Ralph Ellison and K. S. Maniam: Ethnicity in America and Malaysia, Two Kinds of Invisibility

Abstract

Ethnicity and its concern with cultural distinctiveness and group history and origins stress a sense of community and of group differentiation. The focus on cultural separateness helps towards a sense of identity but this also tends, to some extent, towards isolation and aloofness from other groups. However, where ethnic consciousness is more relaxed, it may become more accommodative towards other ethnic cultures in contact with it. It may admit some degree of fusion and intermingling, even as cultural diversity and distinctiveness are recognized. A community may be said to possess a genuine ethnic culture when it adheres to and closely observes a tradition rich with its own folklore, music, and idiom. In contrast, as H. J. Gans terms it, involves a kind of symbolic identification with an ethnic culture that has dwindled in influence or has grown remote. It is an emotional attachment to some aspects of ethnic tradition, which often expresses itself in the preservation of certain ethnic (Smith 157). While this may bring about some satisfactory interweaving of the old and the new, it may also, and more likely, highlight an area of anxiety and conflict. For ethnicity, especially, is often linked to an identity crisis, a sense of fragmentation, that gives rise to guilt and despair. In Ellison's Invisible Man and K. S. Maniam's The Return, the concern with ethnic identity is strong and becomes increasingly urgent in the face of a foreign dominant culture. Ethnicity as a means of self-affirmation is a possible stay against eclipse, invisibility. Ellison convincingly depicts the persistence of a vibrant American Negro tradition. But the struggle against obscuration leads to a greater, triumph. His characters achieve a sense of wholeness, as ethnic life is seen to complement the national culture. Through the idea Of cultural diversity and oneness, Ellison propounds a vision of burgeoning selfhood and relationship. The threat of eclipse is replaced by the possibilities of self-creation and integration. However, the lack of a strong cultural heritage is evident in K. S. Maniam's novel. Symbolic weakens the attempt to affirm ethnic roots and identity from the very beginning. The cleavage between ethnicity and the need to start afresh in a new land further complicates the immigrant's predicament. Cultural dispossession and dissolution are the final outcome. This difference between the two novels is no basis for any hasty or simple judgement on the comparative success or failure of artistic insight in each case. The two writers may be seen to represent different stages of ethnic attitude and development, and the contrasting ages of their countries. While American Negro experience goes back four hundred years, non-Malays in Malaysia have a history of only a hundred years or so. Furthermore, unlike the Negroes, these Malaysians did not have to weather anything so traumatic as slavery, and have not developed, from their experience in the new land, a strong and supportive folk culture ripe with forms of response to existence (Hersey 170). Ellison's larger vision reflects this maturity; it proclaims an achieved state of fecund relationship and national consciousness. K. S. Maniam's tortured view, on the other hand, signals the still continuing struggle to define identity. With the publication of Invisible Man in 1952, Ralph Ellison brought to the American Negro novel a stature and dignity never achieved before. For the first time, a Black writer, with creative nerve and freedom, was able to overcome the seff-consciousness of a minority culture, to realize the opportunities for greater awareness and fulfillment that are latent in d borderland existence. Ellison convincingly depicts the richness and beauty of Negro culture and tradition in the United States, and clearly shows the inappropriateness of neo-African nationalism. More significantly, he establishes the essential place of Black culture in American society, and demonstrates the emmense prospects that accompany marginal life in a modern world. …