Traversing Boundaries: Journeys into Malaysian Fiction in English

Abstract

of Malaysian literature has dealt with the problem of psychic displacement of migrant communities settling in a new land. Certainly, Malaysian literature written in English has identified very closely with this concern over the decades of postindependence Malaysia. The complexity involved is intensified by the fact that English is an acquired second language, rather than the first language, of the writers themselves. Choosing a colonial and non-native tongue to write about questions pertaining to identity and struggles of integration within a multicultural and pluralistic social context is, to say the least, fraught with difficulty that writers in a monocultural setting would be quite unfamiliar with. As with most marginalised communities, Malaysian writers in English are faced with the onerous task of creating a place for themselves in a setting which may not always regard them as possessing a crucial voice in the evolution of a people or a country. English, once the predominant language of administration, now no longer harbours hegemonic designs on the majority who speak the local and national language, Malay, with greater ease than ever they did English. So far, Malaysia resembles any postcolonial, postindependence country, with its attendant problems of the loss and recovery of native cultures and language. With the inflow and settling of migrant groups from neighbouring countries as part of the colonial answer to the need for cheap labour in the nineteenth century, Malaysian society is now no different from many of its Asian neighbours in its spread of multicultural groups and its varieties of Asian languages existing alongside the dominant indigenous tongue and culture. The development and evolution of Malaysia have taken turns which have fostered, at least in cross-cultural communication, a greater willingness on the part of the nonindigenous (non-Malay) migrant communities to use Malay as their lingua franca. The displacement of English from the administrative and educational centers of Malaysian life itself has had implications on the receptivity of the average Malaysian to Malaysian literature written in English. The move downward from common administrative lan-