Different Voices: The Singaporean/Malaysian Novel

INTRODUCTION

1 INTRODUCTION The last decade of the twentieth century witnessed a marked increase in novels written with a setting in Malaysia and Singapore by those who have grown up in this region, some of whom have either migrated to other countries or are now living abroad. I have selected novels written about this region by non-European writers that offer possibilities for discussion. As my objective is to reveal the underlying relationship of the represented speech of the person speaking in a multilingual environment, such as Malaysia and Singapore, to the thematic intent of each novel, I have selected novels that suggest that multiple meanings are possible. Therefore, the choice of the texts depends very much on the dialogic quality of the language. In other words I have chosen novels where an internal dialogue in the narrative is present. It is this that allows multiple interpretations. The theoretical basis for the discussion of the text will be the notion of heteroglossia, the base condition governing the operation of meaning in any utterance, postulated by Mikhail M. Bakhtin and the interanimation 00b SMNovel.indd 1 10/2/09 3:33:39 PM 2 Different Voices of languages through the person speaking. Bakhtin says that the novel “orchestrates all its themes, the totality of the world objects and ideas depicted and expressed in it, by means of the social diversity of speech types and by the differing individual voices that flourish under such conditions” (The Dialogic Imagination, p. 263). Bakhtin’s notion of heteroglossia gives an appropriate framework for analysing the novels I have selected because he sees the novel “as a diversity of social speech types (sometimes even diversity of languages) and a diversity of individual voices, artistically organised” (p. 262). Bakhtin also sees the “distinctive links and interrelationships between utterances and languages, this movement of the theme through different languages and speech types” (p. 263) as the basic distinguishing feature of the stylistics of the novel. Bakhtin’s insistence on the person speaking as the central dynamic of the narrative (p. 332) offers a challenge to writers who embark on writing a novel in English in a multilingual speech community such as Malaysia and Singapore, because of the linguistic composition of these societies. Formation of Speech Communities The formation of the multilingual speech communities in Malaysia and Singapore was an accident of history. Although Indian influence started some 1,700 years ago (Andaya and Andaya 1982, p. 14) and contact with China from the fifteenth century (p. 40) onwards, the “development of large and diverse speech communities in the Malay Peninsula took place in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century” (Platt and Weber 1980, p. 2), 00b SMNovel.indd 2 10/2/09 3:33:39 PM Introduction 3 mainly because of the establishment of British Settlements in Penang, Singapore, and Malacca. Immigrants were from different speech communities in India, China, and the Malay Archipelago. And “large scale immigration continued into the twentieth century, due partly to the development of tin mining and, later on, to the rapid growth of the rubber industry” (Platt and Weber 1980, p. 2). The composition of each major ethnic group will indicate the complex nature of the various speech communities . Tamils, Malayalees, Telugus, Bengalis, Punjabis, Gujaratis, and Sindhis, each with a distinct spoken and written language, are classified as Indians. Hakka, Hokkien, Cantonese, Teochew, and Hainanese, each with a different dialect, come under the heading of Chinese. However they have a common written script, Mandarin. The people from the Malay Archipelago were mainly Bugis, Boyanese, Acehnese, Javanese, Sulawesis, and Minangkabaus from Sumatra. They spoke different varieties of Malay. Munshi Abdullah in his travel accounts contrasts the “pure Malay language” (Andaya and Andaya 1982, p. 119) spoken in the state of Johore, with the dialects of Kedah, Kelantan, and Trengganu. However, the colonial government’s identification of each ethnic group with “a specific economic role, affected early colonial policy towards education” (Andaya and Andaya 1982, p. 222) bringing about further divisions in the speech communities. “Only a small local elite” was “given the privilege of an English education”, in order “to equip them for clerical duties within the colonial government bureaucracy or in European-controlled companies” (Andaya and Andaya 1982, p. 222). For this purpose, the first English-medium schools, Penang Free School in 1816, followed by Raffles Institution in Singapore in 1823, were 00b SMNovel.indd...