Malaysian Literature

2964 Words6 Pages

Malaysian literature in English, in the genre of fiction, has become a dynamic body of writing that has been the arena where alternative views and ideas about culture are raised and articulated. In Cultures in Conflicts, Fernando’s intent in revealing the curiosity of the Tasadays, a newly discovered tribe in the Philippines, to have a glimpse of the outside world is to highlight the popular ethereal precept that “Let us call all men one man” (1), a tenet much imbued in Tagore’s writings on universal human relationship attained from the Upanishads teaching and the Emersonian maxim of the Oversoul / Unity. I argue that echoes of these universal maxims are evident in Fernando as well when he expresses in Cultures in Conflict “We search for unity, homogeneity, while being confronted by the reality of heterogeneity” (Fernando 3). The traumatic incidence of racial riots of May 13, 1969 provided the setting and milieu for Lloyd Fernando‘s Green is the Colour. Interposing Bakhtin’s dialogism in the poetics of multiculturalism about difference and unity, I propose that the novel interprets Fernando as a responsible novelist in the position of a member of a multiethnic and multicultural society in Malaysia who must contest individual aspirations in the face of communal and social demands for unity hence locating Green is the Colour as a promising consequence of multiculturalism against ferocious ethnic relationship towards nation building in that particular milieu. Furthermore, I argue that the fundamental category in Fernando’s mode of visualizing a multicultural nation in the novel is not evolution but coexistence and interaction.

I commence with arguments that its Fernando’s authorial intention to highlight the issue of multicultu...

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