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Bernard Wilson
To cite this article: Bernard Wilson (2003) Memory, myth, exile: The desire for Malaysian
belonging in K.S. Maniam's The Return , "Haunting the Tiger' and In A Far Country, Textual
Practice, 17:2, 391-412, DOI: 10.1080/0950236032000094908
Download by: [Universiti Pendidikan Sultan Idris UPSI] Date: 07 May 2017, At: 02:24
Textual Practice 17(2), 2003, 391412
Bernard Wilson
Memory, myth, exile: the desire for Malaysian belonging in
K.S. Maniams The Return, Haunting the Tiger and In A Far
Country
Nations, like narratives, lose their origins in the myths of time and
only fully realize their horizons in the minds eye.
(Homi Bhabha, Nation and Narration)
Exile is one of the saddest fates.
(Edward Said, Representations of the Intellectual)
Introduction
K.S. Maniams output as a writer, playwright and academic spans the last
three decades. The leading writer of English-language prose fiction in
contemporary Malaysia, his novels, short stories and plays invariably reflect
the plight of the marginalized from the perspective of the Indian diaspora
in Malaysian society but, more broadly, redefine concepts of self and nation
through an exploration of the origins of ancestral memory and myth. In
this essay I wish to examine the colonization of discourse that is incorporated
into Maniams texts, his use of myth and metamorphosis, the sense of
internal exile and desire for belonging that informs his prose, and his (often
allegorical) depiction of the increasingly blurred division between individual
and national consciousness in postcolonial Malaysia as represented in the
two novels, The Return and In A Far Country, and the short story, Haunting
the Tiger.
Textual Practice ISSN 0950-236X print/ISSN 1470-1308 online 2003 Taylor & Francis Ltd
http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals
DOI: 10.1080/0950236032000094908
Textual Practice
Ancestral memory
The opening paragraph of the 1981 novel, The Return, resonant with the
antipathetic symbolism of both noble pioneer and downtrodden beast of
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Bernard Wilson Memory, myth, exile
The arrival in Kedah of Ravis grandmother, the dipping pool for all of the
other characters,6 effectively mythologizes the arrival of immigrant Indians
in Malaya and establishes two dominant leitmotivs in Maniams writing;
in Periathais emergence from the land itself, as it were, the inextricable
connection between self and terrain is immediately introduced, together
with the exploration of possession in its various incarnations: spatial
occupation, cultural validity, material acquisition.
In The Return, Maniams central characters exist in what Bhabha calls
the ambivalent margin of the nation space 7 but more precisely (since the
two spatial concepts are inseparable) they also exist in the increasingly
ambivalent margin of individual space. Though Malaysian in setting, the
novel deals almost exclusively with first- and second-generation Tamil
Indians and examines their obliteration/regeneration in confronting colo-
nial, postcolonial and neocolonial influences and their (largely unsuccessful)
attempts to negotiate a path towards a hybrid identity that acknowledges
their cultural and religious heritage. As such, The Return is less specifically
Malaysian than universally diasporic in focus. The narrative action is seen
through the eyes of Ravi who, Malaysian-born, straddles the interstices
between traditional Indian cultural religious values and colonial British
influences, and attempts to create a sense of spatial belonging and fulfil a
need for connection and identity. Though Ravi is the central protagonist
in the narrative, powerful images of the dislocations of his grandmother
and particularly his father, Kannan, dominate the textual landscape and
foreground the psychological complexities faced by displaced individuals
trying to justify existence in surroundings that are concurrently familiar
and alien.
As the title of the novel (implicit as it is with the various physical,
psychological and spiritual manifestations of a cultural return) suggests, the
vexed question of identity involves some retention of an ancestral and
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Bernard Wilson Memory, myth, exile
Moreover, Ravis superior use of the English of the colonial teaching system
posits him as white monkey (p. 43) among the local children. The Return,
then, is depicted through a consciousness affected by linguistic change
(which is) mediated through the narrative presence of the protagonist,11
but it becomes increasingly clear that, in the constantly shifting cultural
parameters of Ravis existence, no language can adequately signify a sense
of belonging for his polyglot identity; the cultural and sociological implica-
tions of each form of communication ensure that Ravi exists in linguistic
interstices. Kannans withdrawal and subsequent mental and linguistic
breakdown represents a dispossession of identity which Maniam renders as
an ironic and tragic rewriting of particularly Hindu, but also Christian,
religious mythologies; Pentecostal glossolalia is inverted in Kannans con-
fused polyglot ramblings and melded with animistic ceremonial offerings
to Shiva Nataraja, cosmic dancer of creation and destruction (Breathe your
spirit into them! he chanted. Make them the clay and grass of my body!
(p. 168)), in a desperate and tragic response to the heteroglossial, multi-
ethnic landscape in which he finds himself. For Kannan, the consuming
and inevitably catastrophic need for possession of physical space equates to
reclaiming lost ancestral identity, but it is this pursuit that results in mental
and physical annihilation.
But if The Return appears to provide an overwhelmingly discouraging
outlook for cultural and linguistic belonging in colonial and postcolonial
Malaya, this is only partly true. While the author emphasizes the negative
and destructive traits within his characters, it is clear that the subtext of his
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How does one describe the land one lived in but never saw? It was
more tangible than the concrete one we flitted through every day.
Darkness gave it its true dimensions. Then it vibrated within our
hearts. If we saw, perhaps through some quirk of optics, a flame beside
the drain, then it was a dead pregnant womans soul come to haunt
the real world; if we heard rumours, echoed voices among the hills,
they were the chanting and tinkling of banana-tree spirits dancing in
the courtyard of the night. The quick rush of the communal bathshed
signified some unappeased souls feverish bathing. We were hemmed
into our rooms, houses and into our minds. But for all these there
were a lot of colours in our invisible world. The gigantic figures that
filled our imagination were turned out in bright togas, arms heavily
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arises in a culture for which the real world has become meaningless,
devoid of intrinsic value, fragmented yet mysterious. The allegorist
merely arranges the fragments of this world, its images, to produce a
meaning the fragments could not produce by themselves a meaning
not identical to the intention of the allegorist but reflecting his or her
relation to the given historical context.15
In essence, then, the allegorist necessarily pursues meaning in an increas-
ingly meaningless world, and in such a context self-identity and self-
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Bernard Wilson Memory, myth, exile
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Muthus sleep is filled with dreams. And they are always the same: he
finds himself miraculously changed into a chameleon. His tapering,
curled tail is hooked onto the branch of a huge tree. His eyes, encircled
by lids that never close, look at the danger below but he is also excited
by the leap he will have to make. His tail unclasps and as he hurtles
through the changing hues of the foliage and sees the red, dark earth
rush up at him, he screams, Ill possess! Ill possess!
(p. 42)
Like Kannan, possession for Muthu is the seemingly natural (but intrin-
sically flawed) response to marginalization, which carries with it a pervasive
sense of dislocation and dispossession, and Muthus attempt to control,
rather than acquiesce to, his surroundings retards his pursuit of a meaningful
individual and collective identity:
Nevertheless they will not let go of what they know in the flesh and
in the mind. Muthus flesh and mind crave: they would know where
400
Bernard Wilson Memory, myth, exile
they are and for what purpose. Zulkifli has known it all: how to take
Muthu into the knowledge that resides within him?
(p. 43)
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The implied caveat, though, is that willing acquiescence to, and immersion
in, the symbolic essence of Malaysia promises a metaphysical epiphany but
carries with it the underlying vulnerability of submission. Perhaps, then,
this is the personal cost of nationhood: to immerse oneself in ones
environment and seek a collective Malaysian consciousness is also to
conform at the risk of stifled individuality. Rebirth and nationhood are, in
Maniams view, salutary goals and (as Renan noted) necessarily involve
402
Bernard Wilson Memory, myth, exile
403
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The sound, the boom, scaled and let scatter, layer after layer, a radiance
the ordinary eye could not look upon. The laterite road thinned into
a pencil line, then spread out as a red beam and hung like a canvas,
attached to the trees. A flower detached itself from the stalk and,
following mesmerizingly the arc of the boom, traced a fateless journey
downwards.
(p. 24)
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Bernard Wilson Memory, myth, exile
Akin to Mrs Moore, who is terrified over an area larger than usual 31 in
her encounter with alterity, the older Rajan, reflecting on this experience
and his past, is filled with a terrifying emptiness (p. 25), for he is unable
to completely accept the range of otherness with which he is interconnected
and which, by implication, constitutes his Malaysian identity. Such an
acknowledgement of paradoxical identity, which necessitates the occupation
of multiple (and often contradictory) spaces, is no more, from Maniams
perspective, than the acceptance of a
Like Haunting the Tiger, In A Far Country relates the struggle towards
a cathartic rebirth of identity through mythologizing the interdependent
components of a wounded but resilient and regenerative land and examin-
ing Malaysians shared position within it. Echoing Kannans self-destructive
goal in The Return, the words that drive Rajans fathers futile search ( We
must go to the real land. . . . Must get to the centre, he said, all by
ourselves. (p. 44)) represent both legitimate quest and parody in his need
to locate his identity through physical geography. These elements of epic
quest in the novel, the young Rajans visions of natural phenomena, his
surreal pursuit of the symbolic Malaysian tiger as an adult, and his
subsequent fragmentation of identity have in them Yeatsian qualities of a
battle between self and other.33 Maniam, like Achebe before him, borrows
in part from Yeats vision of religious upheaval: in trying to re-invent his
identity it is inevitable that the younger Rajans centre cannot hold, that
to reject ones culture and ones past and to embrace otherness in totality
may, initially at least, explode, rather than recentre, ones notion of self.
The mature Rajan, nevertheless, in contrast to his former fragile and
dismembered self, is able in his second, willing search for the tiger (part
muse, part self, part Malaysia) to achieve a sense of purgation (p. 143), a
cleansing of spirit that at the very least opens him up to the possibility of a
communal, aboriginal existence and some comprehension of the necessity
of imagining oneself into an identity that embraces a mythical otherness as
a path to a shared land and nation. As Daizal Samad notes, the apprehension
of the tiger and its very nature is wrought from a search that is rooted in
the actual landscape of Malaysia and that is yoked to its peoples; but it is
wrought equally from the soil of the imagination and the people that
inhabit that imagination.34 The introspective prose of In A Far Country,
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As the sun rose higher somewhere behind the hills, the paper flat
colours too mounted into slopes and gradients and tall, furzy trees;
mounted into birds that took to the sky; mounted into leaves that
opened to the thick green that flooded them. The earth where the
contractors had cut into to bank our houses, glistened with a brown
rawness. Tree trunks stood out, quietly displaying their intricated and
runnelled barks, black lines cutting out tiny grey or dark blocks. Then
the grass came up at us, each blade chiselled into green curves that
would wilt and flatten out as the day advanced. . . . As the sun went
down, the sky glowed with a red rawness, not always, but often
enough to touch me with the mystery of a universe putting itself
away. All petty prejudices, jealousies, resentment and suspicion fell
away. There was no me left.
(p. 29)
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Bernard Wilson Memory, myth, exile
An energy, not their own, shuffled and manipulated them through life.
The source was external, a national crisis or words radiating from the
white administrator. They didnt explore; they supported and obeyed.
Little plots of land sprang up for them from the white mans words.
(p. 43)
Similarly, there is an utter distance between Lee Shin and the words that
[pour] from his mouth (p. 61): dialogue in a significant number of
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They came to this country even without hearing of it. In other words,
they took a chance, made a leap. They leapt across the sea of the
unknown to discover new territories for themselves. They left behind
the safe and the domestic to carve out a new land for themselves.
There was no continuity, past or future. Once they got here, they
looked into the resources available and built a familiar environment
around themselves. They transplanted their language, culture, systems
of order, justice and administration.
That is what we have to do: make a great leap. Now that we have the
land we have to build the systems that will support our hopes and
ambitions. We must not allow ourselves to be trapped by the past, by
the familiar. We must go forward into the great unknown.
(p. 76)
Superficially, the exhortation to forget ones past and forge a new collective
Malaysian future is attractive. However, in counselling a leap forward into
the great unknown, Rajans rhetoric is problematic in that, while it seeks
to forget a colonial past, it risks too close an association between the path
of heterogeneous Malaysian progression and the mechanisms of European
colonial rule. In arguing for the demolition of the signifiers of colonial rule
he risks the eradication of his own sense of ancestral belonging and
personal history in favour of a generic form of nationalism, dominated
overwhelmingly by the hegemonic culture to the exclusion/extirpation of
peripheral cultures.
Partly for this reason, the motifs of castration and emasculation
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Bernard Wilson Memory, myth, exile
present in The Return are even more overt in In A Far Country, but
they serve to emphasize not only the protagonists discomfort with the
paradoxical aspects of national identity and its construction around the
metaphors of nationalism, race and ethnicity,39 but also the tenuous and
fraught position of the Malaysian English-language writer in this society,
as may be seen in this Orwellian vision of castration and lobotomy which,
I would suggest, evinces Maniams own struggle with societal (and self-)
censorship:
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One must be ready to let go even the most prized personal ideas and
beliefs in order to come by an even more substantial grain of truth.
The self, shaped by family, society, education and all that nourishes
the ego, must be firmly put aside. One must escape from the prison
of self-imposed or imposed upon order so that a new openness to life
can be discovered.
(pp. 1667)
Perhaps if, as Mrs Moore notes, there is not one but a hundred
Indias,43 the anguish of its loss must be felt all the more keenly by the
diasporic writer. Yet the echo of the subcontinent, so often the ancestral
memory that propels Indian diasporic fiction, has gradually functioned less
as debilitating wound and more as sporadic cultural touchstone in Maniams
writing. With the occasional backward glance, Maniam has attempted to
circumvent what George Lamming calls the cage of ones personal history 44
through an exploration of self as other and through charting paths towards
collective identities which embrace a disparate past. At the core of his prose
are the manifest forms of exile for Malaysias inhabitants, but this inherent
sense of loss and ostracism and its resultant overwhelming desire for
acceptance and belonging has also instigated a healing process through
narratives that work against cultural domination by learning to rather
than being forced to forget and by undo(ing) the network of inhibitions,
prohibitions, history and predilections that we have cast about us (p. 196).
Chuo University, Japan
Notes
1 Ernest Renan, What is a nation?, in Homi Bhabha (ed.) Nation and Narration
(London: Routledge,1990), p. 11.
2 Bernard Wilson, An interview with K S Maniam, World Literature Written in
English, 33:2, 34:1 (199394), p. 23.
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Bernard Wilson Memory, myth, exile
3 Ibid., p. 23.
4 Kee Thuan Chye, Just In So Many Words: Views, Reviews and Other Things
(Singapore: Heinemann Asia, 1992), p. 16.
5 K.S. Maniam, The Return (London: Skoob [1981], 1993), p. 1. All further
references are to this edition and will appear in the text.
6 Bernard Wilson, An interview with K.S. Maniam, p. 17.
7 Homi Bhabha, Introduction, in Bhabha (ed.) Nation and Narration (London:
Routledge,1990), p. 4.
8 Bernard Wilson, An interview with K S Maniam, p. 17.
9 Anne Brewster, Linguistic boundaries: K.S. Maniams The Return, in K.S.
Maniam, The Return (London: Skoob Pacifica, 1993), pp. 1834.
10 For his overall analysis see M.M. Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination (Austin:
University of Texas Press, 1981).
11 Irene F.H. Wong and Margaret Yong, The case of English in Malaysian Fiction:
a Look at K.S. Maniams The Return, Southeast Asian Review of English, 6 and
7 (Kuala Lumpur: University of Malaya, 1983), p. 12.
12 Bernard Wilson, An interview with K S Maniam, p. 18.
13 Tang Soo Ping, Renegotiating identity and belief in K.S. Maniams The
Return, in Jurnal Bahasa Jendela Alam, Kuala Lumpur, 1996. Taken from
\http:www.asian-child.com/printer_maniam.htm[.
14 K.S. Maniam, Re: Memory, myth, exile: the desire for belonging in K.S.
Maniams The Return, Haunting the Tiger, and In A Far Country. Personal
e-mail to Bernard Wilson, 29 May 2002.
15 Patrick McGee, Texts between worlds: African fiction as political allegory, in
K.R. Lawrence (ed.) Decolonizing Tradition (Chicago, IL: University of Illinois
Press, 1992), p. 241.
16 For Jamesons complete argument, see his essay, Third-World literature in the
era of multinational capitalism, Social Text, 15 (1986), pp. 6588.
17 Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory (London: Verso, 1992), pp. 95122.
18 K.S. Maniam, Haunting the Tiger: Contemporary Stories from Malaysia (London:
Skoob, 1996), p. 42. All further references are to this edition and will appear
in the text.
19 K.S. Maniam, Preface, in Haunting the Tiger: Contemporary Stories from
Malaysia (London: Skoob, 1996), p. xii.
20 Edward Said, Representations of the Intellectual (London: Vintage, 1994),
pp. 5960.
21 Ibid., p. 49.
22 Ibid., p. 52.
23 Ibid., p. 53.
24 David Bevan, Literature and Exile, Rodopi Perspectives on Modern Literature,
Vol. 4 (Amsterdam/Atlanta: Rodopi, 1990), p. 3.
25 K.S. Maniam, In A Far Country (London: Skoob, 1993), p. 40. All further
references are to this edition and will appear in the text.
26 Paul Sharrad, Introduction, in K.S. Maniam, In A Far Country (London:
Skoob Pacifica, 1993), p. xvi.
27 For the full discussion of Edwin Thumboos interpretation of space see Essential
space and cross-cultural challenges, in B. Bennett et al. (eds) Crossing Cultures:
Essays on Literature and Culture of the Asia-Pacific (London: Skoob, 1996),
pp. 1124.
28 Homi Bhabha, DissemiNation: time, narrative, and the margins of the modern
nation, in Bhabha (ed.) Nation and Narration (London: Routledge, 1990),
pp. 31011.
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29 K.S. Maniam, Re: Memory, myth, exile: the desire for belonging in K.S.
Maniams The Return, Haunting the Tiger, and In A Far Country. Personal
e-mail to Bernard Wilson, 29 May 2002.
30 E.M. Forster, A Passage To India (London: Penguin [1924], 1984), p. 212.
31 Ibid., p. 61.
32 K.S. Maniam, The new diaspora, Taken from: http://www.ucalgary.ca/UofC/
eduweb/eng1392/492a/articles/maniam-dias.html.
33 I am referring here partly to the epic battles against protean adversaries in The
Wanderings of Oishin but, most specifically, to Yeats use of symbolism in his
vision of societal cataclysm in The Second Coming.
34 Daizal R. Samad, Toward national identity as by phenomenal alchemy: a
reading of K.S. Maniams In A Far Country. Forthcoming.
35 Sudesh Mishra, Haunted lines: postcolonial theory and the genealogy of racial
formations in Fiji, Meanjin, 52:4 (1993), p. 623.
36 K.S. Maniam, Re: Memory, myth, exile: the desire for belonging in K.S.
Maniams The Return, Haunting the Tiger, and In A Far Country. Personal
e-mail to Bernard Wilson, 29 May 2002.
37 Ibid.
38 I am referring here to the nameless narrator of Lee Kok Liangs first novel,
London Does Not Belong To Me, but also to the protagonists in many of his
short stories, most notably The Mutes in the Sun.
39 Anne Brewster, in commenting on castration motifs in The Return, notes
the perceived challenge that immigrant groups represent to a homogenous
community and concludes that all three terms that are usually associated with
a sense of permanence and validity in relation to the concept of a collective
nation nationalism, race and ethnicity are themselves constructs and meta-
phors. Linguistic boundaries: K.S. Maniams The Return, in K.S. Maniam,
The Return (London: Skoob Pacifica, 1993), pp. 1823.
40 Approximate figures as at 2000 indicate that Malays comprise 58 per cent of
the population; Chinese 27 per cent; and Indians 8 per cent. CIA Factbook,
http://www.odci.gov/cia/publications/factbook/geos/my.html
41 Annie Greet, An interview with K.S. Maniam, The CRNLE Reviews Journal,
1 (1991) (Adelaide: Flinders University of South Australia), p. 4.
42 Moi defines this state in the following way: The Imaginary corresponds to the
pre-Oedipal period when the child believes itself to be part of the mother, and
perceives no separation between itself and the world. In the imaginary there is
no difference and no absence, only identity and presence. The Oedipal crisis
represents the entry into the Symbolic order. This entry is also linked to
the acquisition of language. Sexual/Textual Politics: Feminist Literary Theory
(London: Methuen, 1988), p. 99.
43 I have in mind here the episode immediately prior to Mrs Moores departure
from India, during which she longed to stop, though it was only Bombay, and
disentangle the hundred Indias that passed each other on its streets. E.M.
Forster, A Passage To India (London: Penguin [1924], 1984), p. 214.
44 S.P. Paquet, The Novels of George Lamming (London: Heinemann,1982), p. 68.
412