Beneath his noisy persona, his furious tearing at falsity and pretence ultimately makes him, like the semar, a bearer of much spiritual refinement, an agent working to save Malays and

Malaysians from themselves. Though he is the bane of the ulamas and other conservative

160 Malay authorities, as thoughtful a Muslim reader as Adibah Amin commends his grasp of religious thought and his understanding of Islam: "In him, intellect and intuition merge.

The result is an understanding that cuts through dogma to the essential idea of the

Compassionate Creator" (As I Please 183).

But Salleh's celebration of freedom in religion and his relishing of cultural crossovers and borrowings are accompanied by vigilance. As Margaret Drabble observes,

"He votes for multi-culturalism, but he understands its dangers" (As I Please xiv).

Salleh's most frequent target is the cultural purist backed by state and religious power.

He understands how Malay culture can be wielded like a weapon to keep both Malays and non-Malays docile. He also recognizes that he has greater power and freedom to resist the state and cultural police than non-Malays have because the penalties provided for by law are applied less stringently when the resistance comes from the Malays. Buthe is also alert to conversations among the Chinese and Indians that accentuate stereotypes or play on repressed fears. Salleh criticizes, for instance, the racial undercurrents and potentially explosive stereotyping in what was billed as an apparently innocent "cross­ cultural" theatrical collaboration between Singaporean and Malaysian theatre groups. The play in question, 3 Children. was written by a Malaysian Chinese playwright, Leow Puay

Tin, and co-directed by Ong Keng Sen ofTheatreworks Singapore and Krishen Jit, a well-known and respected Malaysian Indian director of the Five Arts Centre, Kuala

Lumpur. Salleh probes the attitudes that prompt a particularly macabre scene in which "in a thoroughly Chinese milieu with its very Chinese preoccupations there suddenly intrudes a scene about a Malay woman" who enters a beauty parlor only to get electrocuted while getting her hair done. Her body is stuffed into a sack and later thrown into the river.

161 Salleh challenges the writer's and the directors' "innocence" and "apparent blindness to the implications of those images and gestures in an ethnically highly charged society"

(Nothing is Sacred 245). His interrogation might apply just as well to some of the disquiet that the work of Shirley Geok-Lin Lim, another working-class Melaka Chinese writer, stirs in the careful reader and that will be discussed in the next chapter. Such apparent "innocence" and "blindness" in the way other races are seen and depicted work against a shared sense of national identity.

Increasingly, the preoccupation amongst politicians is deciding who is Muslim and Malay, and whether the work of artists who choose not to use the Malay language or reflect Malay culture can be Malaysian. This policing of cultural production is making itself particularly felt in the area of independent films, the subject of a later chapter in this study. The current administration of Prime Minister Abdullah Badawi has decided that it would be politic to present Malaysia for external consumption as an Islamic state subscribing to a "progressive, moderate Islam Hadhari." But internally, this administration has passed "increasingly repressive, intrusive and constricting laws" that target the private behavior of Malay-Muslims, and single them out in public places for alleged violations of codes of modesty. In From Majapahit to Putrajaya: Searching for

Another Malaysia. Berlin-based political science commentator Farish Noor states that

"Islam is simply too important to be left to Muslims alone" (126). He cites the lack of intervention or assistance by non-Muslims when Muslims were harassed by religious police in a public nightspot as the logical outcome of policies which tell non-Muslims they have no right to comment on Islamic affairs. II

162 In a "social system that cannot laugh at itself, that responds to those who do not know their place by building a string of prisons" (Hyde 188), voices like Salleh's are few and valuable. Speaking from a love of nation that is truly inter-national, Salleh is helping to articulate the need to discover what it means to be Malaysian. Disrespecting the artificial spaces rigidly defined by public policy, he writes about what is Malaysian in the less tidy border territory, where the lives of people of different communities routinely, sometimes clumsily, sometimes elegantly, sometimes unknowingly, intersect. Both

Malays and non-Malays, frustrated for different reasons by the constraints of a system of privilege by race, find in Salleh a voice that breaks restraints, disrespects boundaries, and mocks privilege because Hermes-like, he has privilege. This writer steals from every tradition he is exposed to in ways that re-affirm and enrich what it means to be Malaysian on the ground, and challenges in the process what political leaders say being Malaysian means.

In a climate in which "being left alone" is the reduced aspiration of many non­

Malay Malaysians, Salleh's life writing is more essential than ever. 12 It falls to writers like him to do what Hyde called the "dirt-work" that trickster figures, those who can mediate between worlds, do. His writings and his public actions "invert and disorder the normal pattern" of Malaysian life (186):

Where change is not in order, ritual dirt-work offers the virtue of non­

violent stability .... Regular dirt-rituals are like nodes on a shoot of

bamboo, repeating year after year to strengthen the growing stalk, but

then, when conditions demand it, splitting open to produce new growth.

(188)

163 The lastingly subversive effect of his writing is advancing understanding of what it means to be Malaysian-and not just for Malays, but for all the different, increasingly hybridized communities that constitute Malaysia today. Malays and non-Malays have found through Salleh's writings bitingly comic relief from the pronouncements of politicians, and ways of looking at their dual or triple ancestral traditions that are richer than those presented by the "census, map, museum" inherited from the late colonial state

(Anderson 184). Instead of resting on his privileged status as a Bumiputera, Salleh chooses to put that position of privilege at risk every time he looks inward or speaks out, providing non-Malaysians with a much-needed alternative view of the country and its culture. In so doing, he fills a role that is essential to the fashioning of a national identity, evolving from the ground up a sense of being Malaysian that is a welcome alternative to the bromides dispensed by those who wield state power and the means of conferring or denying identity. The next chapter of this study looks at what another writer from

Salleh's native Melaka, Shirley Geok-Lin Lim, brings to her representation of her life as a Malaysian, and what it tells us about the struggle to frame one's identity in and beyond the borders of original and adoptive homelands.

164 1 See, for example, "Ria" about the death of his four year old daughter, "Songs and

Monologues 12" about dealing with depression and "Infidel Wife" in his bi-lingual fust collection, Sajak-Sajak Saleh: Poems Sacred and Profane as well as several portraits of his wife, Aton, and his adult children, Anna, Adam and Hawa and an imagining of Ria at

36 in his latest collection, Adam's Dream. These poems, and others dealing with friends, fellow writers and mentors like Ee Tiong Nam and Usman Awang, James McAuley, and others help fill out the personal dimensions ofSalleh's "life without frontier," a phrase he uses to describe the life of his Australian-Malaysian daughter, Anna, in the poem 'The

Durian and the Grapes" (Adam's Dream, 97).

Z This is a jibe at The Malay Dilemm!!-, a book by Malaysia's longest serving and most controversial Prime Minister, Dr. Mahathir Mohamad. The book raised hackles because of its analysis of the hereditary and behavioral practices of the Malays, and its argument that a kind of biological and cultural determinism restricted progress in the Malay community. The book was banned until Mahathir came to power, and promptly lifted the ban.

3 A familiar Malay proverb intended to express the ignorance of someone with a very limited world view, who like a frog trapped under a coconut shell, assumes that what he sees there is indeed the whole world.

4 Adibah Amin, a respected female Malay journalist, has written admiringly of Salleh's work. This comment comes from "Rising Above the Barriers," a review she provided of

165 Sajak-Sajak Saleh Poems Sacred and Profane, in the leading English daily, New Straits

Times. 14 August 1987. Her willingness to comment favorably on Salleh's work attests to the support he enjoys amongst literary, middle class Malay audiences despite disapproval from more conservative establishment voices.

5 See his Dedication in As I Please: Selected Writings 1975-1994.

6 Tekan means "to stress," and belachan is a pungent shrimp paste that is a popular flavor enhancer in many Malaysian dishes.

7 Naturally, the article in which he makes this case was not accepted by the editors of any of the publications in which Salleh's work regularly appears.

8 This is how he characterizes the state of literature in Malaysia in a piece which celebrates the work of bohemian Indonesian poet Charil Anwar, who died at the age of27 of multiple illnesses: tuberculosis, typhus, cirrhosis of the liver and syphilis. In a leap that is typical of the kind Salleh often makes, trickster fashion-sometimes for effect, sometimes just to shock establishment readers in particular into listening-he suggests that "the health and vitality of a nation's literature can be gauged by the existence or otherwise of non-conformists among its writers; non-conformists who may have to be sick in body, due to depravation, but alive in spirit." "In Praise of a Wild Beast," (17

May 1991) in As I Please. 117.

166 9 See Hyde's discussion of how a trickster is often seen as a psychopath when in fact he perfonns the necessary, constructive social function of breathing new life into the community. Trickster Makes This World, 158 -159.

10 See http://www.vimoksha.comlcontent/view/210/238/ for a review that touches on how Ramli Ibrahim's mastery of Odissi and Bharat Natyam reflects an integration and criss-crossing of traditions and multiple cultures. Also see htlp:llWW\v.kakiseni.com/articles/pcople/MDYzMO.htrnl#top to understand the pressure that Ramli Ibrahim came under as a Muslim dancer accused of promoting the Hindu religion. Religious officials have warned him of eternal damnation should he die while dancing in the role of Shiva. He has been advised to dress conservatively on stage, in keeping with Islamic mores--advice he has consistently resisted to be true to the spirit of liberation that dance represents to him. His efforts as both a dancer and teacher have been directed at crossing cultural and racial boundaries through such means as training

Chinese dancers in the Odissi or through mounting a Bharata Natyam perfonnance that presents the passion, not of Shiva or Krishna, but of Jesus Christ.

11 See Farish Noor's account of this incident in which non-Malays were told to proceed to another part of a nightclub "to enjoy themselves" while more than a hundred Malays were arrested and harassed publicly for behavior supposedly unbecoming of Muslims

(124 - 125).

12 In conversations with Chinese friends who spend much of their professional lives in neighboring Singapore, but hope to retire in Malaysia, where they still own property and 167 have links to family and friends, the tone is one of distinctly diminished expectations.

The refrain of "letting the Malays fight it out amongst themselves," and of wanting to be

"just left alone," is a recurring one and symptomatic of a lack of hope that non-Malay

Malaysians will ever be offered the opportunity to be fully vested in the Malaysian dream. Since they do not wish to engage in the game of securing political patronage to succeed, the most people like this professional couple hope for, is to be left alone to pursue a private professional life, or one that operates at the periphery of the nation, tasting what is available and consumable at the level of street culture but staying well away from the staged culture of the nation. This position is shared by many, and the consequence is an opting out of the national project as defined by those in power.

168 CHAPTER 4. TRANSCUL TURAnON

Shirley Geok-Lin Lim: Among the White Moonfaces: Memoirs of a Nyonya Feminist; Two Dreams; Joss and Gold

Ironically enough, the inclination among Malaysians to define themselves in terms of race rather than nation probably peaked after the riots of May 13, 1969 when political steps were taken to legislate harmony and establish a race-based formula for nation-building. Andaya and Andaya note that "Officially, 196 people died and 409 were injured, but the numbers were certainly higher, with most of the victims being Chinese"

(297 - 298). In his review of Constitutional Conflicts in Contemporary Malaysia, H.P.

Lee points out that "No independent inquiry was held to determine the causes of the racial riots and to trace the sequence of events" (20), but significant changes were made to the Constitution that

imposed restrictions on the right to freedom of speech, abridged the

parliamentary privileges of members of the Federal Parliament and the

State Legislative Assemblies, defined the scope of official usage of the

national language, enhanced the status of the natives of the Borneo States

and the Malays and finally, entrenched various constitutional provisions.

The May Thirteenth crisis marked a turning-point in political and

constitutional developments in Malaysia. The fundamental changes to the

Constitution sought to curb public discussion of certain sensitive issues

and to redress 'the racial imbalance in certain sectors of the nation's life.'

(14)

169 While there was no independent inquiry into May 13, whispered commentary and myth­ making flourished around the event, and the new correctives to nation-building that it spawned. The life writing by Malaysians discussed in this study provides a number of independent examples of how this pivotal event in Malaysian history shaped the framing of individual, communal, and national identity. The differing responses of these writers as they speak for themselves, for race, and for nation, help us understand the many competing fictions of nation that make Malaysia, fifty years after achieving independence, still very much a contested idea.

The genealogy of contestation over claims to the nation had its genesis in colonial times, and in the roles assigned to each race. The Chinese and Indians were brought in to fill specific needs in the mining and plantation sectors of the colonial economy. These were supposedly the jobs the Malays were not interested in doing--or that the British decided the Malays were not interested in doing. But once the immigrants put down roots in the new land, they branched out into the small trading and service enterprises that supported both town and country life. They became the shopkeepers, the dhobis (Indian laundry service), the money-lenders, the poultry and dairy farmers, the butchers and bakers, the iron-mongers and mechanics, the laborers on public works, the railway and port workers. In the passage from colonial to postcolonial state, there was enough capital accumulation so that in some notable instances, yesterday's struggling immigrant became today's successful towkay (Chinese businessman) and the middle class as a whole grew in numbers and relative prosperity. While working class Indians on the plantation remained mired in poverty, with few opportunities for advancement and with little attention paid to their circumstances, in the urban centers, immigrants who had been

170 administrative and clerical functionaries in a colonial bureaucracy worked hard to give their children the kind of education that produced professionals for key positions in an independent Malayan-and later Malaysian-infrastructure of government and private sector enterprise.

Native Presence and Settler Claims

So it was with a settler's sense of earned right that Lim Chong Van, a Chinese member of the Legislative Council of the Straits Settlements, addressing a Penang

Chinese Association audience in 1931 asked, "Who said this is a Malay country?"

When Captain Light arrived, did he find Malays, or Malay villagers? Our

forefathers came here and worked hard as coolies--weren't ashamed to

become coolies-and they didn't send their money back to China. They

married and spent their money here, and in this way the Government was

able to open up the country from jungle to civilization. We've become

inseparable from this country. It's ours, our country. (Roff,209)

The speech made headlines in the Malay press. In The Origins of Malay Nationalism,

William Roff cites the journal AI-Ikhwan. which carried the headline "Orang China

Mengaku Semenanjung Negeri-nya dan kata-nya Bukan Negeri Melayu" (A Chinese claims the Peninsula to be his country and not that of the Malays). After quoting Lim at some length, the journal goes on to report other Chinese views expressed in the English- language Malayan Daily Express and Straits Echo.

The firm belief that Chinese labor largely built Malaya has survived among the

Chinese even as it has become riskier to express it, thanks to Malaysian laws that attempt to box in the issues of race and religion. In the aftermath of May 13, the Malaysian 171 Sedition Act, which originated under British rule in 1948, was amended to broaden the definition of seditious tendencies to include any attempt to bring into public discussion the following four "sensitive' issues":

citizenship (Part III of the Malaysian Constitution); the National Language

and the languages of other communities (Article 152); the special position

and privileges of the Malays, the natives of Sabah and Sarawak, and the

legitimate interest of other communities in Malaysia (Article 153); and the

sovereignty of the Rulers (Article 181). (Lee 112)

These laws were effective in stifling discussion, but instead of going out, the fires they tamped down simply went underground, where they were felt no less keenly for not being aired. Poets like Wong Phui Nam and Ee Tiang Hong, and the short story writer, Lee Kok

Liang, are Malaysian men of Chinese descent who found ways to convey to their limited

English readership the anguish with which they wrestled with the issues of who they are and where they belong. They describe very clearly what Wong Phui Nam calls their

"ways of exile" in his book of poems of that title. But while they insist on what their forefathers have done to earn themselves and their descendants the right to call Malaysia

"home," they are generally silent about the fact that during the transition to independence, the colonial bureaucrats were largely replaced by the Chinese and Indians in governmental and professional positions while the Malays continued to be tied primarily to agriculture and were therefore further away from the centers of power. The

Sultans remained in place as traditional rulers. From their number, a Yang di-Pertuan

Agong (paramount Ruler) was elected every five years as constitutional head of the

British-style parliamentary democracy established with independence. But other than

172 ------

retaining these largely ceremonial vestiges of power, the Malays did not have access to

the "insider deals" that helped bring prosperity to the descendants of the early immigrants

in the urban centers. This pattern of development resembles what took place after

annexation and statehood in Hawai' i, where flows of immigration dramatically changed

the racial composition of the population. In Displacing Natives, Houston Wood describes

the process that allowed businessmen like "Dillingham and his heirs ... and many other

non-Native businessmen with sufficient money to influence local and federal politicians"

to gain more and more control ofland and enterprise in Waikiki (98).

In Malaysia, however, what concerns writers like Wong, Ee, Lee, and others is

not native displacement but immigrant estrangement from the past and the present. Cut

off from ancestral traditions and constrained by contemporary politics, they examine the

allegiances of custom and religion in relation to nationality from their position, albeit a

conflicted one, within Malaysian society. Ee Tiang Hong emigrated reluctantly to

Australia in 1975 at the age of 42, and spent the last years of his life in Perth, where he

died in 1990. But his face and his writing were always turned with longing towards his

native Melaka, and to seven generations of illustrious family history and a sense of

belonging that he could never abandon. Each of these Peranakan (Straits-born) writers

share the anomaly of being ethnically Chinese while having been raised speaking Malay,

a characteristic of the Peranakan community in Melaka, Penang, and Singapore. They

assimilated more fully than other Chinese in the Peninsula, adopting and adapting such

aspects of Malay culture as cuisine and dress, though not religion and custom. They are

therefore estranged linguistically and culturally in multiple ways. Not seen to be as fully

Chinese as other Malaysians of Chinese descent, since they do not speak any Chinese

173 language, they cannot however be Malay, even though they speak the language as if it were their mother tongue. And they write in English in a post May 13 Malaysia in which that language has been relegated to second place. Shirley Geok-lin Lim belongs to this cluster of Peranakan writers, but she merits closer attention for this study because the body of her work is the most substantial of any Malaysian writer writing in English and she has perhaps earned more recognition than any other Malaysian within literary and academic circles outside Malaysia. She speaks therefore from a position of greater influence than any of the other writers mentioned here. Her pronouncements on race and nation in Malaysia carry the added authority of strong affirmation from the multiple solidarities to which she is seen to belong.

Like Salleh ben Joned, Shirley Geok-Lin Lim is a boundary-crosser who negotiates different worlds expertly. But her crossings are markedly different from the breaching of communal walls found throughout Salleh's work, or attempts at building multi-racial solidarity found in the biographies of John Victor Morais: Like theirs, Lim's body of work, one of the most extensive of any Malaysian writer, is transparently autobiographical, and interrogates the issues of identity and belonging that engage other

Peranakan writers. By articulating as directly and repeatedly as she does her feelings of exclusion and disenfranchisement she provides one lens through which outsiders might better understand some of the social and political dynamics of being Malaysian. Her life writing also invites Malaysian readers to examine national identity in ways that state and self-censorship usually do not allow. And yet, while questions of national identity get examined at length in almost all her work, her project is more conspicuously and consistently focused upon herself and her expectations, rather than on the larger issues of

174 nationhood and belonging for all, native and immigrant. Lim shares some of the angst the other writers also experienced and then fed into their work. Unlike them, however, she left Malaysia as a young adult to pursue a graduate education and built her career as an academic and writer in the United States. Furthermore, her sense of disenfranchisement as a Malaysian, and her view of race and gender relations in Malaysia, have empowered her in her country of adoption in ways they probably never could in Malaysia. In fact,

Malaysia's indifference to the departure of writers like Lim and Ee is profoundly wounding to them. Like Singaporean poet Lim Tzu Peng who writes about a package she receives in the mail with no accompanying note, they look "in vain for a word" from the sender and encounter what she does:

On the package.

EXPORT LICENCE

NOT REQUIRED

stared me in the face. (39)

Such writers could stay or leave: it was of no interest to the powers that be in Malaysia.

But having left, Lim writes back from a platform newly weighted with influence and recognition. Based in America, with its overwhelming dominance as the sole remaining super-power, she speaks with the apparent authority of the Academy, and the cachet of having been much published and recognized within Commonwealth and Asian

American literary and feminist circles.] In 1980 she won the Commonwealth Literature

Prize for her volume of poems, Crossing the Peninsul;!, the same year that she became an

American citizen, and thus simultaneously crossed several borders and staked her place in multiple worlds. Just as the generous endorsements of statesmen and people in exalted

175 positions such as the Lord President of the Federal Court enhanced the importance of the biographies Morais wrote and his own stature as the nation's biographer, Lim's importance as a voice for Asian women, for Malaysian Chinese, for exiles, and for Asian

American writers rests, not just upon her talent, but upon the support of influential figures from many quarters who proclaim her importance relative to a number of struggles that cluster class, race, gender, and nation around questions of belonging, estrangement and exclusion, and the impact these questions have on identity. On the back cover of

Moonfaces, Hisaye Yamamoto calls Lim's memoir "the work ofa triumphant survivor."

Mitsuye Yamada celebrates her as a "voice that must be heard" for the courage she demonstrates in writing about her "otherness" as she "looks back on her early days."

Sidonie Smith calls it a "stunningly evocative narrative of the transculturation of an

'immigrant' mother."

The questions Lim raises about identity arise primarily from what she sees as the unfair curtailment of her opportunities as a Chinese Malaysian in the aftermath of the race riots of May 13, 1969. Throughout her writing, she keeps returning to this subject in ways that reinvent who she was and what she has become. In so doing, she sustains a legacy of settler righteousness about the magnitude of their contributions towards building the new nation, and their sense of injury at being newly sidelined in the national project while eliding their own involvement in native displacement during the transition from colony to independent state. Like the Asian Americans Candace Fujikane speaks of in the context of Hawai'i, Chinese and Indians in Malaysia owe their place in their adoptive homeland to their position as descendants of "settlers in a colonial context" (74).

But the accountability this fact seems to call for is not something that has been addressed

176 in public discussion in Malaysia largely because the tenus of such a discussion have already been framed explicitly in ways that are both restrictive and potentially punitive.

Lim's work would seem to hold the promise that she, like other Malaysians, could further the idea of nation by fIrst acknowledging that "understanding the distinction between Natives and settlers involves our own self-interrogation and re-education"

(Fujikane 74). But Among the White Moonfaces: Memoirs of a Nyonya Feminist. Two

Dreams and Joss and Gold offer perspectives that overlap uneasily: a traditional view of female Straits-born Chinese, the nyonya; a struggle to escape poverty; Western notions of feminism and individualism; and an outrage at being denied what Lim believes she has a right to as a Malaysian. Running through her work is a vein of protest at being always racialized: by fellow citizens in her country of birth, and by other Americans in her country of adoption, the United States. While she does not like to be stigmatized as a

Chinese, it is as a descendant of the Chinese immigrant community-those she characterizes as having built Malaysia and thereby earned their place in the nation-that she most often defInes herself:

Rather than being money-grubbing sojourners with no attachment to the

country to which they had immigrated, a stereotype that British

administrators fostered about the Malaysian Chinese, these Malaysians

invested their desire for country affIliation in their children's education.

From these cohorts were to come the teachers, nurses, doctors, dentists,

court clerks and officials who would assume the underlying governance of

the country. (136)

177 Passages like this present the immigrant quest for personal advancement as a kind of largesse to the host country, since the newcomers are doing for the natives what they obviously could not do for themselves. Her over-generalized statement about the Chinese taking care of the "underlying govemance of the country" invites the reader to assume that the Malays still occupy the roles they had occupied before independence while the

Chinese stepped in and carried out the serious business of building a "brave new nation."

Such claims may suggest to the reader, ifnot to Lim, why Malays bristle at the notion that they should be properly grateful for a process of development which changed their society in ways that left them trailing behind the immigrant communities.

Though she does not seriously address Malay disenchantment with what so-called development has brought them, Lim does attribute her own disenchantment with

Malaysia to the deep, structural changes in public policy following the ethnic clashes:

After the disillusionment of the May 13 riots ... I had no nationalist

idealism to imagine. The cultural parochialism that took shape in the

aftermath ofthe riots in Malaysia, which includes race-based quotas,

communalist politics, and separatist race-essentialised cultures, was

absolute anathema to me. (279)

She is explicit about the fact that quotas for education and jobs, as well as the other government measures designed to put a greater share of the economy in the hands of the

Malays, prevented her from doing what she believes is expected today of every

"culturally free subject ... in the moment of nationalist independence": to disavow one's colonial education. "We should all support nationalistic measures to recover and reconstruct that cultural self-esteem a colonial history has almost obliterated," she

178 declares-but frames that effort in ways that suggest she sees the "vendetta against

English-language users" as a vendetta primarily against the Chinese by a "political elite," primarily Malay, who are themselves "educating their children in English." While she does not explicitly attach race to the "English-language users" or to the "political elite," the lining up of each group by race is implied in her warning that such a vendetta "is a dangerously divisive policy in countries where social cohesion is most necessary"

(Quayum 302). Drawing on Andrew Graham-Yooll's categorization of exiles as either

"whiners who had given up hope of returning to the homeland and those exiles filled with energy who worked surely towards the day of their return," she says "I am the whiner," and explains her position thus:

More separates me from my original place than distance. Educated to have

my talents of service to my society, I kuow now that my particular

linguistic talents are instead viewed as irrelevant to the official line on

national development today. Proud of my abilities, I had seen myself when

young as belonging to an intellectual and creative elite, helping to shape

and create the features of this brave new pluralistic Southeast Asian world.

Now the hour for that elite has been taken away, and another has taken up

its position. (300)

She is angry that the elite group she belonged to was displaced by the Malays, the new

"elite" defined by race rather than by merit. But the fact that these changes in public policy were aimed at correcting practices since colonial times that had sidelined the

Malays does not engage her. Again, this invites comparison with developments in

Hawai'i. Houston Wood reminds us that "In contemporary Waikiki, it is not only

179 Caucasians but also Asians, and especially the Japanese, who assume the role of racial superiors as they continue to displace Kanaka Maoli from their homes" (90). Like other

Peranakan writers, Lim is justifiably proud of her abilities. But while she understandably laments public policies that reduced the importance placed on those abilities, she does not take the conversation further to examine why such drastic changes were needed or how they might have been better shaped and implemented. For Lim, the battle lines are drawn with language. She warns that societies like Malaysia that have denied "a place for writers who have attached themselves to a language tree other than the politically correct one" run the risk of stifling "the lyric voices of their free men and women celebrating their past and inventing their future" (302). But again, the fact that elevating Malay might increase the probability of those native voices being raised in celebration and invention in ways they could not in English does not draw comment from her.

For the most part, the writer who mastered the language of the colonizers seems deaf to the language ofthe country of her birth. Nowhere is there any admission of the sensuality of Malay, the tragedies attendant upon the colonial re-ordering of the Malay

States, or that much of this re-ordering might have been anathema to the Malays. Where the Chinese were looking to build new lives, the Malays largely wished to be left to live the lives they had always known. In discussing how Malay nationalism emerged, William

Roff points to local state loyalties, and an expectation amongst "that large proportion of the peasantry which looked for a defense against changing times, not a formula for adapting to them":

For the majority of peninsular Malays, most of whom remained peasant

farmers, political loyalties still lay with their rulers and chiefs, whose

180 immemorial duty it had always been to ensure the welfare of the state and

its inhabitants. The British connection had indeed done no more than

reemphasize that. Despite the growth of a plural society, the Malay

peasant believed and was encouraged to believe that in affairs of state the

Malay interest was paramount. (195)

The Japanese Occupation and rise of the largely Chinese Malayan Communist Party both heightened Malay insecurity:

Malay suspicions of the Chinese had been reinforced and they had also

been made aware of the extent to which they themselves had depended on

British protection. Some felt resentful of the amount of money that had

been injected into New Village facilities, often far better than those

available in Malay kampung. For more radical Malays, the MCP (Malayan

Communist Party) challenge was evidence that basic questions about the

future remained unanswered. (Andaya and Andaya 274)

Feeling threatened herself but not hearing Malay insecurity, as a young undergraduate two years after the formation of Malaysia, Lim recalls that being "Malaysian, that new promise of citizenship composed of the best traditions from among the Malays, Chinese,

Tamils, Eurasians and Dayaks and so forth seemed more and more to be a vacuous political fiction" (188). Though she sees herself as a "thoroughly English-educated mind, emptied of Chinese racialized sentiments" (189), on the strength of statements like these, she exemplifies the kind of English-educated Chinese who the colonial civil servant and scholar Victor Purcell claimed were the "most effective in helping Malayanisation." The

Chinese community, says Purcell, "sees its interests, not in terms of China, but of its

181 adopted country" (197-198), but those interests were not necessarily congruent with the interests of the Malays, and to a large extent kept them "from making common cause politically" (194).

Chinese interests were largely tied to the primary exports of rubber and tin. Trade unions and Chinese control of the entrepreneurial activities of the Malay states allowed

Chinese wage earners to advance economically in ways that widened the gulf between them and the Malays. Neither the rural Malays, anchored in rice farming, nor the Malay aristocracy despite their privileged status in government, enjoyed the same pace of development or acquisition of wealth as the Chinese in urban centers. Chinese identification with the interests of the adopted country was very much, therefore, an identification with the personal, material opportunities the adopted country represented, rather than an identification with a shared ethos of a future that cut across communal boundaries.

In her essay "Tongue and Roots: Language in Exile" Lim describes herself "as nothing but an individual. This self-image of 'an individual' is the bottom of a descent, from nation and community." She speaks of "growing up as a native-born Chinese­

Malaysian," suggesting in that phrase a kind of parity between "native" and "native­ born" so that the children of Chinese immigrants become the same as the children of

"native" Malays (Quayurn 298 - 299). And a case can be made to view Malay culture as

"peranakan" as well, since the Malays are descendants of fairly recent waves of immigration in the nineteenth century from the Indonesian islands. Australian anthropologist Joel Kalm, while acknowledging that "it will doubtless scandalize Malay purists," argues that "although they were never called peranakan, the term is entirely

182 I

appropriate to describe them," and especially if peranakan "is pushed beyond its literal

meaning to take in connotations ofhybridity and cultural flux" (170). The status of the

Malays as "native" or Bumiputra is also complicated by the marginalized status of the

Orang Asli, who are still treated as wards of the state rather than as the natives that their

very name suggests they are. But if we grant Mahathir Mohamad's argument that the

Malay Rulers of the "Malay-governed Malay states of Malaya" were the ones with whom

treaties were negotiated and through whom independence was secured in the context of

the nation, Malays can be seen as "natives" for the purposes of this study (127). When

Lim speaks of wanting to write a literature overflowing with "native presence," she is not

however speaking of Malays or Orang Asli, but of "native-born" settler communities, a

terminology that displaces one group with another without appearing to do so. This

sleight of race under cover of nation is in fact similar to the New Economic Policy's

methods for displacing one elite group with another-a phenomenon that Lim was

acutely sensitive to, as we saw earlier.

Lim accuses both Chinese and Malays of exhibiting a "palpably contemptuous

superiority from which I cringed":

To many xenophobic Malays and Chinese, Eurasians and Indians were

always the wrong race. Eurasians were jibbed at as "half-breeds,"

"mongrels," white-lovers, loose, unambitious, the disintegrating fragments

of a dying race. Indians were mocked as the wrong color, communalistic,

quarrelsome: they smelled, used coconut oil and worshipped strange gods.

(189)

183 What we hear in these stereotypes is the residue of race as seen by the colonial power, and she reports them as if they were the attitudes of others who lacked her open, unprejudiced mind. Yet her own descriptions of Indians and Malays suggest that her view of others bears some kinship at least to the Orientalized perspective F acuconnier brought to his representation of the different races. Rolain in The Soul of Malaya refers to his

Eurasian estate manager as a "half-caste swine" (24). Lescale regretfully describes the

Malays as "little placid and polite men" not the "wild pirates" he had imagined them to be (48). And Lim's own work attests to the degree to which this kind of colonial view of race was passed on and continued to haunt race relations in Malaysia long after the departure of the colonial government. Because of the lives lost and the lives sidelined by its political aftermath, the Chinese often represented May 13 as a "blood victory" for the

Malays, and a defeat and disenfranchisement for non-Malays. But it was also a reminder for Malays, whether they participated in, endorsed, or repudiated what happened, of the fragility of their position in their own land. But Lim's work contains little reference to what the Malays or Indians felt during the slow dance of race and politics in a country whose population had been radically reshaped by the economic policies of the departing colonial power. Lim describes the atmosphere in the university where she worked in terms overlaid with the kind of racial determinism that she distances herself from elsewhere:

A palpable tension hung over the university community. The

Chinese students and lecturers who usually did not mix with the

Malays were even more visibly segregated. Miriam, the daughter

of a Scots mother and Malay aristocrat, who was also completing

184 her Master's degree in the English department, said exultantly in

one of those moments I carried with me for years like a scriptural

passage, "We Malays would rather return Malaysia to the jungle

than live with Chinese domination." (208)

Lim characterizes this outburst as simply "the strong racial antipathy to the economic success of Chinese Malaysians that was suddenly orthodox among Malays," but the reference to a "sudden orthodoxy" betrays an absence of historical perspective and the somewhat stereotypical view of Malays as the ungrateful beneficiaries of Chinese enterprise:

To the question, how will Malaysia succeed without Chinese industry and

labor, she replied, "We don't need the Chinese. We will be happy to sit on

the floor if that's what it means to do without the Chinese!" I looked at her

angular features, surely inherited from her Celtic ancestors, and marveled

at the ironies in her position. (208)

It is not entirely clear to me why those angular features interfere with Lim's ability to recognize the anger Miriam feels as a member of a Malay community increasingly over­ whelmed by Chinese dominance. Lim makes the valid point that as someone born into privilege, Miriam stood to gain even more by a system that favored the Malays, but rather than point to the flaws in the system, Lim questions how authentically Malay Miriam is.

Although Lim speaks of her own son, born of an American father and a Malaysian mother of Chinese descent, as "100% American" (Moonfaces 317), she has difficulty with the "ironies" in Miriam's position because of her mixed heritage. That, and her affiliation to Malay aristocracy apparently disqualify her from speaking for those "less

185 than well-situated Malays"-the subalterns tied to the farm who do not exemplifY the kind of entrepreneurial energy and success the Chinese do--who more closely fit Lim's notion of who the Malay is in her view of a multi-racial Malaysia (209).

Clearly Miriam's unreasonable outburst stands as evidence of Malay failure to appreciate the contributions of the Chinese. Lim does not mention the contributions of the

Indians or Malays and largely ignores the impact of intermarriage between many Indian

Muslims and the Malays that produced a more assimilated group known as the Jawi

Peranakan, especially in Penang. Noting the anger of the "hundreds of thousands of

Malaysians" of Chinese ancestry who "emigrated to Australia, Hong Kong, Singapore,

Britain, Canada and the United States," she describes them as an "aborted community" of people who left unwillingly because of laws that discriminated against them. As for her own departure, she says, "I was suffering the cowed paranoia of the defeated. It seemed easy then to walk away from a violated dream of a national future which included people like me--people not tied to race-based ideology who were looking to form a brave, new nation" (209).

She does acknowledge that this "is only one part of the political narrative. The other story .... is of people who perceive the justness of their claim for special rights in an original homeland" (209 - 210). But despite this nod to the Malays as a native people,

Lim's writing shows little understanding of how radically the Malay world changed with colonization and immigration--how it was made, like so many other colonized societies, to "march to quite different rhythms," how its consciousness was "mediated by such distinctions as class, gender, and ethnicity" (Comaroff and Comaroffxi). Though she claims to be "not tied to race-based ideology," she repeatedly sees the nation's history

186 ------

and its communities primarily through race-colored glasses. And so of course did everyone else. But what each saw through those glasses depended on each writer's--and each generation's-- prescription for nation.

Lim does not find the Chinese and Indian communities guilty of "cultural parochialism." Except when she speaks of being denied what was due to her as a citizen, she speaks repeatedly of Chinese, not Malaysian values. For example, frrmly transplanted to the United States, she recounts an incident when her toddler playfully slaps her arm. In response, she hits him angrily, so hard that "the slap left red finger bruises on his face:·

The lesson in filial piety here is that "Chinese [my emphasis] children do not hit their parents" (Moonfaces 305). And yet she insists that her "100 percent American" son is

"one of those children in the Promised Land whose very privilege must come freighted with responsibility" and that one day he will enjoy "a broader citizenship with humanity.

Being an American, after all, is not much good if it is not good for something other than identity" (318). All her nationalist idealism flourishes in the new land, as she vests her son's American citizenship with both privilege and responsibility.

Yet her account of growing up Malaysian does not emphasize connections to other Malaysians nor that "broader citizenship" her son will claim as an American. If anything, we learn that being Malaysian has not been much good to Lim. Her continuing lament is that of having been personally disenfranchised. She says she wants her child to

"possess the privileges of a territorial self, even as I had as a young Malaysian" (294), but over and over again we encounter not a "young Malaysian" but a young Chinese girl. As she journeys from her small hometown, Melaka, to the capital city, Kuala Lumpur, and then to an international stage, she displays a stamina and shrewdness that allowed her to

187 ------,

survive poverty and a fractured family. By winning recognition for her intellectual gifts, she further establishes her "territorial self," but again as a Chinese girl surviving a hard­ scrabble childhood.

It is instructive to compare Shirley Lim's view of growing up in small town

Malaysia and getting educated in a convent school with how Hilary Tham, another

Malaysian Chinese writer who moved to the United States, decribes a very similar childhood. Thrun looks back on her working class roots in Kelang, a small port on the

Straits of Melaka, and writes affectionately about her education in a school run by overly strict nuns. Her "earliest ambition was to become a nun. All the people I admired were

Irish nuns in the Convent School I attended." Her desire for freedom came from watching the nuns enjoy the luxury of having "books to read. They had time to read. Their lives seemed like heaven to me" (91). Unlike the nuns who were "brimming over with life and energy and enthusiasm," the wives and mothers she knew were "tired, worn-out, often bad-tempered, generally unhappy women. I knew I did not want to be a wife and mother when I grew up. I wanted to be full of vitality and rich with knowledge, to be full of delight in what I did, like Sister Louis. Ergo,! wanted to be a nun" (93).

Tham defines a quality of life, rather than quantity of deliverables. Lim sees her relationship to the nuns who schooled her as confined to performing for them in ways that showcased her talents and capacity for achievement. In one of her loosely autobiographical short stories, "Hunger," she speaks of being loved by Sister Finnegan because she could parrot back the Book of Luke: "She had this secret machine inside her that could eat up books, swallow them whole, then give them back in bits and pieces as good almost as before she ate them" (Two Dreams 7).

188 ------

Lim talked back to Empire by studiously imbibing English literature. Viewed with suspicion by the teachers supplying her with colonial (British) culture, she is recognized as a skilled performer, but an interloper. Here is how she describes her break with the school that helped equip her for her superior performance at the university:

When the Fifth Form examinations were over and I was admitted to the

coeducational Malacca High School at seventeen, my exhilaration, which

has remained with me over the years, was akin to a prisoner's incredulous

relief at escaping with her life. The morning I returned to the convent

school to pick up my grades, Mother Superior came up to me, dazzling in

her unspotted cream robes. Her glasses glinting nastily, she said, "You

don't deserve those grades," to which I murmured, "No, Mother

Superior." I never visited the school again. (Moonfaces 153)

An exceptional student has survived a terrible system. Through her own talents and with little help, she acquired an education. Unlike Tham, she recognizes no debt, and feels no sense of wanting to return to her place of schooling, moving on instead to new territories where she will once again triumph in the face of adversity and hostility by mastering the culture of other foes. Though she earned a coveted First Class Honors in English at the

University of Malaya, she highlights the English professor's spiteful response to that academic achievement: "Of course, you know you were fooling us in some of your papers. But remember, you can't fool all of the people all of the time" (185). Though she admits at times that she was merely "performing civilization" she also claims a primal connection to the language and literature that proved her ticket to "escaping with her life." Arguing that "the literature may have been of Britain but my love of literature was

189 outside the empire" (185) Lim confesses that she wanted to "write a literature like

Wordsworth's Prelude, but overflowing with native presence [my emphasis]: writing should be an act of dis-alienation, of sensory claims. If we were not Malayans, who could we be?"(l86) she asks. Her response to this question begins with a prescription for nation that is free of racial bias and full of hope:

I was a mold into which the idealism of a progressive multiracial identity

could be poured. Chinese chauvinism offended me as much as other

racisms, for, although of Chinese descent, I was usually treated by

Malayan Chinese speakers as foreign, alien, and worse, decadent, an

unspeakable because unspeaking, degenerate descendant of pathetic

forbears. But Malay chauvinism was no better. (Moonfaces 189)

This claim to rise above race is belied, however, by the evidence her writings offer of an easy lapsing into her own dismissive labels for Malays and Indians that often resemble the "negative stereotypes" she accuses xenophobic Malays and Chinese of using.

Defining Others

In Two Dreams. her collection of short stories, we encounter only two Malay characters, Mrs. Hashim in "Another Country," and Tun Razak, then Prime Minister of

Malaysia, in the title story. Mrs. Hashim is a manic-depressive whose breezy conviviality turns out to be a mask for her frail mental state and terminal leukemia. "If being crazy is happy, she's happy" (174), says Chun Hong to the heroine, Su Weng, who appears to be largely based on Lim, and who "thought she had never loved a friend like Mrs. Hashim"

(176). In "Two Dreams" Tun Razak is presented through a radio broadcast:

190 He spoke in a slow, deep voice which made everything he said of peculiar

emphasis, as if the resonance of the voice box captured the emotional

vibrations of the actual event; it was the voice of a statesman, dignified,

accustomed to respect, and assured of being heard, a thread of air which

penetrated through open houses. She felt she could respect him. .. (211)

In both cases the love and respect for Malays is based on fragile foundations-thin encounters, in which no communication of substance takes place, and which caricature the Other. Mrs. Hashim is a Malay earth mother, Tun Razak. is a disembodied voice.

Form, not substance; ceremony and show-these, for other Malaysians, are the stereotypes of the Malay community. Even Fauconnier's stereotypes of Malay indolence are at least balanced by insights like Rolain's, when in the midst of a general commotion about an amok, he remarks that "they say these people are soft .... Yes, soft-as dynamite" (159).

In another example of racial over-simplification, she confesses that she was attracted to Eurasians and Indians because of the "romance of minoritism, as a way out of the fixedness ofrace identity" (189). Her writings do indeed allude to a string ofindian and Eurasian lovers, but it is hard to find any hint of romance in the relationships she describes with these men. Ian is " a tall, handsome Eurasian from lohore .... older and more polished than Angus, Dan or any of the other Eurasians" (Moonfaces 163). When she fails to "give up" her virginity as planned to Ian, she arranges to meet one of his office mates, an Indian called Rajan, on a hurried trip to Singapore expressly for that purpose. Tiring of Ben, another Eurasian and an artist, constantly present as "sentinel and guard" (190), she is drawn to Iqbal, newly returned from Berkeley with a "veneer of

191 American sophistication" (196), even though Ben tells her "Iqbal was the ugliest man I could have picked": "Not much taller than I, inclined towards fat, with a mass of unruly black hair that looked greasy even when clean, and wearing thick glasses that gave him the myopic gaze of a goldfish in a small bowl, Iqbal charmed by more tenacious routes than the body"(197). Finally, in "Karmal and his roommates, young Indian men who tried to cheer me up and saw that I ate occasionally," on the eve of her departure for America one senses more convenience and utility than "romance" (212). These lines can perhaps be read as feminist agency: if Chinese women were supposed to be "easy," she would tum the tables, and use the perception of availability as a means to her own ends. But allowing for this possibility, this recasting of Lim's encounters with Indian and Eurasian lovers as "a way out if the fixedness of race identity" still read more like a stereotype of sixties' behavior politically updated and made over in terms of postmodemist Otherness.

Lim's writing displays the legacy of generations of inter-communal prejudice.

Disdain between the Malays and Chinese ran both ways. R.O. Winstedt saw enough of it to write that "fond as he is of his distant cousins the Chinese, the Malay despises them.

Mildly he envies their business capacity and their wealth, but as a Muslim he contemns a pagan" (Start from Alif 57). In tum, the Chinese habitually contrasted their industry and business acumen with the stereotype of Malay indolence. It had taken Chinese industry to

"open up the country from jungle to civilization": that legacy of settler self­ congratulation and righteousness often translated into a deep-seated, if not always expressed, disdain for the Malays.

In the Melaka of her childhood, Lim hardly ever witnesses ordinary encounters between the races in the business of daily living. What she sees is confrontational and

192 always carries the potential for violence. In Moonfaces, Lim describes with sensitivity how she developed a fear of Chinese speakers, "men with faces like my father's or my uncles," because she had "been taught by the British that they were unpatriotic, brutal and murderous" (70). The formation of the Malayan People's Anti-Japanese Party (MPAJA), which then gave rise to the Malayan Communist Party, led to violent guerrilla activity, so that "Chinese immigrant and Straits-born Chinese, associated through race with disorders and terrorism, also had their 'Chineseness' marked as evil" (68). Fear, not surprisingly, runs through her reports on the curfew conditions of the Emergency in Melaka:

groups of Malay constables, mala-mala would suddenly come out from

behind the shadows of shrubbery, their pistols resting casually on their

hips. "Check!" they would say, and you would fumble clumsily for your

(identity) card, your fear in the darkness as complete as their confidence.

(70)

More than twenty years later she reports the rumor that during the May 13 disturbances, "the Malay soldiers had been slow to stop the race riots and had allegedly shot at Chinese instead" (207). Lim speaks of having to accept the view that her community was a "problem," and declares that Malaysia had become a country where the prevailing attitude was that "race massacres were an appropriate way of dealing with that problem" (209).

Commonplace Chinese prejudices about color influence her treatment of Indians.

In writing about these minor, often silent actors, color or sexuality seem more important than anything they say or do. In "Blindness," Lim describes Mrs Dorsey, the office clerk,

"with her grey-black face and inky black hair" coming to the classroom of the teacher,

193 Mrs. Hong, "like some unlucky apparition" (Two Dreams 96). In the same story, Pilleh is a "tall, swarthy Ceylonese" (106) and "Raja, a chief clerk .... and Ramaswathi, stockier, blacker and merrier than Raja ... were called R & R by the regulars" (I 10). In "The

Bridge," Neo, again a thinly veiled Lim, speaks of cycling around, not minding the "open blazing sun. Her legs, arms and face had long ago darkened to a Tamil shine" (122). But

Neo's aunt worries: "Black like Indian, who's going to marry you when you so wild?"

(127)

The racializing ofIndians is particularly marked in "Thirst." Here the characters emerge through the double haze of color and alcoholism. Describing Fleur'sreturn from

England, Lim observes:

Two years in England had done that to her, the men who chatted her up

but stayed away because she was dark and because she wouldn't give

herself away. The hours she had spent alone ... all because she was

dusky ... No wonder once home she fell immediately for the first man who

didn't think twice about her color. (142)

Anticipating his first meeting with her mixed-blood, alcoholic father, Fleur decides that her suitor "was sure to like Daddy's looks, for Daddy was tall and fair, almost like an

Englishman" (144). But when, James Thamby McNair or "Daddy" does meet the suitor, we learn that "James feIt a sharp armoyance. The dark Indian was repulsive" (145). Of course, this could be read as the exposure of prejUdice rather than any prejudice on Lim's part. But she consistently views Indians primarily through the prism of color, while always offering herself as a mind emptied of racial prejudice. By having Indians always

194 appear through a lens darkly, she eventually homogenizes a community with a great deal of diversity that goes well beyond color.2

In the Melaka of Lim's childhood there was considerable interaction among races in a civil service staffed increasingly by English-educated Chinese, Malay and Indian professionals. And yet we encounter very little of that plurality in Lim's writing. Writing about the work of another Malaysian writer, K. S. Maniam, she observes that "An unknowledgeable reader may well believe Malaysia to be, even if pluralistic, an Indian­ dominant nation, or at least not a Malay-dominant country" ("Gods who Fail" 132). Such a reader could just as easily be led by reading Lim's own work to believe that Malaysia was a Chinese-dominant nation, "or at least not a Malay-dominant country." When she fails to secure a lecturer's position, she realizes that "In Malaysia, I would always be of the wrong gender and the wrong race" (Moonfaces 204). But commentators like William

Case observe

that regardless of ethnic affiliation, most elite-level and middleclass

audiences in Malaysia have been awarded a genuine, if uneven piece of

the action .... the UMNO-led government has forged legitimacy among

most Malays .... at least without disturbing a non-Malay acquiescence

born ofthe recognition that things could be worse. (74)

Zawawi Ibrahim takes this point further, observing that while the other races may resent the policies that have been put in place, they have learned to profit from them: "Most of the ethnicised writings are about Bumiputera, their faults and foibles. On the non­

Bumiputera, particularly on the Chinese, the writings tell us how they resist Bumiputera dominance but not what some have gained in the NEP [New Economic Policy1 era" (35).

195 Lim's writing supports Zawawi's claim. While she refers repeatedly to the despair of

Chinese driven to leave by a sense of being treated like second-class citizens, she ignores the majority who stayed because they felt they were getting "a piece of the action." One gets little sense of the growing middle class of professionals and civil servants who appear in the memoirs of John Victor Morais. It is hard, therefore, to escape the residual sense that the only person who works her way out of the confines of cultural parochialism with any degree of allegiance to self and race while forsaking any hope of nation is Lim herself.

A number of factors fed her distrust when she was growing up that probably made it difficult for Lim to see beyond the politics of personal advancement, or not see everything through the prism of race. Or as she puts it, "Thus, while I do not believe that individuals can be characterized into races, I understand history as racially and ethnically riven" (339). Andaya and Andaya capture how ethnically "riven" the population was during the Japanese Occupation in this description of how relations were strained by

long-standing economic competition, the increasing presence of Chinese

squatters in rural areas, the position of Malays as police and district

officers, Malay resentment against MPAJA [Malayan People's Anti­

Japanese army] requisitions, and MPAJA reprisals against Malays who

collaborated with the Japanese. (262)

Further, as a Straits-born Chinese, Lim felt she was part of a "degraded people, people who had lost their identity when they stopped speaking Chinese .... A Malayan child, I understood Chinese identity as being synonymous with Chinese chauvinism" (70).

196 Transported to America, she quickly recognizes the resonance of being "Asian­

American," and allows herself to be cast in this role within the economic machinery of publishing and academia. She acknowledges that she appropriated an identity that Asians born and raised in America fashioned and struggled to articulate in the face of very real socio-economic and political challenges over generations: "1 wanted to learn another life from them, finally to place Malaysia side by side with the United States, and to become also what I was not born as, an Asian-American" (341). In some ways she has succeeded.

Originally attributed to a "Nyonya feminist", her autobiography, in one iteration at least, is billed as "An Asian-American Memoir of Homelands. ,,3 Perhaps she rationalizes this through some degree of identification with the Asian-American cultural struggle, seeing as some common ground, "a different space, one that promised rather than denied community" (341). But solidarity with someone else's struggle requires more than appropriation of their identity and requires at least some acknowledgment of the spoils of that identification4 The easy entry she allows herself into other circles of belonging, however, is not entirely surprising given the realization that came to her in the disillusionment that set in after the May 13 riots:

In 1969 I saw myself as a passive and innocent victim of the conflict

between elites and races. After May 13, most events in Malaysia, whether

public or domestic, were, and possibly still are, inevitably charged with a

racialized dimension, whether in civil service or private business, whether

professional or personal, economic or literary. However, even after this

violent rupture, 1 held on to the necessity of art as aesthetics; the notion of

living in a society where every aspect of one's life was unavoidably

197 ------.

cathected in the political horrified me. I wanted social justice without

having to struggle for it, a position I see now as only available to those

already privileged. (Moonfaces 211)

One logical outcome of such a perspective is to seek membership among those "already privileged," whether their power derives from adoptive citizenship, gender or racial solidarity. And thus Shirley Lim became American, feminist, Asian-American, and a fine example of an immigrant success story.

Jumping Fences

Not everyone, Lim discovers, is as adept as she is in identifying and winning entry to these solidarities. Though unmistakably "cathected in the political," they prove after all to be more helpful than horrifying to her. But having used her intelligence and keen reading ofthe times to jump over "fences of gender, race, class, nation and religion"

(340), she views others who have not made the jump with some disdain. She speaks of her mother dismissively: "My mother lived through her senses. I do not believe she was capable of thinking abstractly. Her actions even late in her life were driven by needs-for food, shelter, security, affection." In distinctly Orientalist terms, she presents her mother as an exotic deity watching over a dysfunctional extended family, exudingperanakan female power: "My mother worked with deities to cast out the envious eye, the ill-wisher, and the intruding hungry ghosts attracted by the plenty in her home. This burning incense was the smell of my mother's faith" (32). But her imagination, we learn, was highly restricted: "My mother's aesthetic sense was insensible to anything as abstract as a picture or a photograph" (33).

198 This is not too different from the French planter, Lescale's objectification of his coolie lover, Palaniai, in The Soul of Malaya. Palaniai, "having no modesty, was in no sense immodest," with no more feelings than "a choice sweetmeat." When she spends the night with him, she sleeps on the floor, "as though she considered it improper" to sleep beside him (39). Lim provides a compelling account of her mother's struggle to survive in a male-dominated extended family household with a philandering husband who relied on handouts from his towkay (self-made businessman) father to feed a household of children whom he continued to father through war, business disaster, and the evolving politics of the Straits Settlements. And yet Lim clearly aligns herself with her "handsome father" and his "Western ways," shaped by the Hollywood movies and magazines he consumed voraciously. Despite his facile pursuits, she does not accuse him of being incapable of abstractions. In fact, she identifies with him, and claims she writes "to make my father's life useful," and rescue it from the ordinariness of "struggle and failure, small pleasures, and modest hopes" (58). She does not aspire to do the same on behalf of her mother, who leaves the family after years of physical hardship and deprivation, sexual betrayal and violence, having "lost two teeth to his [her husband's] fists" (79) and having suffered the humiliation of being openly replaced in her husband's affections by the daughter of the family servant. Lim does not explain how her position as a feminist informs---{)r does not inform-her understanding of her mother's entrapment and escape.

Like her mother, Lim consciously chooses to escape, abandoning, not just the locality of her birth, but its language and history:

Chinese-speaking Malayans called me a "kelangkia-kwei"---{)r a Malay

devil-because I could not or would not speak Hokkien. Instead, I spoke

199 Malay, my mother's language. My peranakan mother had nursed me in

Malay, the language of assimilated Chinese who had lived in the

peninsula, jutting southeast of Asia, since the first Chinese contact with

the Malacca Sultanate in the fifteenth century. (28).

This assimilation manifested itself in the Malay dress-the sarong kebaya-that her mother, like other nyonya women, adopted, and in the use of the Malay language. Lim tells us that she herself

must have chattered in Malay, for just as the Hokkien-speaking elders

named me as a Malay, so Malay speakers placed me as an ancestral talker.

But I have little memory of what I said .... it is my mother's speech but

not mine; it was of my childhood but I do not speak it now. (29)

And yet, in job interviews in the United States, she "wore a green and yellow patterned

Malay gown, a baju kurong, placing my foreignness in view, and determined not to be perceived as American" (258). As "an alien resident ... a non-American," she "could only hope to fill the interstices, foreign to all and mutable, like a small helpful glue"

(259), but the modest framing of her aspirations does not however diminish the political nature of her gesture.

The story Lim tells about herself is quintessentially a story of the search for property; a self-absorbed climb out of poverty into identification with an elite class:

"Hungry and ragged or socially disgraced, I never doubted that my talents placed me in a meritocracy." "Crossing," "Circling," and "Landing," the three books that structure her autobiographical novel, Joss and Gold map out Lim's search for success and for a homeland. More Malay characters appear in this work and they argue issues of identity

200 and resistance. In the first book, Abdullah tells the central character Li An, "The Chinese cannot push us too far. This is our country. If they ask for trouble, they get it" (83). After his trip to America, however, Abdullah's English "had become New England; two years at the Kennedy School had done what almost twenty years of British education had failed to do" (189). Abdullah's belligerence modulates into appeals to understand assured arguments. In the last book, Abdullah tells Chester, the American: "I cannot understand why you never claimed your daughter. We Malays, we love our children. We will kill for them" (189). He later reminds Chester that while Chester had once laughed at Li An's belief in the importance of English literature, today he was

studying the place of English communication in Singapore's social

development. Li An was right. The national language is the soul of our

country, but English is the language of money for Malaysia and

Singapore. The goal of Malaysia is to make money. So English is also the

destiny of our country. (250)

In an interview in which she discussed, among other things, the writing of this book, Lim said: I have some Malay characters in the novel representing recent issues

of identity, and of course I have to speak also from the Malay characters'

mouths. What comes out from the Malay characters' mouths are

statements from another point of view. (Quayum 307)

This remark is probably more telling than she intended. The Malay characters come across as just that: characters. Looking and sounding like updated stereotypes of the showy Malay, they have also adopted her own early strategies for survival as a national plan for prosperity. English is the vehicle that will take the country "from hunger to 201 plenty, from poverty to comfort" (25). But she sees her own story as one of individual triumph, of getting past abandonment and overcoming adversity. In short, her story is singularly lacking in the sense that selfhood is relational in the way Paul John Eakin and others have reminded us it is. When writing about a homeland culture that places the collective good above the individual from a privileged perch in an adoptive culture that celebrates individualism, we can almost hear her say: "1 write my story; 1 say who I am; 1 create my story" (Eakin, Lives 43). By doing so she places herself with other immigrants whose histories bear more pain than hers:

I am always conscious of speaking as an immigrant, from a short hopeful

personal past, and of the voices of others whose lives still bear the

consequences of aU .S. history of genocide, war, racism, and other

violences, who speak to less sanguine emotions. (Moonfaces. 346)

In such company, her life gains greater weight-not because it advances an understanding of the relational nature of the millions of immigrant stories that constitute

America, but because she presents her indomitable will as representative of the determination of all successful immigrants. "My life rushes me toward a shore, in full motion; only my skills keep me on my feet, not drowning" she says, though she does go on to suggest that perhaps ties to the past helped save her from drowning:

How do I reconcile these two different yet simultaneous images--

the ropes that my mother and father have cunningly woven, invisible like

spirits and ghosts, that tie me to the ancestral altar table which presides in

every Confucian home; and the crashing surf that knocks me off my feet

202 and throws me onto a beach, which is never the same from moment to

moment? (347)

Her memoirs conclude with the hope that "home is where our stories are told," and that by writing her stories about America and Malaysia, she is "moving home" (348). She tells her reader that the "dominant imprint" she has carried since birth is "of a Malaysian homeland," and that it has been "an imperative for me to make sense of these birthmarks: they compose the hieroglyphs of my body's senses" (347). But she does so as an advocate of the "conceptual legacy of a culture of individualism" that has, to some degree at least, blinded her as Eakin argues it has others, "to the relational dimension of identity formation" (Lives, 63). As a consequence, we learn a great deal about Shirley Lim's individual triumphs and hopes, and not nearly enough about the complex web of intersecting ethnicities, collective dreams, and state intrusions that constitute the ongoing project of nation-building in Malaysia.

But what Lim cannot see or chooses not to tell us also reflects the reality and challenge of modem Malaysia. To some extent, Malaysian society today displays some of the "damagingly unmindful" ignorance between ethnicities that Paul Lyons calls a

"resistance to knowledge" in U.S. studies of Oceania (9-10). 5 Modem Malaysia is still a country in which the descendants of indigenous and immigrant communities, and of the mixed communities that emerged through inter-marriage, remain insufficiently attuned to each other's needs. Anglicized, newly Americanized, but still racialized, they remain insufficiently vested in a national aspiration that might perhaps bridge communal divides, and serve as the "small helpful glue" (259) Lim at one time thought she might be in the land of her adoption.

203 I Despite her many accounts of having fled a homeland that did not treat her well enough, one of the ironies of Lim's story is that her academic performance in Malaysian institutions, her winning of the Commonwealth Poetry Prize, and her recounting of her childhood growing up in Malaysia all paved the way for her move to America, and continue to feed her work and reputation. In that sense, her homeland and its postcolonial affiliations have served her well, despite her expressed desire to turn her back on her early schooling and on Malaysia's evolving political programs.

2 The tendency especially among middle class Malaysians in the urban centers to homogenize Indians, especially those who belonged to the working class, is discussed at greater length in the next chapter on K.S. Maniam and his life writing.

J See http://Vvww.alibris.com/searchisearch.cfm'?qwork=288270&matches=7&9sort=r

One bookseller offers an edition of Lim's book with the modified title, Among the White

Moonfaces: An Asian-American Memoir of Homelands.

4 Avtar Brah offers a useful discussion of the hazards involved in affirming a political solidarity with others in Cartographies of Diaspora: Contesting Identities, 8. She states succinctly the important, if obvious, point that wanting to identifY with a community does not necessarily entitle one to do so, or entitle one to a welcome.

5 For Lyons, this ignorance refers "not to individual errors of argument, reading or historical detail as much as to pervasive forms of not-knowing and erasure that have deep structures and histories .... The maintenance of such collective illusions [tluough mistranslationlover time functions through what Pierre Bourdieu terms collective or

204 structured "misrecognition," based on a series of mutually confirming citations that condense into a collective heritage, archive, or cultural memory as it functions selectively to secure needs in the present. At the same time, Bourdieu' s "misrecognition" crucially involves a collective acceptance that deceptions are at work along with a willed stationary vantage point" (9). I believe Lim is representative of the hundreds of thousands of Chinese who share that "willed stationary vantage point."

205 CHAPTER 5. CROSSINGS AND COLLISIONS

K.S. Maniam: Arriving. .. and other stories; In a Far Country; The Return; Between Lives

Just as John Victor Morais made it his life's enterprise to define the nation-and in the process himself-by chronicling the lives of the middle class leaders of the different ethnic communities, K.S.Maniam's short stories, novels, and plays define the Indian working class--who they are and where they belong in Malaysia. His project is one of uncovering how they have struggled to be seen and heard. Maniam puts it this way:

Fiction into fact, fact into fiction, the two are inextricably related in my

works .... The stories, novel and play portray the Indian community in

Malaysia. Being of Malaysian Indian origin myself, it seems only natural

that I write about my own community. It is commonly accepted that a

writer writes about what he knows best. That material would stem from

his immediate family background, society outside his family and his

educational background. (Quayum 263)

Albert Wendt has made a similar point: "there is a lot of fiction in a history book, you invent and select. ... For me now there is no difference between autobiography and fiction. There is very little difference between fiction and nonfiction. It all depends on the way you tell it" (Hereniko and Wilson 90). This chapter looks at how Maniam tells us about his personal history through his own voice, the voice of several male characters who resemble him very closely, and to a striking degree, through the voices of several female characters. In the process he says a great deal about identity formation amongst

Indians in Malaysia. Speaking of The Return, Tang Soo Ping remarks that "the narrative

206 is so inward-looking that, apart from references to some national events and some brief mention of people from other racial groups, there is little engagement with the larger multi-racial society outside' (Quayum 278). And Shirley Geok-lin Lim suggests that in

Maniam's work, Malaysia is "even if pluralistic, an Indian-dominant nation" ("Gods

Who Fail" 132). But Lim presents her own story as an escape from an original milieu in which she sees the forms, but declines to explore the substance, of those around her.

Maniam's "inward-looking" narrative, on the other hand, does not so much foreground himself while eliding others, but demands attentiveness to that sector of the Indian community that has been rendered invisible to the prosperous middle class of Malaysia.

He writes "an ethnic life narrative," which Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson have described as

A mode of autobiographical narrative, emergent in ethnic communities

within or across nations, that negotiates ethnic identification around

multiple pasts and "multiple, provisional axes of organization" (Sau-Ling

Cynthia Wong, "Immigrant Autobiography," 160) .... Narratives of exile

inscribe a nomadic subject, set in motion for a variety of reasons and now

inhabiting cultural borderlands, who mayor may not return "home" but

who necessarily negotiates cultural spaces of the in-between where

"hybrid, unstable identities" are rendered palpable through the negotiation

"between conflicting traditions--linguistic, social, ideological"

(Woodhull, 100). (194)

Through his transparently autobiographical characters, Maniam portrays the challenge of negotiating across multiple barriers-not just of race, religion and language, but of class

207 and gender-that is fundamental to identity formation in Malaysia. He merits special attention because throughout his work he explores identity in Malaysia as it plays itself out on the ground. In the dailiness of the working class lives of people of different ethnicities going about their business among colleagues, neighbors, lovers, and friends,

Maniam finds and reveals the vexed relationship of mutual antipathy and affection that being Malaysian entails.

Maniam also engages in what Smith and Watson have called "serial autobiography," shifting his narratives not just "from the perspectives of different times of writing" but also from the perspective of different female narrative voices (203). His stories of disappointment, assertion, and accommodation reflect the diasporic reality that

R. Radhakrishnan, among others, has written about: "when people move, identities, perspectives, and definitions change. If the category 'Indian' seemed secure, positive and affirmative within India, the same term takes on a reactive, strategic character when pried loose from its nativity" (123). Radhakrishnan goes on to suggest several reasons for

'''cultivating Indianness' ... one does not want to be homogenized namelessly, or one could desire to combat mainstream racism with a politicized deployment of one's own

'difference'" (124).

Maniam fictionalized what he described, in numerous essays and interviews, as material drawn heavily from his life experience because it gave him greater freedom to serve his stated goal: "to portray the Indian community in Malaysia." By telling us, as he does repeatedly, that he portrayed that community by drawing on his "immediate family background, society outside his family and his educational background" he is telling us that his fiction is grounded in the kind of personal experience that makes it a form of life

208 writing. Because he reminds us often that the Indian community he writes about is his own, we understand that his is a story of working class struggle. This contrasts sharply with the middle class story of professional success told by John Victor Morais about the kind ofIndian community he represented. Alone among the writers in this study, Maniam actually gets beyond his own lived experience, writing from the perspective of women and other races, and how they view Indians. At times these efforts result in troubling positions with regard to what Maniam appears to be saying about gender and race and the ways in which he modifies his perspective over time suggest that he is aware of the problematic nature of these positions. Maniam' s life writing demonstrates the relational deployment of difference in Malaysia in the politics of race, class and gender and how they have shifted over generations within the Indian community and within other communities. In so doing, his writing suggests some of the difficulties inherent in defining a national Malaysian identity.

Identity in Different Keys

Since colonial times, working class Indians in Malaysia have largely been hidden in plain sight on the plantations. They were the backbone of labor for what was the country's most important export for many years: rubber. Yet they remained invisible to other Malaysians in the new cities and towns that sprang up as the country prospered.

Malay journalist Suhaini Aznam has said that the Indian community was viewed "almost as an afterthought" (15). By writing about it, Maniam brings them into the conversation about identity and belonging, rights and restitution and, in his own words, he tries to

"liberate the inhabitants of the shadows from their fugitive existence" in ways that

209 community leaders and politicians professing to represent them have largely failed to do

(Sensuous Horizons xi).

K.S.Maniam was born on a rubber plantation. Introduced as a cash crop by the

British in the late nineteenth century, rubber created a demand for labor that triggered a steady flow ofIndian immigrants to the Malay Peninsula until independence in 1957.

Drought, famine, and the crippling burden of debt created by the taxation system of the

British Raj drove Tamils to look to the plantations in Malaya as the only way to save themselves and their families. But this flow of immigrants encountered low wages, very poor living conditions and a high mortality rate. Their near enslavement as indentured laborers began with their recruitment by agents in India, and ended only if they successfully paid off the advances against their wages. l But on some estates "as many as

60 rising to 90 percent of the labourers died within a year of arrival" (Sandhu 171).

Though he returned to it repeatedly in his life writing and heavily autobiographical fiction, like Shirley Lim, Maniam used English and a Western education to engineer his escape from a limiting environment. Maniam might also have said of his escape as she did, "The literature may have been of Britain but my love of literature was outside the

Empire" (Moonfaces 185). He claims, as Salleh does, that his country is not just Malaysia but the world of literature, using the "far country" of the imagination to find his way back to ancestral traditions. His autobiographical novel, In A Far Country in fact deals with the efforts of a middle-aged Indian who has escaped his estate origins and achieved success in the business world, but struggles to fmd transcendence in his otherwise banal existence. In portraying similar struggles throughout his canon, Maniam is more attentive than any other Malaysian writer to the situation of women, and Indian working class

210 women in particular. The positions he appears to advocate for women are problematic, and his accounts of women's inner dilemmas are over-written and forced at times. But he does acknowledge that some of the challenge to constructing identity arises from the power dynamics of gender within different ethnic communities as much as from the power play between races. The gap between the public and private discourses that figures in so much of his writing, is that "in-between space that carries the burden of the meaning of culture" (Bhabha 56), and Maniam uses these discourses thematically and structurally to house his stories of working class Indians. Through them we gain insights into those inner and articulated contestations that define gender, class, race, and nationality in

Malaysia.

Maniam focuses on everyday conversations, mining them for what they suggest about how Malaysians regard each other and how unacknowledged divisions separate communities. In the title story of Arriving, a casual conversation in a coffeeshop among old friends is a jumping-off point for the internal ruminations central to all of Maniam's writing. Called a "pendatang" by Mat, a Malay friend in the group, the central character

Krishnan explores the meaning of this word bandied about by politicians setting themselves up as defenders of Malay rights against the new arrivals, the "pendatang."

Krishnan's anger at being called "pendatang" is fuelled by the fact that this middle-aged Indian, not too different from Maniam, sees others as new arrivals. In fact

K. S. Maniam was born Subramaniam Krishnan, and the use of one of his names for his central character can be read as part of the transposing of the past into the different keys of "event, experience, myth" that Paul Cohen has spoken of in relation to the Boxer

Rebellion in China:

211 The Boxers as event represent a particular reading of the past, while the

Boxers as myth represent an impressing of the past into the service of a

particular reading of the present. Either way a dynamic interaction is set

up between present and past, in which the past is continually being

reshaped, either consciously or unconsciously, in accordance with the

diverse and shifting preoccupations of people in the present. What

happens to the past---{)r, to be more exact, the lived or experienced past­

when we perform this feat of redefinition? What happens to the

experiential world of the original creators of the past when, for purposes

of clarity and exposition, historians structure it in the form of "events" or

mythologizers, for altogether different reasons, distill from it a particular

symbolic message? (xiii)

Cohen's questions about the work of historians can also be posed about Maniam's mythologizing of the events ofIndian migration and the subsequent efforts over generations to make Malaysia their permanent home:

Pendatang! Only politicians campaigning for votes used that word ....

What did it mean, pendatang? Arrivals? Illegals?

Pendatang. He had heard the word used on the Vietnamese boat people

coming to the east coast of the country by the boatloads. Soon they

became the boat-people. The courage of these people had astonished

Krishnan. He thought of the long, cramped, hazardous voyage ....

Pendatang. He had seen these other people, the Indonesians at

construction sites. Building the Tudor-Spanish-Moorish houses in the

212 suburbs. They themselves camped in makeshift shacks and bathed in the

open, at the common tap. (7-9).

Though he distances himself as a Malaysian from these more recent arrivals, Krishnan interpellates their experience with the misery his forefathers endured to make his current place in Malaysia possible. His thoughts of the desperate Vietnamese, escaping one homeland in search of another, being attacked at sea and prevented from landing modulates in his mind into his father's experience of escaping from India: '''The ship stank of human dung,' his father's words came to him, 'and we, the human cattle, floated above that odour, towards our new land'" (10). Though he tries to distance himself from his father's experience, he finds himself bobbing mentally in a sea of memories: "He clawed at familiarity. But he only floated, set adrift by this new uncertainty, towards an unfamiliar landfall" (10). In Maniam's autobiographical fiction, each character is trying to reach some kind of shore by drawing on and forsaking tradition, and by grasping some of the newness of the new land. Drawn from his "immediate family background" and the

"society outside his family," these people engage in what, in the context of Wong Phui

Nam's poetry, Maniam has called the process of "inhabitation": "the process of continually entering, immersing in and emerging from one form of culture/existence and then entering through the same process another form of culture/existence" (Ways of Exile xiv).

Part of Krishnan's anger and confusion at being called a pendatang springs from his earlier feeling of solidarity with his Malay colleague during colonial times. In a passage that recalls Morais' comments on the dynamics of competing with others to get ahead, and the changing relationship with his British editor after the war, Maniam says of

213 Krishnan: "He felt he was getting into another struggle, different from the one Mat and he had gone through with Mr. Cuthbert, their British boss before Independence" (II). The cracks Krishnan detects in the "houses he accepted as solid and unshakeable for more than thirty years" (13) are cracks in a nation built through the combined efforts of indigenous and immigrant communities emerging out of a colonial system. This construct is straining under the weight of the expectations and disappointments of the immigrant communities, and the Malay sense of betrayal and loss as the land that was once theirs produces wealth beyond their imaginings for new immigrant owners.2 The result in contemporary Malaysia is a tacit acceptance of "the deceptions they practiced on each other" (Arriving 14) to preserve apparent harmony, across race, generations, gender, and class.

These practiced deceptions and uncomprehending silences mark the interactions between Krishnan and his Chinese and Malay friends. Mat's reaction to a confrontation with their British boss, arouses in Krishnan a confusion of feelings: "camaraderie ... a common sympathy ... a common fear":

There he was moving with Mat. They are in the office and Mat has just

come out from Mr. Cuthbert's office, after a dressing down. There is an

expression on Mat's face Krishnan does not understand.

'Upstart!' Mat says. 'Who does he think he is? Coming here to teach me?

Teach me!'

Krishnan is reminded of a freshwater fish taken out and put into a bucket

of sea water. The scaly thing bucks and rebuffs, striking out indignantly, at

some substance in the water that threatens it with domination. Mat's face

214 is all bathed in a fine sweat of rejection. Then it changes, breaks out into

playfulness.

'A time will come,' Mat says. 'Let's go eat!' (15 -16)

When sneered at by his Chinese friends for his friendship with Mat, Krishnan takes the softer mediating position often ascribed to Indians in the triangular relationship between the different communities in Malaysia:

'Your friend here lah, looking for you,' Teng said.

'That Mat," Wong said. 'Strange man.'

'We should try to understand him,' Krishnan said.

'You wasted a lifetime doing that,' Francis Lim said.

'Maybe I looked from the wrong side,' Krishnan said.

'You can change your position as many times as you want,' Wong said,

'but he won't.'

'The change will be good for us,' Krishnan said.

Teng laughed and the others sniggered. Krishnan listened to the ripples of

scepticism, undiscouraged. (19)

Maniam's point is clear. Despite repeated discouragement, he and some of the characters who speak for him in his life writing advocate a constant striving to breach the gaps.

Because Malaysian political life proscribes the frank renegotiation of the territory of nation in terms of contemporary realities, and hinges all of public policy on entitlements and economic functions originally demarcated under colonial rule, race continues to plague nation in ways that work against an integration of community. The conciliatory, bridge-building position Krishnan espouses contrasts with the stance of the Chinese

215 characters in this story. Confounded in their questioning and quest for their "individual rights," the Chinese characters in "Arriving" decide that the only recourse is "to take what you can and don't let go" (14).

Krishnan's relations with his wife reflect a similar sense of living alongside someone without really understanding what they are about:

His wife received him again, her face reflecting the bitter strain on his

own: they had lived close together without really knowing what went on

inside each other. She glowed when he glowed; he was pleased when she

was pleased. Had anything happened behind that glow and pleasure? (15)

These questions about gender relations parallel those about race relations, suggesting that

Maniam's interrogation of identity, personal and national, takes place on the "multiple axes" along which identity is contested in Malaysia. They also suggest he recognizes the need to let go of unyielding positions shored up by tradition, or the affiliations of race or gender.

Letting go is what Mary Lim cannot do. In "Booked for Life," the second story in

Arriving, Maniam tries to explore the mental landscape of this Melaka Chinese woman, whose tidy, antiseptic, Peranakan family life, with its twice-mopped floors and daily routine of tea on a marble table when her father returns from work, is tom apart by her affair with, and the child she has by her Indian lover, Suresh. Shirley Geok-lin Lim described this Peranakan world in many of her stories, but Maniam's account of its uneasy complication of communities is more nuanced. He attends to what A vtar Brah called the "cartographies of intersectionality" (10), mapping out how race, gender, class, and sexuality overlap and encroach on each other. Bhabha calls this identity that

216 "emerges from the world of migrant boarding-houses and the habitations of national and diasporic minorities" a "vernacular cosmopolitanism which measures global progress from the minoritarian perspective" (xvi). He also shows us the hybridity and tension between "languages lived and languages learned' (Bhabha x) that many have noted in diasporic communities. Mary Lim's mother describes the problem this way:

'You know what's wrong with this country?' her mother had said.

'Too much heat. Gets under your skin and makes you sweat. Drains your

mental energy. Must guard against that. No wonder your father has air­

conditioned the office and the rooms in this house." (57)

She says this after we have been taken through the sweat and grime of Mary Lim's encounters with her lover: "the smelly flat ... Suresh coming in ... drunk or smelling of some other woman" (38). Mary's parents could not accept this relationship because they could not bear to see her "watered down." Her mother explains: "That's what your father hated the most. That's why he couldn't take you back. The blood becomes so thinned out there's nothing left of you or your culture" (41). As a consequence, "there had been no return home and the family fell to pieces" (57).

What is not clear however is Maniam's position as a writer, as an Indian in

Malaysia, and as an Indian man familiar with cross-cultural marriages, and the disapproval that attended them, especially in the nation's early years. By casting Suresh as the destroyer of culture, and Mary Lim as the wronged woman, is Maniam is buying into the stereotype of Indian men who treat Chinese women as easy conquests? His

Chinese women are often easily available and sexually aggressive, and Mary Lim exemplifies this when she pursues Suresh even after he tries to disappear from her life. It

217 is not clear whether her cold bitterness, her compulsions, her tortured dreams of incestuous encounters with the son who so reminds her of his father, and her eventual thawing in the hands of a Chinese man, are Maniam's way of arguing that racial contamination is best avoided by adhering to tradition.3 Can Mary Lim only let go of her nightmares and her bitterness by returning to her Chinese-ness? Maniam's apparent argument against the thinning of tradition runs counter to the continuing experience of nation-building in Malaysia where inter-marriage is transforming the disdain for

Eurasians in colonial times into a prizing of what is termed a pan-Asian 100k.4 The women in Maniam's writings, however, generally struggle to retain or win back what has been compromised when alien influences infiltrate their traditional·culture. But this warning against the watering down of race or this advocacy of a renewed fidelity to tradition by Malaysian women is tempered over the course of his writing and eventually produces somewhat different answers.

When Silence Speaks

Maniam certainly seems to be championing the kind of women who "came out of the histories of suffering at the hands of men. At the hands of fathers, husbands, brothers, lovers. But they walked straight and strong. They were independent. They came from life itself' (55). In the other stories in this small collection, as well as in his plays, Maniam portrays women who often suffer in silence. Some critics have argued that this silence should not be read as pure submission to the patriarchal culture which dominates them and denies them freedom of speech, but as a form of agency and resistance. As Wan

Roselezarn bte Wan Yahya has pointed out about the plays The Cord and The Sandpit,

218 tradition contributes less to exploitation than the circumstances of class, the isolation of working-class Indian women from the rest of Malaysian society, and the lack of education that has kept them ignorant of their rights. 6 Any vestiges of custom that survived the escape from India only exacerbate a situation that is oppressive largely because of poverty and the lack of education. Maniam engineered his own escape through his resourcefulness in insisting on an English education. But rather than suggest that a similar escape via education might be possible for the women whose stories he tel1s, he frequently has them turn back to tradition, stoically bearing the roles that fate and

"symbolic ethnicity" have defined for them (Tang, 276).7 In this sense, Maniam appears to claim for himself an exceptionalism that parallels Shirley Lim's claims for herself that she rejects for her less educated mother. As Maniam's work evolved, his position relative to women shifted in ways that seemed to become more political1y correct and yet less interesting and satisfying to the reader who begins to hear a voice that does not seem authentical1y Maniam's.

Escape and entrapment are central preoccupations for Maniam's characters, especially the women. In his plays, The Cord and The Sandpit. the traditional wife,

Santha, publicly accepts her husband's second wife as tradition demands even as she rages inwardly at the humiliation and loss of social standing. Her husband, Dass, uses the cover of custom to take a second wife, Sumathi, but she herself flouts convention. In fact, it is her playfulness and disregard for tradition that he finds more attractive than the dutiful caring he continues to enjoy from Santha. As a result, when Dass goes missing,

Sumathi ventures out in search of him while Santha stays at home, patiently waiting, sewing the border on her sari to while away the hours.

220 If there is agency in her silence, it appears perhaps in the shift she makes from addressing the audience to addressing her absent husband. We may also see it in her venturing on-stage to sit in his chair, and assume the immodest, uninhibited postures of

Sumathi to prove that she too is capable of acting like her rival. But of course she is not addressing her husband or Sumathi. The challenge she throws out is entirely internal. By choosing to keep sewing while waiting for Dass to come home, she seems to be asserting the primacy of duty that keeps her trapped in tradition, willing to efface her own sense of herself. But this claim to moral superiority over Sumathi and over her husband because of her greater fidelity to tradition provides small compensation for her state of complete subordination. Part of this compensation lies in the hope and expectation of public recognition. She finds it comforting that others will see and recognize her virtue in adhering to tradition:

This chair was always his. He sat there when important matters had to be

talked about. I sat there. (Indicates a spot at the foot of and a pace away

from the chair.) Never too near. When people passed by they saw husband

and wife in their correct places. They respected us. (156-57)

Wan Roselezam rightly points to the problematic nature of how Maniam resolves

Santha's predicament.

The third act is one of disintegration if seen from the feminist perspective:

when Santha has finally accepted her fate as Dass' faithful and strong

wife, the transition of the weak traditional wife to the strong traditional

wife is complete, and her hope of uniting with Dass in order that they

should complement each other negates her individnality. Santha has

221 succeeded completely in annihilating her identity as a separate,

autonomous individual and assumed her femaleness, her otherness. Yet

she is fully aware of her own contribution to the destruction of her

potential: she willingly submits to her tradition because she cannot

imagine an existence outside her marriage to Dass. (14)

Maniam's well-intentioned portrayal of Indian women trapped in poor, polygamous households appears to end with a pragmatic recommendation that they should make the best of a bad situation through personal fortitude, endless compromise, and striving for excellence in observing the very traditions that have disempowered them. At this point in his career as a writer, women have no prospect of liberation through the far country of the imagination.

From Tradition to Liberation

In the short stories "Faced Out" and "In Flight," Maniam is willing to go a little further to disentangle Indian women from the traditions that bind them. In "Faced Out"

Jothi actually feels "smothered in her dreams by endless swathes of cloth" (16). First accused of dishonoring the sari by marrying Raja, a man of her own choice against the wishes of her parents, she appears to dishonor it again when she "took her sari-clad body to the pub where Raja's friends and relatives went" (122), and when she disavows him and her in-laws by unwrapping her sari and thrusting it in their faces. In her second marriage to an Australian, she realizes that her refusal to wear the sari affects how he looks at her: "Called me a colorless bitch. Had that look Raja had that night I slept on the sofa in my sari" (127). Even when she ventures away from home and tradition, tradition

222 asserts itself in the form of dreams in which, like the myth of Draupadi, "there was no end to the saris that came to cover her and so her purity was unviolated" (127).8 This short story ends with Jothi vowing to cut herself "loose from all that cloth" (127), but she does so with a jagged meat knife in hand, waiting for her husband to come home. The prospect of violence underlies the promise of freedom.

"In Flight" takes the liberation from tradition a step further. Sammantha de Silva cuts herself so loose from tradition that she will not tolerate anyone getting too close, and rejects the advances of any man who shows an interest in her. Watching her father drink himself to death, she decides, "You can't let any kind of pollution inside you. No mind and body pollutants. Everything has to be pure. A pure body is a joy in itself. No need to reach out for consummation-of any kind-with other human beings. Men or women"

(146). Challenged on her refusal of any kind of intimacy, she announces, "I don't want to be polluted by the touch of any man or woman .... That's the only way to keep it powerful" (148). Jothi's promise to cut herself off violently from tradition and Sam's determination to rebuff anyone who approaches her, come across as cultural last stands.

Maniam's characters thus range from uneducated working-class women at the mercy of forces of development to apparently worldly middle class women with the freedom and means to pursue whatever life she chooses. But the choices he then makes for his characters often suggest he personally continues to struggle to reconcile traditional expectations and his own choices that have taken him beyond the confines of tradition.

Maniam's preoccupation with purity and tradition also suggest an ambivalence particularly with regard to the way he writes about Indian women. He draws attention to their predicament but in ways that suggest his own disquieting attachment to a patriarchal

223 ------

cultural model and the role of women within it. In "A Hundred Years After," however, the pivotal story in his collection Arriving. he achieves an open-endedness less weighed down by cultural and gender biases that is more effective in its presentation of the on­ going enterprise of becoming Malaysian than any of his other works.

In what the loosely autobiographical character calls a memoir (115), Maniam traces the musings of a retired academic. He nurses stunted ambitions, and knows that his publicly expressed interest in "minorities, those people who received a glance now and then from the authorities" had probably cost him further professional advancement (87).

He also watches his work being picked up and imitated by others less informed and less willing to invest as much as he had in his subject. In this story as well, Maniam makes a genuine effort to get into the minds of the female characters. But he also sheds considerable light, not just on the silencing of Indian women but on the silence and failure of Indians in general to be seen and heard clearly enough in the larger multi-racial polity that is Malaysia: "In this brief memoir, I haven't named myself or my wife for a hundred years hasn't given us an identity," the narrator concludes. "That will have to be discovered by the son and daughters I've named. My wife and I, we'll have to struggle with silence and anonymity until we're drawn into that other, greater silence" (115).

History and politics have denied Indians the sense of identity and belonging that should be theirs after three generations in their adoptive land. The continuing poverty of working class Indians, their lack of effective representation in government, their disproportionate representation in urban gangs and crime statistics, and the failure to address adequately issues such as minimum wage, health, education and employment opportunities, all point to a macro political and economic climate that marginalizes

224 Indians. But Maniam's story also points to a marginalization of women within the Indian community as a result of residual patriarchal attitudes and gender biases that run deep, and are reinforced through the "intermittent enactment of selected rituals or some sporadic airing of certain symbols" (Tang, 278). The failure of the husband, a Ph.D in sociology, to bridge the divide between his work world of multi-racial interactions and academic pursuits, and his home environment of tradition, further silences and marginalizes his wife. Her duties at home and her husband's and children's traditional expectations constitute her entire world view. A severely limiting one, it further distances her from her husband, who confesses:

All I know is when I walk out of the study I'm relieved but when I

approach the lunch table I'm nauseated. My wife is there waiting with the

bowls of rice, curry and vegetables. She places a plate before me and

ladles rice, dhall and long beans into it. She won't be seated and begin her

own meal until I take my first mouthful. Is this what disgusts me? (80)

But the husband also acknowledges his own role in the silence that lies between them:

She doesn't know what I went through at the time the job offer came. I

didn't tell her. I just assumed she wouldn't understand. I didn't even give

her the briefest, most simplified accounts of my academic work. I only

told her I would be working late or I was invited to this conference and

that seminar. (85)

The unnamed narrator here displays a self-awareness of his role in not doing more to bridge the gap that between him and his also unnamed wife that suggests there is room to do better-if not in this generation, then perhaps in the next. In the account of the

225 somewhat flirtatious attentions the daughter of a friend pays him as he tries "to be a kind of father to her while she doesn't at all behave like a daughter," we are also given a glimpse of the freedoms an otherwise tradition-bound Indian man enjoys while his wife is obliged to keep up the pretense of not minding the intrusions and slights resulting from the young woman's presumption. It is telling, however, that once again the intrusion comes in the form of a Chinese "temptress" who stirs up a storm of unarticulated disquiet in this traditional Indian household.

The acquisition of identity by the son and daughters the narrator has named is also something that is not certain but "that will have to be discovered" (115), a search that will perhaps in time lead to the kind of arrival that eludes him. He clearly has few illusions about this process. His daughter, for example, rejects the traditional hopes nursed by his wife, and his own more materialistic ambitions for her:

I can understand now why Nita fled the family .... It foisted its values and

ambitions on her but she couldn't, in any way, influence it into becoming

what she thought a family should be .... She couldn't see herself as part of

the climb towards acceptance, affluence and position .... Her nature was,

and still is, to be herself, even if it means cutting herself off from

everybody and everything.... It's no surprise now that she chose Sunder

to be her man. He too wouldn't be thwarted from being himself, not by

ambition or financial well-being. They would rather wallow in the sweat

of living, the struggle of want and the satisfaction of uninvolvement.

(\05)

226 Distance. Aloneness and Identity

This desire to be left alone, and the struggle with distance from others, is a condition of many of the central characters in Maniam's own life writing. His stories often chart a passage from optimism to diminished expectations. In his early years, when he was training to be a teacher at Brinsford Lodge in England, and clearly on a track he knew would lead to professional success, he had felt a kind of euphoric sense of muhibbah (goodwill):

The Brinsford Lodge society was a truly Malaysian society in that

everyone, irrespective of his race and culture, shared a common spirit of

living together. There was hardly any racial prejudice or cultural

intolerance. For a would-be writer this experience was not only necessary

but vital for it allowed him entry into other personalities, cultures and

languages. (Maniam)9

But in his second novel In A Far Country, Maniam documents the frustration and disillusionment of his central character, Rajan, at the "walls" that "prevent us from knowing each other, knowing ourselves" (24). Here, and in his other life writing texts,

Maniam reaches beyond the Indian community of his childhood to note the doomed efforts of others to plant the culture of their own ancestors in the soil of their adoptive country. By using fiction rather than autobiography, Maniam can draw from the "society outside his family" to tell his own story but with the freedom that fiction allows to experiment with a variety of possible responses to the experience he describes. He says of

Rajan's colleague, Lee Shin, who privately pursues a variety of Chinese cultural arts, that he dies disappointed. All he wanted was "to be left alone" (22), and as we have seen, this

227 ------

is what so many ofManiam's other characters-Jothi, Samrnantha, and Mary Lim, to name a few-also want. Of course, "being left alone" was what Shirley Geok-lin Lim also wanted-but tied to her single-minded pursuit of individual excellence was a desire for recognition that would not be forthcoming in post-May 13 Malaysia. The stories

Maniam weaves out of the life experiences of his family, neighbors and colleagues, however, are less about individual accomplishment, and much more about individuals seeking a personal and cultural integrity while remaining very much part of a society in which multiple traditions are inextricably entwined, and serve to hold the individual in place.

Finding and keeping this place in the nation calls for a balancing of desires with needs. This exacts a price. The immigrant is constantly reminded by the native that "you don't have ancestors here" an A Far Country 23). Pursuing material success distances him further from his ancestral culture. As the character Ravi, in The Return says in a poem to his father, Naina: "The dregs at the bottom of well water is the ash offamily prayers you rejected. I The clay taste the deep-rootedness you turned aside from--for the cleanliness of chlorine" (183). Maniam at times suggests that those of his generation have largely abandoned any hope of shaping a satisfactory identity in the only land they call home. And so to find any sense of home, he appears to advocate a return to an originary homeland of the mind, one in which the light of a certain transcendence shines: "it is the light of intelligence, not the darkness of the limited mind" (In A Far Country 26). In

Arriving, he also alludes to the "country of recollection, of reflection" (114). But the return to this kind of home seems less than satisfactory:

228 I'm caught in the capsule of time I've created for myself; caught in the

capsule of conditions, settings, concepts, ideas, ambitions I've created for

myself. That capsule is a berry some Russian writer wrote about, nurtured

by self-centered ambitions, shone on by the sun of nationalism, moon­

swept by emotionalism. That berry grows in a weed-covered, fenced off

backyard, watered by the effluents of cultural and intellectual waste. As I

pluck and eat that berry, I taste the rancid pulp of my own existence and

that of others. I taste a hundred years of captivity in a self-created prison.

(I IS)

Like the women who yield to custom and seal their entrapment, Maniam's vision of what it means to be Malaysian suggests that both immigrant and indigenous communities have exchanged some sense of who they are and where they came from for development and prosperity. The terms of the political transfer from a colonial administration to independence stipulated that the conversation about being Malayan (and later, Malaysian) would be framed and directed by Malays as the "native" people. Political power and state economic programs have created a wealthy Malay middle class. In exchange for being

"left alone," immigrant communities have been party to, and have continued to work with, the institutions and programs that give preferential treatment to the Malays. For the

Chinese and Indian middle class, "being left alone" has meant the freedom to pursue aggressively a better life, and the accumulation of wealth, by working within and through the system.

Perhaps more than any other Malaysian writer, Maniam reminds us that for the working class, whether Malay, Chinese or Indian, new nationhood and rapid economic

229 development have done little to improve the material condition of their lives or assuage their spiritual hungers. Maniam also shows how gender and class are conveniently written over in a national framework for identity that privileges not just the Malays, by virtue of their constitutionally defined position as natives, but to a lesser degree the urban middle class, whatever their race. These third, fourth, or fifth generation Chinese and

Indians have learned anew how to offer surface harmony, silence and acquiescence to deeply flawed public policy as the collateral for freedom. This time, however, the freedom they seek is the freedom to fashion lives of greater material comfort than the generation that ushered in Merdeka (independence). Self-serving accommodations, far removed from the new nation-building idealism that inspired the first generation of political leaders, have prevented a freer alchemy of the indigenous and the immigrant that the fashioning of a genuine national identity demands. This middle and upper class self­ interest has promoted an economic solidarity that has transcended race without fostering nation. If the increase in poverty, flagrantly conspicuous consumption and debates polarized along racial lines are any indication, the bleak landscape that Maniam paints does not look much more cheerful today despite the thread of optimism that runs through some of his early work. New emerging solidarities along gender lines, such as the Sisters of Islam fighting the forces of fundamentalist Islam, or the new Hindraf movement that has seen Indians for the first time take to the streets by the thousands seeking justice, suggest that Malaysia is entering a new, more unstable phase of identity-formation. 10 This is a phase that may well prove more challenging than the transition from colony to independent nation.

230 ------

Maniam's work frequently returns to the metaphor of a search for the light within to characterize a personal search for identity, but also a larger quest to define what it means to be Malaysian. He asks the questions about Indians in Malaysia that

Radhakrishnan asks about Indians in America: "What does 'being Indian' mean in the

United States? How can one be and live Indian without losing clout and leverage as

Americans?" (123). Rising disillusionment with the current political leadership suggests that the idea of Malaysia will remain a fiction until a leader or a group breaks out of one or more of the ethnic enclaves now constituting the nation to light the way to a new beginning that all Malaysians, whatever their ethnicity, might be drawn to. Until then,

Malaysians remain as in the wayang kulit or shadow play of old, cast firmly in their roles as dalang (puppeteer), puppets, or spectators in a national drama full of insubstantial shadows, high drama, and a flickering, unstable light. But those who want to abandon those old roles are beginning to find new ways to define themselves through other subversive and more readily accessible forms of life writing. Perhaps these hold a better chance of engaging Malaysians across class, gender, and race than the limited English readership of the published life writing discussed in this study, and to these new forms we now turn.

231 I See http://www.historycooperative.org/proceedings/asslhlhagan.html for an account of the conditions under which Indians, mostly from amongst the Untouchables in Madras, were recruited by the thousands. For a discussion of colonial policies and practices, and the economic realities and needs of the colonial state in India and British Malaya that shaped Indian immigration into the Malay States, see K.S. lomo.

2 See http://www.historycooperative.orglproceedingslasslhlhagan.html for a conference paper on "The British and rubber in Malaya, c 1890-1940," by lim Hagan and Andrew

Wells of the University ofWollongong who wrote that

The demand for land rose sharply when companies formed in Britain began to

seek land for rubber plantations ....

The lure of the cash these companies were able to offer through their

agents often proved irresistible to the native Malays who had acquired title to the

land they had held through customary tenure. The Government of the Federated

Malay States noted in 1912 that it had been caused "grave anxiety and

apprehension by the fact that our Malay subjects, deluded by visions of all but

transitory wealth, have been divesting themselves of their homestead and family

lands to anyone willing to pay in cash for them. The rulers of the Federated

Malay States and their Advisers conclusively feel that unless a better judgment is

exercised on their behalf, the result will be the extinction of the Malay yeoman

peasantry" [Lindblad, 47].

232 The result was the Malay Reservations Act of 1913, which provided that land within a Malay reservation was not to be sold or leased to a non-Malay, as thousands of acres had already been. The official reasoning was that the rapidly increasing populations of the rubber plantations would need huge quantities of rice. It would be possible to import rice, but a home-grown supply would be cheaper, and more reliable. Officially, it was to be the role of the native Malays to supply food for the workers in the rubber plantations and tin mines.

3 Benedict Anderson makes the point that "nationalism thinks in terms of historical destinies, while racism dreams of eternal contamination" (149). One could make the case that, in Malaysia, "racial contamination," so to speak, is helping nationhood.

4 A good example of this is the preference for models of mixed ethnicity for the country's tourism campaigns, and more broadly, in all kinds of advertising designed to have broad market appeal. This visual representation, usually female, has become a kind of short­ hand for what is a Malaysian.

5 See Ravindra Jain for a discussion of the diversity, caste conflicts, and lack of homogeneity within the Indian population on a particular group of estates. Chinese and

Malays were almost completely absent from the workforce of the estates he studied. http://www.transcomm.ox.ac.uk/working%20papers/ravijain.pdf

233 6 For a fuller discussion of why working class Indian women lack the channels through which to assert their rights, or the means and will to connect to the larger community, see

Oorjitham.

7 See Tang Soo Ping's discussion of how tradition dwindles to a symbolic ethnicity fraught with anxiety and conflict.

8 Maniam is referring to the story of Draupadi, whose husband lost her in a game of dice to another man. But in trying to claim his prize and humiliate her by pulling off her sari, the victor was repelled by the endless succession of saris that replaced each one he pulled off.

9 From an unpublished paper delivered at a seminar on "Malaysian Writing; the Writers

Speak." 26th Singapore International Festival of Books and Book Fair, Singapore,

September, 1994.

10 "Sisters in Islam" a non-governmental organization, was started by Zainah Anwar, a

Tufts-educated lawyer in 1988. It has attracted other urban, middle class women, many educated abroad, who are fighting the encroachments of more fundamentalist groups who are attempting to introduce syariah law in ways that threaten the rights and freedom of

Muslim women. They are part of a group that is calling for the abolition of the Internal

Security Act (lSA) and the release of Hindraf (Hindu Rights Action Force) leaders detained under the draconian ISA after their peaceful street rallies prompted excessive police action in November 2007. See http;llwVv-w.sistersinis\am.org.my/ and http;llca.youtube.come/watch?v=rIWmafBGIMo for a report on the Hindraf rally.

234 -----~----

EPILOGUE

The Multi-Media Turn in Malaysian Life Writing

The visual images that the state uses to convey a sense of Malaysia are unremittingly glittery, gracious, and gendered. The ubiquitous Petronas Twin Towers have enjoyed the worldwide media attention that came from being, briefly, the tallest building in the world, and one of the locations for the film, Entrapment, starring Sean Connery and Catherine Zeta

Jones.) More often than not, it is pictured at night, when its stainless-steel, diamond-faceted exterior best shows off what its website describes as the building's-- and, presumably, the country's-"polished fayade." The building's "timeless minaret design" is the "crowning symbol of the country and its culture" and its architect, Cesar Pelli, has been honored with the Aga Khan award for "producing a building concept that successfully addresses the needs and hopes of Islamic societies.,,2 A supposed icon of pride for all Malaysians, and a bridge between the country's past and its future, this building clearly renders Malaysia's past, present and future in ways that reflect Malaysia'S Muslim Malay majority, not the entanglement of the indigenous and the immigrant that is Malaysia's fifty year history.

Yet the state recognizes that the multiple ethnicities and the rich intersection of cultures are sources for visual images with strong economic power. Hence their extensive deployment as a central visual motif and platform for Malaysia's tourism advertising. The

"Malaysia: Truly Asia" campaign, featuring a parade of beautiful women attired in traditional ethnic dress, ran for seven years.3 In some advertisements the women were even positioned against a backdrop dominated by the Twin Towers. Apparently chosen more for their similarity in features and their uniformly light skin rather than as representatives of the

235 greater diversity one sees on the street, their elaborate ethnic garb, complete with jewelry and ceremonial headgear that are seldom worn, is obviously meant to play to the Western tourist's expectations of the exotic when choosing to vacation in Asia.4 At the same time though, the women chosen reflect the tension between aspiring to look more Western by erasing some of the obvious markers of ethnicity and asserting ethnicity through conspicuous costuming. In claiming to have all of Asia within its shores, the state happily embraces its immigrant past in economically lucrative ways that pander to Orientalist fantasies not so far removed from those found in Henri Fauconnier's Soul of Malaya. Early reviewers of his work spoke admiringly of how he captured the "confusion ofraces---dark graceful Tamils, vivacious Malays, Chinese overseers and English planters" (Fauconnier, "Appendices" 202-

3). Similarly, the award-winning and revenue-generating tourism campaigns of recent years have presented Malaysia through a kaleidoscope of graceful women bringing recreational offerings to Western, usually male, tourists. The campaign places the Western tourist in a variety of exotic environments stripped of any difficulty of access, thanks to modem

Malaysia's infrastructure--from an award-winning airline and airport to some of the best highways in Asia. Added to that is the exceptional service of Malaysian women, supposedly steeped in the traditions of their ethnicity but presented together with a polished fas:ade like that of the Petronas Twin Towers. There is no confusion: just a strategic commodification of races.

This display of ethnic diversity is a pragmatic marketing decision that has little to do with how the state sees itself, or how it wants or permits Malaysians to think of race and nation. Because Western and other Asian audiences ultimately do not count, and are dismissed as foreign interference in the internal affairs of the nation should they comment on

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the ongoing conversations about identity within Malaysian borders, the state has no problem presenting different faces to the world. 5 This recalls a conversation in The Soul of Malaya in which Rolain puts the behavior of Lescale' s mistress, and the indifference of her husband to her relationship with the white planter, in what he sees as its proper context: "For them you do not count. ...Palaniai brings you merely a propitiatory offering, and Karuppan troubles himself no more than men of ancient days who gladly gave their wives to a god with a taste for mortal women" (42). Similarly, the state is untroubled by a representation of Malaysia that elides ethnicity while parading diversity. It is "merely a propitiatory offering," offered to the god oftourism with a taste for Asia lite. Apart from perhaps the more clueless tourist, all parties involved in this staging of identity, both internal and external, understand that it is purely a performance.

With the help of multi-million dollar advertising campaigns that tout "Malaysia

Truly Asia" from billboards to bus stop panels to television, this official performance of national identity as a model of exotic multiracial harmony is channeled to the world outside.

But a more unruly presentation of Malaysian identity is also staging the nation along racial lines in ways that are channeled to the world via the likes of Al-Jazeera, CNN, and BBC. The state can do very little about the repeated reenactment of these representations of Malaysia, race, and nation, on YouTube or the dozens of other internet sites where bloggers give extended life to this new writing of the life of Malaysia.

Non-governmental organizations, globalization, and Americanization are leading to a greater entanglement of the interests of the working and middle class and a greater coming together of the different ethnic communities on issues. For example, even those who might disagree with the strategy of the Hindu Rights Action Force as it seeks justice for the long

237 Fig. 5. HINDRAF street rally

238 neglected Indian working class, agree that the need for action is real. Thus the disturbing live footage of Malaysian police using excessive force on a peaceful crowd at a lllNDRAF rally that was captured and played repeatedly on Al-Jazeera and YouTube provided a different kind of "Malaysia: Truly Asia." Extensive blog postings and online availability of coverage of the rallies have heightened the contrast between the Twin Towers as the state's preferred international symbol of Malaysia and the domestic spectacle of riot police, tear gas, working class Indians, and demolished temples. The state has treated the domestic spectacle as a stain on that symbol of technological and economic success-an inconvenient but temporary embarrassment, rather than an accurate alternative representation of Malaysia and

Malaysians, and an urgent can to action.

The avenues provided by the new media confirm Smith and Watson's claim that life writing is blending into "a hybrid ... a moving target of ever-changing practices without absolute rules" (7). Whether orchestrated by the state, or writ large on television and computer screens in non-sanctioned ways, contemporary representations of Malaysia provide a dismal view of a retrogressive and increasingly more repressive state and a nation where class and race fissures are wider than they have ever been. The peaceful cosmopolitan nation where people of different races live together in a climate of mutual goodwill seems more of a facade because of state encroachments on private lives, and state failure to rein in the policing activities of some religious authorities. These activities are fuelling the insecurity and unease of Malaysians, and further widening the divisions of race, class, and religion. The lavish homes and conspicuous spending of petty state bureaucrats speak of a climate of corruption and lack of accountability that is eroding public trust in the very institutions to which they must turn to seek justice or redress.6 The force that ended the HINDRAF rally, or

239 Fig. 6. BERSm street rallies

240 the speed with which Hindu temples were destroyed, also indicate that the implementation of public policy is becoming ever more highly differentiated by race.7 The even larger crowds demonstrating at the Malay-dominated BERSIH (Clean) rallies two weeks earlier, had also been greeted with tear gas and water cannons, but the leaders of the two rallies were treated differently.8 The leaders ofHINDRAF were imprisoned under the Internal Security Act, while the leaders of BERSIH were not. Malaysia may be "Truly Asia" but within its borders, the state treats Other Asians as less truly Malaysian than the Malays.

While state-authorized renditions of identity in Malaysia may offer little room for optimism, this study suggests that identity is being closely examined through life writing texts that resist over-simplified state prescriptions. Whether through fictionalized memoirs, biographies, poems and essays, short stories, or semi-autobiographical novels, this body of writing offers a richer, more thoughtful sense of the multi-textured complexity of Malaysian lives. These texts have also allowed us to trace the narrative of nation through the narrative of indigenous and immigrant lives, approached, in the words of Smith and Watson, as "a set of ever-shifting self-referential practices that engage the past in order to reflect on identity in the present" (5). Instability and flux mark these narratives in ways that reflect the continuing instability of the idea ofrace and nation in Malaysia. While often highly instructive, it is also true that these narratives have had a readership confined to the English-educated middle-class with literary interests. But this readership is expanding today because life writing is finding other channels through which to tell the ongoing story of a nation still struggling to define itself.

As the national project gradually shifted out of the hands of the English-educated middle class elite in the decades following independence in 1957, the hopeful rhetoric of

241 early independence collaboration also underwent a generational shift in tone to a more racially divisive and antagonistic discourse exacerbated by state efforts to limit and control it.

The failure to ensure an effective transition at the highest levels of government also created deep divisions within the Malay community and to some degree caused Malaysians of all ethnicities to come together around issues of justice and propriety in ways that transcended race and raised fresh questions about nation.9

In this climate of generational, political and rhetorical shifts, Malaysian life writing has also broadened its scope and practice, finding new ways to say what needs to be said.

And increasingly, the more populist genre of fIlm is leading the way. The past five years have seen a blossoming of independent fIlms that bring a broader spectrum of voices into the conversation about race, nation and identity. These modest, low budget independent productions offer love stories in an idealized rural Malaysia, coming of age stories, tough­ minded glimpses of seedy urban life, and essays in fIlm about the irrationality of identity defined solely by passports and identity cards that fix people in the here and now, and erase years of spillage across borders. Independent films from Malaysia have earned more recognition outside the country than inside, receiving awards regionally and internationally.

But it is, perhaps, less what the fIlms are about than how they are being made and seen, and the state's stance towards them that constitute a new kind oflife writing.

These films continue to tell the story that has been told previously through the printed word about Malaysia, setting in motion the kind of "oscillation between a national visuality and the deterritorialised and transcultural forms of art and communication" that Nestor

Garcia Canclini has talked about (180). This move from the printed word to fIlm and media­ related images is also the "pictorial tum" that W.J.T. Mitchell has identified, engaging

242 ------

broader audiences locally and transnationally in ways that the printed word cannot. In the

process, the films simultaneously enrich and challenge the idea of Malaysia and being

Malaysian in ways that cannot be fully policed by the state.

Independent Malaysian filmmakers are emerging from all communities: Malays like

Yasmin Ahmad, Arnir Muhammad, and Osman Ali; Chinese like Ho Yuhang, James Lee and

Tan Chin Mui; Indians like Deepak Kumaran Menon and Kanna Thiagarajan; and Sino­

Indians like Bernard ChauIy. This growing cluster of Malaysian filmmakers are making

independent films because, as the Singapore director, Tan Pin Pin said, they "need to be

made" (McKay). Several of these filmmakers have won awards at major regional and

international film festivals. Amir Muhammad's The Big Durian was the first Malaysian film

to be invited to the Sundance Festival in 2004. Ho Yuhang's film won the Special Jury

Award at the Nantes Three Continents Festival in 2003. Yasmin Ahmad's Rabun and James

Lee's Min and Room to Let were screened at the 21 st Turino Film Festival. And Yasmin

Ahmad's Mukhsin received the Glass Bear (Special Mention) and the Grand Prix of the

Kinderfilmfest International Jury at the 2007 Berlin Film Festival.

Some, like the films of Yasmin Ahmad and Bernard Chauly, are even being shown to

broader audiences on the commercial circuit, a "cross over" that requires some compromises

to censors. These films are enriching mainstream cinema, and bringing more subtlety and

intelligence to what at least one commentator, Anwardi Datuk Jamil, has called the very

warped view of society presented by Malaysian commercial cinema. lO The way that

independent filmmakers collaborate on each other's projects also represents an alternative

way of being Malaysian. The same names keep turning up in the credits of these independent

films, pointing to a new kind of community that is engaged ideologically, one where

243 ------

members collaborate without regard for race, even as they continue to interrogate both race and nation. This outpouring of independent films is a form of "relational autobiography" reflecting what Susan Stanford Friedman, speaking of women's narratives, calls a "sense of shared identity .... an aspect of identification that exists in tension with a sense of their own uniqueness" (cited in Smith and Watson 201). But this outpouring is also relational in the way it moves the conversation about identity into what Paul John Eakin might identify as yet another "register." Like Eakin, I want life writing to be "as expansive and inclusive as possible" (99). The move from print to film continues in a different genre the process of identity-formation through self-narration. Independent filmmakers narrate the evolving project of building a nation by coming together to interrogate who they are, and how the dynamics are shifting within or between different ethnic communities And they also attest to strategies for being Malaysian by succeeding in being seen despite government indifference, and the deliberate withholding of support. In this way they escape the panopticon of surveillance that Foucault describes as being endemic to the state apparatus. Instead, they have created a new forum, a relatively unregulated public space where private individuals can come together in ways that Habermas described. The "cinema," even if often only the cinema of private showings, becomes the "civic plaza" that the state refuses to provide.

Roger Garcia reports that at the 2005 San Francisco International Film Festival,

Deepak Kumaran Menon remarked that in making his film Chemman Chaalai (The Gravel

Road),

he did not have much governmental interference with his project because no

one understood why he would make a picture about the Tamil in the first

244 · ------

place. Their low place on the multicultural ladder of Malaysia affords them

the luxury of being invisible, if not inconsequential.

Because Menon's film was not made in Bahasa Malaysia (Malay language), it did not qualifY for the tax rebate offered to "Malaysian" films. But the organizers of The Fifth Asian

Film Symposium and Inaugural Forum on Asian Cinema, which took place in Singapore in

September 2005, decided to open the festival with Menon's film. Benjamin McKay wrote that

As the Forum developed and the debate about what makes a film a statement

of a given nation and a given people took place, Deepak's film loomed large in

the collective imaginary of the delegates. If the powers that be in Kuala

Lumpur do not have the good grace or intelligence to deem this film

Malaysian because it is seen merely as a film about one sector of Malaysian

society and that it boldly utilizes so beautifully the language spoken by that

community, then so be it. ... For many of the delegates from around the

region who assembled in Singapore, this film spoke above the hollow

platitudes of nation and identity and reaffirmed for all the very reason we

support independent cinema. This film is of course Malaysian. To say

otherwise is an absurdity and only highlights the very real need for a closer

look at Malaysia's official cultural policies.

Those cultural policies may also have been behind the state's failure to showcase such films as Mukhsin (directed by Yasmin Ahmad), Love Conquers All (Tan Chui Mui), Things We

Do When We Fall in Love (James Lee) and Flower in the Pocket (Liew Seng Tat) at the 2007

Kuala Lumpur International Film Festival, or KLIFF. Organized by Kementerian

245 Kebudayaan, Kesenian dan Warisan Malaysia (KeKKWA)-the Ministry of Culture, Arts, and Heritage Malaysia-and the National Film Development Corporation (FINAS), the festival attracted nearly 170 entries, of which 34 were Malaysian. But somehow the organizers did not include the very films that were being screened and honored at other international festivals in Australia, Indonesia, the United States, and Europe. Clearly, these films portrayed Malaysia in ways that were too challenging and problematic for the state.

Wong Soak Koon makes this point in her review of Sepet, a Yasmin Ahmad film about an inter-racial romance:

One of the most interesting aspects of "Sepet" is its inversion or blurring of

stereotypes. Malaysians, in their daily lives, clearly traverse cultural and

ethnic boundaries. We don't live by the tight ethnic categories politicians use

to box us in .... Orked and her mother as well as the queenly house-help,

Mak Yam, love to watch Chinese dramas and soap operas. One of Orked's

heroes is an actor of Japanese-Chinese parentage.... And Thai songs and

music are shown to have a potent libidinous hold on her parents.

Even as the state apparatus insists on a "one-point perspective" on nation, the fact that

Malaysia bears the legacies of diasporic movements demands attentiveness to what Stuart

Hall called "the in-between of different cultures" (Mirzoeff 205).

In Family Frames, Marianne Hirsch argued that

To step into the visual is not to engage in theory as systematic explanation of

a set of facts, but to practice theory, to make theory just as the photographer

materially makes an image .... theory as a form of reflection and

contemplation emphasizes mutual implication over domination, affiliation

246 over separation, interconnection over distance, tentativeness over certainty.

(15)

Yasmin Ahmad's and Tan Chin Mui's films express a sensitive, romanticized yearning for interconnectedness that takes into account the fact that "hybridity generated by diaspora is not just an interaction with the 'host' nation but among diasporas themselves" (Mirzoeff

206). In Yasmin's Gubr1!, the Chinese lead, Alan says "Sometimes I wonder if you guys realise how hard it is for the rest of us to live here. It's like being in love with someone who doesn't love you back." As Benjamin McKay points out in his review, "In Yasmin Ahmad's

Malaysia, it appears possible for a Chinese Malaysian man to give a Malay woman a ride in his truck and discuss his unrequited love for his country and then for her to show great empathy and understanding in return."

In Tan Chui Mui's South of South the audience comes face to face with the human reality of the "boat people." Dr. Mahathir Mohamad once infamously ordered the authorities to "shoot on sight" Vietnamese refugees who entered Malaysian waters and tried to land, because he believed Malaysia was being unfairly saddled with a problem not of its makingY

In other interviews, he had asked why Malaysia had to deal with the "scum" that other nations would not accept. 12 The film captures a sense of both small town mercies and police heavy-handedness. We see boat people appear at the doorway of a Chinese working class family as they sit down to eat. The refugee kneels, offering gold leaf in exchange for a bowl of rice. Seeing this, the grandmother in the family asks rhetorically, "Why must the Chinese suffer so much?" Borders disappear in this moment when the Chinese grandmother identifies with the Vietnamese boat people. They are one in suffering under the state's ever

247 present surveillance through the police who are charged with making sure the boat people do not receive assistance from the townspeople.

In another Tan film, A Tree in Tanjung Malim. nothing-and everything-happens.

The film follows a young Chinese girl's attraction to a Chinese man in his thirties who treats her with a seeming indifference that masks tenderness. They meet at a bus stop, and they talk about nothing in particular, but obliquely about their feelings for each other, on an unremarkable night in a small town. In the background we hear the call to prayer from the mosque. Through this kind of layering of detail, the film explores the local environment in which diasporic identity is constructed in Malaysia. Another film by Tan, The Company of

Mushrooms. is as coarse as A Tree is tender. Again nothing much happens, as a group of

Chinese men gather for drinks. The conversation is mundane, the relationships push the limits offamiliarity, and the camaraderie is as hard as the bottles ofliquor that accumulate on the table, as the four men talk about women, pornography, and how they might find a little sexual adventure.

Some of the racial lines drawn and crossed at peril in Malaysia are glancingly alluded to when the Chinese karaoke bar owner offers to summon Malay prostitutes to pander to his friends' needs or supply Indian gangsters to beat up the man who has stolen the wife of one of the four friends. The bar owner says Indian boys are so "desperate for money they will do anything," so getting someone' s arm chopped off, will cost a mere 2000 ringgit. The film explores issues of power, gender, and class through small, telling, throwaway details. This is the gritty, unremarkable urban underside of Kuala Lumpur, seen under fluorescent light. We get more of this in James Lee's My Beautiful Washing Machine. possibly a sly homage to the Stephen Frears/Hanif Kureishi film, My Beautiful Launderette. about the dynamics of

248 class, race and sex in late eighties London. Lee's film captures the dysfunctional domestic arrangements and the asymmetrical power dynamics of bored Chinese couples who remain closed off to each other but serve as a lens for us to look through them at the nation, darkly.

Amir Muhammad's Shorts. and his repeatedly censored larger projects, takes further on film many of the views about nation articulated by Salleh ben Joned in his newspaper columns and poems. Like Salleh, he reveals with wry humor, how the state's clumsy efforts to advance the primacy of Malays work against the Malays and the idea of a multiracial nation. In Lost. he traces the tedium of the bureaucratic hurdles he has to go through after losing his identity card, commonly referred to as an I.C., which every

Malaysian is required to carry after the age of twelve. As he goes through the bureaucracy of replacing his lost identity card, which is ironically intended to establish who he is, he has his thumbprint taken by a clerk wearing a tudung (head-scarf) who carefully puts on a glove before touching him. He reports: "I felt unclean." The fact that the processes of state leave

Amir Muhammad, a Malay and a Muslim, a lawyer and a film-maker, feeling "untouchable" in his interaction with a fellow Muslim is profoundly telling. It also re-states Salleh's remarks about the limitations placed on his identity as a Malay, and his resistance to being regarded as an apostate for his informed views on Islam when they run counter to the simplistic view of religion promoted by the state and fundamentalist religious authorities.

But Amir does not stop at his own feeling of alienation from the idea of race and nation as defined by the state. His essays in film probe, as an activist social reformer would, the platitudes of state as it affects others. In another short called Friday. he cites the declaration on the official website of the National Mosque that it is a symbol of unity and racial and religious tolerance because it was built with the help of contributions from many

249 Indians and Chinese. Arnir's film counters that "A true test of unity would be if Muslims gave money to the construction of non-Muslim houses of worship as well. After all, fair is fair." This comment carries an added resonance because of the widespread disquiet following the destruction of several Hindu temples by state Muslim authorities, and the many obstacles hindering the construction of new churches in recent times in Malaysia. 13 Amir' s essay in film expresses a solidarity with non-Malay Malaysians that rejects the homogenizing of

Malays through automatic identification with state religious policies that are increasingly inhospitable to non-Muslims.

Like the photographs discussed by Marianne Hirsch, these independent films present the "paradoxes inherent in postrnodemity" (14).What Hirsch has said offamily photographs, we might say of life writing as it increasingly takes the form of independent film and media-generated visual landscapes. The films let us into a contemporary

"space of cultural memory composed of leftovers, debris, single items that are left to be collected and assembled in many ways, to tell a variety of stories, from a variety of often competing perspectives" (13). One might agree with one of Tan Chin Mui's young protagonists, who fantasizes about his father's job as a scrap-collector, and concludes that

"there is treasure everywhere.,,14 In what can be read as an inversion of the colonial voyages of discovery, the little boy thinks of his father's refuse truck as a big ship, sailing the world in search of treasure. In creating on film the "aesthetics of garbage," Tan and a cluster of independent film producers, who have been creating small, semi­ autobiographical films about their personal journeys of discovery, share what Ella Shohat and Robert Starn called "bricolage aesthetics." We recognize in them a "common leitmotif of the strategic redemption of the low, the despised, the imperfect, and the

250 'trashy' as part ofa social overturning" (51).

Similarly sensitive to the history told in everyday lives, John and Jean

Comaroff argue that "narrative history cast only a weak light," and that "historical consciousness is not confined to one expressive mode, that it may be created and conveyed, with great subtlety and no less "truth," in a variety of gemes" (35). Seeking to articulate a

"poetics of history," their investigations of the consciousness of colonizer and the colonized takes them into journals and letters, novels and poems, praise poems and initiation songs, even the "everyday actions of the illiterate majority who spoke of their history with their bodies and their homes, in their puns, jokes and irreverencies" (35). Life writing in all its unstable forms--cartoons and films, evening dinner theatre and newspaper columns­ provides a poetics of identity in the same way that the Comaroffs argue one can arrive at a poetics of history.

Life writing shows us how Malaysians have been drawn from colonial times to the present "into a conversation with the culture of modem capitalism---only to find themselves enmeshed, willingly or not, in its order of signs and values, interests and passions, wants and needs" (xii). The writers discussed in this study allow us to see the dynamics of a postcolonial plural society reconfiguring itself for nationhood, showing us what Inga

Clendinnen called the "deformations and accretions" that occur with colonized peoples (137).

Thus in Kanna Thiagarajan's ChittaQpa, as McKay points out, the dialogue "skipped nicely between languages-a reflection of course of the way people actually speak in Malaysia." A

Malaysian Chinese film maker, James Lee, makes a short film, Bernafas Dalam LumQur that uses Bahasa Malaysia on screen in ways that have "influenced the cadence and rhythm of the

251 narrative." Bernard Chauly's, Goodbye Boys revisits this young, thirty-five year old film­ maker's childhood and coming of age through what happens when a scout troop takes a grueling 100 kilometer hike through an old tin-mining landscape:

Goodbye Boys is a simple journey with complicated realizations. Set in 1990,

Malaysia, it is about a gang of pimply guys with raging hormones, undecided

ambitions and formative identities. They set out on a grueling 5-day journey

through the Kinta VaUey - once the richest tin deposit in the world, now an

abandoned plain - that changes friendships and selves. It's a group expedition

with individual goals. The harsh realization is that although we're a

troop/patrol, we're not necessarily a 'brotherhood'.

Chauly clearly establishes the film as life writing, declaring that it deals with his "crucial formative years spent in a Mission School run by La Salle Brothers." But he treats this experience very differently from the way that Shirley Lim dealt with her own convent education. In his Director's Note on the film's website, Chauly says:

Growing up in small town Ipoh, educated in Malaysia, America and the UK, I

feel now is the right time to teU 'Goodbye Boys.' Although this will be my

second feature film after Gol & Gincu, it's my first screenplay. Goodbye Boys

is an expedition film, 8 boys on journeys offorming identities, part oflarger

routes in life. "Education is that which remains when everything else learnt in

school is forgotten," a quote by Einstein I still find relevant. Goodbye Boys, a

semi-autobiographical tale and important aspects, the result of 'that which

remains,' now ready to be recounted ... 15 years later.

252 Chauly points to his films as expressions of his realization that "identity is my route, not my roots." This sense of identity as a continuing journey, rather than an essence fixed in race, class, gender or nation, is perhaps what most informs the life writing that we see today via the genre of independent film.

These filmmakers are locating nationhood the way Hirsch tells us Todorov and

Habermas located "the 'universality of the human race' through a systematic scrutiny of particularities, not in a simple specularity." Hirsch adds that

Todorov's integrationism, like Jurgen Habermas's Enlightemnent humanist

community, does not erase otherness and power, but wishes to respond with

ideals of civility and mutuality, a recognition of fundamentally shared values

and a model of responsible citizenship. (71)

In the same spirit, Kwame Anthony Appiah more recently has written that "identity is at the heart of human life," and the "ethics of identity" must go hand-in-hand with "the cosmopolitan impulse" (268). Autonomy, argues Appiah, makes possible variety, which in turn sustains the cosmopolitanism that fosters human agency. Both the ethics of identity and the cosmopolitan impulse are threatened in multiple ways in Malaysia primarily through the power and apparatus of the state. Amartya Sen has observed that "The neglect of the plurality of our affiliations and of the need for choice and reasoning obscures the world in which we live" (xiv). Malaysia is now experiencing what Sen has described in India as the "disastrous consequences of defining people by their religious ethnicity and giving predetermined priority to the community-based perspective over all other identities" (169).

The life writing discussed in this study bears out the truth of both Appiah and Sen's observations. The new pictorial turn that life writing is taking, and the conversation that is

253 clearly going on within the small but growing cluster of independent filmmakers and an ever­ widening online community in Malaysia, attest to a continuing spirit of resistance. These developments offer some hope that Malaysians may better understand through that resistance what Appiah called the "sociality of mutual dependence" through which the ethics of identity as well as the spirit of cosmopolitanism may yet survive the ravages of the state (268). The

March 2008 general elections in Malaysia, which saw the ruling coalition lose control of five major states and the Opposition parties make unprecedented gains in Parliament, attest to the growing willingness and ability of Malaysians to come together to address shared needs. 1s

Khoo Gaik Cheng identifies "cosmopolitanism" as the defining characteristic of

Malaysian indie films. They reflect cosmopolitanism "in the Kantian sense of a 'worldwide community of humanity committed to common values,' and as a 'political project for recognizing multiple identities' .... that is oriented to the individual who is simultaneously a member of many groups." By writing their lives and the lives of those around them on-screen in collaborative ways that cross multiple borders, these filmmakers seem to be giving fresh expression to that optimism about a newly independent nation prevalent in the early decades of independence and found in the lives and aspirations chronicled in the biographies of middle class leaders of the different communities that Victor Morais turned out in rapid succession to celebrate Malaysia'S new nationhood. My discussion of Maniam's life writing also pointed out the importance of his attention to a whole class of people previously ignored: the ordinary, often severely disadvantaged working class. Malaysia's independent filmmakers are today more attentive to both working and middle class lives and to how the two inter-penetrate and overlap. Like Maniam, they are recording the particularities of everyday interaction, rather than the broad strokes of national history and very nature of their

254 professional collaboration suggest their awareness of how much Malaysian society is constituted of

a multitude of persons, existing successively and side by side, who cannot do

without associating peacefully and yet cannot avoid constantly offending one

another. Hence they feel destined by nature to [fonn], through mutual

compulsion under laws that proceed from themselves, a coalition in a

cosmopolitan society ... a coalition that, though constantly threatened by

dissension, makes progress on the whole. (Kant 190 -1)

In making the case for this kind of Kantian cosmopolitanism in Malaysia, Joel KaIm argues that "relative peace" is not always "the result of the imposition of good governance by nation-states." Rather, he points to the cosmopolitanism that "governs the practices of localized individuals and institutions, everyday social interaction between individuals and groups, popular cultural activities and fonns of religious worship, patterns of economic interaction, and the infonnal institutions oflocal governance (167 - 8). The blossoming of independent films in Malaysia suggests that at the level of popular culture, as independent films enter the mainstream and enrich the national conversation about identity, Malaysians are finding other more satisfactory ways of articulating who they are. And they are doing so daily in larger numbers than ever before in a climate of mounting political tension. The

Malaysian blogosphere and the ease of distribution that the internet has provided have unleashed a virtual torrent of email communications that have given Malaysians the more freedom of expression and freedom of assembly than they have ever enjoyed. In so doing, these newer genres of life writing are allowing a more spirited, more broad-based, multi­ lingual conversation about the state of the nation. It is a conversation supported by instantly

255 shared news, videos and photographs that is more accessible to all. It is a conversation that ventures beyond the confines of a literary, educated minority and is breaking down old barriers of class, race, generation and gender. In so doing these emerging forms of life writing are helping to further dispel some of the colonial and postcolonial fictions of this small nation and propose new ways of imagining Malaysia that cross traditional racial and religious boundaries and create new alliances.

256 1 See http://www.foxmovies.com/entrapment for details of the film, and the use of Kuala

Lumpur, described as "the high-tech capital of Malaysia."

2 See http://www.petronas.com.my for a detailed tour of the building and its use of traditional

Islamic design elements and Malay handicrafts in what the architect, Cesar Pelli, former

Dean of Yale's School of Architecture describes as an effort to capture "the essences of the country. The building is rooted in tradition, but it is mostly about Malaysia's aspiration and ambition. "

3 See http://www.tourism.gov.my/co!J1. The various permutations of the campaign are still available for viewing in the Trade and Marketing Resources section of the website.

4 The choice of the women in the ads appears to support what marketers have identified as a trend to be exploited in Asia: the interest in looking lighter skinned and more

Western. A 2003 article in the New York Times quotes a Maybelline researcher, Balanda

Atis, who had just been awarded a patent for a new mascara formula. "Marketed in Asia as Maximum Lash Base Mascara, it fills out the 'short, stubby lashes' that Asian women tend to have, according to Ms Atis. 'The Asian market right now has a huge interest in the Western look,' she said." The same article goes on to discuss other patents for a cream to "brighten undereye circles in Caucasian women and serve as a general skin lightener for Asian women" (20 January 2003). The growth in this trend is borne out by the numerous brands of skin lighteners now offered at the cosmetic counters in

Malaysia today. Five years ago, it would have been hard to [md any.

257 5 Malaysia and the other members of ASEAN have deliberately adopted a policy of non­ interference that keeps them from speaking out on issues like Myanmar, for fear that their neighbors' gaze might be turned to what goes on within their own borders. As a result, any attempt by groups outside of the country to comment on or intervene in support of Malaysian issues-whether they be the handling of the Deputy Prime Minister's sacking, the treatment of Vietnamese refugees, or the police mis-handling of peaceful rallies-is easily dismissed as unacceptable interference in the internal affairs of the nation. Malaysia has cited this ASEAN principle of non-interference on every occasion where it has failed to speak up in response to desperate situations in neighboring countries. See http://www.kln.gov.myl?m id=2, the official website of the Malaysian Ministry of Foreign Affairs for a detailed position statement on why it has spoken out on some notable occasions, as in the case of Bosnia, but has generally remained silent on others, such as the continuing hold on power by the military junta in

Mynamar.

6 See http://rockybru.blogspot.com/2007110/istana-zakaria.htmlfor the much circulated photographs and commentary on the lavish sixteen bedroom, twenty one bathroom mansion built by a state assemblyman on land acquired through highly irregular means. All charges brought against him were dropped.

7 See http://ca.youtube.com/watch?v=rIWmafBG1Mo for a BBC report on the Hindraf rally. The report includes an interview with a member of the Malaysian Indian Congress, a part of the ruling Barisan Nasional coalition, who distances himself from those who took part in the rally, and defends the actions of the police. His comments were widely mocked.

258 8 See http://scottthong.wordpress.com/2007/11115/2007-bersih-ral1y-super-cover-up-iob-by- govemment-and-mainstream-medial for a layman's view of the rally for clean elections. The photographs of scenes from the rally contrast starkly with the neat, staged images of the

Malaysia Truly Asia campaign.

9 The very public sacking of Deputy Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim in September 1998 after a widening rift between him and the Prime Minister Dr. Mahathir Mohamad set in motion events that caused a great deal of public and private anger and anguish over the months that followed. Whatever their ethnicity and regardless of how they felt about the Deputy Prime Minister, Malaysians recoiled from the circus atmosphere in which his trial for alleged sodomy was held, his assault by the Chief of Police while in custody, and the lurid front page treatment of Anwar's supposed mis-deeds by a compliant press. In addition to dividing the Malays over the very public "shaming," considered by many to be culturally objectionable and very un-Malay, the trial and treatment of Anwar Ibrahim had the effect of making Malaysians come together in a shared disgust at being taken for fools by those in power. A particularly telling example of the drivel dispensed during this period, was the Prime Minister's suggestion that his

Deputy had incurred his black eye while under detention because he had perhaps punched himself in the face. In Face Off, a personal diary of the street protests and personal encounters surrounding those events, and the call for Reformasi (reform), independent internet writer and journalist Sabri Zain describes speaking to an Indian taxi driver who rails at how "fed up he was at being treated like he was stupid. 'We all knew a long time ago he [the Police Chief] beat up Anwar. Why fool us all these five months? And they 259 thought we were all stupid enough to believe that he beat himself up?' He then mockingly pretended to punch his face repeatedly with his fists" (71).

10 Anwardi's paper "Malaysian Cinema: Filem Kita Wajah Kita" (Our Film, Our Face) is referenced in Benjamin McKay's "Whose Film Is It Anyway?" posted on Kakiseni's website, a forum for discussion of the Malaysian arts scene.

11 See R.S. Milne and Diane K. Mauzy's discussion of Mahathir's disposition towards the

West and his strategies for leadership. Milne and Mauzy also make the point that in a country whose politics is so explicitly founded on the claims of race, each of the nation's

Prime Ministers represent some kind of hybridity, with Thai, Bugis, Persian, or Indian blood in their heritage, even as they acted as champions for the Malay race.

12 See http://querv.nytimes.com/gstifullpage.html?res''''J50DEODF I E39 F93AA25752C 1A96F948260 for a report on Mahathir' s position on the refugees that got Malaysia front page treatment around the world.

13 See http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/4965580.stm and http://linkenlim.blogspot.comI2007/03/destruction-of-non-muslim-worship.html for accounts of the demolition of a modest church while it was in the process of being built on Orang Asli land, of the difficulty in getting permits to build churches in new townships, including the administrative capital, Putrajaya which boasts a very impressive mosque, and of the demolition of a number of nineteenth century Hindu temples supposedly because they did not have the required land permits.

260 14 See Tan's 1999 independent film of the same name: There is Treasure Everywhere.

15 See http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/08/world/asiaJ08cnd- malaysia.hlml? r=2&ref=worJd&oref=sJogin&oreFsJogin for a report on the poor performance of the ruling Barisan Nasiona1, and the Opposition parties gains.

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