Self-conscious and queer

Abstract

Writers of historical fiction invariably engage in acts of translation in order to make the past meaningful to present-day readers. Lydia Kwa’s This Place Called Absence depicts the lives of two Chinese prostitutes in turn-of-the-century colonial Singapore while Tan Twan Eng’s The Gift of Rain traces the relationship between Philip Hutton, a young British-Chinese man, and a mysterious Japanese spy during the Second World War in Penang. Both novelists use metafictional elements to dislodge if not fracture the realist narrative frame and seek self-consciously to foreground the competing tensions at work in representing the past in these two Southeast Asian countries. They contest the historical arrangements of race, gender, and sexuality which continue into the present, and force the reader to confront the limits of historical knowledge and knowability. At the same time, through their depiction of queer desire and sexuality as well as their disruption of linear time in these novels, Kwa and Tan present their protagonists as being out of place and out of time. In so doing, they mount a crucial critique of the way in which national histories in postcolonial Singapore and Malaysia are invariably presented as “straight” narratives.