Diary of a French Missionary: Penang During the Japanese Occupation by Marcel Rouhan

Abstract

Reviewed by: Diary of a French Missionary: Penang During the Japanese Occupation by Marcel Rouhan Shanthini Pillai Diary of a French Missionary: Penang During the Japanese Occupation. By Marcel Rouhan, Translated and Introduced by Serge Jardin. Penang: Areca Books, 2021, 224 pp. ISBN 9789675719431 The College General in Penang has stood on Malaysian soil from the onset of the 19th Century, with even earlier links to Thailand reaching far back into the 17th Century. For the Malaysian Catholic community, the institution holds a special place of reverence because of its role as a major seminary for prospective young Catholic priests in the making, symbolising hope for the sustainability of the Catholic church, with certain quarters of academia probably more well versed with the intricacies of its historical foundations. Most references to the College General exist primarily in the French language. As such the publication of this diary written by Mgr Rouhan, one of the Directors of the institution before its transference to solely Malaysian clergy, and duly translated into English by Serge Jardin, a Malaysian domiciled French, is a significant contribution for awareness and understanding among the circles of Anglophone academia. The publication is organised into three sections. We are first provided with the translator's introduction to the diary, followed by excerpts from the translated diary itself and finally, a list of appendices that includes a timeline of key milestones pertaining to the rise and fall of Japanese Occupation in Malaya, informative lists of people and places mentioned in the diary as well as key Catholic missions. The translator must be commended for bringing to attention an especially valuable collection of day-to-day entries of a French missionary who not only held an important administrative position in a transnational Catholic educational institution, but who also possessed sufficient clout in the community to enable him to engage effectively with both the colonial government as well as their Japanese usurpers. The substance of this influence is revealed in the very first entry of the diary where we are told of a covert agreement to allow the British government temporary use of land belonging to the College General to prepare for the defence of Penang against the encroaching Japanese army. The extensive possessions of this French-administered religious institution in Penang are immediately gleaned from references not only to land owned but the acres that it spread over, which we learn later extended to numerous properties, coconut plantations as well as other agricultural holdings. We learn of multi-national tenants of the many bungalows that they owned including British, French, Danes and even Japanese. This is further underscored by the possessive pronouns used in abundance throughout when the diarist refers to the gazetting of the land by the government or the 'sacrifice' of numerous coconut trees and their abundant fruit, as well as other possessions scattered across the island of Penang. Seen collectively, these episodes draw attention to the fact that the College General was perceptibly a full-fledged financial arm of the Société des Missions Étrangères de Paris (M.E.P) or Paris Foreign Missions Society, generating income that would have been crucial for the maintenance of not only the college but also mission development work among the vast network of French-based religious societies operating in Penang at that juncture. [End Page 125] The diarist reveals the close-knit network that existed between the various French religious communities, mainly the missionaries of the M.E.P. responsible for the formation of Catholic parishes, and the La Salle brothers who, along with the Dames of Saint-Maur (more popularly known in Malaysia as the Infant Jesus Sisters or I.J.S.), set up various schools and orphanages. A strong sense of territoriality also surfaces when faced with secular encroachments into the grounds of the institutions founded by the French sisters especially. These constantly remind us that the discursive imaginary is Catholic at its core, as do the numerous references to prayers for the intercession of Saints, especially Saint Joseph, celebrations of high mass, community mass and various Catholic feast days. Of significant interest also are the references to several local Catholic priests who started out as seminarians during...