Board of Regents of the University of Oklahoma

Traversing Boundaries: Journeys into Malaysian Fiction in English

Author(s): Wong Ming Yook
Source: World Literature Today, Vol. 74, No. 2, English-Language Writing from Malaysia,
Singapore, and the Philippines (Spring, 2000), pp. 277-282
Published by: Board of Regents of the University of Oklahoma
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 Traversing Boundaries:
JOURNEYS INTO MALAYSIAN FICTION IN ENGLISH
WONG MING YOOK
of Malaysian literature has dealt with the
problem of psychic displacement of migrant
communities settling in a new land. Certainly,
Malaysian literature written in English has identified
very closely with this concern over the decades of post-
independence Malaysia. The complexity involved is
intensified by the fact that English is an acquired second
language, rather than the first language, of the writers
themselves. Choosing a colonial and non-native tongue
to write about questions pertaining to identity and
struggles of integration within a multicultural and plu-
ralistic social context is, to say the least, fraught with dif-
ficulty that writers in a monocultural setting would be
quite unfamiliar with. As with most marginalised com-
munities, Malaysian writers in English are faced with
the onerous task of creating a place for themselves in a
setting which may not always regard them as possessing
a crucial voice in the evolution of a people or a country.
English, once the predominant language of administra-
tion, now no longer harbours hegemonic designs on the
majority who speak the local and national language,
Malay, with greater ease than ever they did English.
So far, Malaysia resembles any postcolonial, postin-
dependence country, with its attendant problems of the
loss and recovery of native cultures and language. With
the inflow and settling of migrant groups from neigh-
bouring countries as part of the colonial answer to the
need for cheap labour in the nineteenth century, Malay-
sian society is now no different from many of its Asian
neighbours in its spread of multicultural groups and its
varieties of Asian languages existing alongside the dom-
inant indigenous tongue and culture. The development
and evolution of Malaysia have taken turns which have
fostered, at least in cross-cultural communication, a
greater willingness on the part of the nonindigenous
(non-Malay) migrant communities to use Malay as their
lingua franca. The displacement of English from the
administrative and educational centers of Malaysian life
itself has had implications on the receptivity of the aver-
age Malaysian to Malaysian literature written in English.
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The move downward from common administrative lan-
guage to a language used by an urban minority has meant
that users and writers of English have become increasingly
marginalised; simultaneously, English has contributed
to an increasingly fragmented context in which it stands
alongside other local (and limited) vernaculars such as
Tamil or Chinese. Most speakers of English are educated
and middle-class urban dwellers. Many, though not all, of
them are non-Malays who may have little access to their
own native tongues, or most probably prefer instead the
internationality of English as a means of effective commu-
nication, though they are familiar enough with Malay as
the medium of communication locally.
Shirley Lim, a Malaysian-born writer and academic
now resident in the United States, sums up very well the
complex situation of language choice among the Chinese
Malaysians; for example, "If Bahasa [Malaysia] is seen as
an instrument for empowering one racial group and con-
sequently for disempowering the Chinese Malaysians,
the language itself may rouse strong feelings of disaffili-
ation, to be used only when necessary. The same
Chinese Malaysians may turn to the language of descent
to express their resistance
to a national formation
So far, Malaysia resembles any
that appears to erase their
identity postcolonial, postindependence
both Malay and Chinese
cultural nationalisms based
country, with its attendant
on paradigms of racial problems of the loss and
descent, assent to an inter-
recovery of native cultures
national language . . . En-
glish" (1994a, 46-47). Such and language.
complications dog the
immigrant communities, whether Chinese or Indian in
descent, in their relations with the dominant language of
discourse, the national language, known as Bahasa
Malaysia (Malay) or Bahasa, for short.
Those who resort to English are of course regarded
sometimes unfavourably as Malaysians heavily influ-
enced (and still colonised) by the fashions of the West
WORLD LITERATURE TODAY • 74:2 • SPRING 2000 • 277
and who have no real sense of rootedness in the land. The
situation is compounded by the fact that such Malaysians,
many of them nonindigenous, have never resolved the
problem their migrant fathers /mothers encountered ear-
lier in the century: estrangement and alienation from the
adopted new land. In fact, English serves quite well as
the language to carry the ideas and metaphors of alien-
ation occurring within migrant communities. Its alien-
ness lends to its use a pecu-
liar suitability, a deliberate
dissonance and distancing
between text and reader
that only emphasises the
extent of alienation experi-
enced. For the Malaysian
writer in English, this is
amplified in the content of
the writing itself, which is
usually to do with the
migrant consciousness
struggling for integration
and authenticity. Writing
from the fringes of a predominantly urban and therefore
cha(lle)nging landscape, the Malaysian writer in English
exemplifies the dispossessed en-gaged in confronting
the fragmented historical and cultural sense in a postin-
dependence, postcolonial state.
In speaking of several Malaysian novels, Shirley Lim
writes incisively and insightfully of the place of English
in the Malaysian setting:
English is an ethnic-neutral instrument whose international
character counters a national-language /cultural dominance
to express fragmentations resulting from exclusions and sup-
pressions. In a monolingual, monocultural situation, minori-
ties delegitimatized national-language processes [sic] use the
former colonial language's "otherness" to give themselves a
voice and identity. In oppressive national cultures, writers
may turn to the strongly metropole function of English to
criticize their societies' provincialism and chauvinism. . . .
For Malaysian minority ethnic writers whose participation in
the national literary scene has been severely marginalized,
English serves as a counter-identification with a more
accepting international culture. (1994b, 136-37)
Though there is a growing use of English among the
Malay urban and elite class, most of the current Malay-
sian writers in English write from non-Malay, immi-
grant perspectives. The scene has not evolved all that
much from the tightly culture-bound considerations of
the different ethnic communities of preindependence
Malaya to postindependence Malaysia. Writers of note
continue to grapple with the notion of a national identi-
278 • WORLD LITERATURE TODAY • 74:2 • SPRING 2000
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ty and a national culture, no matter how subtly or other-
wise this is worked through. The traceable novelistic
attempts emerge from ethnic categories, first and fore-
most; fidelity to these " ethnic surface [s] and social inter-
actions'7 (Lim, 1994b, 138) provides the Malaysian writer
with a well-worn familiarity that frames the deep, ongo-
ing sense of dispossession well. For the purposes of this
essay, the Malaysian fiction writers considered will in-
clude the major voices writ-
ing in English, such as Lee
Kok Liang, Lloyd Fernando,
and K. S. Maniam. It must
be noted that Malaysian lit-
erature in Malay (the nation-
al literature), despite its
prolific and rich nature,
will have to be excluded.
Movements in Malaysian
fiction have been occasioned
by the immigrant's need to
make sense of his new land.
In a writer like K. S. Mani-
am, the almost inchoate need and desire for rootedness
is most thoroughly expressed in his autobiographical
novel The Return (1981). As a bildungsroman, it retells
the story of the young narrator's life as he struggles to
escape the oppressiveness of his small-town South Indi-
an culture into greater freedom as a young schoolteacher
working in a bigger city. Identity conflicts between first-
generation and second-generation immigrants are
described in terms of the narrator Ravi's escape from the
paternalistic and chauvinistic stranglehold of the Ayah1
figure of the novel. His education is felt to be the most
crucial aspect of his young life, because it represents the
fulfilling of his individuality and his overcoming the
repressive social system of his inherited culture which
has kept his family poor: 'This is a community of Indian
immigrants dependent on a system of colonial patron-
age and cowed by the circumstances of the rubber plan-
tation economy from which they draw their livelihood.
It is a community turned in on itself, angry, shrewish,
violent, engaged in unremitting conflict, and dominated
by the seemingly arbitrary viciousness of the menfolk"
(C. W. Watson, introduction to The Return, xi). Ravi's
gradual empowerment is (ironically) effected through
his mastery of the English language, the language of the
colonialist. In fact, he is ridiculed by his community for
trying to be a white. Finally, Ravi's conflict is between
his Asian past and quasi- Western present self, a self that
is "phantasmagoric, absorbed in fantasies insidiously
propagated by an aggressively colonizing culture " (Lim,
1994b, 140). The vision of the land which his grandmother
Periathai had, and the obsessive madness of his father-
to-be, likewise anchored in the land, form part of the
uneasiness of Ravi's life. He desires this rootedness,
while seeing little beyond his own sense of dislocation
as a second-generation South Indian immigrant and
Western-trained English- language schoolteacher.
We see the same agonised
negotiation of the individual
through the labyrinthine pas-
sages of initiation in Mani-
am's other works, such as the
title story in the collection
Haunting the Tiger, 'The
Pelanduk" in Plot, The Abort-
ing, Parablames and Other Sto-
ries, and particularly in his
1993 novel In a Far Country.
Evaluating ethnic traditions
in a multicultural and plural-
istic postmodern context, and
attempting to redefine and even transcend these social
and psychological geographies, remain, for Maniam and
other writers like him, crucial challenges. Reading isolat-
ed writers in Malaysian literature gives the impression
that Malaysia is in the main monocultural, either com-
prising Indian or Chinese or Malay peoples. Cursory ref-
erences to other cultures and races in literary texts fur-
ther such an impression, which is erroneous but perhaps
unavoidable in writings which begin from very clear
and concrete cultural settings. In much of the depiction
of cultures not the writer's own, it is all too clear how
superficial and stereotyped the descriptions can be.
Maniam, for instance, works remarkably well in his
astute renditions of the Tamil Indian scene, but is less
confident and less successful otherwise. Directing the
tide of thinking therefore toward a culture that is vital
and hybrid seems to be the desired requisite in novelis-
tic concerns in Malaysian fiction. This Maniam does
attempt, especially in the later work In a Far Country.
Lloyd Fernando in Scorpion Orchid (1976) and Green
Is the Colour (1993) tries this, but the focus in Scorpion
Orchid, for instance, on ethnically representative figures
during the political troubles of the 1950s in Singapore
(when it was still part of Malaysia), tends toward mere
stereotype. Green Is the Colour explores the trauma of the
13 May 1969 racial riots, with the central concerns again
being located in characters from the Chinese, Malay,
Indian, and Eurasian communities in Malaysia. These
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contiguous communities are forced together into an
uneasy alliance after the riots. This is reflected in the four
friends, as Fernando takes pains to emphasise. But the
artificiality of their togetherness is not always intention-
al. The friends remain surface figures, stereotypes: "The
author has to deal with a range of characters of different
races without privileging anyone. ... He does not stay
long enough with any one character for us to know that
character well. Although his
characters are memorable
collectively, no one individual
arrests our attention" (Wong
Soak Koon, 1994, 188). In
spite of the government
push toward Muhibah,2 and
certainly in spite of autho-
rial intent, these friends
remain bound within their
ethnic and cultural contexts.
The effort toward a dynamic
and organic national com-
munity is stillborn.
There is a lack of penetration into the core of the
Malaysian struggle suggested by such potentially
stereotyped novels. While Fernando looks toward intro-
spection to understand the troubles which afflicted
Malaysia in the 1950s and 1960s, there is little delibera-
tion beyond the obvious race and culture observations.
Integration stemming from the deeply conscious need
for a kind of identity loss as necessary in the process of
transcending race /culture bounds occurs in Maniam's
novel The Return, where we see an initial engagement of
this sort in Kannan, Ravi's deranged father. At the
work's conclusion, Ravi pens a poem to his late father
and intimates that his "words will not serve" (173). His
mastery of the coloniser's tongue has gained great free-
dom for him, but does not settle the deep and underly-
ing malaise of his dispossession. Ravi is both margin-
alised and deracinated, fundamentally withdrawn from
the heart of his history/past. Kannan, on the other hand,
with the unself-consciousness of the madman (or the
schizophrenic here), finally "degenerates" linguistically
into a kind of glossolalia: "He began to chant in a gar-
bled language. It embarrassed me to hear him recite a
rhythm mounted on Tamil, Malay and even Chinese
words. It was a secret language, like the one we invent-
ed among ourselves when we were adolescents . . . with
additional consonants or dropped vowels" (170-71).
Kannan's withdrawal from the realities of the social
world reflects the inchoate need to enter into himself, to
WORLD LITERATURE TODAY • 74:2 • SPRING 2000 • 279
 meditate, for "he was a man possessed by a special, eso-
teric dream" (171). His chants and rituals, for instance,
support such a reading of the events of his life leading to
his suicide. In fact, Kannan's deranged tongue may not
be so insane as Ravi thinks; fruit of his maddened con-
templations, it may even be legitimately seen as a " gar-
bled attempt to grapple with a multi-racial environment"
(Wong Soak Koon, 1995, 94), distant and apart from his
son's mastery of the English language. The crux of Kan-
nan's somewhat quixotic quest (which finally drives him
mad) is the inexpressible need for landedness and root-
edness: "He had lost touch with reality completely. Now
he not only increased his visits to the river, but he also
brought pebbles, clay and Iallang3 to the house. These he
laid out on a banana leaf before Nataraja. 'Breathe your
spirit into them!' he chanted. 'Make them the clay and
grass of my body!'" (168). He fights against
A framework of government officials who tell him he is a
squatter and will be evicted soon, just as
impersonal universal
his mother Periathai had done earlier.
forces at work The pathos of the repetitive cycles which
oppress mother and son only stresses the
resonates continually
ongoing dispossession of all the charac-
in Malaysian fiction. ters and underlines ironically Ravi's sup-
posed triumph over his repressive soci-
Death reaches inexorably
ety as simply an evasion of the challenge
into people's lives, facing migrant communities. Kannan
dies at last in the house he builds with
unapologetic about
his own hands, burned by the flames he
its interference. himself ignites, literally consumed by the
land he so longed to possess.
The human enterprise is viewed with deep irony and
fatalism; it appears that integratedness is too remote an
illusion to entertain. Lee Kok Liang's work, with its
Buddhist undertones, describes the desire for coherence
within a backdrop that continually renders all action
impotent. His narration is often detached: the sufferings
of human life are inevitable, part of the tedious cycle of
samsara^ and karma5 from which humanity struggles to
emerge through death. Death Is a Ceremony was Lee's
last published work before he died in 1992. The title
sounds portentous in retrospect; certainly, in this collec-
tion of short stories, death reaches inexorably into the
lives of men and women, unapologetic about its interfer-
ence. Such a framework or backdrop of impersonal uni-
versal powers and forces at work resonates in the context
of Malaysian fiction as continual reverberations of those
political and social dynamics which drive individuals to
madness and dissolution. In the wheels of a greater deter-
mining force, Lee's characters emerge as strange players
280 • WORLD LITERATURE TODAY • 74:2 • SPRING 2000
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executing their roles in a painful scene, uncomprehend-
ing of purpose and futile in their bid for transcendence.
Lee describes a fear-ridden cast attempting to take
the narrative eye away from their necessary end (death
and dissolution). However, his characters are not with-
out will. Flowers in the Sky (1981) and The Mutes in the
Sun (1981), Lee's other books, resist helpless defeat in
their stories about "alarming, powerful profiles of indi-
viduals brutalised, ostracised, alienated by authority fig-
ures or fellow victims" (Harrex, 144). These "paradigms
of social evils" are nevertheless "mitigated by gestures
of compassion or love" (144). This is also a point Fernan-
do picks up, incidentally, in Green Is the Colour, suggest-
ing therefore that human gestures forging interracial
communications express the "glimpses of hope" in the
collective struggle toward integration and identity
(Wong Soak Koon, 1994, 185).
Lee's use of the mute in the title story (actually a
novella) of The Mutes in the Sun and "Dumb Dumb by a
Bee Stung" (from Death Is a Ceremony) is an interesting
rendition of the dumbfounded individual in a situation
of psychic displacement within a pluralistic context. The
mute is the silenced Other, marginalised by nature and
society, yet ironically, he "articulates" the inadequacies
of the dominant ideology /culture by his gaze in "Dumb
Dumb by a Bee Stung," for instance. The mute hunch-
back intrudes disturbingly into the funeral of Mr. Tze
Tai Yuen. The deformed child's presence provides a
curious dissonance amid the gathering of the cultural
elite awaiting Mr. Tze's euphemistic departure to the
"yellow springs." It is his incongruously steady gaze
that proves unsettling and unnerving.
The little hunchback was really annoying him, staring at
him; his right cheek twitched. There was something in that
fellow's eyes that disturbed him - a stare as questioning as a
cat's but glazed over by a film of resignation, defeat or
acceptance. Hin Too glanced around and it seemed to him
that the whole atmosphere of the place had been compressed
into the stare of the boy. He shook off the feeling. It was hot
and he was getting tired. (153)
In retaliation for his intrusion, the boy is thrown out of
the hall, to be tormented by the street youths and stung
by a hive of bees. As a description of marginalised man,
the hunchback who intrudes into such frames of ritual
and ceremony becomes, through a reversal, a frighten-
ing figure which relays to the characters at large their
own illusory sense of dominance. He reminds them of
bad karma and the ephemeral nature of human striving
for power. Mr. Tze's death, which has been ceremoni-
alised and is the "euphemistically applied 'journey' he
is about to take" (M.Y. Wong, 28), cracks the moment
the characters face the uncompromising reality of the
hunchback's undermining gaze.
Lee appears to confine himself to depicting the
human condition in such terms. But, as Syd Harrex
points out, "Politics permeate most spheres of human
activity and relationships in Lee's fictional world" (144).
Ever mindful of the local sensitivities, Lee conveys his
sense of the conflicts of the Malaysian individual subtly
and indirectly; certainly, this gentle refusal to confront
another directly is typical of the fastidious refinement of
his Straits Chinese background and culture. His technique
of "applied introspection" which "reveals the inward
brooding of a world and its inhabitants" (Harrex, 145)
does seem, in fact, to be the general direction to which
other writers like Maniam and Fernando are also point-
ing. But there is no prescription about Lee's fiction. He
offers not so much a method as a meditative considera-
tion of life through his characters' internal conflicts.
Taking up this idea of introspection and conscious-
ness as a means toward transformation and transcen-
dence of race/culture bounds, Maniam in In a Far Country
moves away from the simpler structure and concerns of
The Return and experiments with an inward retrieval of
the dispossessed individual's past before any transcen-
dence or transformation can occur. The protagonist,
Rajan, tells his wife Vasanthi, "We must go back again
and again" (186). The liveliness of the past is sustained
through such connectedness with it. In the linearity of
human continuity and evolution, the past remains open
and accessible, revitalising through its influence on the
shaping mind and spirituality of the individual who
seeks. Rajan's exploration of his past requires a drastic
minimalising and a deliberate shrinking of his immedi-
ate world. In what appears to be some imminent break-
down, he shuts himself up in a room in his house to
initiate this inner journey: "It was on such a bright
morning, some time back, that I left my office premises,
abruptly, and shut myself up in this room in my house.
My wife and children didn't know what to make of my
behaviour the first few days, then fell into a routine that
emerged from the crisis" (1). The difficulty of the enter-
prise is underscored by Maniam's prose, "dense, ob-
scure" (Wong Soak Koon, 1995, 95); the departure from
realism and the dependence on mind and dreamscapes
is destabilising, fostering the continued heightening of
an expanding consciousness and understanding of the
present in the revelatory use of visions from the past.
Rajan's breakdown is transfiguring; it transforms him as
he "enters those mindscapes . . . dormant in the mind . . .
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to re-experience with fresh empathy and understanding
past relationships" (Ibid., 95).
Rajan's delving into his past involves his recall of his
father and his friend Lee Shin, Zulkifli, Wali Farouk,
vagrant philosopher Sivasurian, and Vasanthi. His
father represents the obvious, Rajan's cultural heritage;
Lee Shin and Zulkifli represent the Chinese and Malay
consciousness respectively. Zulkifli and Sivasurian also
act as Rajan's spiritual guides as he undertakes the jour-
ney inward, and it is important to see Zulkifli, the
indigenous Malay guide, as the one who assists in
Rajan's discovery of the land (symbolised by the spirit of
the tiger) through the lens of an essentially migrant con-
sciousness. But Rajan now moves beyond even what
Zulkifli shows him in the inward and symbolic journey
which he takes back to the land of the tiger (this time
alone). In depicting these interracial communications,
however, Maniam avoids "nationalist realism" (Paul
Sharrad, introduction to In a Far Country, xv) and stereo-
typing: his novel, while about "trying to become a
Malaysian" (ix), shifts its attention from externally
imposed views of national identity. Identity for Rajan/
Maniam begins at the point of spiritual blackness
encroaching upon the country of the soul. In the far
country of his mind and past, Rajan is engulfed by the
darkening realisation of his dispossession. Only as he
comes to new understanding of the characters he recol-
lects, and replaces their actions and lives in the refresh-
ing context as individuals rather than racial representa-
tives or stereotypes, does Rajan fully appreciate how he
has himself shifted from the stifling insularity of cultural
boundedness to an expanding and encompassing sym-
pathy and knowledge of others.
Rajan's purgatorial breakdown voices the deathliness
Lee Kok Liang's characters fear. Its necessity is evident
in Rajan's final recovery of the self, and of the tempered
hopefulness at the novel's conclusion. The theme is not
new: by choosing loss and death, Rajan emerges a
phoenixlike figure, imbued with a depth of empathy for
the struggles of his friends and an undeniable connec-
tion with the land. This is crucial to the novel. Rajan's
earlier foray into the interior of the jungle, or the land of
the tiger, had been effected with Zulkifli as his guide;
but now, his inward and symbolic rejourneying to the
same place is to understand what he could not years
ago, and, finally, to transcend it: "Without anyone to
guide or impose on me, I am travelling with an agility of
my own. There is no more an eye, neither Zulkifli's nor
the tiger's, watching. I've suddenly become the eye it-
self. A lidless eye so that nothing can be distorted" (138).
WORLD LITERATURE TODAY • 74:2 • SPRING 2000 • 281
 Rajan's consciousness becomes concentrated in the
eye, all-seeing and all-understanding. It is through this
spiritual awakening that he reaches even beyond the
tiger's boundaries, the symbol of "some central ordering
principle" (Wong Soak Koon, 1995, 104) or authority: "I
am relieved I don't hold on to any authority, in whatev-
er sense, and merely allow the stream of experience to
reveal all the various shades of experience and meaning.
. . . My only wish now is that I never try ever again to
impose my will or beliefs on others. And in return, I hope
others will do the same" (144). Fernando's acts of compas-
sion and Lee's saddened gaze of the Other resonate in
Rajan's words. Maniam's renewed protagonist is practical:
emerging out of the crisis, he redefines his relationship
with his wife, coming to see how she, and the women
before her, have suffered from the oppressiveness of male
discourse within dominant social /cultural structures. In In
a Far Country there are these little acts of kindness, and the
Other no longer seems quite so threatening in the light of
his or her humanity. Legitimizing the Other is not an act
which frees Vasanthi, or the countless suppressed Indian
women Raj an can think of, so much as it certainly frees
him from the rigidities of his cultural biases.
Then, as I watched her, she began to sob and then to cry.
It wasn't a woman who was crying. Her body didn't just
shake; it was convulsed with tremors from a deeper source.
Was it because I was so near her that I saw and felt a strain-
and struggle for an assimilating and encompassing con-
sciousness. Wrestling the sinewy antagonist, fragmenta-
tion, does call up great unease, deep anguish, but out of
the unyielding blackness emerges "an endless landscape
the ridges of which lead you into fresher and fresher
valleys of discovery" (In a Far Country, 196). EH
Kuala Lumpur
1 Honorific for a man of high social standing.
2 Malay for harmony and unity.
3 Tall, wild grass.
4 Samsara refers to the Buddhist/Hindu concept of a continu-
ous cycle of life, death, and rebirth of the individual soul.
5 Karma refers to the Buddhist /Hindu doctrine of reincarna-
tion and rebirth.
Works cited
Fernando, Lloyd. Scorpion Orchid. 1976. Singapore. Times Books
International. 1992.
Harrex, Syd. "Obituary: Lee Kok Liang (1927-1992)." Centre for
Research in the New Literatures in English Reviews Journal, no. 1
(1993, special New Zealand issue), pp. 143-45.
Lee, Kok Liang. Flowers in the Sky. 1981. Singapore. Federal
Publications. 1991.
Federal Publications. 1991.

ing? Was it because I was near the nearness that I couldn't

Federal Publications. 1992.
help myself from releasing her from the straining?
Lim, Shirley Geok-lin. "Language, Gender, Race and Nation: A
Something helped me to begin the unworking. Unworking
Postcolonial Meditation." In Writing Southeast / Asia in English.
the sari folds tucked so tightly, neatly, into her flesh. Undoing
London. Skoob Books. 1994a.
the cross-stitches of her and my sari-bordered life. It comes
to me now, even as I write, this strange, unlooked for energy
Malaysia and Singapore." In Writing Southeast / Asia in English.
that dares to undo the network of inhibitions, prohibitions,
London. Skoob Books. 1994b.
history and predilections that we have cast about us: a naked-
Maniam, K. S. The Return. 1981. London. Skoob Books. 1993, 1996.
ness that reaches beyond the flesh. (196)

Using the woman to describe the Other provides focus

for Maniam to deal with the wider social scenario. He
does not go beyond this point in his conclusion, but the
implications are more than evident.
Malaysian fiction in English has always contained a
core sense of the anguish of the dispossessed. Indeed,
the novels examined are "identity-haunted books spiral-
ing from their fringe locations" (Lim, 1994b, 154). Con-
structing fictions to voice that alienation remarks on
these movements toward a healing resolution. Maniam's
point, especially in In a Far Country, is to take the atten-
tion away from (and even reject) externally imposed
views of group or collective identity, and rightly sug-
gests that culture, being dynamic and organic, arises
first from the growth of the assenting individual con-
sciousness. For migrant consciousness to be absorbed
into the land (the far country, surely), the Malaysian
writer in English must grapple hard with the willing-
ness to lose cultural boundedness in the deeper desire
Sharrad, Paul. Introduction to In a Far Country by K. S. Maniam.
1993. London. Skoob Books. 1994.
Watson, C. W. Introduction to The Return by K. S. Maniam. In
S.E. Asia Writes Back! Skoob Pacifica Anthology No. 1. C. Y. Loh,
and I. K. Ong, eds. London. Skoob Books. 1993.
Wong, M. Y. "Behind the Ritual." Centre for Research in the New
Literatures in English Reviews Journal, no. 2 (1993), pp. 27-29.
Wong Soak Koon. "lourneying into K. S. Maniam's In a Far
Country." In Challenges of Reading the New and Old. Lim Chee
Seng, ed. Kuala Lumpur. University of Malaya. 1995.
Pen Is Mightier Than the Sword: Skoob Pacifica Anthology No. 2.
C. Y. Loh, I. K. Ong, eds. London. Skoob Books. 1994.
Wong Ming Yook is a lecturer in the Department of English at the
University of Malaya. A specialist in twentieth-century British litera-
ture, she also professes an interest in postcolonial (particularly South-
east Asian anglophone) and women's literatures. She is a regular book
reviewer for the New Straits Times, has published several short stories
and poems, and recently coauthored a book on literature for schools.

282 • WORLD LITERATURE TODAY • 74:2 • SPRING 2000

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