15 New Writings in English from South East Asia

Amlan Baisya

About the chapter:

The term “South-East Asia” usually refers to the lands of Burma, Thailand, Malaysia, Singapore, Brunei, Laos, Kampuchea (Cambodia), Vietnam, Indonesia and the Philippines. It must be mentioned here that people of South-East Asian culture are also found in the eastern hills of India (Assam – notably Nagas, Garo, Khasi, Mizo) and Bangladesh (Kuki in Chittagong Hill and its adjoining areas) and in the southern parts of China (predominantly Tai-speakers and Miao). In ancient times, the Pacific and Madagascar were also colonized and this resulted in a wider distribution of the South-East Asian cultural and literary artefacts. However, it must also be remembered that many South-East Asian departments in universities throughout the world include the literatures from India, Pakistan and Sri Lanka as part of their curriculum—this is aimed at getting a more comprehensive and holistic idea of the literatures of that particular geographical location. The literary and cultural relevance of this area is often undermined for its strategic sandwiched position between two major literary traditions namely the Indian and the Chinese. However, this area has its own charming history and a range of literary representations which bear proof to its unique heritage and culture. Since this literary tradition accommodates and internalizes various regional languages, it is very hard to draw a common trajectory for the literatures of all the constituent countries; however, what I shall endeavor in the next part is to point out certain major issues and events which have dominated the thematic framework of the English ‘literatures’ of this area post 1950s.

Major Issues and Events:

1.  Economic Globalization: Most of the countries in this region have obtained freedom from colonial rulers either in early or mid-twentieth century. As a result, their respective economies have demanded a considerable amount of time to recover from the issues that hindered their economic prosperity. Primarily from the end of twentieth century, they opened their markets for global business. The economic liberalization did not only open up avenues for financial transaction, but also for cultural and literary negotiations. The opening up of the dominant Western culture helped them explore different modes and topics of writing in Western countries and also in the eastern part of their territories. Such exposure helped them deal with global issues more comfortably and also represent their own issues in ways which are globally practiced.

2.  A Name for itself? Whom to Go to? India or Bharat? Burma or Myanmar? ‘What’s in a name?’ might be an elevated literary expression but for a country that fails to assign a name to itself and, therefore, suffers from an identity crisis, this non-fixity in name is a major theoretical problem. It’s not simply in a name; the larger question becomes whom they do side with. With the influx of Western economy, no longer are they countries being watched by the opulent Western world from a distance, world superpowers are, on the other hand, making their visits and opening up their gift- boxes to nascent democracies around the globe. Let us now, as a case study, consider the Burmese condition– why has the Burmese government decided to negotiate with the West from the last decade of the twentieth century? One reason is obviously because they are afraid of becoming a Chinese state. Mandalay and much of Upper Burma is owned by Chinese businesses. And, crucially, China is set to open up a trade corridor from Yunnan Province ending in the Bay of Bengal. Realistically the country has no option but to open its trade sector to the West if it wants to survive, rather if it wants to survive on its own. Identity thus plays a crucial role in the functioning of the state.

3. Censorship: Most South-East Asian countries lack a dated version of democracy to look up to and solve the internal situations of crisis. Except the Indian sub-continent, all other countries have gone through an authoritative-totalitarian regime—be it in the form of a Right-wing Fascist government or a socialist-nationalist rule. Such regimes have historically thrived upon controlling all spheres of cultural manifestation especially the literary field. The rule of emergency imposed on the Indian democracy in 1975 by the then Prime Minister Mrs. Indira Gandhi was such a period when the free movement of the press was restricted and many progressive writers were jailed and humiliated. Quite understandably, a whole gamut of literature against this fascist regime came up both during and after the period of crisis. Similarly, in the Burmese condition, in 1975, the then extreme Socialist government printed a list of do’s and don’ts to restrict the use of ‘any incorrect ideas and opinions’ or ‘anything detrimental to the ‘Burmese Sociality Program’. The resulting mass censorship over successive generations was not merely a case of writer’s freedom being jeopardized by the censor’s pen. In fact, during General Ne Win’s government he—becoming increasingly paranoiac—banned the use of the word ‘sunset’ (simply because his name roughly translated as ‘sunrise’, so he assumed that writers using ‘sunset’ would be assassinating him in print). Ne Win’s ruthless Socialist agenda also forbade the colour ‘Red’ because of its Communist associations and later on, until Aung San Suu Kyi was released from periods of imprisonment and house arrest, Ne Win’s successor, General Than Shwe, banned the use of the word ‘mother’ (this time the reason was that ‘mother’ was one of the many nicknames that Daw Suu Kyi’s followers conferred her with).

4.  The Colonial Memory: There hardly is any other country in the entire world which can claim more disturbances in the free movement of the literary field in the last century than Vietnam. The long war against the mighty America from 1950s to 1970s was a period of complete cessation of the growth of literature. Vietnam’s older generation of writers argues against the notion of the writer who does nothing but write. To older, socialist Vietnamese, a writer may have a special vision but they must also ‘work’ for the good of the society that he or she lives in. One of the key observations of writers in Vietnam is just how much Vietnamese fiction writing can be viewed generationally, from that of the older generation aligned to the State to the work of younger writers who refuse to view the war temporally as the social and cultural watershed it was for their parents. This may be reanalyzed as a reaction against the tendency to project the collective traumatic history of a nation to overshadow the importance of immediate and contemporary concerns. An almost similar approach to literature could be found in the writings of some Bangladeshi writers who denied to acknowledge ‘Muktiyuddha’ (The War for Freedom) as the single watershed event of the country in the later half of the last century—they rather preferred to look at the larger socio-political issues that are plaguing the country in the present days. The texts and writing practices of contemporary young Vietnamese authors like Hanoi’s postmodernist Phan Huyen Thu and Ho Chi Minh City’s hip-hop ‘Open Mouth’ writers mark a sharp contrast to those of earlier writers who grew up during the trauma of the Vietnam war, such as Tran Dan Khoa and Bao Ninh, whose 1991 novel, The Sorrow of War: a Novel brings forth a narrator so defined by the war that he is unable to escape the novel he writes.

5.  Tradition and/vs. Modernity: With the end of the colonial rule, the writers of the colonized countries started looking back at their own indigenous literatures and histories that were hitherto unacknowledged. However, almost at the same time, the writers were exposed to Western influences through the inroad of a free market economy. The project of looking back halted for sometime; there started a negotiation between the two modes of influences. Progressive left writers have almost unanimously accepted both the forms with open arms and advocated for an interplay between them; whereas the Right wing Nationalist brand of writers are more bent on a unidirectional agenda of looking back at the indigenous past with all admiration and vigor. Ismail Hussain (2006) comments:

The present interest of the Malay people towards their own traditional literature has been very mixed. On the one side there is the group of ardent nationalists who are eagerly grabbing anything that come in their way and trying to reconstruct it into a glorious cultural past at the expense of precision and historical accuracy. A member of this group will tell us of the rich literary heritage of the Malay people, but the probability is that he himself has not read four texts of this heritage and can hardly name twenty titles of that rich literature. On the other side, there is the group of young forward-looking people who are interested only in the present and the future, who are anxiously trying to forget the past, because the past has brought them nothing but embarrassment. Their literary past for example which was built upon the feudalistic contrast of the unquestioned power of the court and the subservient position of the masses can no longer give them any meaning in their struggle for human dignity.

6.  Search for an Identity: In the past century, South-East Asian literature in English has been one of the chief sites of examining and exploring contemporary issues regarding identity. As already mentioned, these countries were going through a critical phase of relocating their cultural and literary heredity; questions regarding identity-formation occupied one of the principle sectors of investigation. For example, with regard to ethnic identity construction, Malay literature not only offers insights into the writers’ creation of Malay ethnic identity, but also the ways in which language (English in particular) shapes the writers’ notions of what it means to be a Malay. In terms of gender and sexual identities, Malay literature provides a site for the formation of normative -and non-normative gender and sexual identities. Many Malaysian writers in English, particularly those from the later half of the last century, explore issues dealing with gender and sexuality from a religious perspective.

which includes among others “aspects of male-female relationships”, “women’s body”, and “alternative sexuality”. Literary works produced by Malaysian women writers in English from the 1960s to 1990s explore various issues regarding feminist perspectives of self and identity by reflecting on their individual gendered experiences as well as the struggles they face daily in this world. They present their views about identity based on their specific experiences shaped by personal circumstances and everyday life, social expectations and modernity in general. In Malaysia, issues of self and identity, in addition to ethnicity and the nation, are “vital preoccupations” for many Malaysian writers in English as the consequence of the sociopolitical and cultural conditions that have affected their lives and works, their vocations and freedom of speech, as well as their sense of identity and belonging to the country (Quayum 2007, 2008). This puts the Malaysian writers in a perennial flux to decide how to portray their characters and also themselves—their identities were in a confused state of belonging– primarily in terms of ethnicity or nationality, or embrace various identities in calling themselves an individual and a member of their ethnic and national community. Such tension which permeates through and guides the works of many of these writers is characterized by the tension between retaining their vocation as a writer and giving it up completely given the social-political conditions affecting their lives and works. This became even more pertinent with the rise of right-wing nationalist and religious fundamentalism as the dominant discourse of their political sphere.

As already mentioned, in the present day academic world, the distinction between a South East Asian Studies department and a South Asian Studies department is fast diminishing. The social, political, literary and cultural position of the Indian subcontinent is not completely distinguishable from those of the erstwhile South-East Asian countries. They are not identical; however, their similarities cannot be completely ignored. They share a curios symbiotic relationship. It is hard to discern the organic aesthetic of a Vietnamese text without having a complete understanding of the geo-political conditions of the neighboring countries. It is, therefore, of utmost necessity to be able to locate the South-East Asian literatures against their counterparts in the southern parts of the continent for a proper and more comprehensive understanding of the texts. Moreover, the English language that these countries have developed over the last fifty years is highly influenced by and indebted to the Indian English writers. As a case study, therefore, we shall carefully discuss two major writers and their chief works in order to understand the different issues and techniques at play in new South-East Asian writings. Our first author is Tehmina Durrani from Pakistan and her autobiographical masterpiece The Feudal Lord (1994). Durrani is a Pakistani women’s rights activist and an author whose first book The Feudal Lord is about the traumatic and ghastly experiences she faced as a wife in a conservative Islamist family in Pakistan when she was married to Ghulam Mustafa Khar—the then Chief Minister of Pakistan. At a tender age of seventeen, Durrani was married to Anees Khan with whom she had a daughter. However, they separated in 1976. Later, Durrani married Khar who had married four times already. They had four children together; however, owing to tremendous mental and physical torture, Durrani and Khar ended their thirteen years of institutional togetherness. This is precisely the time when Durrani started writing about her horrific experiences of being tortured by a feudal landlord—her husband.

“My Feudal Lord” is one of the extraordinary autobiographies that could ever be written. Durrani uses it as a means of exposing the religious and social hypocrisy of the ruling elites in Pakistan in general and the cruel nature of her husband in particular. In this book, she talks about the social ethos of Pakistani marital life by citing her own marriage as an example. The book revolves around Tehmina, who belongs to an ultra-modern, westernized and well-off family of Pakistan and Mustafa Khar—one of the most prominent politicians in Bhutto’s regime, who belongs to conservative, traditional, religious and characteristic feudal background. Apparent love unites these two opposite figures; however, Tehmina’s dreams  are soon shattered and turn into nightmare when Mustafa’s decency faces oppressive brutality. She divided this brutally honest account of hers into three parts– Lion of the Punjab, Law of the jungle and Lioness.

Lion of the Punjab deals with Mustafa who, like a typical lion, roars and destroys the lives of simple and innocent women without any hesitation. Tehmina is also married but she leaves her husband “an innocent, simple guy” and marries Mustafa—the flamboyant man with enormous power. But soon she realizes the hollowness and barrenness of this relationship– “I had no power, no rights, and no will of my own”.

Law of the Jungle starts with Tehmina and Mustafa’s immigration to London. Mustafa engages in a physical affair with Durrani’s younger sister. Durrani remains silent and tries to please Khar with all her womanly attributes. However, the affair made her panicked and paranoid. She endures all her husband’s physical assaults and sexual brutality as a part of her destiny. But then she decides to rebel the lion– “I am not your sister or your mother. I am your wife”. This is how Tehmina problematizes and challenges the patriarchal notions of womanhood by denying all the roles ascribed to women as futile and abstract. But Mustafa can never allow her to leave him because he considers her as his carnal play-toy and moreover, such a decision of her essentially challenges the ‘manliness’ of the most talked about figure in Pakistan.

In ‘Lioness’ Tehmina campaigns for Mustafa and he wins the elections. But a Lion is a Lion at every cost…his violence becomes more intense. Finally, she decides to burst out all her pains in the form of book and an act of writing for woman is to break the silence that patriarchal society has culturally imposed upon her.

Thus Tehmina Durrani goes carefully unwinding the details of her private life in a male dominated chauvinistic society, to give voice to the abuse she suffered while being married to a despotic husband Mustafa Khar as a Sixth Wife. After suffering in silence for thirteen years and often trading her self-esteem and individuality for a marriage that can be characterized by physical abuse and emotional blackmail, Tehmina Durrani stands up for what she truly is. Durrani’s is a personification of traditional definitions of feminism. It covers all the aspects concerning differences, binaries and identity issues which show women’s subjugated and subhuman place in Pakistan. Julia Kristeva’s feminist concept of Semiotic vs Symbolic distinctions is appropriate to analyze the text of Durrani’s memoir. Kristeva opines that a child naturally inclines towards his/her mother. She terms this inclination as ‘semiotic’. But later the ‘symbolic’ structure of society shifts his/her inclination towards father as she recognizes the father’s authority and supremacy over all others in the family. This semiotic / symbolic controversy constructs a complex cobweb, which is very difficult to rip off. In Durrani’s memoir, it is the male social order which created a chauvinistic figure, Mustafa Khar. Khar, the male character of the memoir was not a born autocrat, but society taught him the art of autocracy against women. There are many occurrences in the story which show that the source of women’s suppression and men’s domination lies in social discrimination. Any act of writing for a woman is an opportunity to break her silence of ages because the patriarchal set up has repressed her and the racial society has taught her to be culturally silent. This phenomenon has been generally observed all over the world, but is more conspicuous in some parts of the world particularly Indian subcontinent. The feminine becomes the marginalized consciousness caught in complex.

cobwebs of life on several fronts. Besides physical, moral and mental subjugation, race and religion do play an important part in her subjugation in the form of rituals, traditions and the right code of conduct dictated specially to her because of her gender. Durrani throws light on the marginal self along with various other issues pertaining to women. Patriarchal discourse limits and transcribes the image and identity of Tehmina but she inverts the social and familial constraints to emerge as a new woman. She strives against all odds to escape all forms of essential categorizing that render the subaltern or minority woman both the victim and unwilling perpetrators of damning stereotypical metaphors both by Eurocentric imperialism and the patriarchal tenets of her Islamic society, the power politics in Pakistani government and the social ethics of Pakistani marital life. Tehmina is urging her readers to rediscover their marginal self and thereby gain emancipation and empowerment.

As a complement to Durrani, we shall study the poetry of Ocean Vuong and his book Night Sky With Exit Wounds. When thinking about Night Sky with Exit Wounds (Copper Canyon Press, 2016) by Ocean Vuong, one is captured by the beginning moments of the book–begging from within, wanting more than what was given or offered. Then that wanting, peeking through a limited access, watches a man being loved by nature. But, in these few lines, one falls in love with the lyrical imagery Vuong paints us with. It is this act of labor we have come to love from Vuong. The way he scripts a scene reminds us of the endless opportunities language often hides from us. In the opening poem (“Threshold”), the speaker watches “through the keyhole/not the man showering, but the rain/falling through him [.]”  It’s a secret moment as he holds his “clutched breath” behind the door, watching and waiting. Yet in this clandestine act, the speaker still coaxes his readers in with him to watch water like “guitar strings snapping/over his globed shoulder.” Once we turn the page that we learn the cost of looking “was to lose/your way back” with “eyes/wide open.” The poem ends almost abruptly, the couplets giving way to a single-lined stanza. It’s a fine introduction to a book where one loses oneself in looking at oneself while peeping through the lives of others. Simple and understandable, the poem is a fresh stroke of air before the dive into deeper waters, the beginning of a longer journey. For Vuong, it’s a world unreasonably punctuated by violence, book-ended on one side by colonialism in Vietnam, the Vietnam War and on the other hand, what we see today. In the second section, Vuong introduces us to the interse ction of Vietnam and his family’s history. As we journey form one poem to another we realize how one’s identity is constructed in the face of a preconditioned notion of social and cultural milieu. In the poem, “Aubade with Burning City,” we see an overlapping of two otherwise.

contrasting experiences– the evacuation of American civilians and Vietnamese refugees during the fall of Saigon; all the while, telling the story of a man trying to persuade a woman to have sex with him. This evolves as a fine documentary on how bodies react to each other when they wish to get closer and at the same time, their primary concern remains to evade any upcoming danger. The poem becomes the true meaning of love and war. Vuong is showing us how he wishes to entrust the body to the acts of love while destruction is literally tearing at the window; “The city so white it is ready for ink”; as if one urges another to revisit the history that one has written so far. Giving up the fear of destruction, of harm, for the immediate response to love is what entices a reader. And then the pressure to turn your back on this fear or an otherwise erasure of history–“Don’t worry, he says, as the first shell flashes/ their faces, my brothers have won the war / and tomorrow … / The lights go out.” For Vuong, violence—its memory, its presence, and its possibility—leaves a mark on the person and transforms him. The transformative power—or the disfiguring power—of violence is perhaps most apparent in the last poem of the first section, “Self-Portrait as Exit Wounds.”

So far in this paper, we have discussed the general characteristics (if any) of the new literatures in English from South-east Asia and also elaborated on the same by giving a detailed description of two eminent writers within this geo-temporal boundary.

Reference

• Durrani Tehmina. My Feudal Lord. New Delhi: Penguin Books, 1994.
• Prasad Amarnath, Peter Joseph, S. John. Indian Writing in English: Critical Ruminations. Vol-II, New Delhi: Sarup & Sons, 2006. P-254.
• Raihanah Mohd Mydin(ed) & Shahizah Ismail Hamdan(ed). Linking literary identities: Malaysian society, culture and the other. Malaysia : Universiti Putra Malaysia Press,2003.
• Seemanthini, Niranjan. Gender And Space: Feminity, Sexualization And The Female Body. Sage India, 2001. P-64.
• Snodgrass, M.E. Encyclopedia of Feminist Literature. New York: InfoBase Publication.2006.
• Thomas, M & Drummond L (eds) Consuming Urban Culture in Contemporary Vietnam, Routledge/Curzon, New York & London, 2003.