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.

Forging nation, forgetting self

In a lecture entitled Quest-ce quune nation? delivered at the Sorbonne

in 1882, Ernest Renan proposed that forgetting, I would even go so far as
to say historical error, is a crucial factor in the creation of a nation, which
is why progress in historical studies often constitutes a danger [for the
Textual Practice ISSN 0950-236X print/ISSN 1470-1308 online 2003 Taylor & Francis Ltd
http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals
DOI: 10.1080/0950236032000094908

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principle of ] nationality. 1 Renan was identifying the principal method

through which the political nation-state, and an allegiance to that state, is
created: a dominant force supplants its ideology through the marginalization (and often obliteration) of races, cultures, religions and concepts
different from its own. While the political policies (including economic,
religious and ethnocentric directives) that induce this selective amnesia are
very much part of a conscious and pre-determined process, the overt
and covert control of language(s) also forms a crucial element of (neo)
colonization and ideas of collective nationhood. Such observations are, of
course, generally applicable to the majority of existing nations throughout
the globe, for most of which there are sufficient similar arguments related
to the effects of colonization in its various guises but, in the Malaysian
context, language shapes national consciousness and individual identity to
an overwhelming extent.
To exist in the present, then, Malaysians must return to the root
source of their language(s) to reclaim a lost sense of individual identity
from which to look forward to an inclusive national consciousness. To
belong one must forget and then relearn elements of ones past and ones
heritage, and K.S. Maniams sense of nation and identity can be achieved
only (if it can be achieved at all) through a journey of introspection towards
the true realization of self. No nation can truly exist, he argues, unless the
individual asks: how far has he made the country in which he has lived for
so long a country in his soul?2 Maniams mapping of external and more
importantly internal paths to individual and national consciousness
explores the paradoxical potentialities and implausibilities of such concepts
and attempts to reveal what lies beneath what he terms the mummy-cloth
of self-preoccupation.3 In his literary oeuvre, his vision of nation invariably
begins and ends with conscious and subconscious quests for self-truth as a
reaction to the marginalization of ones language(s), race(s) and culture(s),
and as a response to a collective identity superficially imposed through
political or geographical conditions. What is clear is that perceptions of
individual ethnic identity and a collective plural national identity should
not be diametrically opposed or mutually incompatible indeed it is only
when the individual acknowledges his or her ethnic heritage and identity
that the potentiality of true nation can begin to exist. Maniam invariably
envisions this exploration in metaphysical terms, claiming that his wish,
and the primary purpose of his writing, is to see the universe in man.4

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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burden, is an introduction to the preoccupation with transcultural concerns

that dominates Maniams fiction:
My Grandmothers life and her death, in 1958, made a vivid impression on me. She came, as the stories and anecdotes about her say,
suddenly out of the horizon, like a camel, with nothing except some
baggage and three boys in tow. And like that animal which survives
the most barren of lands, she brooded, humped over her tin trunks,
mats, silver lamps and pots, at the junction of the main road and the
laterite trail. Later she went up the red, dusty path, into the trees and
bushes, the most undeveloped part of Bedong. The people of this
small town didnt know how she managed, but they saw her before a
week passed, a settled look on her face, a firm gait to her walk.5
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 colonial, 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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cultural past coupled with an ability to survive in the multicultural present

yet the balance between the two is delicate and fraught at best. In its
mapping of three generations of Indian diaspora in Malaysia through its
depiction of a Tamil family negotiating the interstices of past and present
cultures, of actuality and imagination, the novel suggests that in order for
individuals from marginalized ethnic groups to survive (physically and
metaphysically) they must accept the diasporic dichotemies of their existence. Such a quest is increasingly a journey of introspection and, despite
moments of enlightenment and revelation, it is this journey into self which
causes Kannans ultimate destruction. Unable to reconcile the polarities of
his existence, he seeks to ground his search in physicality in placing roots
in a soil which must reject him. Like his mother before him, he attempts
to create a sense of belonging by claiming land but, unlike Periathai, who
despite her disappointments retains a spiritual identity through her stronger
bonds with south Indian culture and religion, Kannan is inevitably doomed
in his desire to balance the spiritual and the physical because he crosses
the line from rationality to irrationality (and) is too desperate to regain his
identity,8 and in this lies the principal tragic element of the novel: Kannans
inability to straddle the interstices of cultural identity.
As Anne Brewster has noted in her discussion of the polyglossic and
heteroglossic multi-layered discourses to be found in The Return, it is
the juxtaposition of languages within the text (and largely within one
ethnocentric group) that lends the novel much of its narrative power:
A novel like The Return thus works to deconstruct the dominant
discourses of the milieu, in this case, that of the Colonial language
and its literary tradition . . . and that of nationalism. Emerging as it
does from the boundary line between culture and languages the
novel is inevitably heteroglossic and combats what Bakhtin sees as the
particularly national unity of monoglossia.9
Bakhtins assertion that no language can exist in a pure or sterilized form
and that heteroglossia necessarily subverts attempts to impose monocultural nationalism10 is, of course, particularly relevant in a postcolonial/
multicultural context. Maniam, in line with Bakhtins exposition, views
language(s) and dialogue in a Malaysian context as, on the one hand, a tool
of subversion and control, but also as a constantly evolving process that is
non-directional and open-ended, employing (both subconsciously and
consciously) myriad cultural, social and historical influences. Multiple
discourses both those languages the characters within the text employ
and the English language of the text itself form the key to the manifold
tensions within The Return. Various characters (Miss Nancy, the Eurasian
schoolteacher, and Mr Mennon, the superintendent of the hospital

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compound, are two such examples) employ language as an emblem of

authority and class division and as an apparatus of marginalization; Ravi
himself divines the empowerment and exclusionism that knowledge of the
controlling language of empire can engender.
Central to the structure of The Return is an exploration of the
ramifications of a polyglot existence: its dual import of escape and claustrophobia. The limitations and implicit entrapment associated with all three
languages/dialects Ravi speaks are clear: the Tamil language provides a
concrete ancestral and cultural past but a limited future in Malaysia; the
MalaysianEnglish dialect of Bedong provides an alternative, and a partial
sense of inclusion, but little hope for liberation from economic and racial
oppression, and is employed reluctantly:
Long time you no catch us, one of them said.
The language grated on my ear it was the English we lapsed
into after school hours.
Long time I no play, I said, reluctantly.
(p. 42)
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 implications 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 confused 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, multiethnic 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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depiction of all of the characters in The Return is a constant indictment of

life at the lower end of the socio-economic scale in Malaya during this
transitional period. We are rarely far from the oppressive themes of
entrapment and peripheral existence but the validity of individual and
collective existence for Maniam, I would suggest, lies not in abandoning
ancestral memories, but in accepting a precariously balanced existence
which marries ones cultural past with a new multicultural and multilingual
present that accepts past, present and future as inseparable. In order to
achieve this state of mind one cannot, in the words of the author, think of
time in terms of linear progression, but rather as time existing in perpetual
fluidity in the mind of the individual:
We should think not so much of time in the conventional sense but
of the experiences within a culture, and how that culture can be linked
to something else a new country, a new soil . . . Ravi cannot
entirely go back to the old culture for he cannot eradicate from his
consciousness the education and language that he has acquired.
Therefore there must be a combining of the two worlds, and how he
achieves this is demonstrated in the poem at the conclusion of the
novel using English to contain certain cultural blind spots that he
has developed. This is intended in a positive way because I have always
been concerned with getting all cultures to join together rather than
advocating the supremacy of one culture.12
Though the text is predominantly realist in style it is often through
the surrealistic mental landscapes flagging the technique employed most
often in In A Far Country that Maniam chooses to probe the nature of
antecedental memories and myths, and the task of creating a spatial
existence that neither renounces nor prioritizes traditional cultural values
in a colonial/postcolonial context:
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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braceletted, necks studded with gold and heads aureoled by intricate

crowns. Fair, gentle men and women (gods and goddesses, I suppose)
fought off the more scheming and brutal characters in battles that
clashed over our sleeping heads. The tension between good and evil
shimmered therefore like an inevitable consciousness within our
heads.
(p. 14)
The discordant tones of entrapment and exhilaration in this passage
represent a strong awareness of, and reliance upon, ancestral memories
and myths amidst the oppressive existence which confronts the Tamil
community within 1950s rural Malaysia. Increasingly, the lack of physical
and psychological space brought about by the cramped, impoverished
conditions of the compound and the multiple marginalizations experienced
by Ravi and his family manifest themselves in transitory and/or disintegrating individual and collective identities. The destructive anxieties of
separation and exile provide the characters principal motivation; Maniam
depicts an ethnic minoritys identity in a state of flux, with no real concept
of national belonging or individual worth, a minority which is posited in
what Tang Soo Ping calls the borderland state. Such a state:
focuses on dispersal and fragmentation as part of the new world order.
The Return critiques the attachment to fixed systems and beliefs which
are or have become irrelevant or oppressive; it suggests the possibility
of departure and reconnection. . . . Multiple crossings are evoked in
the novels account of three generations of an Indian family attempting
to settle in a new land Malaya. Separation and exile give rise to the
need to re-member [sic] and reconnect but the diverse cultural
constructs overlapping in the border spaces of the consciousness mark
these efforts. Ultimately, the tendency is to keep journeying, crossing
borders, to assume an expansive mindset so as to create ever new
stories or systems to explain the world and ones place in it.13
The Return, then, functions primarily as nomadic narrative(s); journey,
arrival and departure motifs are predominant in the text and form the
cyclical structure of the novel: for its characters flux and transition are,
oxymoronically, permanent states. With the qualified exception of Ravi,
who makes some progress towards accepting a culturally transient state, the
Tamil characters of The Return seek a sense of belonging that must fail
because it alternates between the polarities of cultural rigidity and cultural
vacuum. What is crucial for survival, Ravi goes some way towards learning,
is the creation of new hybrid-polyglot, transcultural myths without the
rejection of an ancestral base: a weaving of the fabric of cultures and

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discourses to make sense of this permanent state of transition and to

combat the political discourses of colonialism and neocolonialism. In this
sense, then, the title of the novel works as ironic paradox, suggesting, as it
does, what is physically impossible for this marginalized ethnic group, and
only partially possible in a metaphysical context: for Ravi must return to
the shadowy beginnings of ancestral myth, but only to define a new
transcultural existence in his minds eye. Such a deeper awakening, as
Maniam himself terms it,14 is represented though the poem-cum-epilogue,
Full Circle, itself a final paradoxical comment on the nature of language
and culture. Ravi, then, ultimately advocates an acknowledgement of
ancestral roots and seemingly rejects language as sterile and defective, but
given that these sentiments are expressed in poetic form, the rejection may
itself be viewed with some irony:
The dregs at the bottom
Of well water is the ash
Of family prayers you rejected.
The clay taste
The deep-rootedness
You turned aside from
For the cleanliness of chlorine.
Words will not serve.
(p. 173)

Myth and exile

In much of Maniams writing subsequent to The Return one may witness a

progressively dominant use of allegory and protean symbolism, and it is
the function and purpose of these techniques that I would now like to
examine in relation to the short story, Haunting the Tiger, and his second
novel, In A Far Country. Allegory, as the American academic Patrick McGee
has asserted:
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 increasingly meaningless world, and in such a context self-identity and self-

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worth become more and more difficult to retain, or in terms of

Maniams transcultural vision create. McGees definition, made in
specific reference to African literature, offers a more flexible stance than
Jamesons unconditional assertion that all third-world texts are necessarily
. . . allegorical,16 a position to which Aijaz Ahmad among others (including
McGee) has famously responded,17 and goes some way towards describing
one of the principal techniques in Maniams writing. The great majority
of Maniams characters search for meaning within a disjointed world
through attempting to comprehend and/or possess the disparate spiritual
and material fragments of their eclectic societies. Though the failure to
connect, both within ones own community and across cultures, is the
predicament which prevails in his novels and short stories, these occlusions
and the resultant feelings of transience and inadequacy are seen increasingly by the author, I would contend, with greater ambiguity than initially
rendered in The Return. In much of his later writing, flux has become
the unavoidable state of existence for all Malaysians, rather than only for
those positioned within its societal fringes; Maniams bumiputra characters
may possess a mystical and historical connection with the soil, but it is
clear that significant changes within the landscape and society have
rendered that connection tenuous and their own sense of individual and
national identity problematic. The nomadic desire to belong is no longer
limited to the migrant communities of Malaysia but, Maniam indicates,
applies just as clearly to Malays themselves. Further, if one accepts
that in this multicultural, heteroglossial context the positioning and
repositioning of Self and Other is in a constant state of transformation
and revolution, one must also accept implicitly that any real sense of
permanence in cultural or individual identity has now become a contradiction in terms. That, in Maniams vision, has become the natural condition
of existence, but it is apparent in his writing that to accept this condition
is unnatural, and in this lies the central conundrum within many of his
stories and, most specifically, in In A Far Country. Individual and collective
Malaysian identity can only exist, in Maniams terms, when the democratic
interchangeability of Self and Other is acknowledged as not only desirable,
but also essential.
I want now to discuss the short story Haunting the Tiger in light of
these propositions, as this story, it seems to me, is not only about
maintaining a diasporic consciousness and embracing a new national vision
but, just as importantly, it narrates the kaleidoscopic range of otherness
within Malaysians and Malaysia. Originally published in 1990, the story
provides a thematic and stylistic bridge between Maniams two published
novels, pointing towards the shifts in technique and the broadening, more
convoluted, perspectives of In A Far Country. The third-person narrative
of Haunting the Tiger centres on the dying reflections of a first-generation

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Malaysian-Indian, Muthu, and his endeavours to possess the land of his

birth. The younger Muthu hunts boar in the jungle regions beyond where
he lives in a failed bid to connect spiritually with his landscape but
ultimately turns to the tiger as the mystical heart of Malaysia. Mocked by
his father (who, we learn in retrospect, eventually returns to India) for his
pursuit of the non-material, he turns to the Malay, Zulkifli (who also
appears in similar guise in In A Far Country), and whose cultural wisdom
and knowledge of the land stems from, in his own words, centuries of
living here.18
The story relates a painful psychological metamorphosis for its protagonist and deals with, in Maniams view, the distinction between consciousness and awareness:
The former suggests an aggressive colonization of a body of knowledge
about life and the world. The latter is a more passive but perceptive
approach to living and the space that makes possible the living. In the
former case you act upon, in the latter you are acted upon. The self
that asserts itself is only comfortable in a narcissistically created world;
the self that is open to all influences learns to view itself in a larger
context.19
This differentiation between consciousness and awareness manifests itself in
psychological conflicts within the jungle landscape. Muthu seeks to invade
the sentient consciousness of his environment as a dominating energy,
effectively repeating the chain of colonization, while resisting the positive
metamorphosis of identity that a communion with the land offers:
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 intrinsically 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

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they are and for what purpose. Zulkifli has known it all: how to take
Muthu into the knowledge that resides within him?
(p. 43)
Though born in Malaysia and significantly less economically and
socially excluded than the Tamil characters of The Return, Muthu remains
an exile, disengaged from his ancestral heritage and from contemporary
Malaysian society. This state of exile though, Maniam suggests, need not
be debilitating if one cultivates a passive awareness of ones surroundings, a
stance which is similar in attitude to the transience that Said recognizes as
a quintessential component of the exiled intellectual who, he argues, is
like a shipwrecked person who learns how to live in a certain sense with
the land, not on it, not like Robinson Crusoe whose goal is to colonize his
little island, but more like Marco Polo, whose sense of the marvelous never
fails him, and who is always a traveler, a provisional guest, not a freeloader,
conqueror, or raider.20
Just as Said sees the intellectual exile as exist[ing] in a median state,
neither completely at one with the new setting nor fully disencumbered of
the old, beset with half-involvements and half-detachments, nostalgic and
sentimental on one level, an adept mimic or a secret outcast on another 21
so too Maniam sees the Malaysian exile as always arriving (the title narrative
of a short story collection published in 1995), but never achieving arrival.
This state engenders dual perhaps even multiple perspectives of existence
that can result in self-enlightenment and/or self-destruction. Though Said
does refer to the diasporic state of actual exile, he is quick to claim that
exile is also for [his] purposes a metaphysical condition22 and it is this
metaphysical state with which Maniam is largely preoccupied. Thus
Maniams vision of the individual in a constant state of flux, of always
arriving, correlates closely to the oxymoronic permanent impermanence of
Saids middle ground a spatial position in which one is prey to restlessness,
movement, constantly being unsettled, and unsettling others. You cannot
go back to some earlier and perhaps more stable condition of being at
home; and, alas, you can never fully arrive, be at one with your new home
or situation. 23
Saids summation of exile (be it self-imposed or otherwise) is clearly
at odds with Aijaz Ahmads more pragmatic differentiation between what
he sees as those who choose exile for utility and those who have such a state
thrust upon them, but this more rigid dichotomy does not take into
account another very real sense of exclusion which I will call the third
dimension of exile: that of the marginalized individual who exists in exile
in the country of his or her birth because, as Maniam terms it, he or she is
unable to create a sense of country or nation within his or her soul. It
becomes clear for Maniam that exile within a place is often still more

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poignant than exile from a place or exile to a place. Exile, viscerally, is

difference, otherness. 24 This otherness may exist irrespective of where a
person physically resides, and it is this third dimension, the problematic
pursuit of some elusive rootedness 25 a national and individual belonging
with which Maniam continues to concern himself.
Maniams Indian-Malaysian protagonists in Haunting the Tiger and
In A Far Country, although dispossessed of an ancestral home through time
and geography, are no longer confined to the outer edges of Malaysian
society. Socially and economically they have traversed boundaries, going
some way towards build[ing] a fabric of wisdom,26 yet the spectre of
dislocation, of a lack of collective purpose, continues to haunt their psyche.
For Muthu to come to terms with this psychological state of exile and to
create an essential space (as Edwin Thumboo terms it27), he must undergo
a highly complex and problematic process of balance and counterbalance,
not between racial or cultural groups alone, but also between a painful
renunciation of his ancestral past and an osmotic communion with the
Malaysian landscape:
I know whats wrong, Zulkifli says. Theres something foreign to the
tigers nose. He wont show himself until the smells are gone.
Zulkifli fixes Muthu with a surveying stare. Muthu becomes
nervous.
What smells? he says.
Mind and body smells, Zulkifli says.
Muthu is offended and turns away from him.
Not in the way you cant go near a person, Zulkifli says
confronting Muthu. The clothes you wear, the thoughts you think.
Where do they come from?
Theyre just clothes and ideas, Muthu says.
They must fit into the place where the tiger lives.
Why must they fit in? Muthu says. I only want to break out
from my fathers hold on me.
So you brought a purpose with you? Zulkifli says. And a way
of thinking. How can you get into the tigers stripes and spirit?
(p. 45)
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

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forgetting, but neither can the covert anti-colonial/neocolonial discourse be

ignored: capitulation can also lead to obliteration.
Muthu remains fundamentally unfulfilled in that he is unable to shed
the latent colonizing instinct in his character and, as a consequence, unable
to truly connect to the Malaysian environment. But in his exploration of
the universe in man Maniam also suggests, I would argue, that the leap in
consciousness Muthu must make is not one between Self and Other but,
rather, the painful acknowledgement that Self is Other, for universe implies
Self and Other as entwined, inseparable but, if one is to reinvent oneself in
a transcultural context, also interchangeable. In this sense Haunting the
Tiger indicates that Muthu, to create an essential space of individual and
mutual identity, must immerse the ideological fabric of his existence in a
multiplicity of alterity. In his quest for an enlightened Malaysian identity,
he must shed his instinctive desire to control his environment but he must
also perceive his racial origins (that ancestry which has initially provided a
concrete sense of self-identity) as now posited in the realm of Other. The
sense of belonging he craves his spiritual integration with the land in
which he lives will elude him because he cannot finally acknowledge the
inherent alterity that constitutes his past and present existence.

Towards individual and national identities

In A Far Country probes more deeply, and in significantly more abstract

fashion, the metaphysical preoccupations of Haunting the Tiger. Seen
through the eyes of Rajan, again a Malaysian-Indian, the novel in part
correlates physical escape from ones impoverished surroundings with the
mental anguish of exile from ones cultural roots, but in particular attempts
to portray the problematic responses to what is perceived on one level as
abandoning self but on another as, in Bhabhas terms, chang(ing) our
understanding of the pastness of the past, and the unified present of the
will to nationhood:
To be obliged to forget in the construction of the national present
is not a question of historical memory; it is the construction of a
discourse on society that performs the problematic totalization of the
national will. That strange time forgetting to remember is a place
of partial identification inscribed in the daily plebescite which
represents the performative discourse of the people.28
In his exploration of remembering and forgetting to remember and their
relation to the construction of individual and national identity, Maniam
attempts to mesh linear and lateral concepts of time and memory in a

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synchronous and multifarious prose, frequently departing from realism and

conventional textual continuity.
Less deliberately diasporic in viewpoint than much of his earlier prose,
the narrative of In A Far Country deals primarily with Rajans conscious
and subconscious battles with the inherent alterities in the Malaysianess of
his identity, again symbolized predominantly through the jungle terrain of
rural Malaysia. This physical and psychological confrontation within the
text is represented through experimental prose styles and structures: Rajans
personal memoirs, scientific treatise, epistles, political satire, parables and
myths, the nebulous, almost Confucian, advice of visionaries and soothsayers, the protean symbolism of dreamscapes, revisions of canonical
literature, the Homeric quest for unity and identity both glorified and
parodied. The struggle, which also takes the form of an ongoing battle
between the dualities of materialism and spiritualism, and body and soul,
reveals itself in a series of epiphanies, a device which Maniam employs
regularly in his prose to signal alternating planes of perception:
My sweat-stained shirt and the folded paper bag were inconsequential
details. They belonged to personal history. One was smell, the other
just grained matter. The otherness gained dominance. The trees were
no more boa-constrictors nor the flowers spines of odour. They lined
the laterite road well within a pattern of their own making. The space
between them reflected a light that only the first morning on earth
could have radiated.
(p. 24)
What Maniam terms as the first metaphysical statement of intention in
the novel 29 seeks to convey, through Rajans experience, an awareness that
is in some ways akin to the the twilight of double vision that Mrs Moore
experiences in Forsters A Passage to India.30 Indeed echoing (if one pardons
the pun) the undermining of Mrs Moores Eurocentric/Christian code of
existence in the Marabar Caves, the young Rajan experiences and flees
from a muffled booming sound . . . which interlaced road, tree, flower
and sky into an unimpressed and unmarked fluidity:
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
multiplicity in thought, memory and space [that] seems to define
individuals everywhere. It is no longer possible to retain the view that
you come from a single-strand dominant culture. The majorities
define the minorities as much as the reverse; in other words the
changing periphery causes alterations at the centre, if there still is a
centre.32
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 examining 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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however, while dwelling on the interconnectedness of the jungle landscape,

also evinces the rupturing of the crucial symbiotic (and symbolic) relationship between the Malaysian environment and its inhabitants in the face of
materialistic incursions:
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)
This disappearance of self, encapsulated as it is in a liberating/obliterating
communion with the Malaysian environment, may be seen as the central
paradox for the marginalized Malaysian: a willingness to commune with
the environment offset by an abiding suspicion of the (Malay-dominated)
social and political forces which erroneously seek to annex diasporic groups
and yoke the disparate elements of Malaysia.
The linguistic preoccupation that dominates Malaysian literature
written in English since Independence is again evident in In A Far Country,
which is immediately concerned with the use of language as a colonial/
neocolonial tool within Malaysia. Indeed Maniam, having experienced
three discursive formations of colonialism (colonialism, neocolonialism
and postcolonialism),35 is at times seemingly overwhelmed by this complex
fascination with, and deep mistrust of, the fluidity of language. This deeply
ambivalent approach to discourse(s), first broached in The Return, is
exemplified in In A Far Country by the Indian wanderer Sivasurian, who is
advised by his mother to pursue material wealth and power through seeking
a position in the controlling political machinery (Be an important person
in the government. The government looks after everybody. . . . The words
were like my clothes. Without them I felt naked and weak (p. 87)), but
ultimately rejects the inherent hypocrisy associated with material wealth
and the manipulation of hegemonic discourse: Language is such a useless
instrument. Its only an instrument. What comes through it is sieved and
filtered according to its capacity (p. 86). Sivasurian, as self-proclaimed

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Bernard Wilson Memory, myth, exile

Lord of the Sun, remains a key to unravelling the text, embodying as he

does pure consciousness, total seeing, like the light of the sun that falls on
everything without bias.36 And it is the twin leitmotivs of light and the allseeing protean eye (which appears in various guises throughout the novel
as that gigantic eye formed by crabs on the beach not far from the
settlement, as Manis eye, as the eye that accompanies [Rajan] and Zulkifli
into the jungle, and also the eye that is there as [Rajan] goes through,
voluntarily, the imaginative landscape in his fully awakened state)37 that
anchor the text and function as moral perspective and insight to metaphysical truths.
The nomadic existence of Sivasurian, though, is only one of several
experimental templates for identity explored by Rajan and, although his
cryptic ideology has merit in that he has liberated himself from the desire
to possess, it is partially flawed in its absence of shared communal values
and cultural connection:
A wanderer cannot carry too much baggage with him. . . . He has to
be light in his body, mind and the other thing people put near the
heart. Soul? Atman? Brahman? (Words stand for things; they are not
the things themselves. How can they hold within themselves invisible
qualities?)
(pp. 1034)
Rajan attempts to locate an individual and national sense of coherence
through the eclectic range of characters, anecdotes and myths that people
his memory, among them Lee Shins sexual exploration and subsequent
moral and spiritual degeneration, Sivasurians cryptic advocacy to live in
the present so that you can go back to the past one day (p. 89), Zulkiflis
vision of a reunification of land, mind and body, and the devastating effects
of materialism on his son Mat. As it proves for Ravi and Kannan in The
Return, language in the majority of these instances is effective primarily in
its propensity to disempower and anaesthetize. Plantation women, living
vicariously through a debilitating colonial discourse, navigate their existence
within a dehumanizing colonizer/colonized framework:
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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instances in In A Far Country, as for Lee Kok Liangs nameless narrators,38

represents a (neo)colonial apparatus of deceit, division and alienation, an
agent for inducing the amnesia that Renan expounds as crucial to the
creation of a nation-state.
The fraught relationship between the monolithic Eurocentric dominance of a colonial past and a collective heterogeneous future is evoked in
the juxtaposition of three letters which (supposedly) support differing
stances on the demolition of a number of colonial buildings in Rajans town,
evidencing his own conflicting viewpoints, while providing a manifesto for
contemporary Malaysia and a covert political critique of its present course:
The destruction of the familiar is a destruction of the comfortable. If
we look deeply into the phenomenon, we will discover the imperative
for why these buildings will have to go. How did these buildings come
to be erected? What do they tell about the spirit of the people who
built them?
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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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:
As soon as the leaders voice ceases, the machine descends further so
that Im enveloped in a womb-like sheath. All kinds of instruments
probe my body; I feel suction-like pads on my head, face, chest, thighs
and feet. Then the machine pauses as if it has found the source of my
non-conformity. There is a sharp pain as a clamp is riveted to my
temples; a sharper pain when a casing is fitted to my testicles and
penis. I struggle, lash out, push and scream and scream.
(p. 158)
One of the major problems marginalized Malaysian writers are confronted
with is, as Maniam states, overt and covert methods of censorship within a
predominantly Malay society.40 In a 1991 interview he noted that if I had
a protagonist in a work of fiction of mine and that protagonist was a Malay,
and if I then included his religious beliefs and I redefined them for him
then I would be up against quite a lot of protest and, much worse than
that, I would probably be put in jail, or stigmatised,41 and although In A
Far Country does not deal specifically with religion, it does attempt to
question and redefine notions of what constitutes Malaysia and Malaysians.
As such, Maniams discordant style in In A Far Country is, I would contend,
primarily an artistic experiment and a reflection of its obtuse themes, but
also, given the delicate nature of his exploration of Malaysian society, a
deliberate obfuscation in response to social and political pressures.
In order to discover personal redemption and his own spatial position
within this Malaysian montage, Rajan must probe the contrary myths and
memories that comprise his fragmented identity and symbolize Malaysias
intercultural dynamics and social structures. This journey necessitates his
return, in Lacanian terms, to a pre-Oedipal or imaginary state to reorder,
relearn, and, where necessary, expunge, the multiple memories (ancestral,
familial, colonial, neocolonial) of his existence. Rajan must first revert to
the imaginary, a place where there is no difference and no absence, only
identity and presence 42 to learn and reorder the roots of his identity in
order to ultimately enter an endless landscape the ridges of which lead you
into fresher and fresher valleys of discovery (p. 196). His journey and
redemption necessarily involve both a physical (partly sexual) and meta-

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physical awakening, and enormous peril risks emphasized by Lee Shins

inability to accept the multiple alterities of his existence and Pak Zuls sons
self-destructive rejection of Malaysian society. But although it is seen by
Rajan as a departure into waste (p. 167), Lee Shins negative example
nevertheless provides Rajan with a path to (individual and national)
recovery through a redefinition of past and present:
At one time, I thought of the past as dead history. I dont think so
now. The past is needed to make the present alive. But there must be
no slavish or desperate clinging to the past.
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 metaphors. 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