Microsoft Word - 02_Page of 23.doc

Transcription

1 中山人文學報 Sun Yat-sen Journal of Humanities Number 23_Winter 2006

2 中山人文學報 Sun Yat-sen Journal of Humanities Number 23_Winter 2006 主編 Editor-in-Chief 林慶勳 (Lin Ching-Hsiun) 執行編輯 Executive Editors 劉文強 (Liu Wen-chiang) 出版者 / Published by 國立中山大學文學院台灣. 高雄市 804 鼓山區蓮海路 70 號 College of Liberal Arts National Sun Yat-sen University 70 Lienhai Road Kaohsiung 804 Taiwan 編輯助理 Tel: +886(7) ext Editorial Assistants Fax: +886(7) 林宜豊 (Lin I-li) Website: 林雅晨 (Lin Ya-chen) cla@mail.nsysu.edu.tw 李宜璐 (Lee I-Lu) 業務助理 Managing Secretary 汪玉秋 (Wang Yu-Chiou) 編輯委員 Editorial Board 邱源貴 (Chiou Yuan-guey) 陳豔姜 (Cheng Yuan-jung) 蔡順美 (Tsai Shun-mei) 蔡秀錦 (Tsai Hsiu-chin) 羅宗濤 (Luo Tzung-tao) 袁鶴翔 (Yuan Heh-hsiang) 陳昌明 (Chen Chang-ming) 張玉玲 (Chang Ye-ling) 編輯顧問 Advisory Panel 余光中 (Yu Kwang-chung) 沈清松 (Shen Ching-sung) 馬水龍 (Ma Shui-lung) 杜維運 (Tu Wei-yun) 許倬雲 (Hsu Chuo-yun) 黃宣範 (Huang Hsuan-fan) * Cover painting: Chen Chi-mao, 大道, 1999, The Road 封面畫為台灣畫家陳其茂先生一九九八年油畫作品 大道 ( 局部 )

3 中山人文學報 Sun Yat-sen Journal of Humanities Number23_Winter 2006 Mohammad A. Quayum Between Worlds: Charting the Singapore National Identity in Lloyd Fernando s Scorpion Orchid 楊凱麟 15 謝綉莉 29 蕭裕民 Cheang Wai-fong Tsai Chia-chin Englishization and Glocalization in Current Taiwan The Woman Does Not Exist : Femininity in Angela Carter s Nights at the Circus 李欣穎 113 李曉菁自然影像 環境想像與地方意識 無言的山丘 137 蔡秀枝傷勢 / 傷逝 : 2046 中的時空重返 159

4 BETWEEN WORLDS: CHARTING THE SINGAPORE NATIONAL IDENTITY IN LLOYD FERNANDO S SCORPION ORCHID Mohammad A. Quayum International Islamic University Malaysia The old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum there arises a great diversity of morbid symptoms. Antonio Gramsci, Prison Notebooks Published in 1976, Scorpion Orchid is Lloyd Fernando s first novel and also the first, and arguably the best, novel in the English language by a Malaysian writer. It was written and published during the most critical period for the English language in the country, in the aftermath of the introduction of the National Language Act in 1967 that made Bahasa Malaysia the new national language, and a further amendment to the Act in 1971 which made it seditious to question the legitimacy of the language and concomitantly the literature written in the language as national literature. This move, and the decision to accord the marginal status of sectional literature to writings in English and other ethnic languages in the country, exposed the deep futility of pursuing English as an imaginative medium in this post-independent, postcolonial, emergent nation-state, forcing many of the writers to cross over to the national language, choose silence, or take up migration to a new land. 1 However, in *This paper is part of a research project on Malaysian Literature in English, funded by The Research Centre, International Islamic University Malaysia. 1.For example, Muhammad Haji Salleh chose not to write in English after 1967, Wong Phui Nam entered a period of protracted silence, and Ee Tiang Hong and Shirley Lim both migrated to Australian and the United States respectively. For further details on this, see my articles Malaysian Literature in English: Challenges and Prospects in the New Millennium and Malaysian Literature in English: An Evolving Tradition. For my discussion of Fernando s socio-cultural-political ideas in his second novel, see Imagining Bangsa Malaysia : Race, Religion and Gender in Lloyd Fernando s Green is the Colour and Received: May 8, 2006/Accepted: Dec. 23, 2006 Sun Yat-sen Journal of Humanities 23 (Winter 2006): 01-14

5 the face of such acute crisis for the writer, Lloyd Fernando decided to stay the course and bring out his novel, not as a marker of challenge to the country s language policy, but out of a simple conviction that a writer is not free to choose his language and could only write in one in which he not only thinks but also feels in the depths of [his] being (Quayum, Lloyd Fernando ). The novel is set in Singapore, where the Fernando family had settled down following their migration from Sri Lanka in 1938, and interrogates in hindsight the politically volatile period before the country s emergence as a separate, independent nation-state in The fate of the island state of Singapore had remained tied to that of neighbouring Malaysia (Malayan peninsula) since the fourteenth century when the Malay writings used to refer to it as Temasek (Place surrounded by the Sea), through the period it came to be called Singapura (Lion City). It was a vassal state (negara) of the Sultan of Malacca until Malacca fell to the Portuguese in the fifteenth century and later to the Dutch in the eighteenth century. In 1768, at the onset of the Industrial Revolution, the East India Company founded a settlement on Penang Island (Pulau Pinang), slowly spreading its control over the whole territory, capturing Dutch Malacca in 1795 and Java in 1811, and finally establishing a new Crown Colony in the region in 1867, administered by a Governor based in Singapore. Thus effectively Singapore became the capital of British Malaya and remained that way until the Japanese Occupation in 1942, when Singapore was renamed Syonan (The Light of the South) and made the capital of Japan s southern region. In 1945, when the British drove the Japanese out, recapturing the territory, Singapore for the first time was detached from the rest of the Malay states (which were formed into Malayan Union in 1946 and the Federation of Malaya in 1948), and ruled as a separate colony, until it was allowed internal self-government in 1959 and independence in 1963, when Singapore briefly joined the Federation of Malaya, before its emergence as a distinct national entity on 9 August The awakening of a new national identity in Singapore began with the Japanese Occupation of 1942 which shattered the skilfully nurtured myth of British superiority and invincibility, and convinced the population of the island that it was time for them to resist the imperial rule and take control of their own destiny. Lee Kuan Yew, the first Prime Minister of autonomous Singapore, explained this burgeoning of new political awareness in the form of anti-colonial nationalism among the people of his generation, in the following words: My colleagues and I are of that generation of young men who went through the Second World War and the Japanese Occupation and emerged determined that no oneneither the Japanese nor the British had the right to push and kick us around. We are determined that we could govern ourselves and bring up our children in a country where we can be proud to be self-respecting people. Shaping a New National Identity with Dialogic Vision: Lloyd Fernando s Green is the Colour. 2.For full details on the history of Singapore, see Andaya and Andaya, A History of Malaysia and Ernest C.T. Chew and Edwin Lee, eds. A History of Singapore. Mohammad A. Quayum_Between Worlds_2

6 When the war came to an end in 1945, there was never a chance of the old type of British colonial system ever being recreated. The scales had fallen from our eyes and we saw for ourselves that the local people could run the country. (10-11) However, this sudden self-awareness and the wish to invent a separate identity for itself from the patriarchal imperial rule did not turn out all positive for Singapore in the immediate years. It destroyed, to use V.S. Naipaul s phrases from a different context, the security of a fixed world or the miraculous peace of the colonial time, and reduced Singapore to a free state. 3 There was widespread unrest and violence throughout the island, especially in the mid 1950s, owing to the proliferation of boisterous mass politics that failed to harness the aspirations of the people to a cohesive force, and the rise of Communist militancy that sought bloodshed and industrial unrest as tools for unsettling and thwarting the colonial power. Singapore was caught between two worlds, one dying and the other about to be born, and in order to be born anew it had to undergo the unavoidable birth pangs, or what Gramsci would call, a great diversity of morbid symptoms. Tok Said, a shadowy figure in the novel, says to Sabran, a protagonist, Birth is bloody. Do not lose heart (64). This is perhaps also the author s view. Part of the problem that led to this political upheaval was that Singapore had hitherto been administered by external powers, often as a small part of larger states and empires, and therefore when it came to self-determination, the people had little experience or sense of collective identity. The problem was exacerbated by the country s historical evolution from a largely monolithic and singular society to a plural and diasporic society during the British colonial period. Singapore (and the Malay Archipelago) was mostly inhabited by the Malays and the Bugis, as well as some Chinese, Indians and orang laut (sea gypsies) before it was made a British colony. With the rapid expansion of the economy during the colonial rule, there was a large influx of indentured workers from South India and southern China into the territory, such that by 1931 the Chinese community in Singapore constituted 74.3 per cent of its total population (Chew 360). Moreover, the British had carefully cultivated the seeds of separatism between the races as its very survival depended on the policy of divide and rulea problem further magnified by the discriminatory Japanese policies towards the different Malayan races during the period of occupation, especially the Chinese who were viewed with deep distrust by the occupying forces owing to the Sino-Japanese rivalry created by Japan s invasion of China in This lack of a shared history and the seeds of discord between the races sowed and nurtured wilfully by the British and Japanese imperialists were to fragment the nationalist movement in Singapore in the pre-independence years on communalethnic lines and so result in extensive political chaos and turbulence. Lloyd Fernando singles out this violent phase of national history for reconstruction and dramatisation in his novel, Scorpion Orchid. Fernando was a student of the University of Malaya in Singapore during this period and had witnessed the explosive political situation in the island first hand. Thus his narrative is as much 3.These phrases from Naipaul are quoted in the article by Koh Tai Ann. Naipaul uses the word free to ironically mean a state of anarchy or lawlessness. 3_Sun Yat-sen Journal of Humanities

7 grounded in fact as in fiction, and can be described as historical fiction in the tradition of the works of such American writers as Norman Mailer and Truman Capote; but at the same time it is an expressly politicised production that meets the definition of a national allegory articulated by Fredric Jameson in his article, Third World Literature in the Era of Multinational Capital. In an attempt to create a distinction between First World and Third World fiction, Jameson explains that one attribute of Third World fiction is that, owing to the long standing history of colonialism and painful memories of subordination, the writers from this part of the world often fetishize the nation and provide their narrative in a way so that the story of the private individual destiny is always an allegory of the embattled structure of the public culture and society (67). This is true for Scorpion Orchid in which the writer focuses on the experiences of four university friends, representing the four major races in Singapore,Sabran (Malay), Santinathan (Indian), Peter (Eurasian) and Guan Kheng (Chinese)and their strained friendship in the face of a mounting political strife as a testimony of what the whole emerging nation was experiencing at the time. Set against the backdrop of such violent and vehement political disorder, the question that the writer centrally poses in his novel is, how can Singapore with its lack of a shared history and internal social cohesion, create a collective soul for itself and chart a common national destiny? The answer that emerges from the narrative is that it is possible through the dismantling and dislodging of racial and gender hierarchies; active and objective settlement of the language question; and creation of mutual trust between the races through a process of interdependence and cultural exchange, or the devising of new contact zones that, in Mary Louise Pratt s words, would allow disparate cultures [to] meet, clash and grapple with each other, often in highly asymmetrical relations of dominance and subordination (Ashcroft 233). It could, furthermore, be accomplished through a weaving of past memories with present experiences and future hopes which would enable Singaporeans to fashion an identity for themselves transcendent of their respective racial and cultural affiliations. The author s hope and fear in his delicate vision for Singapore s future are both embodied in the novel s title. The omniscient narrator claims that orchids are a unique indigenous flower that Captain Smith according to one version of the story surrounding him, who had come to the Malayan peninsula in the eighteenth century on board the Eastern Queenwanted to gather among specimens of flora and fauna during his visit. Thus an autochthonous flower, which also later became the country s national flower, it is suitably made to stand for Singapore, with its bilaterally symmetrical shape and three petals signifying the potential coming together of its three main races (Chinese, Indians and Malays), forming a harmonious and holistic nation. But the author cautions that while orchids could flower, scorpion[s] lurked among the roots in the rich soil (138) and could destroy them any time if not tended and nurtured with utmost care. The author advises that the Singapore nation, like any other nation, needs to be imagined and constructed, and given its diversity, protected against all internal and external threats. As a delicate flower it could thrive only when the circumstances were right, and if left unattended it would fester with destructive worms. When the novel opens the Singapore national identity is in an unformed, unshaped, ungainly state, and whatever illusion of togetherness there was has also Mohammad A. Quayum_Between Worlds_4

8 been coming to pieces. Many of the migrants who had seen the place as their home are now in a hurry to quit. They are not prepared to withstand the sacrifices required of them at this moment of crisis. Santinathan s uncle Rasu is one them; he has lived here for twenty five years, but now that there was too little order, too much unease, uncertainty (12), he is anxious to leave. It s not safe to be here. It s better to be among our own people (13), Rasu ruminates on way to the ship that will take him back to India. Of course, Rasu is good riddance, as with his binary us/them feeling and lack of commitment to the new society, he has no constructive role to play in the formation of the identity of the emerging Singapore nation. Pledge of allegiance to the land and its people, in spite of all challenges, is, after all, the first and foremost requirement from every individual in the crystallisation of a stable, compatible and wholesome identity for any nation. However, while the uncle leaves with his family, the nephew, Santinathan, and his sister Neela, choose to stay on. Santinathan has been a friend of Sabran, Guan Kheng and Peter since their school days. They are from different cultural, racial and economical backgrounds: Santinathan, an Indian, brought up in a plantation; Sabran, a Malay, in a kampung (Malay village); while both Guan Kheng, a Chinese, and Peter, an Eurasian, in the main hub of economic activity during the colonial period, the city. This is how the colonisers had planned the races to remain isolated from one another so that fellowship would not extend beyond racial borders and each would look up to the British for protection against the other. It was their ultimate hope to perpetuate their power, as no interaction between the races would make the building of cultural bridges an impossible taska hope that was expressed by a well-known English writer and an agent of Empire, Anthony Burgess, and is echoed by two of the English characters in Fernando s novel, Ellman and Ethel Turner. In his novel Time for a Tiger, Burgess had expressed this imperial sentiment, drawing wedges between the local races, and establishing superiority of Europeans and their civilising mission in this primitive land, in the following words: The fact is that the component races of this exquisite and impossible country just don t get on. There was, it s true, a sort of illusion of getting on when the British were full in control. But selfdetermination s a ridiculous idea in a mixed-up place like this. There s no nation. There s no common culture, language, literature, religion. (45) Ethel Turner, who has been living in Singapore for several years and lecturing at the same university where the four multiracial friends have been attending as undergraduate students, also voices a similar view when she says to Ellman during a lazy talk, before their prosaic, routine sex, that turns out to be unfulfilling and laborious for both partners (exposing the prurient motif behind the imperial enterprise and the inherent fallacy in the speaker s claim): It s not a single society, really. Thank God the British are here. The Malays are in their kampungs, the Chinese own all the business, and the Indians are in the rubber estates. And the Eurasiansnot half-castes the Eurasians sit in their cricket club and imitate us, 5_Sun Yat-sen Journal of Humanities

9 rather poorly actually. You see, they have nothing in common. If we left tomorrow, there d be such a lovely bit of mayhem that we d have to come back and keep the peace. No, I m afraid we have to grin and bear itthe white man s burden, I mean. (89) This self-valorisation and exaltation of her race by Ethel Turner is rooted in the principle of Social Darwinism and the essentialist views of racial variation put forth by natural scientists in the nineteenth century such as Georges Cuvier and James Cowles Pritchard, that allowed genetic superiority of one human group over others, indicating therefore that the superior race/s could rule over the inferior race/s and inscribe their authority over the other. This argument was not only seized by the proponents of colonialism because it suited their purpose but has also been used in history to justify discrimination, apartheid, slavery and genocide. The idea of race as a valid scientific concept has been rejected by mainstream evolutionary scientists and Zoologists in the twentieth century such as Franz Boas (1912), Ashley Montagu (1941, 1942) and Wilson and Brown (1953) for four reasons: empirical, definitional, the availability of alternative concepts, and ethical (Wikipedia). Yet the discourse has remained an inextricable part of identity politics, especially for the privileged groups, because as the American Civil Rights activist Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. has aptly pointed out, [the] privileged groups seldom give up their privileges voluntarily. Individuals may see the moral light and voluntarily give up their unjust posture; but groups are more immoral than individuals (Wikipedia). Ellman, Ethel Turner s fellow colleague, might think he is an individual and different from the rest of the white people living in Singapore he did not want to be drawn into an ambit which might mark him off as belonging to one camp or another (92)but he certainly has not seen the moral light that the Reverend thinks some individuals are capable of seeing and therefore has not been able to abrogate his racialised unjust posture. In a conversation with his students he shows the same impetus of binary distinction and hierarchisation of human variation, when he says in a superior tone, We brought law and order. You have little in common. The moment we go you ll fight and kill each other until one community gets the upper hand or the communists walk in (147). As the novel progresses, these prophecies of Burgess, Turner and Ellman most tragically and appallingly seem to come true, not because their arguments of racial classification and fixity have any scientific basis but because the colonisers have successfully compartmentalised the people through a process of social segregation and psychological contamination, sowing seeds of mutual distrust and hostility in and between them. Thus the two local workers unions run by the Malays and the Chinese respectively, in spite of their initial plans to join forces against the British Realty, fail to organise united rallies. This lack of understanding and cooperation between the two organisations emasculates the movement, making it distraught, diffused, fragmentary, rowdy and violent. Instead of the British Realty, innocent locals, ironically, become its ultimate victims. Peter is lynched by a mob and Sally-Salmah is gang raped. The four friends suddenly awake to a new reality that their friendship was not strong enough to survive the present turmoil. The worms of racial suspicions creep into their delicate orchid and start putrefying it in a slow process. The foursome eventually turn cold with one another and find themselves as strangers to each other and the rest of society. As Guan Kheng ruminates, trying to escape the riots on Mohammad A. Quayum_Between Worlds_6

10 Victoria Street, with Sally-Salmah sitting next to him in his car, But who understands himself or his true place in this country. Did these people, who jostled on all sides, their faces set in lines of vacant hate, understand themselves? The truth is that no one does. We are all strangers to one another (84). While the novel progresses on this narrative level spelling doom on the friendship as well as the community in general, the author adopts certain strategies to provide his counter-argument and his prescribed solutions to the problems that will help build the collective national identity for the new country. One of these devices is the cultivation of symbols that undercut the race argument and show its plasticity and lack of inherent basis in culture. The other is to interlayer the present narrative with translated passages from the Malay classics, Sejarah Melayu and Hikayat Abdullah. These passages provide considerable novelty, complexity and depth to the novel, giving it an experimental touch and enhancing its allegorical dimension. They also help to anchor the novel in the local tradition, especially by highlighting the native account of history that often contradicts the Eurocentric version. The author indirectly advises readers to view the local history more favourably in order to escape the imperial discourse with its interpelletive rhetoric of race and hierarchic code of regulations. One of the tropes artfully maintained by the author throughout the narrative is the figure of Tok Said, a murky character much discussed and cited by the other characters but who never actually appears in the novel. It is believed that Tok Said is a bomoh, a medicine man, who has been spreading rumour and fear among people and thus causing the turmoil. In this sense Tok Said could be seen as an embodiment of the collective fear of the people, as well as a manifestation of their irrational, superstitious beliefs. Bomohs are highly revered people in the Malay culture, and even the most educated class will flock to a bomoh when they are caught in an emotionally or physically vulnerable state, in spite of the fact that Malays consider themselves religious and bomohs have no religious sanction. Thus by creating a bomoh as the fountainhead of all troubles, it is quite possible that the author is taking a swipe at the superstitious practices in the local culture, which he considers a deformity of religion and a senseless glorification of the irrational. However, interestingly, Tok Said is also believed to have communist links and is even mentioned once or twice as a possible agent planted by the British. Nobody can be sure of his identity. Santinathan, Sabran and Sally have all presumably met him but cannot agree on his racial specificity: Santinathan thinks he is a Malay, Sabran believes he is Chinese, while sally considers he is an Indian. This is of course an expression of the indelible mark of negative difference and how the local imagination is racialised ; how every group thinks that the other is to blame for the unrest. From another point of view, however, it can be seen as the author s way of dislodging the race discourse, that racial differences are more of an illusion than reality, and although race has been used as an ideological weapon to achieve many political ends and became the sine qua non of the colonial rule, the distinction between one race and another is but perceptual and at best cultural, and does not correspond to any biological or epistemological absolutes. A person who looks like an Indian to some might appear like a Malay or Chinese to others. Rigidity in race undercuts the human potential for adaptability and the concept of monogenism 7_Sun Yat-sen Journal of Humanities

11 that we all share one ancestor and there is only one race living on earth today, the human race. Sally also seems to have a figurative role. She appears as a living character, occupying a central position in the principal narrative, and yet it is obvious that she is more than just a fictional individual. She was once married but has run away from her husband and now works as a prostitute. She is an old friend (25) of Santinathan, Sabran, Guan Kheng and Peter, and allows herself to give love to all four of them freely and often without money (86). In a sense she is the centre of attention for all the four friends and come to embody their mutual bonds. She could also be seen as the representation of the homeland that gives love to all its children equally and indiscriminately. She explains: Even the rough ones I give them a little love. They are frightened, all of them, as if they are running away from something and want to rest. Malays, Chinese, Indians, Eurasians, I give them rest. I know they are confused, they talk bad of one another sometimes sometimes even they get very angry. But when they are with me they become calm, they don t argue, they don t talk. (120) A prostitute, she shares the similar maternal instincts of the homeland that knows how to give only, without expecting anything in return. A central irony of human beings has been that a temporal creature, it has always felt possessive about something more permanent, the land, and has seen it as an integral part of both individual and collective identity. How many wars have been fought to meet the human greed for land? In his poem Hamatreya, the American poet Emerson wonderfully dramatises this tragic greed of human beings, with a string of individuals making their claim over a piece of land and the earth responding, after the demise of the individual claimants, in the following words: And where are these men? Asleep beneath their grounds: And strangers, fond as they, their furrows plough. Earth laughs in flowers, to see her boastful boys Earth-proud, proud of the earth which is not theirs; Who steer the plough, but cannot steer their feet Clear of the grave. (518) The present conflict is also partly over landeach group trying to inscribe its authority over the island of Singapore. However, whether a trope of friendship or of the homeland, Sally s bodily violation at the height of the riots, signals destructive consequences for both; it signals the dissolution of friendship between the four youths on the one hand, and rape or wreckage of the homeland on the other. However, like Tok Said s, Sally s identity is also given to considerable ambiguity. Everyone initially thinks she is a Chinese who could speak both Malay and Cantonese with equal ease. But after the rape it is discovered that her name is Sally Yu alias Salmah binte Yub. This throws everyone into confusion. When asked what her born name was, her reply helps little to resolve the problem, it didn t matter, Sally or Salmah, it was the same (121). This deliberate confusion surrounding her Mohammad A. Quayum_Between Worlds_8

12 racial belonging once again helps to dispel the totalising view of race and suggest how easily racial boundaries could be altered through the process of transculturation or the creation of hybridisation zones. Sally who can speak both Malay and Chinese can pass off as Malay or a Chinese, which indicates that races are not separate species, and as anthropologist Frank Livingstone has suggested, there are no races, only clines (279). Another strategy adopted by the author to dismantle the essentialist view of race and create the spirit of dialogue between the local groups is to insert passages from the Malay classics that highlight the history of mingling between the Malays, Indians and Chinese even before the arrival of the British. The author s argument is that the groups have been living together happily and with mutual acceptance and trust for hundreds of years, and it is only through the cunning manipulation of the colonisers that the groups are now rife with discontent and distrust. By turning away from the divisive schemes of the British and focussing attention on their interactive past, the groups could overcome their present differences and restore the spirit of accommodation and friendly unity, which will thus empower them to chart their common destiny as a nation. One such passage is taken from Hikayat Abdullah, which appears towards the beginning of the novel. It is about an ancient rock, Allah alone knows how many thousands years old (18), which was found at the point of the headland lying in the bushes (18). The rock was covered with some chiselled inscription, but no body could determine the script because of extensive scouring by water (18); to the Indians it looked like Hindi, to the Malays like Arabic, and to the Chinese, Chinese. But before anybody could decipher the writing, the rock was unfortunately broken by an Englishman, Mr. Coleman, prompted perhaps by his own thoughtlessness and folly (19). The passage goes a long way in establishing the harmonious past and ancient history of the various local groups, and the nonchalance of the British in erasing that history from their self-righteous national self-aggrandizement. As Fanon has aptly pointed out: Colonialism is not satisfied merely with holding a people in its grip and emptying the native s brain of all form and content. By a kind of perverted logic, it turns to the past of the oppressed people, and distorts, disfigures and destroys it. (265) Two other passages from Sejarah Melayu argue the same point and help establish the author s vision for Singapore s future. One of these passages recount the story of a lost Malay boy rescued by an Indian family and adopted by them. The other is about a Chinese princess who voluntarily came to Malaya with five hundred sons of Chinese ministers (78), married Sultan Mansur Shah of Malacca and settled down with her men in this country. She later gave birth to a son named Paduka Mimat, who in turn gave birth to a son called Paduka Sri China. This is the beginning of the arrival of the Chinese to the Malayan territory who have been living here harmoniously with the other groups since then. Both the passages highlight the shared experiences of the Malays, Indians and Chinese and their potential for compatibility and building a unified nation in post-independence Singapore. 9_Sun Yat-sen Journal of Humanities

13 As with race, the author also tries to dismantle the gender hierarchy, because like race, gender is a constituent element of identity formation, and a site for resistance and adaptation. Through the characters of Neela and Sally in particular, Fernando shows in his narrative how women were marginalised or even double colonised during the period, being subjected to both patriarchal and colonial oppressions. Neela is abused and abandoned by her family because of her sexual liaison with Ellman, who has taken the privileges of being a man and a white to impregnate her, but never offers to marry her because of his sense of eugenics and the delegitimation of miscegenation during the colonial period. Sally, on the other hand, has been reduced to a prostitute because of her refusal to act subservient to her illiterate and abusive husband. According to Gloria Anzaldua women in traditional Christian societies are left with three options: she could turn to the Church as a nun, to the streets as a prostitute, or to the home as a mother (888). For Sally, presumably a Muslim, the first option does not apply because Islam allows no priestly role for women. The third option requires the ability to serve, which Anzaldua says, is the highest virtue (892) for women in the eyes of men. When Sally fails to demonstrate that virtue by not voluntarily accepting the truncated, gagged, caged life of an Asian wife an insignificant other to her husband, the absolute, the essential she is left with the sole option of turning to the road and becoming a prostitute. Such critiques of sexual duality and othering of women are provided by the author with the sincere intention of restoring dignity and subjectivity to women, and undercutting the primacy of the phallus in traditional Asian societies. However, in spite of the author s attempt to address the intersecting discourses of both race and gender as issues involving his vision for the nation, it needs to be pointed out that race emerges as the superordinate and privileged discourse in the narrative. This is because, being a male writer himself, brought up in a traditional society, Fernando often shows a masculinist bias in his portrait of the female characters, despite his best intentions to restore the circumstances of women in society, and uses the female body as signifiers without full sensitivity of their impact on the discourse. The very fact that Fernando uses four male characters as protagonists of his novel shows that men are at the centre of his imagination and nation formation, justifying therefore Virgina Woolf s claim that women always remain outsiders in a nation, that women have no country (199) and are often treated as mere slaves of the country. Furthermore, the portraits of Neela and Sally somehow fulfil the male assumption that woman is carnal and easily available, and especially the association of Sally s body with the homeland, which results in her having concurrent sexual relationship with the four friends (Sabran, Santinathan, Peter and Guan Kheng), and leads to her literal and figurative rape in the narrative, reduces her to what Anzaldua would call a Shadow Beast. Another issue that the author addresses in his formation of a collective national identity for Singapore is language, which is, and has always been, a significant component of identity and representation. As Ray Gwyn Smith has asked rhetorically, Who is to say that robbing a people of/its identity is less violent than war? (qtd. in Anzaldua 893), and Gloria Anzaldua has claimed, I am my language (898). Simon During explains that In both literature and politics the post-colonial drive towards identity centres around language (qtd. Childs 193). Given this decisive role of language in the formation of individual and collective identity, Fernando returns to Mohammad A. Quayum_Between Worlds_10

14 the issue several times in the novel. He shows how the workers unions that wish to unite on a common agenda against the British Realty find it so difficult to communicate with one another because of a lack of common language. Sabran, who works for the Malay worker s union as translator, explains this mutual challenge experienced by the parties to Guan Kheng: Of course we re going to join. You should have seen the men. I was doubtful at first. First, we introduced Thian, the President of the Prosperity Union. Thian spoke in Mandarin. Huang translated into English. Then I translated that into Malay. Then, Rassidi, the President of the Co-operative Union, spoke. I translated into Mandarin. It was going so slow I was worried. Then Thian got up again and tried to speak in Malay. It was so funny the crowd laughed. I think that did it. After that it was all cheering. (18) In spite Sabran s initial optimism, it is rather clear what a formidable obstacle the two parties were faced with, which was also a common obstacle for the nation. Being a multicultural society, it is likely that Singaporeans communicate in different languages, often according to their ethnicity. How could this gap be bridged? It is widely assumed that a common language is necessary to build a single society, as in the case of most European nations. Mahathir Mohammad, Malaysia s former Prime Minister, has pointed out in his book, The Malay Dilemma, that nations have two options with regard to their language policies, either to adopt the US-Australian model of putting a single language at the centre, or adopt the Swiss model which has no national language but four official languages. So which model would Singapore adopt, and if the nation chose the first model which language would be elevated to national langue? Fernando does not provide clear answers to these questions, although he seems to suggest that utmost caution and prudence would be necessary in settling this issue. At one point, Sabran suggests that it is incumbent on everyone to learn Malay as it is the original language of the land. But Peter shows unease with that. He complains that he and his kind have been forced to give up their language over and over again. Each time the Master changed, they were required to switch over to a different tongue: the Portuguese, the Dutch, the English, and the Japanese. Now he will have to unlearn English if Malay was introduced as the national language. Now it seems I must unlearn it [English] once more and learn Malay, he says, disconsolate, and asks his friend in a rather angry tone, How many times? Can you tell me that? The process is simply repeating itself, why can t it stop? (143). Peter has every reason to feel so disappointed as language is his identity; to deprive him of his tongue would be an act of atrocity. It would be like taking out parts [from his body] and putting in new parts (142). Peter here does not speak for himself alone or for the Eurasian community, but for all the Singapore diasporic communities. Singapore, in order to forge a collective national identity, would have to adopt a language policy that does not marginalise any of the communities; any hierarchy or centre/margin dichotomy would be counterproductive to the cause of national unity. It so happens that Singapore has recognised this challenge in the postindependence period and adopted a language policy in the Swiss model, having four official languages for the country, representing all its major ethnic groups Malay, 11_Sun Yat-sen Journal of Humanities

15 Chinese, Indians and Eurasians with English being widely used as the bridge language. This is contrary to Malaysia s policy of introducing Bahasa Malaysia as the language of national unity, which however does not mean that Malaysia s approach has been any less effective than Singapore s because the socio-cultural circumstances in the two countries are widely different, and every country will have to define for itself how best it could forge a collective national identity. In conclusion, although a Malaysian writer, in his first novel Scorpion Orchid, Fernando has taken the privilege of interrogating the socio-political circumstances in Singapore in the immediate years before the country s independence and suggesting ways of formulating a collective national identity for itself by overcoming its culturally fractured state. He has done so for two reasons. First, he was himself a student in Singapore when the island was experiencing its birth pangs and, therefore, obviously he felt the necessity of narrating and fictionally recounting what he had witnessed first-hand during his university days. Second, by addressing this particular phase of Singapore s history, he is indirectly probing the problems encountered by post-independence Malaysia, which not only has a shared history with Singapore but also a similar multi-cultural environment. In this sense, the author s prescription for Singapore for charting its collective national identity also translates to one for Malaysia, which he develops more fully in his second novel, Green is the Colour, by examining a similar critical phase of the riots of May 13, 1969 in the country s history. If Scorpion Orchid shows the way forward for Singapore as a nation, Green is the Colour does the same for Malaysia, which means the two novels, in spite of their different spatial and temporal settings, complement one another in their narrative and thematic scope, and should therefore be read as sequels, dealing with the history and ethos of two neighbouring nation-states that were historically together for centuries but are now separated by colonial intervention, or an accident of history. WORKS CITED Andaya, Barbara Watson and Leonard Y. Andaya. A History of Malaysia. Houndmills, UK: Palgrave, Anzaldua, Gloria. Bordelands/La Frontera. Literary Theory: An Anthology. Ed. Julie Rivkin and Michael Ryan. Massachusetts: Blackwell, 1999: Ashcroft, Bill, Gareth Griffiths and Helen Tiffin. Key Concepts in Post-Colonial Studies. London: Routledge, Burgess, Anthony. Time for a Tiger. The Long Day Wanes: A Malayan Trilogy. Penguin Books, Chew, Ernest C.T. and Edwin Lee, eds. A History of Singapore. Oxford: OUP, Childs, Peter and Patrick Willaims. An Introduction to Post-Colonial Theory. Harlow, England: Pearson, Emerson, Ralph Waldo. Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson. Ed. with an Introduction by J.P. Adelaide: E.W. Cole. n.d. Fanon, Frantz. On National Culture. Literature in the Modern World: Critical Essays and Documents. Ed. Dennis Walder. Oxford: OUP, Mohammad A. Quayum_Between Worlds_12

16 Fernando, Lloyd. Scorpion Orchid [1976]. Singapore and Kuala Lumpur: Times, Jameson, Fredric. Third World Literature in the Era of Multinational Capitalism. Social Text 15 (Fall 1986): Koh Tai Ann. The Empires Orphans: Satyers and Quitters in A Bend in the River and Scorpion Orchid. Malaysian Literature in English: A Critical Reader. Ed. Mohammad A. Quayum and Peter Wicks. Kuala Lumpur: Pearson, Lee Kwan Yew. The Battle for Merger. Towards Socialism. Vol. 5. Ministry of Culture Series of Twelve talks Delivered between 13 September and 9 October 1961, Singapore. Government Printing Office, Livingstone, Frank. On the Non-Existence of Human Races. Current Anthropology 3 (1962): Mahathir Bin Mohammad. The Malay Dilemma [1969]. Singapore and Kuala Lumpur: Times, Quayum, Mohammad A. Malaysian Literature in English: Challenges and Prospects in the New Millennium. CRNLE Journal (2001): Shaping a New National Destiny with Dialogic Vision: Lloyd Fernando s Green is the Colour. Malaysian Literature in English: A Critical Reader. Ed. Mohammad A. Quayum and Peter Wicks. Kuala Lumpur: Pearson, Imagining Bangsa Malaysia: Race, Religion and Gender in Lloyd Fernando s Green is the Colour. World Literature Written in English 38.1 (2001): Malaysian Literature in English: An Evolving Tradition. Kunapipi 25.2 (2003): Lloyd Fernando. Dictionary of Literary Biography: Southeast Asian Fiction. Ed. David Symth. South Carolina, USA: Bruccoli Clark Layman (forthcoming, 2007). Race. Wikipedia. < Retrieved on 15 April Woolf, Virginia. Women and Nationalism. Literature in the Modern World: Critical Essays and Documents. Ed. Dennis Walder. Oxford: OUP, ABSTRACT This essay examines Lloyd Fernando s first novel, Scorpion Orchid (1976), to show how the author has artfully reconstructed and dramatised the political turmoil in Singapore in the 1950s, in the aftermath of the Japanese Occupation of British Malaya ( ), and during the period in which its population were striving to find their independence from the British Raj. It further investigates how the author in depicting the racial upheaval of the pre-independence period has also shown ways for Singapore to forge a new national identity for itself in the post-independence period that will be unified, cohesive, dynamic, peaceful and harmonious. He does it through the cultivation of various symbols in the novel as well as by interlayering the present narrative with passages from the Malay classics, Sejarah Melayu and +Hikayat Abdullah, both of which help to undercut the race argument and reaffirm the history of mingling between the races in the island as well as in the Malayan Peninsula that 13_Sun Yat-sen Journal of Humanities

17 went well beyond the period of colonial intervention. Fernando concludes that the best way for Singapore to chart its new destiny would be to dispel the race discourse, dismantle gender hierarchy and adopt a language policy that would unify its diverse people, without marginalising any of the groups wilfully. Key-words: Malaysian Literature in English; Nationalism; Ethnicity; Gender; Language. Lloyd Fernando Scorpion Orchid(1976) ( ) 1950 Sejarah Melayu Hikayat Abdullah Fernando 4 MOHAMMAD A. QUAYUM is professor of English at International Islamic University Malaysia. He is the author or editor of fifteen books, including Peninsular Muse: Interviews with Modern Malaysian and Singaporean Poets, Novelists and Dramatists (London: Peter Lang, 2007), Saul Bellow and American Transcendentalism (New York: Peter Lang, 2004) and Petals of Hibiscus: A Representative Anthology of Malaysian Literature in English (Kuala Lumpur: Pearson, 2003). His scholarly articles have appeared in the Journal of Commonwealth Literature, Wasafiri, World Literature Written in English, Postcolonial Text, Kunapipi, South Asian Review, Interdisciplinary Literary Studies, CRNLE Journal, MELUS, Journal of South Asian Studies, Crossroads: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Southeast Asian Studies, New Zealand Journal of Asian Studies, Saul Bellow Journal, American Studies International and Studies in Jewish American Literature, among others. Former co-editor of World Literature Written in English, Quayum is currently an Advisory Editor of Journal of Postcolonial Writing. Mohammad A. Quayum_Between Worlds_14

18 ) Dec. 15, 2005 / May 15, (Winter 2006): 45-74

19

20 47_

21 A.C.Graham 1 2School of Chuang-tzu3primitivist4Yangist 5 syncretist A.C.Graham, Chuang-tzu:the seven inner chapter and other writings from the book, London:George Allen & Unwin, How much of Chuang-tzu did Chuang-tzu write? in A.C.Graham, Studies in Chinese philosophy & philosophical literature, Singapore : The Institute of East Asian Philosophies,

22 49_ [ ]

23 /

24 51_ /

25 [] [] : [ ] [ ]

26 53_ / /

27 ( 577) 51.

28 55_ [ ] [ ]

29 56 / / /

30 57_ []

31

32 59_

33 ( )

34 61_

35 [] []

36 63_

37 64 88!

38 65_

39

40 67_ / / [ ] [ ] [ ] /

41

42 69_

43 A 114.

44 71_ ( 1099 ) 116.

45

46 Graham, A.C. Chuang-tzu: the Seven Inner Chapter and Other Writings from the Book. London: George Allen & Unwin, How Much of Chuang-tzu Did Chuang-tzu Write? Studies in Chinese philosophy & philosophical literature. Singapore: The Institute of East Asian Philosophies, ABSTRACT Since Zhuangzi( ) involves wide contents of philosophy, it is not easy to interpret the texts and often leads to reading in fragments and misunderstanding. In this research, a more complete basic framework of Zhuangzi s Philosophy is argued on the basis of texts of Zhuangzi. It is helpful to grasp the thread of thought of Zhuangzi and to interpret texts. Through the connection of several viewpoints obtained from texts, it is found that: Both dao () and xin () are the important parts of Zhuangzi. 73_