Different Voices: The Singaporean/Malaysian Novel

11. PLAYING MADAME MAO (2000)

239 PLAYING MADAME MAO (2000) In Playing Madame Mao (2000), Lau Siew Mei through effective exploitation of the convention of multiple narrators is able to explore fully the concept of freedom of speech. This is because The language used by characters in the novel, how they speak, is verbally and semantically autonomous; each character’s speech possesses its own belief system, … thus it may also refract authorial intentions and consequently may to a certain degree constitute a second language for the author. (Bakhtin 1981, p. 315) Thus the multiplicity of voices enables the author to express the underlying theme of the narrative. According to the writer, “central to Playing Madame Mao is the question of what freedom of speech means to human society. What are the effects of censorship and self-censorship upon the inner lives of people living in a country where they are prevalent?” (Quayum 2002, p. 446). Lau Siew Mei CHAPTER XI 11 SMNovel.indd 239 10/6/09 10:07:05 AM 240 Different Voices emigrated to Australia in 1994 and her novel, published in Australia, uses a mode of presentation which imposes an aesthetic distance from the obliquely political message buried in a phantasmagoric representation of life in Singapore. The main plot of the novel deals with the so called Marxist incident of 1987 when a group of Catholic Church workers was arrested for conspiring to incite resistance against the state of Singapore. The writer uses this incident to dramatize the effects of censorship and the lack of freedom of speech in a society. The blurb by Nicholas Jose states that the novel is “a phantasmagoric representation of the life in a world of mirrors, where a woman’s memoir of her existence is projected through flashes of this myth and history”. The effective exploitation of this mode is possible as the characters, Tang the scholar, Roxanne the journalist, Chiang Ching the scriptwriter and third person narrator, all speak in the same register as they come from the educated, upper middle-class, where English has become the language of thought and feeling in Singapore. This allows the writer to make rapid changes of scene where one point of view blends into another. The voice of Madame Mao is in vernacular transcription and it is through the role play of Chiang Ching the actress and scriptwriter, that her voice is heard. By using the same name, Chiang Ching, for both the actress in Singapore and for Madame Mao, the writer is able to create the time shifts involving cross references, backwards and forwards, across the chronological span of action. The writer constructs the multilingual environment of Singapore through the speech of the minor figures such as the old amah Ah Mui, the old man Ah Pek, and the old Encik Ali, who speak in a lower register. When Ah Mui 11 SMNovel.indd 240 10/6/09 10:07:05 AM Playing Madame Mao (2000) 241 says, “Two men to see master” (p. 19) and “I am old, lah” (p. 24), the writer establishes a low variety of English. With the stone engraver, the writer uses the interjection “ah” to denote the lower register. He says, “You must be important lady ah. What you like? A poem? In stone? You have money?” (p. 27), and “Many think death important” (p. 27). The omission of articles and markers for question show that he has very little formal education in English. Encik Ali says “You come again, ah?” (p. 44). Here “ah” which denotes the lower register, used as a question particle, is typical of Singapore-Malayan English speech. However, the dialogue with Ah Pek is rather problematic. He starts with a low variety of English when he says, “Complain also no use” (p. 76) and “Why you not married” (p. 76), but as the dialogue develops he moves to a higher register with statements such as “They didn’t dare execute her” (p. 76), ‘I went to China in support of the Communist Revolution” (p. 76), and “I was one of the lucky ones who managed to survive” (p. 77). This inconsistency mars the artistic representation of the speaking voice of Ah Pek. A multilingual environment is also evoked through the use of lexical borrowings from Malay, the Chinese dialects, and the Indian languages. They are scattered throughout the narrative. The knowledge of the Malay words such as putat laut (p. 11), kachang puteh (p...