THE GLOBALIZED DIASPORIC VOICES FROM ACROSS THE PACIFIC AND THE BLUE SILK GIRDLE: AN OVERVIEW Somdatta Mandal The South East Asian region and the Pacific islands have been traditionally viewed as divided into two cultural spheres, one in which Indian influences predominated (sometimes identified as “Greater India”), and the other, “Greater China,” in which Chinese influences ruled. Similarities abound in these countries, separated by seas and borders. They share a similar tropical or subtropical climate, flora and fauna. In many places, societies possess a kinship system based on strong family and community bonds and uphold East Asian values. Together, their common histories include Hindu, Buddhist, and Muslim, as well as Christian, influences and a syncretic approach to multiple cultural and racial crossings. Geographically, however, the region is characterized by a tremendous variety of indigeneous peoples, languages, and cultures. This tendency to fragmentation was exacerbated by the action of Western colonial powers that seized much of this territory for markets and resources and imposed dissimilar Western cultural and language policies on adjacent lands. In the postcolonial world, this has manifested in different kinds of literature that are similar in certain issues of globalization and cultural memory and yet at the same time different according to the past colonial history of the particular country from where it emanates. My presentation today focuses upon the writings emanating from the Pacific island of Fiji and that of Singapore and Malaysia, popularly known as the Straits countries or the Blue Silk Girdle. In the last thirty years or so, the writer in Malaysia and Singapore has fulfilled his role by and large under the shadow of technology. The interest in these two countries in the postindependence era has been on nation building: in economic development and technological advancement. This has diminished the authority of imagination and made life overtly tangible in that part of the world. Much energy is spent there in “getting and spending” as Wordsworth would say, or in quenching “the brutal thirst for possession augmented by science” as Rabindranath Tagore would remark. For lack of any concerted effort to marry commerce to culture or art to science and technology the writer has

2 suffered immeasurably. He has been slowly pushed to the periphery by the contemporary materialistic society.

Even as early as 1970, this inhospitable environment for the writer in Singapore and his diminishing role in society was noted by one of the early poets in English in the region, Edwin Thumboo. In his Introduction to an anthology of writings from Singapore and Malaysia, entitled The Flowering Tree, Thumboo explained how the pioneering commercial spirit of Singapore, which focused on material growth, throttled the spirit of the writer and deprived him of his social role. Though Malaysia may have been relatively sympathetic to the finer as well as higher things in life, she too has joined the blind race for an accelerated materialistic development. In addition to this common predicament of the writer in Malaysia and Singapore and elsewhere, there are some other challenges faced by writers in English in these two countries. First, in spite of its long historical presence, English is still considered an “alien” language in that part of the world, rooted neither in the soul nor in the soil. Second, because of its role in the colonial era when English was used as an instrument of oppression, nationalists often cast aspersions on the language and castigated those who wrote in it. Falsely and unfairly accusing the writers of being cultural anomalies, looking for the West for tutelage as well as audience, resulted in a sort of marginalization of the writers who might already feel isolated in a heterogeneous linguistic community, where in particular, the indigeneous languages enjoy preferential treatment.

Malaysia and Singapore are both multi-racial countries standing at the crossroads of culture. Four distinct races coexist here: the Malays, who are considered bumiputras or “indigeneous” people of the land; the Chinese and the Indians who came respectively from China and India, and occasionally from Sri Lanka, towards the early part of the 20th century and made that country their homeland; and a small number of Eurasians and Europeans. These people speak four different languages: Melayu by the Malays, Mandarin and various dialects by the Chinese, Tamil by the Indians, and English by the English educated and the Eurasians and Europeans. Of the four languages used in the two countries, the status of English is the most ambiguous. In spite of its presence for more

3 than two hundred years, fiction writing in English is a very recent phenomenon in both these countries. Edwin Thumboo, in his General Introduction to The Fiction of Singapore (1990), has pointed out that the “position [of English] as pivotal, bridge language, has strengthened [in Singapore] since 1985.” However that is not the case in Malaysia. A post-British colony with a Muslim-dominant but multi-racial population, there Bahasa Malaysia has been both the lingua franca and the national language since independence. This has obstructed the rise of English to the status that it currently enjoys in Singapore.

If we take a look at some of the leading writers in English from Singapore and Malaysia, we find that they fall into different racial categories and accordingly their work also reflect the different local varieties of English to suit the tempo of local life, i.e. “Hinglish” for India, “Singlish” for Singapore and “Manglish” for Malaysia – a concept long proposed by Raja Rao in his Foreword to Kanthapura –[“We cannot write like the English. We should not… Our method of expression …has to be a dialect which will some day prove to be as distinctive and colorful as the Irish or the American…”]. This concept has found wide currency and acceptance since then and has indeed become almost a norm in the post-colonial era. It is interesting to note here that in the early days of Malaysian and Singaporean writing in English, from the mid-thirties to the fifties, when the tradition of English writing was still at a formative state, the writers who worked in isolation could not fully rise above the weaknesses inherent in using a foreign medium. Thus the writings of S. Rajaratnam, Lee Kok Liang and Awang Kedua (pseudonym) do not have a clear sense of belonging or a distinct literary and intellectual tradition for them to emulate. But writers who flourished from the late sixties onwards arrived with a new sense of confidence. They were more sure-footed in the use of the language and versatile in their craft. Thus writers of Indian descent like K.S.Maniam, Murale Pillai, Kirpal Singh, Philip Jeyaratnam, Gopal Bharatham and others; writers with Cantonese background like Catherine Lim, Shirley Geok-Lin Lim, Nalla Tan, Ho Minfong, Ovidia Yu or an Eurasian like Dudley De Souza all form part of the rubric that constitutes the English writers forum in these countries.

4 Now, the interesting fact is that if we take a close look at these writers, probably with the exception of K.S. Maniam who till recently taught English at the University of Malaya, and Catherine Lim, who lives an teaches in Singapore, almost all the other writers mentioned here form part of the global diasporic community and they hop, skip and jump continents at will. The most striking example is the case of the award-winning writer Shirley Geok-lin Lim. Shirley’s writings feature in almost all English anthologies of Singapore and Malaysia but she works as Professor of English and Women’s Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara and her works also feature regularly in Asian American anthologies and very recently in an anthology jointly edited by her and Cheng Lok Chua, which is even more region-specific. Aptly named Tilting the Continent: Southeast Asian American Writing she included her own writings with those of the other writers from the ASEAN nations, namely Brunei, Cambodia, Indonesia, Laos, Malaysia, Myanmar, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand and Vietnam. In crossing over to the United States, immigrants from South East Asia carry with them their multicultural histories, histories that are peculiarly resonant with contemporary social and cultural phenomena in late twentieth century America. This possession of a shared identity and destiny as immigrants in the United States but at the same time unwilling to sacrifice their political and cultural economy shapes the nature of their writings.

Talking of how cultural memory and globalization affects these new literary voices also brings along the problems of nomenclature and it has become very difficult to label such writers. For the sake of academic discussions, they have been classified into different categories. Sudesh Mishra, for example, makes a clear distinction between the old and the new disaporic voices: This distinction is between, on the one hand, the semi-voluntary flight of indentured peasants to non-metropolitan plantation colonies such as Fiji, Trinidad, Mauritius, South Africa, Malaysia, Surinam and Guyana, roughly between the years 1830 and 1917; and on the other the late capital or postmodern dispersal of new migrants of all classes to thriving metropolitan centers such as Australia, the United states, Canada, and Britain…… Although the old diaspora is made up of communities that

5 hail from different provinces, who speak different languages and practice different religions, and who are often inspired to leave ‘home’ for quite dissimilar reasons, the category is justifiable on the grounds that the earlier or older migration happened in the context of (and was determined by) colonialism in the heyday of capitalism. For, after all, it was CSR, a giant Australian sugar corporation, that initiated the migration of indentured labour to the Fiji Islands. Likewise, under the category of ‘new’, we have to include those descendants of the old diaspora who, together with the wave of post-Independence emigrants from the subcontinent to sundry metropolitan centers, are the willing subjects of – or unwillingly subjected to – a postcolonial or transnational political economy.

Mishra also and calls them the sugar and the masala diaspora. As examples of these two different kinds of diasporic writers we can refer to Seepersaud Naipaul, a second generation Indo-Trinidadian born in the canefields of Caroni as representing the earlier category and Satendra Nandan, Usha Sunder Harris and Sudesh Mishra himself (all originally from Fiji and now settled in Australia) as representatives of the second. For Satendra Nandan, born and educated in Fiji, coming to becoming a writer was itself an accident. As an elected member of the Fiji Parliament in 1982 and 1987, Satendra was a minister in the Bavadra cabinet and Fiji’s first Labour MP. An overnight coup led him to flee to Australia, where he is now settled as an academic at the university of Canberra. Satendra’s dozen published books include The Wounded Sea, Lines across Black Waters, Fiji: Paradise in Pieces, and Requiem for a Rainbow. The Wounded Sea gives a us a clear picture of the saga of Indian indentured labourers, also known as the ‘girmits’ who share similar experiences with those sent to the West Indies and Mauritius and other distant countries. Possessing a the enormous weight of an ‘anxiety of influence,’ popularized by the gigantic figure of V.S. Naipaul, Nandan tells us how the Indian fragment in Fiji constructed imaginary belief systems for its own self-authentication, selfgeneration and legitimation. But the Indians themselves were essentially a fragment which had been forcefully wrenched from its centre. For the Girmitiyas (the indentured labourers) their life in Fiji was retrospectively seen as a deception played upon them by

6 recruiting agents (arkatis) who convinced them of future possibilities filled with millenarian expectations. This dual process – the logic of a fragment and the process of millenarianism –led to a Fiji Indian cultural complex which is both specific to that racial group as well as connects it to the larger girmitiya diaspora around the world. The imaginative world of Satendra Nandan grows out of the special predicament of this Indian fragment in Fiji. It is built around an intuitive grasp of the girmit ideology, which Nandan occasionally blasts open, often parodies, but invariably enters into through a process of self-dialogisation. “Our fate in Fiji,” he writes, “had echoes of The Ramayana: exile, suffering, separation, battles, but no return.”(p.88) In Requiem for a Rainbow, published in 2001, Nandan has very ably weaved politics, personalities, poetry, events, outcomes, and bits of history, all to form a very readable autobiography. The book according to him is: “…my story and how I went into Fiji politics through my study of literature and how I came out of the dark, derelict tunnel to teach and study literature again.”

For a true diasporic migrant soul like Sudesh Mishra, the question of how he became the outcast of the Pacific and where he belonged to actually are left unanswered: The system, as it has been passed through the British and now taken over by the elite Fijians, has never actually allowed us to say that this particular grain of soil is yours, that you belong to it, that you can actually plant roots. So there is a kind of airiness [sic] between the earth and the feet for the Indo-Fijian.

A similar nostalgic tone haunts the voice of Usha Sunder Harris, another Indo- Fijian journalist, documentary producer and lecturer, for whom the coup is the latest in a long line of betrayals through a history which saw the British colonizers bring Indians to Fiji as labourers and then abandon them without proper provision for land ownership or political inclusion. She narrates how she was confronted by her “otherness” when on a warm Sunday afternoon as she worked in the garden with her mother, a Fijian girl who had recently moved into the neighbourhood approached them and pointing to their house

7 said, “Hey kai India [Indian], one day I will live in that house.” The realization that they are now resident aliens in their own homeland makes them unstable and like all people who are denied the prividege of calling their homeland ‘home’, denied roots, they begin to look outwards to other possible landscapes where thy can actually plant roots. Says Harris in her documentary called “No Place in Paradise”: Like those Indo Fijians, I also left Fiji about 20 years ago in pursuit of education. Ironically, I have kept my Fijian citizenship through the turbulent times in Fiji’s politics, always hopeful that one day I may return home……I have often pondered about the place called home. Home is not a place where we can be arbitrarily told to belong or not belong. Home is that favourite tree in the schoolyard, or that bend in the river, or that lonely hill beyond – places of our childhood deeply etched in the memory. Chiefs and coup leaders in Fiji may tell the word Indians don’t belong in Fiji, but we know that Fiji belongs to us.

My conclusion poses a serious but natural question. After studying the predicament of the forced and voluntary diasporics, in the present globalized scenario, should we then label the writers who now straddle two continents the dollar or the greenback diaspora? As Sudesh Mishra rightly points out, the movement from the old to the new dispora suggests an important rethinking of the concept of ‘home’ within the diaspora, especially as this occurs against the backdrop of the global shift from the centering or centripetal logic of monopoly capitalism to the decentering or centrifugal logic of transnational capitalism. Whereas for the old diaspora, ‘home’ signified an end to itinerant wandering, in the putting down of roots, ‘home’ for the ‘new’ diaspora is linked to the strategic espousal of rootlessness, to the constant mantling and dismantling of the self in makeshift landscapes. It is of course clear that whichever diasporic category a writer might fall into, primarily his or her writing reiterates with memories of the ‘home’ country and culture and this lends the globalized diasporic writer a particular label and voice from which he cannot escape. ---------------------------------

8 References: Harris, Usha Sundar. “Cry, the Beloved “Other” Country,” Sydney Morning Herald online, 7.05.2000 Lim, Shirley Geok-Lin & Cheng Lok Chua. Eds. Tilting the Continent: Southeast Asian American Writing. Minneapolis:MN: New Rivers Press, 2000. Mishra, Sudesh. “From Sugar to Masala: Writing by the Indian Diaspora” in A.K.Mehrotra ed. An Illustrated History of Indian Literature in English. New Delhi: Permanent Black: 2003. pp.276-294. Mishra, Vijay. “Satendra Nandan: The Wounded Sea.” SPAN, no. 32. Nandan, Satendra. Requiem for a Rainbow. Canberra: Pacific Indian Publications, 2001. Quayum, Mohammad A. ed. In Blue Silk Girdle: Stories From Malaysia and Singapore. Serdang: Penerbit Universit Putra Malaysia, 1998.