Malaysian literature in English, anyone?

By Sim Kwang Yang

The naiveté of half-cooked patriotism knows no bounds.  A reader wrote in to the NST, questioning why Malaysian students should study English literature.  Why, he wondered, should our children not study Malaysian literature instead?

The obvious problem is with the very existence of anything that we can recognise as Malaysian literature.  Obviously, there is a body of Malay literature, especially that promoted by the Dewan Pustaka dan Bahasa.  All the Chinese newspapers give plenty of space for aspiring writers to develop their talents.  I am sure the Indian community also have some literary activity. But do we have a Malaysian literature – for all Malaysians?

Strangely enough, the most robust English dailies have done little to encourage literary creativity in English.  Does it mean that there is no market for it, and that English-educated Malaysians of all races are simply not interested in literature?

We tend to think of literature as the product of highbrow intellectual activity, a kind of self-indulgence bandied about by the very educated elite to display their superior taste.  But literature in the modern sense became a mass phenomenon only after the arrival of what Benedict Anderson described as print capitalism.  Literary successes depend very much on market demand.  Writers, poets, playwrights, and novelists must be paid, or else they would simply starve.

Charles Dickens wrote his many magnificent stories as serialised segments published in magazines.  Feodor Dostoyevsky was so broke from his gambling debts that he had to write day and night to keep his creditors at bay.  Bernard Shaw could find publishers because the theatre tradition in England had always been flourishing since the time of William Shakespeare.

But in the modern era, publishing has also become a high-risk industry.  Printing is a costly business.  Promotion is often prohibitively expensive.  No matter how strong their sense of mission is, publishers simply will have to make money in order to survive.  Without a market for it, there is no point in investing in a writer, no matter how talented he is.

The other day, I walked into a Chinese bookstore in Sungei Wang.  There were shelves and shelves of short stories, poems, prose writing, and such stuff produced by our home-grown writers.  But there were few takers, as the store-keeper told me.  People were more interested in books on fortune telling, cookery and cheap romances, she said.

Malaysians who like to run down all things Malaysian would perhaps make the dubious claim that Malaysian writers simply have no literary talent to speak of.  I can think immediately of three Chinese novelists who have since found more fertile ground in Taiwan, and become the leading lights in the literary circle there.  One is from Kuching actually.

A star student of mine at the New Era College has also won very prestigious literary prizes from Taiwan for his rather metaphysical poems, written when this chap was hardly out of his teens.

We have the talent, but we do not have the market for literary creativity.  Something is wanting in our national soul.

It is all too easy to point to the politics of race and the ensuing repressive climate that stifles the freedom needed for artistic creativity.  There is something in that.  Ours is a much politicised society.  When Eric Hobsbawm’s “official nationalism” has invaded and permeated all the public space of the individual at all social and cultural levels, the creative impulse that must spring forth from the nadir of individuality must die a slow death.

On the other hand though, contradictions and adversities are the raw materials of which great novels and poems are made.  The ridiculous contradictions of racial unease were given a humorous treatment by Anthony Burgess in his Malayan Trilogy, even if he was also not impervious to racial stereotyping.  From the perspective of Edward Said’s post-colonial critique, Burgess was also guilty of telling his story from the colonizer’s point of view.  But at least, you can credit Burgess for giving a more human face to the Malayan ‘natives’ than Conrad or Maugham had ever done.

(I am puzzled by reports that Burgess’ book has been banned by our officialdom.  But that is material for treatment elsewhere.)

Besides, literature seeks to uncover the truth.  Or at least, literary endeavour tries to unravel the enigmatic nature of truth.  Sometimes, artists must address themselves to the powers-that-be.  Often, the voices that tell that important story are more powerful than the power that tries to silence them.

Take the Soviet Union under the Communist 70-year rule for instance.  The Soviet Communist party had come to power on the grounds prepared by the Russian intelligentsia.  Then the Communist Party turned around and persecuted with unthinkable brutality those who criticised the regime.  The Siberian hard labour camp was the favourite place for dissident writers to be exiled.

That did not prevent writers from continuing with their work, and sometimes smuggling their manuscripts to be published in the West.  It certainly could not prevent Alexander Solzhenitsyn from exposing the horror of the Gulag.  In fact, when he was later exiled to the US, he complained bitterly of being removed from his home soil to a “castration of the soul”, and he never produced any great work hence.

At the end of the day, I think our failure in producing any Malaysian literary classics can be attributed to our failure at building one nation out of a culturally and linguistically diverse population.

It would be very hard for any aspiring writer to escape from the walls of his ethnic prison.  The object of his concern is largely limited to his life-experience within his ethnic enclave.  His theme, narrative, and the tonality of his treatment are almost bound to be ethnically biased.

Even if the writer wants to step out of his ethnic circle, and venture into the Malaysian form of life that crosses ethnic boundaries, he would be deterred by a whole host of racial and religious sensitivities.  There is little room for experimentation.  Even when no mistake has been committed, the poor writer may have to confront an angry mob at his front gate demanding his head as punishment for his perceived or imagined insults against certain race or religion.

Of course, there is the problem of language.

I also know of Chinese writers who are trying to write in Bahasa Malaysia.  BM is a beautiful language in the right hand, but it has been deadened by politico-bureaucratic usage.  The national language is so politicised that people of Non-Malay descent will harbour great resistance in using this language for purposes other than official communication.

In any case, literary works that are not produced in BM will be sidelined, because that is the social reality in Malaysia.  That is a pity.  After all, literature is an art form.  Art may be born from any cultural or linguistic niche, but the greatest works of art always transcend cultural and linguistic barriers.  They should become the universal heritage of the entire human race.

For instance, the tragedies of Sophocles may have been written in the ancient Greek that no living souls in the modern world use as a lingua franca, except for perhaps the small circle of Greek scholars.  But if a good English translation of the plays can be procured, and if the tragedies are performed on the stage, the audience can still feel the full force of the dramatic hell that Oedipus experienced when he discovered he had killed his father and married his mother.

Then again, Conrad was a Pole, learned his maritime trade in French, and retired to write great novels in English. Joyce and Yeats were the epitome of Irishness, and yet they wrote in English, the language of their conquerors.  Nabokov was decidedly Russian, and yet made his name in the US with his English novels.  Lately, the most significant contribution to English literature has come from the Indians.  Salman Rushdie and V S Naipaul are two shining examples.

Irrespective of their national origins, great writers and poets in English literature have contributed to the understanding of the human condition, and added beauty to an otherwise mundane existence to which the human race is subject.

Together with literary giants of the Non-English speaking world, from the Russians to the Africans and the South Americans, whose works have been translated into English, English writers sing the songs of the soul, paint the colours of our humanity, and narrate the eternal tales of the comedies and tragedies that characterise our earthly existence.

Given the splintered nature of our Malaysian linguistic universe, perhaps English is the only suitable medium for the birth of a great Malaysian literature.

( First published in Malaysiakini on January 13, 2007 and edited for HU on November 11, 2009 )