Different Voices: The Singaporean/Malaysian Novel

6. THE CROCODILE FURY (1992)

140 THE CROCODILE FURY (1992) The Crocodile Fury (1992) by Beth Yahp has Australian readers as the target group for it was written and published in Australia. The writer, according to her acknowledgments, draws her information from books such as The Bomoh and the Hantu, Malay Superstitions and Beliefs, Traditions and Taboos, Hantu Hantu, and Ghost Stories of Old China. However, there are only two Malay words in the narrative. The Malay term Mat Salleh (p. 7), a nickname for white man, echoes throughout the narrative, for it is the name of the hill on which the ghost house stands. While the Malay word pontianak (p. 123), used only once, evokes the supernatural beliefs of the Malay community, the term Mat Salleh has a synecdochic function of representing the presence of the British colonials. These words also imply that the story is taking place in a Malay environment where physical abuse and oppression take place. Yahp tells the story using the narrative genre of the fantastic where the narrator becomes the focus of the CHAPTER VI 06 SMNovel.indd 140 10/5/09 2:14:58 PM The Crocodile Fury (1992) 141 conflict of two belief systems, orchestrated in the narrative with the theme of physical abuse and oppression. The fantastic as a genre “supports two alternative readings: a supernatural one and a naturalistic one” (Carroll 1990, p. 145). The narration keeps these two interpretations in balance by making the first person narrator gather the story from her grandmother and her mother, thus repeating the events from two different perspectives. The “astute reader realises that neither of these interpretations is conclusive, and therefore, vacillates or hesitates between them” (Carroll 1990, p. 145). By using this narrative mode, Yahp manages to keep the story ambiguous, allowing the reader to suspend judgment between the naturalistic and supernatural explanation. Since Yahp is using the narrative mode of the fantastic genre, the vagueness of language and language use play a crucial part in creating a blurring of reality. The vagueness of certain details is also strategically ambiguous. For instance, the convent has no name. It is just “The convent on the hill” (p. 4) or “The hill with the convent” (p. 7). Only readers who are familiar with Kuala Lumpur will recognize it as the Bukit Nanas Convent situated on a hill. The city also remains without a name. By stripping the narrative of any geographical details, Yahp manages to blur the boundaries between the natural world and the supernatural. The historical details of the colonial days and the Emergency are generalized for the same purpose. However, Yahp manages to capture the essence of the times in spite of these generalizations. The term “Paper Wars” (p. 245) effectively sums up the war of propaganda that was waged during the Emergency. This is structurally sound as the source of information is the grandmother who is uneducated and ill-informed and lives on a different plane of reality. 06 SMNovel.indd 141 10/5/09 2:14:59 PM 142 Different Voices The illusion of spontaneity is created by making the narrator use phrases such as “never-fail matches” (p. 28), “then put back wrong” (p. 33) “read-over pages” (p. 84), “one-leg-kick servants” (p. 77), and “little-People-litter” (p. 90) which are used by the grandmother to tell her story. By transcribing her idiom, Yahp produces a kind of hybridization of language as these phrases are mimetic translations of the Cantonese dialect. Although these phrases are not new lexical forms, they have the similar function of a new word created from the linguistic structure of the mother tongue. Hence they function like colloquial neologisms, the practice of creating new words. The success lies in their function within the narrative. Colloquial neologisms are a particularly “important feature of the development of English variants” and are an “example of the metonymic function of all post-colonial literature” (Ashcroft et al., 1989, p. 72). The only Chinese word tauhu (p. 79) has the function of inscribing difference. In fact, there is no direct reference to any of the different races, except a suggestion by the phrase “pale men and dark men” (p. 22). This informality in the narration not only enchances the representation of spontaneity, but also illustrates that the communication between the grandmother and the narrator is in a variety of English which has many phrases that are mimetic translations of...