Violence and Comedy: The Malayan Emergency in the Malaysian Novels of Lloyd Fernando and Anthony Burgess

The period of violence and civil unrest in the Malay Peninsula, known to the British as the Malayan Emergency (1948–60), evolved out of the anti-Japanese guerrilla campaigns of World War II. It was also often referred to as a communist insurgency because of the leading role of trade union leaders inspired by communist successes in China. These campaigns were directed against the British, who were trying to reestablish suzerainty after the defeat and withdrawal of the Japanese. In this sense the Malayan Emergency was also an anticolonial war of independence.

The anti-British insurgency effort in Malaysia was waged viciously. Although the insurgency did not spread to the whole of the Malay Peninsula (it remained contained mainly in the district of Johore), it had a firm grip on the public imagination. This important, socially disruptive period of Malaysian/Singaporean history is represented very differently in the Malaysian novels of Lloyd Fernando and Anthony Burgess, both of whom locate their stories in the period of the emergency. In Fernando’s novel Scorpion Orchid violence is embraced as a catalyst for the emergence of a postcolonial national identity; in Burgess’s novels the violence of the emergency is subdued and elided, transmuted into farce and comedy.

Lloyd Fernando is one of three prose writers who should rightfully be considered to stand at the forefront of Malaysian literature written in English.¹ Though Fernando was not a prolific writer of fiction, his first novel, Scorpion Orchid, is very influential, a regular set text in university courses dealing with Singaporean and Malaysian writing (it also has been adapted and performed as a play).² Scorpion Orchid is remarkable for its experimental form, combining Western and Asian narratives, and for its comprehensive vision of a postcolonial society, a vision that has been successfully fulfilled in present-day Singapore. Fernando expresses this vision in a modernist novel that brings together historical, cultural, and fictional narratives in fractured synthesis.

Written in 1976, Scorpion Orchid’s act of composition is situated in a postcolonial world—postcolonial in a chronological sense—but the novel itself looks back to the 1950s, a time of racial tension and nationalistic fervor in an atmosphere charged with the exhilarating anticipation of decolonization. Fernando’s novel has a clear ideological agenda: to promote a tolerant multiethnic nationalism by foregrounding a common regional heritage, one that does not deny the participation of European colonialism. It aims to create, in other words, a sense of a common cultural memory that can serve as the foundation for national consciousness. The element of national allegory in Scorpion Orchid is made very obvious by the self-conscious experimentalism of the novel, and consequently it is a point critics of the novel cannot fail to notice. K. S. Maniam points out that Scorpion Orchid “creates myths almost arbitrarily to present an integrated Malaysian nationality.”³ He is referring to the italicized passages liberally interspersed throughout the novel, which together supply the novel’s underlining of latent significance with a mythical dimension. The theme that emerges from a historical consideration of Scorpion Orchid is the theme of national birth and the attendant anxieties of racial conflict and ethnic self-interest. Another critic, Ron Shepherd, notes the metaphor of growing up in Scorpion Orchid. He says, “[T]he process of growing up, at all levels, is also the process towards some notion of truth or wisdom. The text itself reflects growth and is part of the metaphor.”⁴

The novel operates on two levels. The main narrative is a conventional story involving the disillusionment of four young men—Malay, Chinese, Indian, and Eurasian. These men at the center of the novel gain a new awareness of their ethnic identities as they negotiate the race riots that destroy the complacent sense of camaraderie derived from their elite colonial identity as university students. This awareness is central to their transition from adolescence to adult life. Running parallel to the story of the four young men is a collage of passages from important Malay literary and cultural...