If the problem of the twentieth-century, as W.E.B. Dubois has written, is the “problem of the color line”,¹ then it must be especially true for Malaysia and Singapore, where so many communal groups are perched precariously together in a system of balanced pluralism and where ethnic differences are politicised, sometimes sharpened to the edge of antipathy and violence.² Reading the “Perception of Other Worlds” as the perception of Difference—specifically “racial” difference—and bringing the question of “Race”³ to bear on the literatures in English of the two countries, I would argue that, if not explicitly thematicised or described, it is certainly pervasively inscribed into these literatures.

Assessments of these literatures have been careful to examine the influence of British colonialism, particularly, the ambiguous legacy of the English language as a medium for self-expression. Along with daffodil-bashing and the debunking of such texts as Palgrave's A Golden Treasury of English Verse, critics have indicated that by a process of “domestication,” writers could create an autochthonous and autonomous literature.⁴ Seeking to establish such autonomy, local educators and critics have focussed attention on the received British literary canon, suggesting that by revaluating and discharging outmoded and irrelevant texts, they could eventually expunge the colonial influence. Regarding issues of “race” and perceptions of Difference, however, such influence seems to be far more widespread and deeply embedded than an examination of the usual literary canon would allow. Beyond this canon, from much of the tradition of British theoretico-political thinking, it would seem, certainly from the 18th- and 19th-century rhetorical and lexical apparatus of natural and social sciences (an apparatus that provided a pervasive production of cultural representations), we seem to have inherited the Burden Of the Other. “To reopen the epistemic fracture of imperialism without succumbing to a nostalgia for lost origins,” says Gayatri Spivak, “the critic must turn to the archives of imperial governance.”⁵

In my paper, I would like to examine the “discursive configurations”⁶ of “Race” as presented by two British colonial writers, Alfred Wallace and Frank Swettenham, both of whom were to exert considerable influence in demarcating the Malaysian and Singaporean landscape—whether physical, historical or cultural. Both provide a unitary, objectified “worlding” (to use a term coined by Gayatri Spivak) whose nativist language represents entrenched colonial habits of thinking and provides a fixed image-repertoire about the ethnic people in the region. In the same context and by comparison, I would like to examine Edwin Thumboo's poetry as a conscious attempt to present a “native worlding”, that is, as a writing of decolonisation and disalienation reinstating the native as subject and spokesperson.

Alfred Russell Wallace's The Malay Archipalego, first published in 1869, is, significantly, dedicated to Charles Darwin and comes to us from that tradition of British evolutionism with its attendant notions of natural selection and hierachy, and related implications of hegemony supportive of the imperialist project. Thus Wallace, whose ostensible mission was to track down and document certain wildlife (I need not enumerate the vast numbers of animals he killed for his collection during his quest for the bird of paradise), was to state in his first chapter on the physical geography of Malaya:

Man has means of traversing the sea which animals do not possess; and a superior race has power to press out or assimilate an inferior one. The maritime enterprise and higher civilisation of the Malay races have enabled them to overrun a portion of the adjacent region, in which they have entirely supplanted the indigenous inhabitants if it ever possessed any. …⁷

We must note here, not only the assumption of a deceptive tone of objectivity and authority, but also the ideological implications inherent in his conception of “superior” and “inferior” races, not to mention his dismissal of that most marginalised of groups in Malaysia, namely, the Orang Asli. It introduces, in other words, a discourse of marginalisation and of Difference that posits fixed polarities of Self/Other, We/Them, Civilised/Savage.

In another chapter titled, “The Races of Man In the Malay Archipalego”, Wallace offers a categorisation of the racial groups in the region, the Malays and Papuans:

The Malay is undoubtedly the most important of these two races, as it is the one which is the most civilised, which has come most into contact with Europeans, and which alone has any place in history. What may be called the true Malay races, as distinguished from others who have merely a Malay element in their language, present a considerable uniformity of physical and mental characteristics, while there are very great differences of civilisation and of language. …⁸

I need scarcely point out here the imperialist equation of “civilisation” with European contact. More insidious, I think, is the use of “Race” as a positivist criterion for advancement and the notion of a “true race”, redolent as it is to us of Aryan supremacy and what Edward Said more recently has defined for us as the essence of Orientalism.⁹ “As a meaningful criterion within the biological sciences” Henry Louis Gates reminds us, “Race” has “long been recognised to be a fiction. … [It] has become a trope of ultimate, irreducible difference between cultures, linguistic groups, or adherents of specific belief systems which—more often than not—also have fundamentally opposed economic interests.”¹⁰ As an absolute, biological reality, in other words, “Race” simply does not exist.

Wallace's description of the Malays continues:

The colour of all these varied tribes is a light reddish brown, with more or less of an olive tinge, not varying in any important degree over any extent of country as large as all Southern Europe. The hair is equally constant, being invariably black and straight, and of a rather coarse texture, so that any lighter tint, or any wave or curl in it, is an almost certain proof of the admixture of some foreign blood. The face is nearly destitute of beard, and the breast and limbs are free from hair. The stature is tolerably equal, and is always considerably below that of the average European. …¹¹

Here, we can recognise what Mary Louise Pratt describes (speaking of another colonial writer, John Barrow) as

a familiar, widespread, and stable form of “othering”. The people to be othered are homogenised into a collective “they”, which is distilled even further into an iconic “he” (the standardised adult male specimen). This abstracted “he/they” is the subject of verbs in a timeless present tense, which characterises anything “he” is or does not as a particular historical event but as an instance of a pregiven custom or trait. … Through this discourse, encounters with an Other can be textualised or processed as enumerations of such traits [italics mine].¹²

We have, in other words, what can be called a fictionalised narrative, one presenting the indigence as object—clinically decontextualised and codified in pseudoscientific terms—and which serves at the same time to give the illusion of the European subject as absolute centre. As Trinh Minh-ha so astutely points out, such scientistic descriptions of native life, although not necessarily false or unfactual, are “actor-oriented, that is to say, reconstructed or fashioned according to an individual's imagination”.¹³

Moving to Singapore, Wallace gives us an equally reductive, normalised description of the Chinese:

The Chinese merchant is generally a fat, round-faced man with an important and business-like look. He wears the same style of clothing (loose white smock, and blue or black trousers) as the meanest coolie, but of finer materials, and is always clean and neat. … He is rich, he owns several retail shops and trading schooners, he lends money at high interest and on good severity, he makes hard bargains and gets fatter and richer every year.¹⁴

This portraiture, fixing as it does the Chinese immigrant into an icon of continual self-aggrandisement, must be situated in a kind of writing which, as Mary Pratt reminds us, “rejoins two planetary processes that had been ideologically sundered: viz, the expansion of the “knowledge edifice of natural history and the expansion of the capitalist world system …”, the latter being an undertaking amounting to “the physical appropriation and transformation of that globe” disguised or glorified as “the spirit of commerce and adventurous industry”.¹⁵ Both processes derive from specific cultural habits (empiricism, pragmatism, capitalist economy) whose diffusion projected and then perpetuated a myth of universality. Says Johannes Fabian, “There is no knowledge of the Other which is not also a temporal, historical, a political act.”¹⁶ Wallace's language, therefore, is an “encratic language,” that is, “a language produced and spread under the protection of power”.¹⁷ It emanates from a seat that granted him free and protected access to the hinterlands of Malaya and Borneo and the surrounding islands—complete with a retinue of local guides and posters—a seat which should be identified with a state, furthermore, that found it advantageous to recruit Chinese immigrants into positions of coolies, merchants and compradores and whose country of origin it had already overrun with guns and opium.

Frank Swettenham's British Malaya, similarly, emanates from such a seat of power—in his case, more obviously, from his position as Governor of the Straits Colony and High Commissioner of the Federated Malay States. His portraiture of the Malays, despite his involvement with and professed affection for them, affects the same objectifying, scientistic tone as Wallace's:

The Malay is a brown man, rather short of stature, thickset and strong, capable of great endurance. His features, as a rule, are open and pleasant: … His hair is black, abundant, and straight. His nose is inclined to be rather flat and wide at the nostrils, his mouth to be large. …¹⁸

Swettenham bases repeated claims of what he perceives to be the “inherent laziness” of Malay character on pseudo-historical reasons of climate and tradition. He says, for instance:

The leading characteristic of the Malay of every class is a disinclination to work. Nature has done so much for him that he is never really cold and never starves. He must have rice, but the smallest exertion will give it to him; and he will not grow it, he can buy it for very little.¹⁹

Further on, he says again:

… the Malay has no stomach for really hard and continuous work. … Whatever the cause, the Malay of the Peninsula was, and is, unquestionably opposed to steady continuous work. … As a race, Malays are guided more by their hearts than their heads.²⁰

Both Swettenham's and Wallace's texts can be summed up, then, as a “conjectural history” in which the native—no matter of what ethnic origin—has been turned into the racial Other. Both texts present what Spivak would call “an imperialist narrativisation of history”. Both refract “what might have been the absolutely Other into a domesticated Other that consolidates the imperialist self”.²¹ Whether in formalised topologies of the natural landscape in which the native is completely effaced, or in such codified portraitures as the ones I have described, the foreign eye / I dominates the scenario at all times as the repository of intelligence and importance.

In his groundbreaking book, The Coloniser and the Colonised, Albert Memmi explains:

… Just as the bourgeoisie proposes an image of the proletariat, the existence of the coloniser requires that an image of the coloniser be suggested. …

Let us imagine, for the sake of this portrait and accusation, the often cited trait of laziness. It seems to receive unanimous approval of colonisers from Liberia to Laos, via the Maghreb. It is easy to see to what extent this description is useful. It occupies an important place in the dialectics exalting the coloniser and humbling the colonised. Furthermore, it is economically fruitful.²²

Memmi's conclusion is that “racism is part of colonialism throughout the world; and it is no coincidence. Racism sums up and symbolises the fundamental relation which unites colonialist and colonised.”²³

That vestiges of the discriminatory effects of colonialist formulations remain in Malaysia and Singapore can be seen, not only in literary but in everyday political and social discourse—from fixed denominations of the populace and political groups in Malaysia into “Malay, Chinese, Indian” (percentages anxiously tabulated as if such a categorisation represented some immutable triumvirate overshadowing all other considerations of class, age, physical and mental health, talent or gender) to the valorisation of “traditional racial values” as justification for resistance to change and interchange among peoples. Such a valorisation amounts often to no more than a nostalgia, an invention of Custom consisting of what Frantz Fanon describes as a “stock of particularisms” having little connection to the real culture of a people. As Fanon explains:

Culture has never the translucidity of custom; it abhors all simplification. In its essence it is opposed to custom, for custom is always the deterioration of culture. The desire to attach oneself to tradition or bring abandoned traditions to life again does not only mean going against the current of history but also opposing one's own people.²⁴

As poet, critic, editor and educator, Edwin Thumboo's career can be said to have long been informed by a consciousness of what he calls “the general dispensation of the colonial system”. Growing up in that “interregnum” between colonialism and Asian nationalism imbued him, he explains, with “a state of feeling, of anticipation and that state of feeling, of compelling hope, was formed by a knowledge of history … as part of the understanding of self, of community, of nation to be.”²⁵ In meeting the challenge of fashioning a decolonised sensibility and literature, Thumboo places utmost importance on what he calls “a historical sense”:

This historical sense functions as a kind of internal sensor. Moreover, it encourages a larger time perspective, questions the aptness of concepts, assumptions and methods of analysis constructed from other societies and other cultures. It subjects the creative imagination to a larger range of references, or at least indicates the need for them.²⁶

Whereas a colonialist worlding would remove the indigence from history, rendering him or her the fixity of an abstracted, alienated icon, a native worlding such as that constituted by Thumboo must re-place the indigence in history. It must, in other words, bring to bear on the native's situation specific and precise understanding of place, time, class, “variety of issue” and “vernacular characterisation”—what Clifford Geertz calls the “light of local knowledge”.²⁷ In a number of poems describing the native in intimate detail—sometimes ironically, sometimes lovingly—Thumboo re-individuates the native to restore to him his irreducible complexity creating such unique characters as Mr. Ang, Mr. Quek, Manikam, Ahmad and Ibrahim bin Ahmad.

In other poems such as “August 9th I” and “August 9th II,” “May 1954” and “Fifteen Years After”, both private and public events and values must be reviewed in their specific historical contexts. In “A Boy Drowns”, for instance, the accidental drowning of two boys in a pool built during the Japanese Occupation is a metonymy for the historical repercussions of this occupation, repercussions not yet fully assimilated or forgotten:

Older folk who stand around feel the soldiers,
The Japanese with high honour,
Who had committed hara-kiri,
To be with the sun more quickly …
The old folks fear that perhaps
The spirits of the soldiers were lonely,
Wanting to share their co-prosperity
A second time
With new spirits, younger blood.
So a second boy drowns.

To put these deaths and the historical experience of the Occupation into full context, Thumboo ends the poem by contrasting the reactions of the old men to that of a number of the new generation:

A young man, perhaps undergraduate,
Replete with life,
Equipped with books, a modern mind,
A file of scientific notes,
Came from tea in the students' canteen.
He saw a body in the withdrawing sun
And looked at the body, speculatively,
As if it were a scientific fact.(28)

In a native worlding, the native subject must be revealed, not in the denuded, informational context of the colonialist narrative, but in experiential terms, in the disalienating “symmetry of reciprocal exchange”²⁹—what Thumboo himself describes, in an interview with Peter Nazareth, as “cultural interpenetration … the building of bridges between communal groups”.³⁰ For Thumboo, the fostering of such “interpenetration” is crucial to the health of a society. In the poem, “Ahmad”, the poet, struggles with the dis-ease of racial distancing before coming to a recognition of fraternity and mutual dependence:

And there is an anger
In that bronze patience
Tied to the murmur of his fingers.
Those speaking eyes,
Squatting on me,
Take up my helplessness
Against this communal gestures.
His eyes have strange fires.
Will there be time,
For us, for me
Groping for a neutral gentleness
To reach him without burning,
To lift into laughter?(31)

Another poem, “Catering For the People”, deals with the same search for this “neutral gentleness”, on which the viability of Thumboo's society depends:

We strive to find our history
Break racial stubborness.
There is little choice—
We must make a people.

In the same poem, individual, albeit idiosyncratic, customs are juxtaposed in unlikely combinations, illustrating the spontaneous daily exchange of Singaporean life:

We have a pressing amalgam—
Sell common or unlikely things;
Are kind or rude or merely reasonable.
Some stay awake to watch the moon;
East bat, chateaubriand;
Sing old songs that have the rhythm of the
                    sun;
Beatleize the stage; turn traditional
And keep our streets soft with the quiet of the
                    night.

(The often-quoted lines from the same poem, “We are flexible, small, a boil / On the Melanesian face / If it grin or growl, we move—To corresponding place … ”,³² can be read, in this context, as an admission of the Singaporean anxiety of race.)

Johannes Fabian has shown in Time and the Other how colonialism works not only by a spatial, but a temporal, displacement of the native. Colonialist discourse denies the native what he terms “coeval time”, that is, “temporal continuity and coexistence between the Knower and the Known”,³³ A decolonised literature, then, must place all native subjects in “intersubjective time”, that is, “a common, active occupation or sharing of time”.³⁴ In Thumboo's poem, “John”, numerous identities sharing the same name—reflecting the wonderful cultural diversity of Singaporean people—meet to “break bread”, to participate in that most universal of human pleasures, the sharing of a meal and of music. In the active reciprocity of friendship, Thumboo concludes, they find a “common cause”:

John Watson, John Tan,
John Harniman, John Raja,
John Cawelti, John Waiyaki,
John Sinclair, John Kasaipwalova,
I know them all, know they
Can meet, be equal,
Cogitate, break bread,
Turning all on soft conversation,
Contemplating … man, proud man,
Dressed in a little brief authority …
Among nine friends
There is comfort.(35)

Friendship and conversation, then, are crucial underpinnings for the building of bridges between cultures. As opposed to “conversation” (we discuss a question), the distancing, marginalising discourse of Wallace and Swettenham which partitions social reality into dichotomies of Self versus Other can be said to be a kind of “gossiping” (we speak together about others), a distinction, as Trinh points out, that goes back to Aristotle:

Gossip's pretentions to truth remain however peculiar. The kind of truth it claims to disclose is a confidential truth that requires commitment from both the speaker and the listener. He who lends an ear to gossip already accepts sympathy with or becomes an accomplice of the gossip. Scientific gossip, therefore, unveils itself as none other than a form of institutionalised indiscretion.³⁶

In the poem, “Conversation With My Friend Kwang Min Ah Loong Kwang of Outram Park”, Thumboo recalls from a dialogue with his friend their common history, a history predating the arrival of British, Dutch, or Portuguese conquerors and evoked by certain influential folk and mythological figures. This history is metonymised in a description of “the ivory boat / sail[ing] to Mogadishu / Taking Cheng Ho by our city”, Cheng Ho calling up the larger tapestry of Sino-Malay diplomacy and inter-marriage since the fifteenth-century and earlier. In the same poem, Thumboo offers Yin, Li Of the Iron Staff, Kun Ming and Hanuman. He provides, thereby, glimpses of an alternative aesthetics and morality eschewing the particular brand of materialism and self-interest brought by Western conquerors—the more peace-seeking, compassionate and self-denying morality of arahats, lohans and boddhisattvas. Says Thumboo in the poem,

What better lesson is there
Than to suffer
Because you helped another?(37)

Finally, when Thumboo concludes in a poem, “Words”, describing the negative and positive propensities of language (“Words are dangerous … neither valid, merciful nor bad … ”) that,

Words are words. Except for us
They are not personalities.(38)

he subverts in a way not only his own language, his own production of words, but the verbalism and logocentrism of the West, directing us, perhaps, to praxis rather than theory—a praxis founded, I would imagine, on compassion and love for one's fellow people. Perhaps he is suggesting in this poem, and in the one discussed before it, that unless one moves beyond words, one will never arrive at a point where opposites lose their essential differences, where Self is not dependent upon diminishment or negation of the Other for its own affirmation but realises itself, instead in an ongoing process of reciprocity, interchangeability and commonality.

Notes

1. W.E.B. Dubois, The Souls Of Black Folk (New York: New American Library, 1969; rpt. 1903), 1.

2. See, for example, Stanley Bedlington's Malaysia and Singapore: The Building Of New States (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1978), 118-119 and Martin Essman's essay, “Communal Conflict in Southeast Asia” in Ethnicity, eds. Nathan Glazer and Daniel P. Moynihan (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1975), 405.

3. I use “race” as a bracketed term, after Henry Louis Gates in his introductory essay in Race, Writing and Difference (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), 1-20.

4. See, for instance, the introductory remarks in Edwin Thumboo, ed., The Second Tongue (Singapore: Heinemann, 1976), vii-ix.

5. Gayatri Chakravarty Spivak, “Three Women's Texts”, in Henry Louis Gates, ed., Race, Writing and Difference, 262.

6. A term used by Mary Louis Pratt in Race, Writing and Difference, 143.

7. Alfred Russell Wallace, The Malay Archipalego (New York: Dver, 1962; rpt. Macmillan, 1869), 15.

8. Ibid., 446.

9. See Edward Said's Orientalism (London: Routledge, 1978).

10. Henry Louis Gates, Race, Writing and Difference, 5.

11. The Malay Archipalego, 447.

12. Mary Louise Pratt, Race, Writing and Difference, 139.

13. Tranh Minh-Ha, Woman, Native, Other: Writing Postcoloniality and Feminism (Bloomington: Indiana Univ. Press, 1987), 70.

14. The Malay Archipalego, 16.

15. Mary Louis Pratt, Race, Writing and Difference, 144.

16. Johannes Fabian, Time And The Other: How Anthropology Makes Its Object (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983).

17. Woman, Native, Other, 74.

18. Frank Swettenham, British Malaya (New York: AMS Press, 1975; rpt. Allen & Unwin Ltd., 1948), 134.

19. Ibid., 136.

20. Ibid., 137-141.

21. Spivak, Race, Writing and Difference, 272.

22. Albert Memmi, The Coloniser and the Colonised tr. Howard Greenfield (Boston: Beacon, 1967), 79. I am grateful to Drs. Koh Tai Ann and Shaharuddin Maaruf of the National University of Singapore for bringing to my attention Syed Hussein Alatass's book on the same subject, The Myth of the Lazy Native (Frank Cass: London, 1977).

23. Ibid., 70.

24. Frantz Fanon, The Wretched Of the Earth, tr. Constance Farrington (New York: Grove, 1963), 224.

25. Edwin Thumboo, “Notes On A Sense Of History,” in Kirpal Singh, ed., The Writer's Sense Of The Past (Singapore: Singapore University Press, 1987, 231.

26. Ibid.

27. See Clifford Geertz, Local Knowledge (New York: Basic Books, 1983), 167.

28. Edwin Thumboo, Gods Can Die (Singapore: Heinemann, 1977), 46-48.

29. Mary Louise Pratt, Race, Writing and Difference, 153.

30. Peter Nazareth, “Edwin Thumboo Interviewed by Peter Nazareth” World Literature Written in English, Vol. 18, No. 1, April 1979, 60-61.

31. Gods Can Die, 28.

32. Ibid., 56-57.

33. Time and the Other, 31.

34. Ibid., 109.

35. Edwin Thumboo, Ulysses By The Merlion (Singapore: Heinemann, 1979), 12-13.

36. Woman, Native, Other, 68.

37. Ulysses By The Merlion, 25.

38. Gods Can Die, 1.