Abstract
Muslim Burmat’s novel Permainan Laut (“Play at Sea”) (2008) explores the social undercurrents of a fishing village located in the Brunei Bay in the period just after independence. Cultural nuances are examined via representations of the female subject prescribed within the Malay language and a national culture which produces the harmonious, yet regulated, lives of gendered citizens in the sovereign Islamic nation. As a tightly-knit nation, Brunei Darussalam ascribes to the model of melayu jati (“malay identity”), which inscribes family values strengthened by the national philosophy. In this way, women’s cultural subservience and auxiliary role underscore their conformity with the “MIB” (Malay Islamic Monarchy) ethos undergirding the national polity. With Islamic patriarchal rules, women also understand that their distinctive roles are defined by social taboos regulated within the gender binary. Furthermore, the monarch’s celebrated rhetoric of himself as the “caring father” informs the family unit, where women serve under their male leaders. This paper discusses negotiations with local language, beliefs, and customs at the arrival of, and enacted by, a tourist-cum-resident woman. In her interaction with local women and eventual marriage to a local man, she assimilates into dominant Malay culture, but also discovers a lacuna that signals an aporia in the outsider-cum-insider’s impasse of Malay identity. Keywords
Highlights
A Nation-state’s Discourse on Malayness and its ChallengesApart from its well-known and well-documented oil-rich status (Hamzah; Bartholomew; Harper), the established repute of Brunei Darussalam ( Brunei) as the longest surviving absolute Malay monarchy in Southeast Asia has drawn attention to this tiny sultanate (Kershaw; Nicholl “Brunei”; Nicholl European; Saunders; Sidhu)
The MIB national ideology declared by the authoritative sultan has provided a legitimate platform for Malay, its language and culture, to be prized while Islamic1 religion is intricately associated with the definition of Malayness—these dual orientations to be safeguarded by the monarch (Low 1) as the self-appointed “guardian and protector of Islamic principles and Malay culture” (Saunders 87)
In Muslim Burmat’s Permainan Laut (2008), when men fail to assimilate into a state-constructed Malayness, they do Malayness beyond the confines of a static idea propounded by the exclusive MIB national ideology
Summary
Apart from its well-known and well-documented oil-rich status (Hamzah; Bartholomew; Harper), the established repute of Brunei Darussalam ( Brunei) as the longest surviving absolute Malay monarchy in Southeast Asia has drawn attention to this tiny sultanate (Kershaw; Nicholl “Brunei”; Nicholl European; Saunders; Sidhu). As the gender binary is supported by the Islamic and monarchic components of the national ideology, women’s attempts at assimilation are highly dependent on men’s own subscription to their Malayness In this way, I underscore the fractures of cultural assimilation that fragment the state-constructed notion of a unified Malay-Muslim identity. In Muslim Burmat’s Permainan Laut (2008), when men fail to assimilate into a state-constructed Malayness, they do Malayness beyond the confines of a static idea propounded by the exclusive MIB national ideology In this perspective, men demonstrate an attempt at Malay inclusivity when acting as agents of social tensions in their resistance, which leads to a fragmentation of the closed Malay-Muslim identity that is undone. In a marriage between a Muslim man and non-Muslim woman, a shahadah (“declaration”, Kumpoh) of intent to assume a Muslim identity involves the male granting his female bride entry into Malayness by hailing this newly converted recipient into the Malay society in the MIB nation
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