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5 From Contemplating WordsWorth’s DAFFODILS to listening to the VoiCes oF the “nation” Wong Soak Koon To look back on one’s intellectual journey and development is one of the hardest tasks. Perhaps one should not even attempt it. Now in my sixtieth year, I hope I may be able to do so with some equanimity and honesty. I shall also try to link this trajectory with some of the key concerns of this volume. As I look back, it seems to me that the main difference between the earlier and later phases of my literary criticism has to do with the shift from an F.R. Leavisian unitary sense of “The Great Tradition” and a New Criticism approach, to my later concern with literature as a part of cultural politics. The later phase thus propelled me into examining issues such as the narratives of nation formation and how these are inflected by gender, class, and ethnicity; the hybridity of identity which is constantly in flux in a global-local interface. These issues have also directed me to look more closely at Malaysian writers, both those who write in English and those who use the Malay language. This does not, however, mean that I have abandoned my old loves (Virginia Woolf, Jane Austen, Shakespeare, E.M. Forster, Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy, and Turgenev in translation, etc.).1 the early days Enrolled as a primary pupil in St Mary’s School, then run by Anglican missionaries, in 1955, just before Malaysia (then known as Malaya) achieved 130 Wong Soak Koon its independence in 1957, I was very much schooled in the colonial mould. Yet there was no critique on my part of this colonizing of the mind. In fact, to my young mind, the world of school was sane and orderly, a sanctuary for identity building, away from the tensions of a dysfunctional fourthgeneration migrant Chinese family (my great-grandfather joined the hordes who sailed to the Nanyang regions and chose Malaya to seek his fortune, but by the time I was born, the family wealth from tin mining enterprises had been lost). The English language itself was, for me at the time, a vehicle for imagining landscapes and lifestyles which allowed for “escape”. The lilt and rhythms of the poems in Palgrave’s The Golden Treasury, for example, invigorated me and the foreignness of snowy climes, of vales and dales with grazing sheep, did not estrange. I remember the little cupboard where I kept my small collection of English books, its doors pasted over with just such pastoral scenes which I had studiously cut out from various magazines. Even today, I cannot go wholeheartedly into a postcolonial daffodil bashing of Wordsworth’s much maligned flower. A poem such as Wordsworth’s was, and still is, able to give me recollections “too deep for tears”. It did not matter that I had not then seen a daffodil; I shared the poet’s sentiments, “And then my heart with pleasure fills/And dances with the daffodils”. When I later studied the works of other heirs to migrant families, for example, The Return by K.S. Maniam and the short stories and autobiography, Among The White Moon Faces: Memoirs of A Nonya Feminist by Shirley Lim, I saw that this love of the English language was not unusual with migrants in colonial settings. And yet, it was always accompanied by ambivalence because of the unmooring from communal Chinese or Indian values this attachment to the colonialist’s language inevitably engenders. Ravi, K.S. Maniam’s protagonist in The Return, a third-generation migrant Indian, may have escaped the “madness” which his father’s recalcitrant clinging to Indian cultural mores breeds, but Ravi’s own identity at the end of the novel is an uncertain one. Straddling migrant Indian and colonial legacies as well as an embryonic Malaysian national identity, Ravi discovers that “words will not serve”. Instead, words “will be vague knots/of feelings, lustreless, cultureless” (Maniam 1993, p. 173). In my first year at the University of Malaya, I was still very much moved by the aesthetics of English literary studies. Wavering between majoring in history or in English, I finally chose English because it fed my joy in solitary reading. The English Department gave us an excellent foundation in the close reading of texts for which I am very grateful. We acquired a confident grasp of nuanced, careful reading as we studied diction, imagery, tone, and [13.58.112.1] Project MUSE...

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