Memory and Nation-Building

World War II in Malaysian Literature

Vandana Saxena

• Editorial: Routledge
• Año: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000422566
• Edición: 1
• Categoría: Letteratura
• Categoría: Critica letteraria asiatica

Nations are built by narrating their past. Threads of common memories weave the fabric of the national culture, integrating the heterogenous communities into the idea of a single nation. In multicultural societies, the process is a messy one. Different communities remember the past from perspectives that often clash with each other. Multiple memories of a multicultural nation challenge the idea of a singular national identity and call for multiple forms of belonging.

Memory and Nation-Building explores the contemporary images of World War II in Malaysian literature and the continuing significance of the conflict in the collective memory and nation-building in Malaysia. Given the multicultural nature of the nation, the War memories of Malaysia are multiple and often contradictory. In the contemporary Malaysian literature, these memories embody the search for a historical narrative that would accommodate the cultural and ethnic diversity of the country.

1 Reading World War II in Malaysian Literature

In March 2019, more than seven decades after World War II (henceforth called the War), a site of a violent War conflict in Malaysia’s northern state of Kedah became the eye of the storm once again. The signboards at the War monument in the state capital, Alor Setar, hailed the three Japanese soldiers, who had died on the spot fighting against the Allied forces, as ‘heroes’. While the monument marking the site of conflict had been there for years, the new signboard was put up after the request by the Japanese consulate to spruce up the site. The signboard sparked an immediate reaction. ‘It should have stated three Japanese soldiers’, insisted the state’s executive councillor for tourism (Kaur, 2019b: n.p.). Emphasizing the lack of sensitivity shown toward the victims of the Japanese occupation, the president of the local Chinese body underscored the fact that ‘they might be considered as heroes in the eyes of the Japanese but not in the eyes of Malayans at that time, as we were fighting against them’ (Tan, 2019: n.p.). Another member of the Malaysian Chinese Association questioned the existence of the monument: ‘We think it is more important to commemorate the many innocent people killed by the Japanese soldiers, instead of the killers. The Japanese soldiers were the invaders. What qualifications do the war criminals have to own a hero’s monument?’ (Kaur, 2019a: n.p.). Clement Liang, a scholar of Malaysian history, attributed the words on the signboard to a direct quotation from a Japanese propaganda book. The monument, according to him, was erected by the Japanese consulate to honour the victims of the War. Urging the people to move on but never forget, he reminds the reader that ‘Lest we forget, every part of Malaya was conquered by them. It is all about memory’ (Nambiar, 2019: n.p.).

The incident, and the responses it evoked, reveals the shifting terrains of memory and history surrounding the War and the Japanese occupation of Malaya. Even as the World War recedes further into the past, it continues to preoccupy the present. The reaction of the people and the defensive nature of the official discourse outline the complexities surrounding the memories of the Japanese occupation of Malaya during the War, one of the formative events of Malaysian history. To a large extent, the violent years of the War were the defining moment in Malaysian history. They marked the end of the British Empire in Malaya which had started in 1786 with the trading post in Penang on the northwest coast of peninsular Malaysia, gradually making inroads with the establishment of the trading base of the East India Company in Singapore in 1819 and the Pangkor Treaty in 1874. Even though the British returned to Malaya after the Japanese surrender in 1945, the years after the War were the swan song of the Empire in Malaya. According to Tan Twan Eng, a Malaysian novelist whose books have garnered considerable attention recently,

The Japanese occupation is also such a clear dividing line between the past and the future which signaled the end of the British empire in the east and the emergence of nationalistic struggles for independence. After the end of the Second World War, all the colonies in southeast Asia started asking and fighting for independence: no more colonial rule, no more British rule, we want to decide our own future. So this is a huge even in our country’s history.

(Jaggi, 2014: 3)

But the War memories in Malaya are not just about the end of British colonialism. Three years and eight months of the Japanese occupation of Malaya had a lasting impact on the country’s political and socio-cultural fabric. These were the years of tremendous shortages and hardships. The racial fault lines that characterized the peninsula during the colonial and precolonial times deepened further during the occupation years, leading to a violent political and racial conflict during the Communist insurgency in the decades following the War. It was amid these throes of violence that Malaysia emerged as an independent nation in 1957.

So the War and the Japanese occupation were the watershed years in Malaysia’s postcolonial politics and nation-building. The memories continue to be revisited and re-narrated in different contexts in this progressive multiracial and multi-ethnic nation. The preoccupation is such that several young authors of Malaysia, born years after the War, frequently return to the time and space of the War in Malaya¹ to explore it from multiple points-of-view in order to understand the dilemmas of the present and trace the varying trajectories of growth back to what is often seen as one of the originary moments in the history of the nation. These texts present a complicated relationship between memory, history, and literature. While history is understood to be an objective and neutral account of the past, memory challenges the grounds of certainty on which history is built. It looks in multiple directions, presents multiple perspectives, and yet remains fallible and vulnerable to subjectivity. While history tries to recount the truth of the events objectively, it validates or legitimizes certain forms of memory and narratives over others. Historians like Hayden White have shown that the past does not come ‘naturally’ to us; it takes the form of a narrative which involves shaping the events into a pattern of cause and effect with a beginning, middle and end, that is, in the form of a story. Such narrativization implies interpretation. Literature, this study contends, provides a space where the traces of the past, the remembered as well the forgotten, can be recollected and retold in shifting contexts, in different time and space. Much of Malaysian contemporary literature set during the War years presents alternate scenarios and insights that come retrospectively, from the vantage point of the present. These narratives undo the linear historiography that moves from one event to the next, following the chronology – the War, the Japanese occupation, Communist insurgency, the independence and nation-building, and so on.

There are many ways in which memory and history are embedded in literature. This study explores the memories of the War in Malaya and their representation in contemporary literature in order to understand the complex relationship between history, memory, and the discourses of nation-building. The preoccupation with the War and the years of Japanese occupation, especially amongst the diasporic Malaysian writers reveal the attempts to understand, even shape the past as it fits the politically constituted and racially divided Malaysian society of today. Thus, while the common wisdom insists that the past of a society shapes its present and also its future (and therefore, one must learn from it), the study contends that the present and the considerations of the future shape a nation’s past – via narratives and recollections that constantly contest the existing strands of historiography, leaving them open to challenges and modifications.

The War in Malaya: History, Politics, and Poetics

According to the Malaysian government’s Department of Statistics, in 2019, Malaysia’s population was over 32 million with nearly 70 percent Malays, 23 percent ethnic Chinese, about 7 percent ethnic Indians, and a small number of other communities. Malaysia’s multicultural population is a consequence of migration and intermingling of racial and ethnic groups over a long period. Based on the archaeological evidence, the early Indians, mainly Tamils, came to the Malay Archipelago between the 4th and 9th century ce, as invaders as well as traders (Khoo, 2009). Similarly, there is evidence of early Chinese cemeteries in Malacca and Terengganu dating back to the 17th century (Ken, 2016). The bustling ports of Malaya attracted Indian, Chinese, and Arab traders, making it a home to several hybrid communities. During the heyday of Malacca Sultanate in the 15th century and later, traders from different parts of the world flocked to the region trading in gold, spices, tin, and other local produce. Several stayed back and mingled with the locals, contributing to the racial diversity of the Malay Peninsula.

By the time the Europeans arrived in Southeast Asia, the region was multicultural and multiracial in composition given its history of trade, exchanges, and empire-building. The lucrative tin mines of Malaya were already the sites of conflict between the Chinese tin miners and Malay rulers (Hirschman, 1986: 336). The British built their empire on tin and rubber, aided by the administrative support of the Malay rulers and the labour from India and China. Hirschman outlines the British administration’s differential attitude towards different races – an attitude which intensified the racial fault lines of Malaya; paternalism towards the Malays was justified on the grounds that ‘Malays do not have the ability to run their country’ (1986: 344). The Chinese were approached with a resentful and hostile admiration while the Indians were seen as a source of cheap and docile labour.² According to Hirschman, these economic considerations created the socio-cultural ideologies and racial fault lines that legitimated the segregation of communities (geographically, economically, and socially) and justified colonial exploitation. In a plural society, the racial and ethnic segregation made the management of the colony easier.

In 1940, as they made inroads into the East and Southeast Asia, the Japanese called for liberation from the clutches of Western imperialism, which, in Malaya, was represented by the British. The Japanese propaganda urged the Asians to overcome their racial schisms and unite against the common enemy – the Western colonialist. ‘Asia for Asians’ and the idea of ‘Greater Asia Co-prosperity Sphere’ resonated with the nationalist movements in countries like India. In Malaya, it echoed with the rising trends of Malay nationalism and the resentment against the colonial rulers in several sections of Malayan society – the resentment that deepened further as the British beat a hasty retreat when the Japanese landed on the northeast coast of Malaya on December 8, 1941. The Japanese pushed relentlessly southwards towards Singapore where lay the focus of British defence – the fortress of Singapore. British retreat left the majority of the Malayan peninsula open for the Japanese army.

Wang Gungwu explains the War in Malaya as essentially ‘a war between empires’ (2000: 17). A total of 132,000 Allied prisoners of war, and almost an equal number of Western civilians were incarcerated by the Japanese (Yap, 2012: 317). These figures do not include the captured Asian soldiers – the 45,000 Filipinos who fought with the Americans, or nearly 40,000 Indians in Singapore, to whom it seemed that the British had ‘handed them over like cattle’³ (Bayly and Harper, 2006: 147). Moreover, despite their ideological propaganda in support of the pan-Asian independence movements, the Japanese were ‘the last imperialists in Asia’ (Wang, 2000: 17). After their brilliant conquest of Malaya, the intention was to stay and expand the imperial Japanese kingdom further into the Asian mainland. Backed by the thought process that underscored the psychology of hierarchy, in the Japanese version of ‘Asia for Asians’, the other Asian nations were meant to occupy a position subservient to Japan (Alatas, 1977: 175).

Therefore, if one looks beyond the ideological declarations and public posturing, the War meant different things to different communities in Malaya. The retreat of the British and the subsequent surrender of Singapore meant that there was little fighting. For most of the populace, the War was a battle of grim survival amid shortages and the threats of violence and torture in the following years. Like the British before them, the Japanese adopted differential policies toward the three races of Malaya – the Malays, the Chinese, and the Indians. Initially, the Japanese forces in Malaya were welcomed by the Malays as they brought the promise and power to free Malaya from the British. Such euphoria is evident in the early poetry of Malay writers like S.N. Masuri:

BUNGA SAKURA

Baik di gunung, di kampong, di tanah lapang,

Sayup hingga penghabisan mata memandang,

Bunga Sakura makmur berkembang,

Jadi lambang semangat berjuang.

...

Disinari matahari pagi,

Indah berseri menawan hati

Ah! Bunga Sakura pujaan perwira,

berkembang semerbak ke mana-mana⁴

(Masuri,1944)

Published in September 1944, the poem uses the Sakura flower as a metaphor to show the awe that the Japanese inspired with their spirit, and patriotism as well as their skills on the battlefield. But more than that, Masuri’s poems expressed the resentment against the British in Malaya and the motivation for self-determination and a better life. The British economic policies and the collusion of the British with the feudal elites in Malaya had left the masses reeling under poverty and inequality. Azhar Ibrahim in his discussion on colonial Malay literature highlights the differential treatment of the races which resulted in the development of social order with latent racial antagonisms: the indigenous population was not only labeled inferior (‘lazy but loya...