The Modern Malay Woman’s Reclaimed (Home)land: Syncretisation as a Strategy of Resistance in Singapore Theatre
The Modern Malay Woman’s Reclaimed (Home)land: Syncretisation as a Strategy of Resistance in Singapore Theatre
By Danial Matin Bin Zaini
Abstract
The Modern Malay Woman (MMW), in both her real and theatrical manifestations, is caught in a triple bind between modernity, Malayness, and femininity, limiting the spaces she can call home. She seeks refuge in pelagic rather than terrestrial ‘homes’, but in these unstable ‘homes' which are undermined by their own fluidity, what modes of agency avail themselves to the MMW in her bid to elude obsolescence despite her peripherality?
I analyse in this essay how, as suggested by Christopher Balme, syncretisation functions as a form of indigenous resistance, and how the play-text, exemplifying Bakhtinian heteroglossia in its mixing of linguistic registers and performance modes, resists the MMW’s assimilation into cultural hegemony, as represented by Anglophonic theatrical conventions. By deploying multilingualism and interweaving the performance of indigenous mythologies and cultural rituals, the syncretic play-text bridges subaltern and normative narratives.
Overall, I conclude that the uneasy reconciliation achieved through such syncretisation entails a necessary risk if we are to enable the pluralisation of possible formulations of the MMW within Singapore Theatre.
1. Introduction
You're not my homeland anymore
So what am I defending now?
Taylor Swift, exile (2020)
“Land” and “water” may be fundamentally different spatialities, but in Malay they are conjoined to form tanah air [1] , which means “homeland”. This uneasy reconciliation suggests that ‘home’, in the Malay imagination, is a dualistic space terrestrially rooted yet pelagically unbound. What seems like an odd metaphor, however, aptly describes the geopolitical realities of Singapore, the island, and the limited spaces the MMW—caught in a triple bind between notions of modernity, Malayness, and femininity—can call ‘home’. In an unstable ‘home’ undermined by its own fluidity, what modes of agency avail themselves to the MMW in her bid to elude obsolescence despite her peripherality? To answer this, we must first understand the historical circumstances surrounding the MMW’s unstable ‘homeland’, which I will trace through three narratives: Singapore’s (absent) Malay history, modern Singapore’s (absent) cultural history, and Singapore Theatre’s history.
1.1 Singapore’s (Malay) History
Singapura [2] was a Malay kingdom within the Srivijaya Empire as early as the 13th century [3], then a British colony from the 19th to 20th centuries, before it became an independent nation in 1965. Throughout these historical transitions, Malay history, once upon a time ‘national’ history, was gradually relegated to a mere subset of Singapore’s colonial and post-colonial history. Malay history’s marginality is complicated by the fact that its pre-colonial history, during which Malay civilization flourished, lacks accessibility due to a dearth of proper historiography. Much Malay history has been orally transmitted and thus not as easily preserved, being susceptible to errors in transmission and the deaths of its bearers. Attempts have been made to document pre-colonial history, e.g., the Singapore Stone inscriptions, believed to date back to the Majapahit Empire [4] (Cornelius-Takahama). Its Sanskrit inscriptions, however, remain indecipherable, and the slab was blown up by British colonialists in 1843 to widen the Singapore River’s mouth, with little regard for the slab’s importance to Malay history (Cornelius-Takahama). It is difficult to name other literary-historical Malay works besides Sejarah Melayu, or the “Malay Annals”, which contains, arguably, the richest account of medieval Malay society thus far [5] (Ibrahim). This suggests a lack of Malay literati in preceding centuries to document Malay society, its concerns, and its cultural traditions, thus disrupting the transmission and appreciation of the ‘Malay’.
Malay history was further suppressed during Malaya’s colonisation by the colonialists’ orientalising accounts of the Malays. These anthropological accounts exoticised the Malays [6] to serve their voyeuristic interests rather than the representational needs of the Malays. That colonial overwriting has, however, found recuperation in the work of modern-day Malay writers like Alfian Sa’at, who have re-codified indigenous histories to usurp colonialist frames. For example, a collection of flash fiction about the Malays using Swettenham’s same title has been published by Alfian Sa’at [7]. Despite Alfian’s account, however, modern literary representations of the Malays in the English language remain limited or regulated.
1.2 Malays in Modern Singapore
Compared to Malaysia’s Malays, Singapore’s Malays faced a very different set of conditions, which set them off on a different socioeconomic trajectory after Singapore’s independence in 1965. Despite literary reclamations of the Malays by contemporary Malay writers, Malays in modern Singapore remain in a state of crisis because (i) they are now a racial minority despite once being the majority, (ii) they experience relatively slimmer socio-economic gains compared to other ethnic groups (see Rahim 1998), and (iii) Singapore lacks cultural history, which means there is little to draw upon for the Malay citizen to construct his/her cultural identity along national lines.
When the British arrived, the Malays were already a reduced majority, comprising 60.2% of Singapore’s population (Saw) due to preceding centuries of Asian labourers and traders migrating into Singapore. British immigration policies further encouraged migration; by 1931, Malays constituted an all-time low of only 11.7% of Singapore’s total population (Saw). The minority status of the Malays was carefully maintained post-independence by the Singaporean government, always calibrated around 14 to 15% in line with the government’s “commitment to maintain the racial balance . . . to preserve social stability and the multiracial character of [Singapore] society” (gov.sg). The relegation of Singapore’s Malays from a racial majority in a Malay kingdom to a minority in a multiracial state potentially creates a sentiment of dispossession.
Figure 1 Singapore’s racial demographic 1824-1967. Source: Saw, Swee Hock. “Population Trends in Singapore, 1819-1967.” Singapore Commemorative Issue 1819-1969, special issue of Journal of Southeast Asian History, vol. 10, no. 1, 1969, pp. 36-49.
Modern Singapore’s calibrated multiculturalism, as seen in the government’s statement above, inadvertently maintains the Malay’s marginal position. Assimilation is essential to Singapore’s multiculturalism, and yet its application in both policy and practice has been critiqued for “institutionalizing structures of dominance mirroring those of the colonial state” (Holden 349). Over the years, civil groups have questioned the productivity and validity of strict racial taxonomies [8] despite their administrative efficiency. The designation of race as a marker of cultural identity may also be perceived to conflate race and culture, which has the result of oversimplifying racial diversity. Race becomes an “assumed ontological category” in Singapore, and while post-colonial multiracialism “enshrines” a kind of pluralism, it is nevertheless “selective” (Poon 72). This “selective pluralism” operates through a nationality that transcends race (Holden 351), even if it marginalises its racial minorities, who must accommodate rather than be accommodated. Despite multiculturalism’s claims, modern Malays find themselves marginalised by the underlying pragmatism of Singapore’s multicultural nation-building project.
The marginality of Singaporean Malays has been further entrenched by their unequal share of Singapore’s economic success. While claims that Malays have risen above the “Malay problem” [9] exist, their socioeconomic gains have been relatively low compared to that of other racial groups. Lily Zubaidah Rahim calls this ‘relative deprivation’: Singapore’s Malays “have not made significant gains in narrowing the socioeconomic and educational gap with non-Malay communities” (24). Malay gains in head-of-household income from 1980 to 1990 have been relatively small compared to other ethnicities, suggesting a failure to progress socioeconomically as much as other ethnicities, including the Indians, who are a smaller racial minority (see Figure 2). Another gap besides the economic one may be noted: Singaporean Malays fall far short of the national average in terms of attaining tertiary education, this having remained unchanged from 2005 to 2010; any Malay gains have been small when compared to national gains (see Figure 3).
Figure 2 Monthly Head-of-Household Income by Ethnicity (1980-1990). Source: Jesudason, James. “Ethnicity and the Political Economy of Malaysia and Singapore.” Conference on Democracy, Ethnicity and Development in South and Southeast Asia, International Centre for Ethnic Studies, 1993, Colombo. Paper presentation.
Figure 3 Highest Educational Qualification Attained for Singapore’s Malays in comparison to national total (2005-2010). Statistics of other ethnic groups were already omitted in the original. Source: Shantakumar, G. “Singapore Malays in the New Millennium: Demographics and Developmental Perspectives”, 2011.
Traditional gender roles persisted in Malay society, where Malay women were expected to be homemakers, while Malay men were expected to work. Such gender roles meant that a higher proportion of Malay men received formal education as compared to Malay women (Census of Population 1970, 1980). Nevertheless, the number of Malay women receiving formal education increased significantly from 1970 to 1980, the number of economically active Malay women quintupling from 9,737 to 50,753 (Census of Population 1970, 1980), which indicates changes in social attitudes amongst Malays towards more gender-equal education. This also meant more Malay women began entering the public domain.
Thus, by considering the marginal position of the Singaporean Malay as a racial and socioeconomic minority, the educational marginality of Malay women, and changing social attitudes (due to modernization) which empowered Malay women, the MMW occupies a uniquely marginal yet progressive position in Singapore society.
1.3 Singapore Theatre
The limited/limiting literary representations of the MMW are perhaps symptomatic of the MMW’s social, racial, and gendered marginalisation, whose self-fashioning is disrupted by her inability to anchor herself to stable ‘homes’, torn also between being Malay and Singaporean. Consequently, manifestations of the MMW within Singapore Theatre, I contend, are framed through a “double consciousness”, to borrow Du Bois’s phrase (1997). According to Du Bois [10], individuals of mixed ancestry can identify with both sides of their personal identity. Yet, psychologically sustaining hybridised identities places additional demands on these individuals. While Du Bois’s theory focuses on racial consciousness, it might be extended to racial selfhood: we might suggest that the MMW’s racial self intersects with her national self, creating a more complex site of contestation. Singapore’s Malay playwrights and their characters wrestled with their own “double consciousness” of being Malay and Singaporean. Malay playwrights and Singapore English Language Theatre (SELT) plays featuring Malay characters and concerns only gained traction from the 1990s (Aidli Mosbit, personal interview, 9 February 2021). This includes, but is not limited to, the works of Alfian Sa’at and Haresh Sharma; critical attention paid to these works, however, remains sparse. Complex Malay characters have been predominantly written by male playwrights from the 1990s onwards [11], and yet it is the Malay woman rather than the man who features more prominently, which suggests a latent feminist crisis within Malay-Singaporean identity. This is in contrast with SELT’s early years, which largely features the post-colonial experiences of the English-educated Chinese [12]. The more recent development of the MMW in comparison to her Chinese counterpart demonstrates, I conjecture, a delayed awareness of her “double consciousness”, possibly engendered by the slower uptake of English-language education by Singapore’s Malay community [13].
Figure 4 Enrolment in Singapore’s Schools according to Language Stream (1941-1978). Source: Rahim, Lily Zubaidah. The Singapore Dilemma: The Political and Educational Marginality of the Malay Community, Kuala Lumpur, Oxford University Press, 1998, p. 169.
Nonetheless, it remains the case that the MMW, both as artist and muse, has been granted limited representation. The MMW is almost always the Other, and SELT stages a self-awareness of this Othering in its attempts to return agency to the MMW.
1.4 The Modern Malay Woman
Thus, the mercurial MMW [14] occupies a critical interstitial position. She contends not just with the homogenizing effects of a nationalizing discourse, but also her assimilation into a multicultural nation-state in which she is now a racial minority, and those patriarchal elements in Malay society that limit feminine agency. Nevertheless, the confluence of access to higher education, “urban life, transnationality, and changing social attitudes” (Izharuddin 55-56) in modernizing Malaya has provided the MMW with greater agency through migration, socioeconomic opportunities, and re-orienting the woman’s position vis-à-vis the man. These modes of agency may be perceived to transcend the hegemonic confines of Malay society and the nation-state, or to adopt a more pessimistically Marxist view, that the MMW’s newfound agency is still encoded by her peripherality.
The MMW thus attempts to syncretise normative and subaltern narratives, although it comes at the price of disorientation. Individual identities are informed by competing claims on cultural and national identity, but such existential transformations are more radically pronounced for those on the fringe. It is from these questions that I investigate the emancipatory possibilities for the MMW through SELT, reading Haresh Sharma’s Rosnah (2011), Zizi Azah’s How Did The Cat Get So Fat? (2015), Alfian Sa’at’s Nadirah (2019), and Nabilah Said’s Angkat: A Definitive, Alternative, Reclaimed Narrative of a Native (2019) [15]. Rosnah contemplates an undergraduate estranged from home and studying in London, who struggles to balance liberal ideals and tradition without losing either. Cat charts a girl’s fantastical journey through modern Singapore’s underbelly, a pseudo-Bildungsroman of the MMW learning of society’s horrors. In Nadirah, an undergraduate’s faith is tested when she discovers her mother’s intention to wed a non-Muslim. Angkat blends fantasy and fact, reconstructing history and an imagined future by intertwining the stories of a mother and her adopted daughter.
John Donne writes in Meditation XVII that “no man is an island entire of itself” (1839); presently, the MMW is an island carrying parts of the main. Her hybridised identity is founded upon reclaimed land, cobbled together from fragments of history and modernity that she excavates and appropriates for herself. Such appropriation undermines the authenticity of her reclaimed, hybridised identity that attempts to reconcile the ‘irreconcilable’. Like Singapore’s nation-building project, which literally entails the reclamation of land, the MMW is perpetually under (re)construction. In this essay, I posit that syncretisation is deployed as a precarious strategy of resistance for (depictions of) the MMW in SELT. I demonstrate this by analysing how syncretisation functions as a form of indigenous resistance and how the text, exemplifying Bakhtin’s heteroglossia in its mixing of linguistic registers and theatrical modes, unsettles the cultural hegemony represented by Anglophonic theatrical conventions. While such syncretisation undermines the MMW’s ontological formulations, the openness to hybridity also enriches possible formulations of the MMW, therefore pluralising the emancipatory possibilities accessible to her.
2. Syncretisation as Indigenous Resistance
Even if I get swept away and get lost, I’m free…
Even if I get lost again, I know my way back.
IU, my sea (2021)
Cultural hegemony presupposes that there is a dominant definition of reality that has come to be accepted as normative such that alternative views are considered not only marginal but threatening. In his Prison Notebooks (1929-1935), Antonio Gramsci proposes that cultural hegemony may be understood as a polyvocal field of competing discourses resulting in an unstable, ephemeral hierarchy. For Gramsci, cultural hegemony is dynamic, the product of complex negotiations and re-alignments within society as marginalised communities attempt to validate their alternate realities. There is never equilibrium because contestation is the norm within the formation of cultural hegemony, which is always an unfinished project. John Fiske re-emphasises this notion: "hegemony is a constant struggle against a multitude of resistances to ideological domination, and any balance of forces that it achieves is always precarious, always in need of re-achievement. Hegemony's 'victories' are never final." (41).
The (re)negotiation of cultural hegemony materializes in the intent and operation of the syncretic play-text, which employs multiple strategies of resistance through the re-framing and re-situating of native, subaltern histories alongside (neo)colonial, normative ones. According to Christopher Balme (1999), the syncretic play-text is one that synthesises multiple modes of performance, a popular practice amongst post-colonial theatre-makers attempting to “[decolonize] the stage” (Balme 1). The syncretic play-text is polyphonic not just in terms of language but form. This includes mixing dominant Western theatrical traditions with subordinate indigenous ones [16], incorporating the use of multilingualism as a stage device, and, to extend Balme’s ideas, interweaving differing cultural narratives and communicative modes (both textual and performative) within the body of the text. The syncretic play-text that co-sites disparate traditions thus (re)imagines a “creative recombination of [dramatic] elements” (Balme 1) that resists assimilation.
2.1 Staging Linguistic Syncretism
The plays’ multilingualism, performed through the incorporation of Malay into SELT, challenges an Anglocentric hegemony. Here, St. André’s revision of Bakhtin’s heteroglossia may be relevant. Fundamentally, Bakhtin’s heteroglossia describes distinct varieties within a single language that allows the refraction of “authorial intentions” through different modes of speech (1981). According to St. André, heteroglossia can comprise “overlapping linguistic situations” (140), expanding Bakhtin’s monolingual formulation into a multilingual one, thus multiplying and complicating the possibilities of refraction. This is perhaps more mimetic of the inherently polyphonic nature of the world. The recognition of the world as polyphonic is mimicked within theatre through syncretisation, where cultural difference is performed via multilingualism. Syncretisation affirms the difficulty of “[conceiving] human diversity as inscribed in bounded independent cultures” (Balme 10). Instead, culture is an interconnected, continuous network. One might argue that plays like Rosnah and Angkat are subversive in their deployment of multilingualism. The inclusion of Malay is not just a simple attempt at authenticity or mimesis for its culturally Malay characters, but a stylistic stage device designed to unsettle the hegemony of the English language in Anglophonic theatrical tradition. In the special case of Angkat, the Malay text almost subsumes the English. Except for the stage directions and Scene 12, the text is almost entirely written in Malay. English translations are offered but only within the margins of the footnotes [17] and without offering the names of the characters who utter those lines, which disorients the reader unversed in Malay. The assertion of the Malay text over the English becomes a kind of performative “reverse colonialism” that Budak 1 professes (62). The predominantly Malay-speaking audience’s experience of alienation from a text written in the English language is thereby inverted; it is the English-speaking audience that is now relegated to a marginal position. Angkat’s Malay-heavy play-text replicates what Young calls “a colonial strategy of exclusion” (39) onto its English-speaking audiences by replacing a dominant language with a marginalised Other. Balme recognises that switching back and forth between languages strategically includes or excludes sections of the audience (116); the four plays vacillate between including and excluding the non-Malay speaking audience whenever Malay is deployed. Angkat’s heavy-handed use of multilingualism, however, potentially undermines its subversive counter-hegemonic project by effectively asserting a new monolingualism whereby an Anglophonic hegemony is replaced with a Malay one. The heavy deployment of Malay potentially alienates its non-Malay-speaking audience, thereby rendering its own text unreadable. While multilingualism is deployed as a theatrical device that serves to undermine Anglophonic cultural hegemonies, the subaltern’s counter-hegemonic project risks replicating the same operative processes of alienation where cultural difference might be recognised but not reconciled.
Figure 5 ANGKAT: A Definitive, Alternative, Reclaimed Narrative of a Native (2019). Featuring (from left-right) Adib Kosnan, Moli Mohter, Hafidz Abdul Rahman and Izzul Irfan. Photo courtesy of MonoSpectrum Photography.
Regardless, the subaltern’s counter-hegemonic project does not always succeed in usurping cultural hegemony. Angkat’s Malay characters switch back to English when referring to abstract notions such as “girl power” (12) or “colonial superiority”, the expression of these abstract notions in English rather than Malay revealing the lack of a native vocabulary capable of articulating these concerns. Secondly, from the perspective of the playwright, the original utterances could have lost their poetic substance when translated. Perhaps no appropriate method exists to translate concepts of feminism and colonial superiority from English into Malay without possibly alienating both English- and Malay-speaking audiences. Therein lies an issue of untranslatability across languages. The writer who deploys multilingualism and translation must make difficult, calibrated choices between semantic accuracy and poetic elegance, sometimes sacrificing one for the other for semantic or aesthetic effect. Still, the fact that the Malay language must give way to English indicates a latent linguistic and phenomenological incompatibility between subaltern and dominant hegemonies. The subaltern may disrupt established cultural hegemony, perhaps even overthrow it. But because a Gramscian cultural hegemony inscribes constant re-negotiation, the subaltern can never fully sublate the dominant, or rather, it is similarly susceptible to revision. It could establish a new dominant or cultural hegemony, but it must still give way to competing discourses.
2.2 Playing with (Mis)translation
The Malay characters and play-text attempt to reconcile this latent incompatibility through linguistic and structural syncretisation, and such syncretisation eludes the politics of binarism to produce a new possibility of emancipation, particularly for the MMW. While Alfian and Nabilah’s texts maintain the syntactical distinctions between English and Malay, Haresh’s text code-mixes Malay syntactical structures with English lexicon, a process J. P. Clark calls “relexification” (31). This situates Haresh along other post-colonial dramatists who allow the “rhythms and syntax of . . . indigenous language [to] manifest themselves in the europhone language” in which they write (Balme 107), and in so doing create a ‘third language’ that bridges the two. For Balme, relexification is an “implicit form of translation” that “distinguishes itself from the normal translation process” (129). There are also other translational practices at the level of form rather than language, which will be discussed later. There remains the problem of performing multilingualism onstage: intimating one language community may alienate another, but linguistic syncretisation through the process of relexification offers an opportunity to bridge this gap. Often, the play-texts and their stagings make explicit the processes of translation to draw attention to the linguistic negotiation in play. Translation is not just applied but performed. By making visible the politics of translation and the difficulties of translation, the play’s audience is made aware of their own linguistic privileges as the play fluctuates between including and excluding different sections of its audience. In Angkat, English translations for the main text are presented in the form of footnotes, which create a distinct, imaginative space within the margins through which the non-Malay speaking audience can appreciate the predominantly Malay text, although the politics of this linguistic game is not without its drawbacks in potentially alienating its non-Malay-speaking audience. Other play-texts, such as Rosnah and Nadirah, are less heavy-handed in the deployment of Malay [18], making them more accessible to the non-Malay-speaking audience. This better facilitates the integration of the marginal Malay linguistic community into its dominant Anglophonic counterpart.
Figure 6 Production images of "How Did The Cat Get So Fat?", commissioned and produced by Esplanade – Theatres on the Bay for The Studios 2018. Photos by Crispian Chan.
The act of translation can be performed not just on the page but on the stage. Onstage, the English translations are projected as surtitles that follow the actors’ speech in real time. The screening of surtitles, however, is not necessarily consistent. In Cat (2018) [19], for example, a directorial decision was made to omit surtitles for certain segments [20] to exclude non-Malay-speaking audiences. This way, the play performs the untranslatability of its own Malay text onstage, in the same way Angkat performs its translational processes on the page. The brief performative moments of untranslatability awaken the audience to their reliance on surtitles as linguistic crutches once the privilege of those crutches has been taken away. There is an interesting scene in Cat that the playwright writes entirely in “F language”, a made-up language decipherable only to the protagonist Fatimah and her own shadow. The audience, whether literate in Malay or English, is alienated from the performance [21]. Despite the 2018 production being oriented towards a Malay-speaking audience, the Malay-speaking audience was potentially alienated in that scene. This process is replicated in Angkat when Mak utters an unintelligible Malay riddle at the end of Scene Five. The playwright includes a footnote indicating that Mak’s outburst is “meant to sound nonsensical yet potentially deep” (47). The riddle is meant to provoke confusion even amongst its Malay-speaking audience as they attempt to decipher nonsense disguised as mysticism.
Regarding the performance of translatability, the literal marginalisation of text—as footnotes in Angkat and surtitles in its live stagings—forms an imaginative space wherein various linguistic codes can interact, negotiate, and co-exist. As Balme suggests, multilingualism is “not just a dramaturgical device” but integral to the “political message of the play [whereby] linguistic diversity does not automatically exclude political unity and cooperation” (114). The Malay-speaking characters in the plays display linguistic superiority over their strictly Anglophonic audience. More importantly, they demonstrate the privileging of multilingual communities over monolingual ones, suggesting that multilingualism accords greater possibilities of liberation by establishing connections to a wider range of linguistic and cultural communities. However, even as multilingualism is emancipatory, it is simultaneously alienating, creating a paradox within the intents and outcomes of multilingualism and translation. The MMW, in voicing herself, must contend with the need to communicate and the possibility of being misunderstood. Nevertheless, the multilingual character can mediate different linguistic communities, thus imbuing the multilinguist with greater agency, such as when Salma in Angkat code-switches between English and Malay to foreground her English and Malay cultural identities to appeal to her English- and Malay-speaking (imagined) audiences. Language itself becomes a dialogic site of contestation and negotiation between different cultural identities and power structures, and it is the multilinguist who gains the upper hand. In the process of re-negotiating cultural hegemonies, language functions as play where new re-configurations can be imagined, and the MMW is both empowered and circumscribed by her multilingualism.
2.3 Formal Syncretism within Performance
In extension of St. André’s (re)formulation of a multilingual heteroglossia, I further posit that heteroglossia can also structurally amalgamate different sociocultural narratives and varying communicative modes. Across the four plays, dominant narratives are co-sited with, and challenged by, alternative sociocultural narratives. In Angkat and Cat, the static hegemony of the city-state, manifested through the Sinocentrism of a Chinese-majority nation and the capitalistic impulses of a neoliberal economy, is challenged by the nomadic narrative of a Malay woman finding her place in a space wherein she appears not to belong. Through the intrusions of other MMWs, i.e., Siti Zubaidah, Nenek, and the Actor in Rosnah and Maznah’s reformulations of the MMW in Nadirah, the hegemony of Malay tradition itself is challenged by competing alternative discourses of what an MMW can or cannot be, especially when inflected by her attachments to race and religion. Balme notes that there are other translation strategies in post-colonial drama beyond linguistic code-mixing (2011). At the level of form, one can interweave more “complex discursive elements such as [cultural] proverbs and sayings” (132), which similarly resist assimilation due to difficulties in translating them across languages. Balme cites the difficulties of assimilating Yoruba language and culture into Anglophonic theatre as an example of how competing systems of reference productively multiply the inherent dialogism of dramatic practice, especially predominantly Anglophonic ones (132). Balme further points out that the parameters of “naturalness” or mimesis within realism as a dramatic tradition are themselves aesthetically restrictive (109). Realism, as a theatrical language, is regarded as Eurocentric; it marginalises indigenous performances of realism that may incorporate cultural performances and rituals that, for now, remain incomprehensible to the orientalising audience.
Even if such cultural performances remain incomprehensible, Balme asserts that they can still be appreciated on the “musical” rather than “linguistic-semantic level” (120), as in the case of poetry and songs. Unlike written language, music needs no translation to carry affective power. In Angkat, pantun are used as framing devices for the pseudo-dream sequences. Each of the four pantun comprises of two stanzas, and each stanza features a pair of couplets following an ABAB rhyme scheme. Conventionally, the first couplet of each stanza features a pembayang, or introductory statement, which may bear no direct logical connection to the second couplet which contains the isi, or meaning, of the pantun,
Figure 7 Rosnah (1996). Photo credit: The Necessary Stage.
although a metaphorical link is often hinted at. This is evidently a different poetic convention from Anglophonic ones such as the Petrarchan sonnet, Italian sestina, or French villanelle. Nadirah ends with pop/rock musician Cat Stevens’s [22] “Wild World” and in the staged production, opens with Nadirah
performing the Muslim prayer ritual with her mother, Sahirah.
Narratively, Haresh interrupts the prosaic text of Rosnah with the factual reportage of academic writing, including excerpts from Virginia Woolf’s Killing the Angel of the House, Seven Essays (1993), Shaykh Fadhlalla Haeri’s The Cow: Commentary on Surah Al-Baqarah (1993), and Vernon Bartlett’s Report of Malaya (1954). One might argue that these interruptions briefly break the continuity and realism of the play-text. However, I contend that these interruptions productively destabilise Anglophonic theatrical conventions and the inclusion of these alternate dramatic texts is an act of theatrical syncretisation. Haresh also weaves in Syair Siti Zubaidah Perang China (125) a canonical Malay syair, which is a didactic poem usually sung and accompanied by music. The syair disrupts the hegemony of spoken speech within the text, offering a brief respite from repetitive prose while introducing a native history, and its native heroine, into the main text. Similarly, Angkat incorporates the folktale of Bawang Merah and Bawang Putih (51) and repeats the playful ABC song about beautiful children who must “kiss… [an] old man’s buttocks” (9, 46, 60, 61). However, the incomplete repetitions of the ABC song (46, 61) suggest how native histories can also be aborted, metaphorized through the attempted kidnapping of a young Salma (46) and the burning of the boat that once granted Angkat’s characters their mobility (61). Therefore, Anglophonic theatrical traditions are easily disrupted by the import of foreign (or indigenous, depending on one’s point of view) aesthetic conventions and performances, which resist assimilation into a broader cultural hegemony. The syncretisation of indigenous performance modes thus offers the MMW alternative (re)configurations, which are bound neither to Western nor indigenous traditions.
The MMW can mediate difference not just through her multilingualism, but her embodiment of multiple personifications. The formal strategy of having the same actor play all the characters in Rosnah delineates that the bodies of the actor and the MMW (as opposed to simply text) are inherently heteroglossic. Haresh disrupts the pantun by splitting the articulation of the first and second couplets across different characters:
NENEK: Sorong puan tatah baiduri
Kapur batu taruh didalam
ROSNAH: Jika pandai membawa diri
Tabur batu tidak tenggelam (Rosnah 122)
The disparate voices of different characters are at once disjointed yet conjoined by the sole polyvocal actor who switches not just between linguistic varieties but different identities. By co-habiting these disparate imperatives and narratives within the body of the actor as well as the body of the text, these ‘voices’ are syncretically organised to form a heteroglossic whole. The actor and text themselves embody and perform the representational ideal of the MMW: one who is multilingual in all senses of the word. It is when the roles of Nenek, Rosnah, Siti Zubaidah, and the Actor collide at the end of Rosnah (136-37) that the syncretisation of these disparate identities is most fully realised. While an unsettled balance is achieved between these disparate characters in Rosnah’s psyche, which culminates in her implicit desire to commit suicide, it signifies that the MMW is not homogenous. There are multiple ways of being an MMW across different spatialities and temporalities as seen across its different permutations in the all-female cast of Rosnah: the present Rosnah is ‘modern’ because she pursues an education overseas, her friend Muslinda is ‘modern’ because she adopts Western practices and asserts bodily autonomy, her elderly grandmother is ‘modern’ because her acceptance of Rosnah’s marriage to a white man is deemed progressive, and the historical Siti Zubaidah is ‘modern’ because she leaves her home and becomes a soldier in search of her captured husband, which (by current Western standards) is a feminist twist to the original male ‘hero’ story.
2.4 Notes on Theatrical Syncretism
There is a difference, however, between theatrical exoticism and theatrical syncretism. The former uses indigenous texts for their superficial appeal without regard for their “original cultural semantics”, thus according them no greater significance than mere alterity (Balme 5). Theatrical exoticism does little to alter the Western aesthetic or ideological frames through which indigenous texts continue to be appreciated (Balme 5). As for the latter, Balme points out that theatrical syncretisation is not simply an “aesthetic phenomenon”. For theatrical syncretism to operate effectively in “[questioning] the basis of normative Western drama” through a “process of cultural and aesthetic semiotic receding” (Balme 4), it must be embedded in “cultural interaction and change” (Balme 3), wherein the indigenous text interacts productively with the dominant Anglocentric text to generate new states of equilibrium. Therefore, simply co-siting the native with the non-native is insufficient to resist assimilation both into tradition and the neo-colonial, but, as previously suggested, the four plays actively reframe established cultural hegemonies through the lens of the subaltern. In so doing, they resist the “peculiarly Western tendency to homogenize, exclude, [and] strive for a state of [racial or stylistic] purity” (Balme 8). Syncretisation is a “conscious stylistic device” because the artists involved must “refashion meanings from diverse cultural sources to create products which declare their hybridity” (Balme 11). As a result, the syncretic play-text recognizes the “fundamentally hybrid constitution of self and culture” (Balme 12), thereby conceptualising the MMW as a dynamic, multivalenced one rather than a static, homogenous entity. It is this radical re-imagining of MMW subjectivities that enhances the emancipatory potential of modernity, Malayness, and femininity by allowing multiple alignments to different communities of resistance, which creates, according to Edward Soja, “real-and-imagined spaces for diverse oppositional practices” (84). Soja formulates that it is only through counter-hegemonic practice that re-visioning spaces can begin to emerge (85). Syncretisation is thus a “defiant political gesture” (Soja 85), a strategy of indigenous resistance. It is within the radical openness of the margins, where the MMW is at her most liberatory but also her most vulnerable, that the re-configuration of her Self and established cultural hegemonies can begin.
Figure 8 Rosnah (2016). Photo credit: The Necessary Stage.
3. Conclusion
This is home truly, where I know I must be
Where my dreams wait for me, where the river always flows
Kit Chan, Home [23] (1998)
To return to the metaphor of tanah air, the MMW’s “homeland” is thus found at the interstitial boundaries between sand and sea, where she must navigate the inherently fluid nature of syncretisation to arrive at more plural notions of selfhood. The MMW must re-constitute her “homeland” in this imaginary/imaginative space, while acknowledging the transience of her constructed identity. It is thus apt that the paradoxical formulations of tanah air and the invented chimeric Merlion [24], which conjoin the terrestrial with the pelagic, has come to define the hybridised yet fabricated figure of the MMW. While invention through syncretisation enables the MMW and rescues her from obsolescence, it also endangers the stability of her identity and potentially at the expense of further alienation. But this is a necessary risk, and one that can be managed. For the MMW to not be bound by fixed ideas of the MMW, she must remain a seafaring wanderer, or a geographer who continuously redraws her map to form new configurations between old and new islands. She must not resist change because her relocation still requires re-habituation.
Through this reading, the MMW thus exposes the universalizing paradigms of the post-colonial that do not fit so neatly within the narrow intersections of marginalised experience within modernizing nation states. As much as the broader Singaporean Malay narratives shape the formation of the MMW, the MMW reinforms the ongoing construction of the Singaporean Malay by testing its boundaries. As previously explained, the negotiation of cultural hegemony is a dialogic process that resists finality. The MMW, whose identity resists translation, demands to be understood on her own terms and in her own voice; her marginality must be accommodated by the text and the audience, not just the other way around. Ultimately, change begins when we recognise the latent heterogeneities within everyday life. The broader Singaporean experience is not divorced from the experiences of the MMW, and in the larger scheme of things, we have always been reinventing our “boats against the current”, to borrow the final lines of Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, lest we be “borne back ceaselessly into the past”.
Endnotes
[1] Tanah is Malay for “land” and air is Malay for “water”.
[2] Singapura is the more formal name for “Singapore”. Singapura is Sanskrit for “lion city”.
[3] This is a conservative estimate. Some studies point to a few centuries earlier.
[4] This is a conservative estimate. Some studies date the slab back to the 10th or 11th century.
[5] Scholars still face problems in identifying the anonymous authors of Sejarah Melayu. For a while the text existed only in scattered fragments and had to be reassembled. It has also been published, translated, and edited many times over 150 years. (Ibrahim)
[6] See Hugh Clifford’s numerous writings, Isabella Bird’s The Golden Chersonese (1883), Emily Inne’s The Chersonese with the Gilding Off (1885) written in response to Bird, and Frank Swettenham’s Malay Sketches (1895).
[7] Alfian mentioned during a Singapore Literature Book Club sharing on his Malay Sketches (21 November 2019) that he cheekily used Swettenham’s same title so that when people looked it up, they would find his work instead of Swettenham’s, in an attempt to reclaim Malay history.
[8] Singaporeans are categorised according to the CMIO model, or “Chinese, Malay, Indian, Others”. The racial category they assume determines the kinds of housing, financial support, and other social services they are entitled to.
[9] The “Malay problem” attributes the social and economic lag to an inherent cultural deficiency rather than larger structural issues. The term “Malay problem” is itself problematic, and such sentiments persist today, even if publicly understated.
[10] Du Bois is also of mixed heritage.
[11] It was only from the mid-2000s that female Malay playwrights writing in English came into greater prominence, which includes Aidli Mosbit, Zizi Azah, and Nabilah Said.
[12] Examples include Lim Chor Pee’s A White Rose at Midnight (1964), Goh Poh Seng’s The Moon is Less Bright (1964) and When Smiles Are Done (1972), and Robert Yeo’s Are You There, Singapore? (1974) and One Year Back Home (1980).
[13] I have been unable to find complete statistical data to prove this trend, which for now remains a hunch. I have included the most approximate data in Figure 4 above.
[14] The MMW is my own version of the New Malay Woman, as it is formally known within Malay Studies, within modern Singapore. The New Malay Woman was understood to have emerged in 1960s Malaya.
[15] It should be noted that the publication of the text does not necessarily precede its staging. Rosnah was first staged in 1995 (in a simple production at a local library) before more full-fledged stagings at The Substation in 1996, an Australian tour in 1997, at National Library Board’s Drama Centre in 2006, and at the Esplanade in 2016. Cat was first staged in 2005 (in a simple production) and 2006 (a more full-fledged production at the Esplanade) prior to its publication in 2015, after which it was restaged at the Esplanade in 2018. Nadirah was premiered by Teater Ekamatra in 2009 at The Substation, before touring Kuala Lumpur in 2012 and Japan in 2016. Angkat, which is still unpublished (though the playwright has kindly granted me access to the text) received its first proper staging in 2019 after previous reworkings at Centre 42’s Boiler Room in 2015 and Basement Workshop in 2018, and Teater Ekamatra in 2016/2017. Angkat won Best Original Script at the 2020 Life Theatre Awards.
[16] Here, “dominant” modes may refer to Eurocentric modes of performance while “subordinate” modes may refer to indigenous non-Eurocentric ones, although I do not intend to mean that indigenous modes are inferior to established Western theatrical traditions, only that they have been eclipsed by them.
[17] When staged, the English translations appear as surtitles on a screen.
[18] I must remind you that Nadirah was originally written and performed in Malay, but for this paper, I am using the published text that the playwright self-translated into English.
[19] Cat’s 2018 production at the Esplanade, directed by Tan Beng Tian, was translated into and performed in Malay.
[20] This reminds me of Thomas Lim’s Grandmother Tongue, a multi-dialect play about a young man’s struggle to connect with his Teochew-speaking grandmother. In the play, the playwright includes the stage direction that the surtitles are to be temporarily turned off.
[21] The coded language may be decipherable to some members of the audience who are ‘in’ on the secret and understand how this coded language operates.
[22] In 1977, Cat Stevens converted to Islam and has since gone by the name Yusuf Islam.
[23] Home is one of Singapore’s many National Day songs and is arguably the most well-loved amongst them.
[24] The Merlion, which has the head of a lion and the body of a fish, was invented by the Singapore Tourism Board in 1964 (Yong) to create a recognisable national icon that could appeal to tourists.
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Danial Matin Bin Zaini graduated from the National University of Singapore (NUS) in 2021, majoring in English Literature.
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