Portuguese and Luso-Asian Legacies in Southeast Asia, 1511-2011, vol. 1: The Making of the Luso-Asian World: Intricacies of Engagement

11. Binding Ties of Miscegenation and Identity: The Narratives of Henrique Senna Fernandes (Macao) and Rex Shelley (Singapore)

11 BINDING TIES OF MISCEGENATION AND IDENTITY: THE NARRATIVES OF HENRIQUE SENNA FERNANDES (MACAO) AND REX SHELLEY (SINGAPORE) Isabel Maria da Costa Morais Vários “pequenos” portugueses fizeram sentir a sua presença na “imensa Asia”, uns quase como reis, alguns como escravos, o maior número simplesmente como portugueses capazes de amar mulheres orientais e ser por elas amados. Capazes de fecundar mulheres de cor e fazer sair dos seus ventres portugueses também de cor. (Several “small” Portuguese made felt their presence in the “enormous Asia”, some as almost kings, others as slaves, the great majority just as Portuguese [who were] able to love oriental women and be loved by them. [They were] able to inseminate women of colour and to make their wombs produce other Portuguese also of colour.)1 Gilberto Freyre, Aventura e Rotina Despite the dynamics of globalization and rapid economic and political development, it is still noticeable nowadays that several Portuguese creolized communities in postcolonial societies have resisted cultural homogenization, particularly those scattered throughout the detached, peripheral regions of East and Southeast Asia that were under the Estado da Índia’s sovereignty and influence (Goa, Daman, Diu, Sri Lanka, Malacca, Macao and Timor) and 239 240 Isabel Maria da Costa Morais that the Portuguese created alongside the local political authorities (Indonesia and today’s Singapore). By the beginning of the seventeenth century, the official population in the colonies of several territories in Asia that proudly claimed Portuguese ancestry had reached nearly one-and-a-half million individuals, as a legacy of colonial (dis)encounters. Centuries later, the Portuguese descendants of this “shadow empire” forged through trading, matrimonial alliances and cultural networks — notwithstanding a pragmatic adaptation to times of unprecedented political, economic and cultural upheaval — persist in a quest for identity and cultural reaffirmation of “Portuguese” cultural differentiation, which continues to be faithfully perpetuated and transmitted, centuries after the earlier Portuguese contacts ceased.2 These communities show distinctive aspects of what could be called a certain “Luso-Eurasianness”, exhibited in oral literature, religious practices, family surnames, ceremonies, cuisine, public structures, ways of speaking and, above all, in identity-making religious and cultural reinterpretation of lived and shared commonalities. This study argues that, even if relatively scant attention has been paid to the literary production of the communities considered here, in particular in Anglophone postcolonial studies, they have influenced and continue to exercise seminal influence on most postcolonial imaginaries, either in their respective societies or in the contemporary fiction of the Luso diaspora. In fact, as forms of marginal discourses in the colonial and postcolonial societies, their narratives have addressed issues such as a quest for identity, hybridity and (dis)encounters between the colonized and the colonizers, which noticeably influenced colonial and postcolonial imaginaries through their local language by consolidating what can be designated as “Lusophone Asian literature”. These representations, narratives and celebrations of a mythologized Portuguese miscegenated ethnicity, reproduced even in official local languages such as English, testify that from the early nineteenth century until nowadays, some members of the local elite — artists and writers who identified themselves as descendants of the earlier Portuguese settlers and forged solid links with the Catholic Church, colonial and military administrations, and trading networks — have been committed to reinventing themselves through novels and newspapers. These media “provided the technical means for ‘representing’ the kind of imagined community that is the nation”, in consonance with Benedict Anderson’s argument in his influential study Imagined Communities.3 In the chapter “Creole Pioneers”, Anderson remarks that the invention of the printing press and the rise of print media contributed to a textual representation of a “popular” print culture, which was also crucial in its Binding Ties of Miscegenation and Identity 241 contribution to a global exchange that would have reinforced the idea of an “imagined community”.4 Anderson further explains that, before the eighteenth century, the concept of nation was extensive, as Latin was the language of a vast imagined community called Christendom. However, as changes occurred in the religious communities, such a concept began to be replaced by French and English as vernacular languages of administrative centralization. Thus, print capitalism — allied to the book market, supported by the improvement of communications and the emergence of new and diverse forms of national languages — established the creation of clusters of small creole “imagined political communities”. They were eager to promote new forms of national and cultural consciousness, aimed at attaining widespread...