Intimating the Sacred: Religion in malaysian Fiction

Notes

In a recent essay on the status of anglophone Malaysian literature, the writers argue that the “proliferation of Malaysian Literature in English [in the last ten years] can be seen as a way of resisting … colonialist discourse by providing a space for Malaysians to create their own constructions of themselves”.1 They qualify this point with the example of how such writings no longer shy away from the use of local terminology (especially that pertaining to food),2 and as such, are resonantly expressing the “construction of a Malaysian identity and to project a more multicultural reality”.3 This essay, I suspect, may be aligning itself with the current political direction in Malaysia which, under the leadership of Prime Minister Dato’ Sri Mohd. Najib Razak (who was elected in 2008, succeeding Ahmad Badawi), proposes to eradicate racism and promote meritocracy through what is known as the “1Malaysia” campaign. Although I am sympathetic with the two critics’ view, and even wish that their assertion were correct, I cannot however agree with them. It is plausible to say that Malaysian literature in English no longer panders to a colonialist discourse but this is not in itself a recent innovation: in the case of fiction, Fernando’s, Maniam’s and Lee’s writings have already demonstrated such a resistance. And it is also accurate to argue that anglophone Malaysian literature provides a space in which writers can fashion their identities, but this is often performed against the state’s dogmatic endeavours to construct its people in a certain, limiting way (tellingly, the two critics deftly avoid the term “nationalism”, replacing it instead with the less threatening “colonialist ”). It is evident that the writers on whom I have focused in my study (save Fernando and Lee) rarely, if ever, write about those outside their own ethnic communities, and this trend continues to manifest in even Conclusion 210 Intimating the Sacred the most recent writings in English by Malaysian (or Malaysian-born) writers. To name just four examples which have achieved international acclaim: Tash Aw’s The Harmony Silk Factory (2005) and Tan Tuan Eng’s The Gift of Rain (2007) both distill the impact of the Second World War on the Chinese community in Malaya, while Rani Manicka’s The Rice Mother (2002) and more recently, Preeta Samarasan’s Evening Is the Whole Day (2008), like Maniam’s narratives, focus on the struggles of Indians living in diaspora. When characters from other ethnic groups are featured in these narratives, they play roles of minor importance, almost as if gestured toward merely to halfheartedly remind the reader that Malaysia is a multiracial society. Like their predecessors, these current practitioners of creative writing are perhaps either wary of crossing racial boundaries in their narratives, or feel inadequately equipped to sensitively portray members of other ethnic communities without reducing them to stereotypes (a weakness from which Samarasan’s novel, in my view, suffers).4 Nevertheless, Malaysian literature in English does contribute to a sense of a “multicultural reality” in two significant ways. The first, paradoxically , reveals that this “reality” continues to remain fraught with tension, suspicion and ignorance. The very fact that these narratives either explicitly (such as “Ibrahim Something”) or implicitly represent someone from outside one’s ethno-religious community as “other” clearly shows that racial and religious harmony remains a condition that the country has yet to achieve.5 Secondly, a point that is related to and somewhat modifies the first, and speaks in a more optimistic tenor, these narratives are written in a language that transcends racial boundaries and this makes them accessible for readers from outside the writer’s specific ethno-religious community. If most Malays are unable to read Chinese or Tamil, and most Chinese and Indians are resistant to reading materials written in Bahasa Malaysia, the neutrality of the English language becomes, almost by default, a common ground for which these divergent peoples can meet to perhaps learn to understand and appreciate one another. This is the view which Malaysian poet Salleh ben Joned has tirelessly championed (see the Introduction). If language is indeed the “soul” of the people (“bahasa jiwa bangsa”), it is perhaps English, more so than Bahasa Malaysia, that has the facility to capture the cultural complexities experienced by a Conclusion 211 specific ethno-religious community and translate them into a recognizable “reality” for others. To read literature written in English by a Malay, Chinese or...