Memory, myth, exile: the desire for Malaysian belonging in K.S. Maniam’s The Return, ‘Haunting the Tiger’ and In A Far Country

Textual Practice 17(2), 2003, 391–412

Bernard Wilson

Memory, myth, exile: the desire for Malaysian belonging inK.S. Maniam’s The Return, ‘Haunting the Tiger’ and In A FarCountry

Nations, like narratives, lose their origins in the myths of time andonly fully realize their horizons in the mind’s eye.

(Homi Bhabha, Nation and Narration)

Exile is one of the saddest fates.(Edward Said, Representations of the Intellectual)

Introduction

K.S. Maniam’s output as a writer, playwright and academic spans the lastthree decades. The leading writer of English-language prose fiction incontemporary Malaysia, his novels, short stories and plays invariably reflectthe plight of the marginalized from the perspective of the Indian diasporain Malaysian society but, more broadly, redefine concepts of self and nationthrough an exploration of the origins of ancestral memory and myth. Inthis essay I wish to examine the colonization of discourse that is incorporatedinto Maniam’s texts, his use of myth and metamorphosis, the sense ofinternal exile and desire for belonging that informs his prose, and his (oftenallegorical) depiction of the increasingly blurred division between individualand national consciousness in postcolonial Malaysia as represented in thetwo novels, The Return and In A Far Country, and the short story, ‘Hauntingthe Tiger’.

Forging nation, forgetting self

In a lecture entitled ‘Qu’est-ce qu’une nation?’ delivered at the Sorbonnein 1882, Ernest Renan proposed that ‘forgetting, I would even go so far asto say historical error, is a crucial factor in the creation of a nation, whichis why progress in historical studies often constitutes a danger [for the

Textual Practice ISSN 0950-236X print/ISSN 1470-1308 online © 2003 Taylor & Francis Ltdhttp://www.tandf.co.uk/journals

DOI: 10.1080/0950236032000094908

Textual Practice

principle of ] nationality.’1 Renan was identifying the principal methodthrough which the political nation-state, and an allegiance to that state, iscreated: a dominant force supplants its ideology through the marginaliza-tion (and often obliteration) of races, cultures, religions and conceptsdifferent from its own. While the political policies (including economic,religious and ethnocentric directives) that induce this selective amnesia arevery much part of a conscious and pre-determined process, the overtand covert control of language(s) also forms a crucial element of (neo)colonization and ideas of collective nationhood. Such observations are, ofcourse, generally applicable to the majority of existing nations throughoutthe globe, for most of which there are sufficient similar arguments relatedto the effects of colonization in its various guises but, in the Malaysiancontext, language shapes national consciousness and individual identity toan overwhelming extent.

To exist in the present, then, Malaysians must return to the rootsource of their language(s) to reclaim a lost sense of individual identityfrom which to look forward to an inclusive national consciousness. Tobelong one must forget and then relearn elements of one’s past and one’sheritage, and K.S. Maniam’s sense of nation and identity can be achievedonly (if it can be achieved at all) through a journey of introspection towardsthe true realization of self. No nation can truly exist, he argues, unless theindividual asks: ‘how far has he made the country in which he has lived forso long a country in his soul?2 Maniam’s mapping of external – and moreimportantly internal – paths to individual and national consciousnessexplores the paradoxical potentialities and implausibilities of such conceptsand attempts to reveal what lies beneath what he terms ‘the mummy-clothof self-preoccupation’.3 In his literary oeuvre, his vision of nation invariablybegins and ends with conscious and subconscious quests for self-truth as areaction to the marginalization of one’s language(s), race(s) and culture(s),and as a response to a collective identity superficially imposed throughpolitical or geographical conditions. What is clear is that perceptions ofindividual ethnic identity and a collective plural national identity shouldnot be diametrically opposed or mutually incompatible – indeed it is onlywhen the individual acknowledges his or her ethnic heritage and identitythat the potentiality of true nation can begin to exist. Maniam invariablyenvisions 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 theantipathetic symbolism of both noble pioneer and downtrodden beast of

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burden, is an introduction to the preoccupation with transcultural concernsthat dominates Maniam’s fiction:

My Grandmother’s life and her death, in 1958, made a vivid impres-sion on me. She came, as the stories and anecdotes about her say,suddenly out of the horizon, like a camel, with nothing except somebaggage and three boys in tow. And like that animal which survivesthe most barren of lands, she brooded, humped over her tin trunks,mats, silver lamps and pots, at the junction of the main road and thelaterite trail. Later she went up the red, dusty path, into the trees andbushes, the most undeveloped part of Bedong. The people of thissmall town didn’t know how she managed, but they saw her before aweek passed, a settled look on her face, a firm gait to her walk.5

The arrival in Kedah of Ravi’s grandmother, ‘the dipping pool for all of theother characters’,6 effectively mythologizes the arrival of immigrant Indiansin Malaya and establishes two dominant leitmotivs in Maniam’s writing;in Periathai’s emergence from the land itself, as it were, the inextricableconnection between self and terrain is immediately introduced, togetherwith the exploration of possession in its various incarnations: spatialoccupation, cultural validity, material acquisition.

In The Return, Maniam’s central characters exist in what Bhabha callsthe ‘ambivalent margin of the nation space’7 but more precisely (since thetwo spatial concepts are inseparable) they also exist in the increasinglyambivalent margin of individual space. Though Malaysian in setting, thenovel deals almost exclusively with first- and second-generation TamilIndians and examines their obliteration/regeneration in confronting colo-nial, postcolonial and neocolonial influences and their (largely unsuccessful)attempts to negotiate a path towards a hybrid identity that acknowledgestheir cultural and religious heritage. As such, The Return is less specificallyMalaysian than universally diasporic in focus. The narrative action is seenthrough the eyes of Ravi who, Malaysian-born, straddles the intersticesbetween traditional Indian cultural religious values and colonial Britishinfluences, and attempts to create a sense of spatial belonging and fulfil aneed for connection and identity. Though Ravi is the central protagonistin the narrative, powerful images of the dislocations of his grandmotherand particularly his father, Kannan, dominate the textual landscape andforeground the psychological complexities faced by displaced individualstrying to justify existence in surroundings that are concurrently familiarand alien.

As the title of the novel (implicit as it is with the various physical,psychological and spiritual manifestations of a cultural return) suggests, thevexed 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 itsmapping of three generations of Indian diaspora in Malaysia through itsdepiction of a Tamil family negotiating the interstices of past and presentcultures, of actuality and imagination, the novel suggests that in order forindividuals from marginalized ethnic groups to survive (physically andmetaphysically) they must accept the diasporic dichotemies of their exist-ence. Such a quest is increasingly a journey of introspection and, despitemoments of enlightenment and revelation, it is this journey into self whichcauses Kannan’s ultimate destruction. Unable to reconcile the polarities ofhis existence, he seeks to ground his search in physicality – in placing rootsin a soil which must reject him. Like his mother before him, he attemptsto create a sense of belonging by claiming land but, unlike Periathai, whodespite her disappointments retains a spiritual identity through her strongerbonds with south Indian culture and religion, Kannan is inevitably doomedin his desire to balance the spiritual and the physical because he ‘crossesthe line from rationality to irrationality (and) is too desperate to regain hisidentity’,8 and in this lies the principal tragic element of the novel: Kannan’sinability to straddle the interstices of cultural identity.

As Anne Brewster has noted in her discussion of the polyglossic andheteroglossic multi-layered discourses to be found in The Return, it isthe juxtaposition of languages within the text (and largely within oneethnocentric group) that lends the novel much of its narrative power:

A novel like The Return thus works to deconstruct the dominantdiscourses of the milieu, in this case, that of the Colonial languageand its literary tradition . . . and that of nationalism. Emerging as itdoes from the ‘boundary line between culture and languages’ thenovel is inevitably heteroglossic and combats what Bakhtin sees as theparticularly national unity of monoglossia.9

Bakhtin’s assertion that no language can exist in a pure or sterilized formand that heteroglossia necessarily subverts attempts to impose mono-cultural nationalism10 is, of course, particularly relevant in a postcolonial/multicultural context. Maniam, in line with Bakhtin’s exposition, viewslanguage(s) and dialogue in a Malaysian context as, on the one hand, a toolof subversion and control, but also as a constantly evolving process that isnon-directional and open-ended, employing (both subconsciously andconsciously) myriad cultural, social and historical influences. Multiplediscourses – both those languages the characters within the text employand the English language of the text itself – form the key to the manifoldtensions within The Return. Various characters (Miss Nancy, the Eurasianschoolteacher, and Mr Mennon, the superintendent of the hospital

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compound, are two such examples) employ language as an emblem ofauthority and class division and as an apparatus of marginalization; Ravihimself divines the empowerment and exclusionism that knowledge of thecontrolling language of empire can engender.

Central to the structure of The Return is an exploration of theramifications of a polyglot existence: its dual import of escape and claustro-phobia. The limitations and implicit entrapment associated with all threelanguages/dialects Ravi speaks are clear: the Tamil language provides aconcrete ancestral and cultural past but a limited future in Malaysia; theMalaysian–English dialect of Bedong provides an alternative, and a partialsense of inclusion, but little hope for liberation from economic and racialoppression, 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, Ravi’s superior use of the English of the colonial teaching systemposits 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 culturalparameters of Ravi’s existence, no language can adequately signify a senseof belonging for his polyglot identity; the cultural and sociological implica-tions of each form of communication ensure that Ravi exists in linguisticinterstices. Kannan’s withdrawal and subsequent mental and linguisticbreakdown represents a dispossession of identity which Maniam renders asan ironic and tragic rewriting of particularly Hindu, but also Christian,religious mythologies; Pentecostal glossolalia is inverted in Kannan’s con-fused polyglot ramblings and melded with animistic ceremonial offeringsto Shiva Nataraja, cosmic dancer of creation and destruction (‘Breathe yourspirit into them!’ he chanted. ‘Make them the clay and grass of my body!’(p. 168)), in a desperate and tragic response to the heteroglossial, multi-ethnic landscape in which he finds himself. For Kannan, the consumingand inevitably catastrophic need for possession of physical space equates toreclaiming lost ancestral identity, but it is this pursuit that results in mentaland physical annihilation.

But if The Return appears to provide an overwhelmingly discouragingoutlook for cultural and linguistic belonging in colonial and postcolonialMalaya, this is only partly true. While the author emphasizes the negativeand 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 oflife at the lower end of the socio-economic scale in Malaya during thistransitional period. We are rarely far from the oppressive themes ofentrapment and peripheral existence but the validity of individual andcollective existence for Maniam, I would suggest, lies not in abandoningancestral memories, but in accepting a precariously balanced existencewhich marries one’s cultural past with a new multicultural and multilingualpresent that accepts past, present and future as inseparable. In order toachieve this state of mind one cannot, in the words of the author, think oftime in terms of linear progression, but rather as time existing in perpetualfluidity in the mind of the individual:

We should think not so much of time in the conventional sense butof the experiences within a culture, and how that culture can be linkedto something else – a new country, a new soil . . . Ravi cannotentirely go back to the old culture for he cannot eradicate from hisconsciousness the education and language that he has acquired.Therefore there must be a combining of the two worlds, and how heachieves this is demonstrated in the poem at the conclusion of thenovel – using English to contain certain cultural blind spots that hehas developed. This is intended in a positive way because I have alwaysbeen concerned with getting all cultures to join together rather thanadvocating the supremacy of one culture.12

Though the text is predominantly realist in style it is often throughthe surrealistic mental landscapes – flagging the technique employed mostoften in In A Far Country – that Maniam chooses to probe the nature ofantecedental memories and myths, and the task of creating a spatialexistence that neither renounces nor prioritizes traditional cultural valuesin a colonial/postcolonial context:

How does one describe the land one lived in but never saw? It wasmore tangible than the concrete one we flitted through every day.Darkness gave it its true dimensions. Then it vibrated within ourhearts. If we saw, perhaps through some quirk of optics, a flame besidethe drain, then it was a dead pregnant woman’s soul come to hauntthe real world; if we heard rumours, echoed voices among the hills,they were the chanting and tinkling of banana-tree spirits dancing inthe courtyard of the night. The quick rush of the communal bathshedsignified some unappeased soul’s feverish bathing. We were hemmedinto our rooms, houses and into our minds. But for all these therewere a lot of colours in our invisible world. The gigantic figures thatfilled our imagination were turned out in bright togas, arms heavily

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braceletted, necks studded with gold and heads aureoled by intricatecrowns. Fair, gentle men and women (gods and goddesses, I suppose)fought off the more scheming and brutal characters in battles thatclashed over our sleeping heads. The tension between good and evilshimmered therefore like an inevitable consciousness within ourheads.

(p. 14)

The discordant tones of entrapment and exhilaration in this passagerepresent a strong awareness of, and reliance upon, ancestral memoriesand myths amidst the oppressive existence which confronts the Tamilcommunity within 1950s rural Malaysia. Increasingly, the lack of physicaland psychological space brought about by the cramped, impoverishedconditions of the compound and the multiple marginalizations experiencedby Ravi and his family manifest themselves in transitory and/or disinte-grating individual and collective identities. The destructive anxieties ofseparation and exile provide the characters’ principal motivation; Maniamdepicts an ethnic minority’s identity in a state of flux, with no real conceptof national belonging or individual worth, a minority which is posited inwhat 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 whichare or have become irrelevant or oppressive; it suggests the possibilityof departure and reconnection. . . . Multiple crossings are evoked inthe novel’s account of three generations of an Indian family attemptingto settle in a new land – Malaya. Separation and exile give rise to theneed to re-member [sic] and reconnect but the diverse culturalconstructs overlapping in the border spaces of the consciousness markthese efforts. Ultimately, the tendency is to keep journeying, crossingborders, to assume an expansive mindset so as to create ever newstories or systems to explain the world and one’s 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 thecyclical 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, theTamil characters of The Return seek a sense of belonging that must failbecause it alternates between the polarities of cultural rigidity and culturalvacuum. What is crucial for survival, Ravi goes some way towards learning,is the creation of new hybrid-polyglot, transcultural myths without therejection 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 tocombat the political discourses of colonialism and neocolonialism. In thissense, then, the title of the novel works as ironic paradox, suggesting, as itdoes, what is physically impossible for this marginalized ethnic group, andonly partially possible in a metaphysical context: for Ravi must return tothe shadowy beginnings of ancestral myth, but only to define a newtranscultural existence in his mind’s eye. Such a ‘deeper awakening’, asManiam himself terms it,14 is represented though the poem-cum-epilogue,‘Full Circle’, itself a final paradoxical comment on the nature of languageand culture. Ravi, then, ultimately advocates an acknowledgement ofancestral roots and seemingly rejects language as sterile and defective, butgiven that these sentiments are expressed in poetic form, the rejection mayitself be viewed with some irony:

The dregs at the bottomOf well water is the ashOf family prayers you rejected.The clay tasteThe deep-rootednessYou turned aside from –For the cleanliness of chlorine.

Words will not serve.(p. 173)

Myth and exile

In much of Maniam’s writing subsequent to The Return one may witness aprogressively dominant use of allegory and protean symbolism, and it isthe function and purpose of these techniques that I would now like toexamine in relation to the short story, ‘Haunting the Tiger’, and his secondnovel, In A Far Country. Allegory, as the American academic Patrick McGeehas asserted:

arises in a culture for which the real world has become meaningless,devoid of intrinsic value, fragmented yet mysterious. The allegoristmerely arranges the fragments of this world, its images, to produce ameaning the fragments could not produce by themselves – a meaningnot identical to the intention of the allegorist but reflecting his or herrelation to the given historical context.15

In essence, then, the allegorist necessarily pursues meaning in an increas-ingly meaningless world, and in such a context self-identity and self-

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worth become more and more difficult to retain, or – in terms ofManiam’s transcultural vision – create. McGee’s definition, made inspecific reference to African literature, offers a more flexible stance thanJameson’s unconditional assertion that ‘all third-world texts are necessarily. . . allegorical’,16 a position to which Aijaz Ahmad among others (includingMcGee) has famously responded,17 and goes some way towards describingone of the principal techniques in Maniam’s writing. The great majorityof Maniam’s characters search for meaning within a disjointed worldthrough attempting to comprehend and/or possess the disparate spiritualand material fragments of their eclectic societies. Though the failure toconnect, both within one’s own community and across cultures, is thepredicament which prevails in his novels and short stories, these occlusionsand the resultant feelings of transience and inadequacy are seen increas-ingly by the author, I would contend, with greater ambiguity than initiallyrendered in The Return. In much of his later writing, flux has becomethe unavoidable state of existence for all Malaysians, rather than only forthose positioned within its societal fringes; Maniam’s bumiputra charactersmay possess a mystical and historical connection with the soil, but it isclear that significant changes within the landscape and society haverendered that connection tenuous and their own sense of individual andnational identity problematic. The nomadic desire to belong is no longerlimited to the migrant communities of Malaysia but, Maniam indicates,applies just as clearly to Malays themselves. Further, if one acceptsthat in this multicultural, heteroglossial context the positioning andrepositioning of Self and Other is in a constant state of transformationand revolution, one must also accept implicitly that any real sense ofpermanence in cultural or individual identity has now become a contradic-tion in terms. That, in Maniam’s vision, has become the natural conditionof existence, but it is apparent in his writing that to accept this conditionis unnatural, and in this lies the central conundrum within many of hisstories and, most specifically, in In A Far Country. Individual and collectiveMalaysian identity can only exist, in Maniam’s terms, when the democraticinterchangeability 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 ofthese propositions, as this story, it seems to me, is not only aboutmaintaining a diasporic consciousness and embracing a new national visionbut, just as importantly, it narrates the kaleidoscopic range of othernesswithin Malaysians and Malaysia. Originally published in 1990, the storyprovides a thematic and stylistic bridge between Maniam’s two publishednovels, pointing towards the shifts in technique and the broadening, moreconvoluted, perspectives of In A Far Country. The third-person narrativeof ‘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 hisbirth. The younger Muthu hunts boar in the jungle regions beyond wherehe lives in a failed bid to connect spiritually with his landscape butultimately turns to the tiger as the mystical heart of Malaysia. Mocked byhis father (who, we learn in retrospect, eventually returns to India) for hispursuit of the non-material, he turns to the Malay, Zulkifli (who alsoappears in similar guise in In A Far Country), and whose cultural wisdomand knowledge of the land stems from, in his own words, ‘centuries ofliving here’.18

The story relates a painful psychological metamorphosis for its protag-onist and deals with, in Maniam’s view, the ‘distinction between con-sciousness and awareness’:

The former suggests an aggressive colonization of a body of knowledgeabout life and the world. The latter is a more passive but perceptiveapproach to living and the space that makes possible the living. In theformer case you act upon, in the latter you are acted upon. The selfthat asserts itself is only comfortable in a narcissistically created world;the self that is open to all influences learns to view itself in a largercontext.19

This differentiation between consciousness and awareness manifests itself inpsychological conflicts within the jungle landscape. Muthu seeks to invadethe sentient consciousness of his environment as a dominating energy,effectively repeating the chain of colonization, while resisting the positivemetamorphosis of identity that a communion with the land offers:

Muthu’s sleep is filled with dreams. And they are always the same: hefinds himself miraculously changed into a chameleon. His tapering,curled tail is hooked onto the branch of a huge tree. His eyes, encircledby lids that never close, look at the danger below but he is also excitedby the leap he will have to make. His tail unclasps and as he hurtlesthrough the changing hues of the foliage and sees the red, dark earthrush up at him, he screams, ‘I’ll possess! I’ll possess!’

(p. 42)

Like Kannan, possession for Muthu is the seemingly natural (but intrin-sically flawed) response to marginalization, which carries with it a pervasivesense of dislocation and dispossession, and Muthu’s attempt to control,rather than acquiesce to, his surroundings retards his pursuit of a meaningfulindividual and collective identity:

Nevertheless they will not let go of what they know in the flesh andin the mind. Muthu’s 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 takeMuthu into the knowledge that resides within him?

(p. 43)

Though born in Malaysia and significantly less economically andsocially excluded than the Tamil characters of The Return, Muthu remainsan exile, disengaged from his ancestral heritage and from contemporaryMalaysian society. This state of exile though, Maniam suggests, need notbe debilitating if one cultivates a passive awareness of one’s surroundings, astance which is similar in attitude to the transience that Said recognizes asa quintessential component of the exiled intellectual who, he argues, ‘islike a shipwrecked person who learns how to live in a certain sense withthe land, not on it, not like Robinson Crusoe whose goal is to colonize hislittle island, but more like Marco Polo, whose sense of the marvelous neverfails 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 ofthe old, beset with half-involvements and half-detachments, nostalgic andsentimental 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 narrativeof a short story collection published in 1995), but never achieving arrival.This state engenders dual – perhaps even multiple – perspectives of existencethat can result in self-enlightenment and/or self-destruction. Though Saiddoes 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 thismetaphysical state with which Maniam is largely preoccupied. ThusManiam’s vision of the individual in a constant state of flux, of alwaysarriving, correlates closely to the oxymoronic permanent impermanence ofSaid’s middle ground – a spatial position in which one is prey to ‘restlessness,movement, constantly being unsettled, and unsettling others. You cannotgo back to some earlier and perhaps more stable condition of being athome; and, alas, you can never fully arrive, be at one with your new homeor situation.’23

Said’s summation of exile (be it self-imposed or otherwise) is clearlyat odds with Aijaz Ahmad’s more pragmatic differentiation between whathe sees as those who choose exile for utility and those who have such a statethrust upon them, but this more rigid dichotomy does not take intoaccount another very real sense of exclusion which I will call the thirddimension of exile: that of the marginalized individual who exists in exilein the country of his or her birth because, as Maniam terms it, he or she isunable to create a sense of country or nation within his or her soul. Itbecomes 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, isdifference, otherness.’24 This otherness may exist irrespective of where aperson physically resides, and it is this third dimension, the problematicpursuit of ‘some elusive rootedness’25 – a national and individual belonging –with which Maniam continues to concern himself.

Maniam’s Indian-Malaysian protagonists in ‘Haunting the Tiger’ andIn A Far Country, although dispossessed of an ancestral home through timeand geography, are no longer confined to the outer edges of Malaysiansociety. Socially and economically they have traversed boundaries, goingsome way towards ‘build[ing] a fabric of wisdom’,26 yet the spectre ofdislocation, of a lack of collective purpose, continues to haunt their psyche.For Muthu to come to terms with this psychological state of exile and tocreate an ‘essential space’ (as Edwin Thumboo terms it27), he must undergoa highly complex and problematic process of balance and counterbalance,not between racial or cultural groups alone, but also between a painfulrenunciation of his ancestral past and an osmotic communion with theMalaysian landscape:

I know what’s wrong,’ Zulkifli says. ‘There’s something foreign to thetiger’s nose. He won’t show himself until the smells are gone.’

Zulkifli fixes Muthu with a surveying stare. Muthu becomesnervous.

‘What smells?’ he says.‘Mind and body smells,’ Zulkifli says.Muthu is offended and turns away from him.‘Not in the way you can’t go near a person,’ Zulkifli says

confronting Muthu. ‘The clothes you wear, the thoughts you think.Where do they come from?’

‘They’re 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 father’s hold on me.’‘So you brought a purpose with you?’ Zulkifli says. ‘And a way

of thinking. How can you get into the tiger’s stripes and spirit?’(p. 45)

The implied caveat, though, is that willing acquiescence to, and immersionin, the symbolic essence of Malaysia promises a metaphysical epiphany butcarries with it the underlying vulnerability of submission. Perhaps, then,this is the personal cost of nationhood: to immerse oneself in one’senvironment and seek a collective Malaysian consciousness is also toconform at the risk of stifled individuality. Rebirth and nationhood are, inManiam’s view, salutary goals and (as Renan noted) necessarily involve

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forgetting, but neither can the covert anti-colonial/neocolonial discourse beignored: capitulation can also lead to obliteration.

Muthu remains fundamentally unfulfilled in that he is unable to shedthe latent colonizing instinct in his character and, as a consequence, unableto truly connect to the Malaysian environment. But in his exploration ofthe ‘universe in man’ Maniam also suggests, I would argue, that the leap inconsciousness Muthu must make is not one between Self and Other but,rather, the painful acknowledgement that Self is Other, for ‘universe’ impliesSelf and Other as entwined, inseparable but, if one is to reinvent oneself ina transcultural context, also interchangeable. In this sense ‘Haunting theTiger’ indicates that Muthu, to create an essential space of individual andmutual identity, must immerse the ideological fabric of his existence in amultiplicity of alterity. In his quest for an enlightened Malaysian identity,he must shed his instinctive desire to control his environment but he mustalso perceive his racial origins (that ancestry which has initially provided aconcrete sense of self-identity) as now posited in the realm of Other. Thesense of belonging he craves – his spiritual integration with the land inwhich he lives – will elude him because he cannot finally acknowledge theinherent alterity that constitutes his past and present existence.

Towards individual and national identities

In A Far Country probes more deeply, and in significantly more abstractfashion, the metaphysical preoccupations of ‘Haunting the Tiger’. Seenthrough the eyes of Rajan, again a Malaysian-Indian, the novel in partcorrelates physical escape from one’s impoverished surroundings with themental anguish of exile from one’s cultural roots, but in particular attemptsto portray the problematic responses to what is perceived on one level asabandoning self but on another as, in Bhabha’s terms, ‘chang(ing) ourunderstanding of the pastness of the past, and the unified present of thewill 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 adiscourse on society that performs the problematic totalization of thenational will. That strange time – forgetting to remember – is a placeof ‘partial identification’ inscribed in the daily plebescite whichrepresents the performative discourse of the people.28

In his exploration of remembering and forgetting to remember and theirrelation to the construction of individual and national identity, Maniamattempts to mesh linear and lateral concepts of time and memory in a

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synchronous and multifarious prose, frequently departing from realism andconventional textual continuity.

Less deliberately diasporic in viewpoint than much of his earlier prose,the narrative of In A Far Country deals primarily with Rajan’s consciousand subconscious battles with the inherent alterities in the Malaysianess ofhis identity, again symbolized predominantly through the jungle terrain ofrural Malaysia. This physical and psychological confrontation within thetext is represented through experimental prose styles and structures: Rajan’spersonal memoirs, scientific treatise, epistles, political satire, parables andmyths, the nebulous, almost Confucian, advice of visionaries and sooth-sayers, the protean symbolism of dreamscapes, revisions of canonicalliterature, the Homeric quest for unity and identity both glorified andparodied. The struggle, which also takes the form of an ongoing battlebetween the dualities of materialism and spiritualism, and body and soul,reveals itself in a series of epiphanies, a device which Maniam employsregularly in his prose to signal alternating planes of perception:

My sweat-stained shirt and the folded paper bag were inconsequentialdetails. They belonged to personal history. One was smell, the otherjust grained matter. The otherness gained dominance. The trees wereno more boa-constrictors nor the flowers spines of odour. They linedthe laterite road well within a pattern of their own making. The spacebetween them reflected a light that only the first morning on earthcould have radiated.

(p. 24)

What Maniam terms as ‘the first metaphysical statement of intention inthe novel’29 seeks to convey, through Rajan’s experience, an awareness thatis in some ways akin to the ‘the twilight of double vision’ that Mrs Mooreexperiences in Forster’s A Passage to India.30 Indeed echoing (if one pardonsthe pun) the undermining of Mrs Moore’s Eurocentric/Christian code ofexistence in the Marabar Caves, the young Rajan experiences – and fleesfrom – a ‘muffled booming sound . . . which interlaced road, tree, flowerand sky into an unimpressed and unmarked fluidity’:

The sound, the boom, scaled and let scatter, layer after layer, a radiancethe ordinary eye could not look upon. The laterite road thinned intoa 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 journeydownwards.

(p. 24)

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Akin to Mrs Moore, who is ‘terrified over an area larger than usual’31 inher encounter with alterity, the older Rajan, reflecting on this experienceand his past, is ‘filled with a terrifying emptiness’ (p. 25), for he is unableto completely accept the range of otherness with which he is interconnectedand which, by implication, constitutes his Malaysian identity. Such anacknowledgement of paradoxical identity, which necessitates the occupationof multiple (and often contradictory) spaces, is no more, from Maniam’sperspective, than the acceptance of a

multiplicity in thought, memory and space [that] seems to defineindividuals everywhere. It is no longer possible to retain the view thatyou come from a single-strand dominant culture. The majoritiesdefine the minorities as much as the reverse; in other words thechanging periphery causes alterations at the centre, if there still is acentre.32

Like ‘Haunting the Tiger’, In A Far Country relates the struggle towardsa cathartic rebirth of identity through mythologizing the interdependentcomponents of a wounded but resilient and regenerative land and examin-ing Malaysians’ shared position within it. Echoing Kannan’s self-destructivegoal in The Return, the words that drive Rajan’s father’s futile search (‘ ‘‘Wemust go to the real land. . . . Must get to the centre,’’ he said, ‘‘all byourselves.’’ ’ (p. 44)) represent both legitimate quest and parody in his needto locate his identity through physical geography. These elements of epicquest in the novel, the young Rajan’s visions of natural phenomena, hissurreal pursuit of the symbolic Malaysian tiger as an adult, and hissubsequent fragmentation of identity have in them Yeatsian qualities of abattle between self and other.33 Maniam, like Achebe before him, borrowsin part from Yeats’ vision of religious upheaval: in trying to re-invent hisidentity it is inevitable that the younger Rajan’s ‘centre cannot hold’, thatto reject one’s culture and one’s past and to embrace otherness in totalitymay, initially at least, explode, rather than recentre, one’s notion of self.The mature Rajan, nevertheless, in contrast to his former fragile anddismembered self, is able in his second, willing search for the tiger (partmuse, part self, part Malaysia) to achieve a sense of ‘purgation’ (p. 143), acleansing of spirit that at the very least opens him up to the possibility of acommunal, aboriginal existence and some comprehension of the necessityof imagining oneself into an identity that embraces a mythical otherness asa path to a shared land and nation. As Daizal Samad notes, ‘the apprehensionof the tiger and its very nature is wrought from a search that is rooted inthe actual landscape of Malaysia and that is yoked to its peoples; but it iswrought equally from the soil of the imagination and the people thatinhabit 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) relation-ship between the Malaysian environment and its inhabitants in the face ofmaterialistic incursions:

As the sun rose higher somewhere behind the hills, the paper flatcolours too mounted into slopes and gradients and tall, furzy trees;mounted into birds that took to the sky; mounted into leaves thatopened to the thick green that flooded them. The earth where thecontractors had cut into to bank our houses, glistened with a brownrawness. Tree trunks stood out, quietly displaying their intricated andrunnelled barks, black lines cutting out tiny grey or dark blocks. Thenthe grass came up at us, each blade chiselled into green curves thatwould wilt and flatten out as the day advanced. . . . As the sun wentdown, the sky glowed with a red rawness, not always, but oftenenough to touch me with the mystery of a universe putting itselfaway. All petty prejudices, jealousies, resentment and suspicion fellaway. There was no ‘me’ left.

(p. 29)

This disappearance of self, encapsulated as it is in a liberating/obliteratingcommunion with the Malaysian environment, may be seen as the centralparadox for the marginalized Malaysian: a willingness to commune withthe environment offset by an abiding suspicion of the (Malay-dominated)social and political forces which erroneously seek to annex diasporic groupsand yoke the disparate elements of Malaysia.

The linguistic preoccupation that dominates Malaysian literaturewritten 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 experiencedthree discursive formations of colonialism (colonialism, neocolonialismand postcolonialism),35 is at times seemingly overwhelmed by this complexfascination with, and deep mistrust of, the fluidity of language. This deeplyambivalent approach to discourse(s), first broached in The Return, isexemplified in In A Far Country by the Indian wanderer Sivasurian, who isadvised by his mother to pursue material wealth and power through seekinga position in the controlling political machinery (‘Be an important personin the government. The government looks after everybody. . . . The wordswere like my clothes. Without them I felt naked and weak’ (p. 87)), butultimately rejects the inherent hypocrisy associated with material wealthand the manipulation of hegemonic discourse: ‘Language is such a uselessinstrument. It’s only an instrument. What comes through it is sieved andfiltered according to its capacity’ (p. 86). Sivasurian, as self-proclaimed

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Lord of the Sun, remains a key to unravelling the text, embodying as hedoes ‘pure consciousness, total seeing, like the light of the sun that falls oneverything without bias’.36 And it is the twin leitmotivs of light and the all-seeing protean eye (which appears in various guises throughout the novel‘as that gigantic eye formed by crabs on the beach not far from thesettlement, as Mani’s eye, as the eye that accompanies [Rajan] and Zulkifliinto the jungle, and also the eye that is there as [Rajan] goes through,voluntarily, the imaginative landscape in his fully awakened state’)37 thatanchor the text and function as moral perspective and insight to meta-physical truths.

The nomadic existence of Sivasurian, though, is only one of severalexperimental templates for identity explored by Rajan and, although hiscryptic ideology has merit in that he has liberated himself from the desireto possess, it is partially flawed in its absence of shared communal valuesand cultural connection:

A wanderer cannot carry too much baggage with him. . . . He has tobe light in his body, mind and the other thing people put near theheart. Soul? Atman? Brahman? (Words stand for things; they are notthe things themselves. How can they hold within themselves invisiblequalities?)

(pp. 103–4)

Rajan attempts to locate an individual and national sense of coherencethrough the eclectic range of characters, anecdotes and myths that peoplehis memory, among them Lee Shin’s sexual exploration and subsequentmoral and spiritual degeneration, Sivasurian’s cryptic advocacy to ‘live inthe present so that you can go back to the past one day’ (p. 89), Zulkifli’svision of a reunification of land, mind and body, and the devastating effectsof materialism on his son Mat. As it proves for Ravi and Kannan in TheReturn, language in the majority of these instances is effective primarily inits propensity to disempower and anaesthetize. Plantation women, livingvicariously through a debilitating colonial discourse, navigate their existencewithin 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 thewhite administrator. They didn’t explore; they supported and obeyed.Little plots of land sprang up for them from the white man’s 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 Liang’s nameless narrators,38

represents a (neo)colonial apparatus of deceit, division and alienation, anagent for inducing the amnesia that Renan expounds as crucial to thecreation of a nation-state.

The fraught relationship between the monolithic Eurocentric domin-ance of a colonial past and a collective heterogeneous future is evoked inthe juxtaposition of three letters which (supposedly) support differingstances on the demolition of a number of colonial buildings in Rajan’s town,evidencing his own conflicting viewpoints, while providing a manifesto forcontemporary Malaysia and a covert political critique of its present course:

The destruction of the familiar is a destruction of the comfortable. Ifwe look deeply into the phenomenon, we will discover the imperativefor why these buildings will have to go. How did these buildings cometo be erected? What do they tell about the spirit of the people whobuilt 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 theunknown to discover new territories for themselves. They left behindthe safe and the domestic to carve out a new land for themselves.There was no continuity, past or future. Once they got here, theylooked into the resources available and built a familiar environmentaround themselves. They transplanted their language, culture, systemsof order, justice and administration.

That is what we have to do: make a great leap. Now that we have theland we have to build the systems that will support our hopes andambitions. We must not allow ourselves to be trapped by the past, bythe familiar. We must go forward into the great unknown.

(p. 76)

Superficially, the exhortation to forget one’s past and forge a new collectiveMalaysian future is attractive. However, in counselling a leap forward intothe ‘great unknown’, Rajan’s rhetoric is problematic in that, while it seeksto forget a colonial past, it risks too close an association between the pathof heterogeneous Malaysian progression and the mechanisms of Europeancolonial rule. In arguing for the demolition of the signifiers of colonial rulehe risks the eradication of his own sense of ancestral belonging andpersonal history in favour of a generic form of nationalism, dominatedoverwhelmingly by the hegemonic culture to the exclusion/extirpation ofperipheral 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, butthey serve to emphasize not only the protagonist’s discomfort with theparadoxical aspects of national identity and its construction around themetaphors of nationalism, race and ethnicity,39 but also the tenuous andfraught 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 Maniam’s own struggle with societal (and self-)censorship:

As soon as the leader’s voice ceases, the machine descends further sothat I’m enveloped in a womb-like sheath. All kinds of instrumentsprobe my body; I feel suction-like pads on my head, face, chest, thighsand feet. Then the machine pauses as if it has found the source of mynon-conformity. There is a sharp pain as a clamp is riveted to mytemples; a sharper pain when a casing is fitted to my testicles andpenis. I struggle, lash out, push and scream and scream.

(p. 158)

One of the major problems marginalized Malaysian writers are confrontedwith is, as Maniam states, overt and covert methods of censorship within apredominantly Malay society.40 In a 1991 interview he noted that ‘if I hada 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 himthen I would be up against quite a lot of protest and, much worse thanthat, I would probably be put in jail, or stigmatised’,41 and although In AFar Country does not deal specifically with religion, it does attempt toquestion and redefine notions of what constitutes Malaysia and Malaysians.As such, Maniam’s discordant style in In A Far Country is, I would contend,primarily an artistic experiment and a reflection of its obtuse themes, butalso, given the delicate nature of his exploration of Malaysian society, adeliberate obfuscation in response to social and political pressures.

In order to discover personal redemption and his own spatial positionwithin this Malaysian montage, Rajan must probe the contrary myths andmemories that comprise his fragmented identity and symbolize Malaysia’sintercultural dynamics and social structures. This journey necessitates hisreturn, 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 tothe imaginary, a place where ‘there is no difference and no absence, onlyidentity and presence’42 to learn and reorder the roots of his identity inorder to ultimately enter ‘an endless landscape the ridges of which lead youinto fresher and fresher valleys of discovery’ (p. 196). His journey andredemption necessarily involve both a physical (partly sexual) and meta-

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physical awakening, and enormous peril – risks emphasized by Lee Shin’sinability to accept the multiple alterities of his existence and Pak Zul’s son’sself-destructive rejection of Malaysian society. But although it is seen byRajan as a ‘departure into waste’ (p. 167), Lee Shin’s negative examplenevertheless 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 don’t think sonow. The past is needed to make the present alive. But there must beno slavish or desperate clinging to the past.

One must be ready to let go even the most prized personal ideas andbeliefs in order to come by an even more substantial grain of truth.The self, shaped by family, society, education and all that nourishesthe ego, must be firmly put aside. One must escape from the prisonof self-imposed or imposed upon order so that a new openness to lifecan be discovered.

(pp. 166–7)

Perhaps if, as Mrs Moore notes, there is not one but a hundredIndias,43 the anguish of its loss must be felt all the more keenly by thediasporic writer. Yet the echo of the subcontinent, so often the ancestralmemory that propels Indian diasporic fiction, has gradually functioned lessas debilitating wound and more as sporadic cultural touchstone in Maniam’swriting. With the occasional backward glance, Maniam has attempted tocircumvent what George Lamming calls ‘the cage of one’s personal history’44

through an exploration of self as other and through charting paths towardscollective identities which embrace a disparate past. At the core of his proseare the manifest forms of exile for Malaysia’s inhabitants, but this inherentsense of loss and ostracism and its resultant overwhelming desire foracceptance and belonging has also instigated a healing process throughnarratives that work against cultural domination by learning to – ratherthan 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 inEnglish, 33:2, 34:1 (1993–94), p. 23.

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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. Maniam’s The Return’, in K.S.

Maniam, The Return (London: Skoob Pacifica, 1993), pp. 183–4.10 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. Maniam’s The Return’, Southeast Asian Review of English, 6 and7 (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. Maniam’s 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.Maniam’s The Return, ‘‘Haunting the Tiger’’, and In A Far Country’. Personale-mail to Bernard Wilson, 29 May 2002.

15 Patrick McGee, ‘Texts between worlds: African fiction as political allegory’, inK.R. Lawrence (ed.) Decolonizing Tradition (Chicago, IL: University of IllinoisPress, 1992), p. 241.

16 For Jameson’s complete argument, see his essay, ‘Third-World literature in theera of multinational capitalism’, Social Text, 15 (1986), pp. 65–88.

17 Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory (London: Verso, 1992), pp. 95–122.18 K.S. Maniam, Haunting the Tiger: Contemporary Stories from Malaysia (London:

Skoob, 1996), p. 42. All further references are to this edition and will appearin the text.

19 K.S. Maniam, ‘Preface’, in Haunting the Tiger: Contemporary Stories fromMalaysia (London: Skoob, 1996), p. xii.

20 Edward Said, Representations of the Intellectual (London: Vintage, 1994),pp. 59–60.

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 Thumboo’s 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. 11–24.

28 Homi Bhabha, ‘DissemiNation: time, narrative, and the margins of the modernnation’, in Bhabha (ed.) Nation and Narration (London: Routledge, 1990),pp. 310–11.

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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 hisvision of societal cataclysm in ‘The Second Coming’.

34 Daizal R. Samad, ‘Toward national identity as by phenomenal alchemy: areading of K.S. Maniam’s In A Far Country’. Forthcoming.

35 Sudesh Mishra, ‘Haunted lines: postcolonial theory and the genealogy of racialformations in Fiji’, Meanjin, 52:4 (1993), p. 623.


37 Ibid.38 I am referring here to the nameless narrator of Lee Kok Liang’s first novel,

London Does Not Belong To Me, but also to the protagonists in many of hisshort stories, most notably ‘The Mutes in the Sun’.

39 Anne Brewster, in commenting on castration motifs in The Return, notesthe perceived challenge that immigrant groups represent to a homogenouscommunity and concludes that all three terms that are usually associated witha sense of permanence and validity in relation to the concept of a collectivenation – nationalism, race and ethnicity – ‘are themselves constructs and meta-phors’. ‘Linguistic boundaries: K.S. Maniam’s The Return’, in K.S. Maniam,The Return (London: Skoob Pacifica, 1993), pp. 182–3.

40 Approximate figures as at 2000 indicate that Malays comprise 58 per cent ofthe 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 thepre-Oedipal period when the child believes itself to be part of the mother, andperceives no separation between itself and the world. In the imaginary there isno difference and no absence, only identity and presence. The Oedipal crisisrepresents the entry into the Symbolic order. This entry is also linked tothe 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 Moore’s departurefrom India, during which ‘she longed to stop, though it was only Bombay, anddisentangle 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.

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Documents

Memory, myth, exile: the desire for Malaysian belonging in K.S. Maniam’s The Return, ‘Haunting the Tiger’ and In A Far Country