Discourse of identity in the world waiting to be made

Abstract

This paper addresses the nature of Australian and Asian identity through an examination of the novel, The World Waiting to be Made, by Simone Lazaroo, the story of a young woman born in Singapore of Malaccan heritage but growing up in Perth, Western Australia. Acutely aware of the Asianness which sets her apart from mainstream Australians, the unnamed narrator in this first person novel struggles to establish a sense of herself at different periods of time, demarcated in this paper as her childhood, her adolescence and her adulthood. The story in Lazaroo’s first novel is of an outsider—a Eurasian young woman from a mixed Portuguese and Chinese background, born in Singapore but with ancestors in Malaysia, fighting to find a place where she can belong, with the narrator trying to change her appearance and behaviour at various stages of her life to conform to what she perceives as genuinely Australian. Having failed to establish her own identity in Australia, the narrator travels back to her father’s family in Singapore and Malacca, where acceptance is no easier than in Australia, although for different reasons, until she meets her Uncle Linus in Malacca, highly respected in the family as a bomoh, or wise man with special powers. Erik H. Erikson’s psychological definition of “identity”, together with traditional critical analysis of literary meaning, provides a theoretical framework to approach the issue of individual identity in relation to national culture in The World Waiting to Be Made. The analysis highlights the narrator’s frustration and struggle against ethnic displacement and marginalization, which she chooses to fight against with different pseudo identities—an Australian self, and mysterious Asianness. Finally these false identities lead to the total loss of herself—until she meets her Malaccan Uncle and claims a new identity. The World Waiting to Be Made, as Kate Temby states, “provides a sensitive searching of questions of nationality, ethnicity and identity as it charts the multiple journeys of its nameless Eurasian narrator.” (Westerly No.4, Summer, 1994, p.148.)