K.S. Maniam’s Bestiary: Reading Animality and Identity in Selected Stories

Agnes S K Yeow

doi:10.22452/sare.vol58no2.12

Abstract

This essay scrutinises K.S.Maniam’s fictional animals by going beyond the confines of metaphor to interrogate the concept of animality and how animality impinges on diasporic identity. I examine the writer’s impulse to animalise the notion of national belonging especially though thestrategic deployment of the animal mask which reveals the shared domination of migrant and animal. I argue that Maniam’s critique of animality not only suggests that migrant and animal lives are interlinked but also informs his re-envisioning of the diasporic self. I positthat Maniam’s “new diaspora”advances the notion of diasporic self as ‘becoming-animal.’

Highlights

The tiger and chameleon from “Haunting the Tiger,” the eponymous mouse-deer of “The Pelanduk,” the sacrificial goat Mani from In a Far Country, and the camel Periathai – the firstgeneration Tamil immigrant nicknamed as such after the cancerous lump on her shoulder, her peddler’s burden of saris, and the way she humps over her tinker tools – in his first novel The Return spring to mind
In light of Maniam’s “new diaspora,” I argue that the notion of animality in relation to humanity is an immanent aspect of the multiplicity of the new diasporic man
I would like to suggest that the re-constitution of the ‘becominganimal’ diasporic identity should foreground the entanglement of animality and humanity as multiplicities that continually cross over and transform into each other

Summary

Introduction

I re-evaluate the significance of Maniam’s bestiary by foregrounding the links between animality and diasporic identity in selected short stories. Animal motifs in Maniam’s fiction are prominently deployed in a variety of allegorical settings including myth-inspired rituals such as tiger-hunting which symbolises the diasporic subject’s quest for belonging in a new country and the desire to possess the indigenous spirit of “tiger-land” (“Haunting the Tiger” 42), the endangered Malayan tiger being a nationalist symbol.

Results

Conclusion